Learnings at the Edge: Personalized Employee Engagement
The humcollective Q3 2022 newsletter.
The future of work isn’t about hybrid work or flexible work arrangements. And it’s not about software.
It’s about a revolution inside the modern workplace, one aimed at breaking a system that promotes work practices that have existed since the industrial era. Organizations and leaders who want to be part of reforming work will ask not just where work gets done but how employees engage with work.
In this edition is a guide for leaders and organizations on how to reconsider employee engagement.
“I think there’s a big misnomer around this idea of the future of work, that it is basically a decision around flexibility. When we’re talking about the future of work, we’re actually talking about a re-evaluation of this idea of vocation, and that is a different conversation. It’s not necessarily just around where work is happening, but also about what’s happening at work.
That brings up questions like: What should organizational boundaries look like? Should they remain the same? Building a broad set of skills means people are coming in and out of companies. So where’s the glue, then? How is culture and connection maintained? Leaders need to have conversations about how people relate to the idea of work and how meaning is created and if traditional employee engagement is still the right tactic.
So you can see that there’s actually a lot of different questions inside of this idea of the future of work. For those organizations and leaders who want to be part of a work revolution, this is a powerful time.”
To explore these questions, I suggest a new way of thinking about the employer/employee contract and how employees become engaged to their work and organization. This new approach is a concept I call Personalized Employee Engagement and it has two components.
1. How work feels vs where work is performed
We humans are wired for connection, care and reciprocity and in some ways, the future of work is a rediscovery of the things that are evergreen about how we behave, but this necessitates allowing for emotions to come back into the organization. A basic human desire is to support others, but this requires emotional engagement, which unfortunately has been stripped out of the workplace in favor of effective and predictable outcomes. Let’s re-consider engagement as a series of one-on-one connections and daily interactions and how those build (or not) emotional good will. Therefore, everyday interactions must move beyond the transactional to something deeper because without shared experience, we don’t know how to show empathy or compassion. This runs counter to how modern technology drives communication, and what can end up happening over zoom and email is a build up of misunderstanding. To break this cycle, discussing emotion, feeling and even measuring it is essential. Embracing the depth of humanity in organizations is called for now.
2. Personal alignment vs employer branding
Every organization now has to decide what type of contract they are making with their employees. There is no single global view on what the new employer/employee contract looks like. Some organizations are setting a stance of building a purposeful workplace. For example, Patagonia and other B corps are committed to contributing to societal good. That’s their stance and if that aligns with an employee’s personal view, then they can come work there. There are other organizations who are asking employees to be in an office full time. That’s their stance and what they believe is essential. For some early career workers this is great because they want to go into the office to build community and connection. There are a myriad of different ways organizations are setting their tone, and now there’s a lot more choice for individuals to ask themselves: Where do I align?
As you can see, reframing employee engagement for the modern workplace is the next step on the journey — and demands thinking about what is happening at work, not just where work happens.
Let’s partner! If you’re looking to redefine how work is fundamentally done — so it can be more humane, sustainable, equitable, and joyful — get in touch.
