Taking Steps to Make Work Work
Given the tremendous disruption to traditional ways of working that arrived with the pandemic and the speed with which generative AI is transforming the day-to-day reality of work, leaders must urgently consider how to make work function more effectively for their organisation and their people. Implementing the right work-related initiatives can help address the obstacles blocking progress.
Invest in changing employee behaviour. Many companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars upgrading their technology. But when they need to change how people work, they may issue a memo or create a new policy. If only it were that simple to alter behaviours. Changing behaviours is arguably the hardest of the two undertakings. People do not typically think and act linearly or react to prompts in the way that a software application would.
Bringing about real behavioural change requires significant investment in developing new and upgraded capabilities. Such investments would, for example, fund communications to articulate the necessary changes and embed new behaviours into upgraded operating models, people processes, and tools. Some of these investments could be to bring continuous learning into people’s daily work and to offer leadership coaching.
Improve the talent proposition. C-suite executives in our survey identified attracting and retaining talent as among their top motivators for investing in initiatives that make work more effective. They chose these factors despite the arrival of generative AI and their awareness of its potential risks and opportunities. Talent issues even trump concerns about competitiveness.
To address talent issues, organizations are offering more flexibility in where and when people can work, compared with what they have offered in the past. Next, companies need to approach their employees much like they approach their customers: by digging into what people want and need and crafting employee value propositions that satisfy both.
Companies need to dig into what people want and need and craft employee value propositions that satisfy both.
Leaders also need employee value propositions that are based on characteristics common to particular groups of workers and also personalized to individuals. Design thinking is a powerful approach that leaders can use to rethink how work functions. Design thinking uses research, synthesis, and ideation to generate a broad set of ideas and then narrows them down—in this case, to value propositions that are better for workers.
Start supporting distributed teams. Companies are asking the wrong question if they are only asking about how to get office-based workers back to the office more days a week. Instead, they should be asking how to help their distributed workforce collaborate more effectively.
Nearly all companies that are pushing for a greater presence in the workplace recognize the value of maintaining some level of flexibility. But the bigger issue is creating an environment that increases productivity and even sparks joy. “We do not motivate colleagues to come back to the office,” one executive told us. “We encourage teams to identify the way to collaborate that best fits their team.”
Organizations can help their teams by building managerial capabilities at all levels. The goal should be to develop generative leaders who can coach, challenge, and support their teams in daily interactions. In addition, these leaders should help employees expand their existing capabilities by exploring internal opportunities, such as a temporary or permanent reassignment, a transfer to another part of the organization, or rotations through multiple roles. Leaders could also pair people who need to learn a skill with more experienced colleagues.
Make frontline workers happy. Eight of the top ten factors that cause frontline workers to quit their jobs involve emotional needs rather than functional ones, underscoring how important it is for employers to understand and attempt to meet those needs. Yet many organizations do not prioritize or even consider meeting such needs. Those views are short-sighted, given that frontline workers make up an estimated 70% to 80% of the global workforce and that companies are still contending with significant frontline worker shortages.
Eight of the top ten factors that cause frontline workers to quit involve emotional needs.
One way that organizations could improve the frontline worker experience and retain more employees is by increasing their shift schedule options and letting them choose which shift works best for them. In addition, employers could give frontline leaders more training and tools to inspire, coach, and connect with their teams.
Get the CEO to lead from the front. Survey respondents noted that when CEOs lead work initiatives, they tend to focus on activities that they see as setting up their organization for the future. All too often, they leave important people-related topics to their CHROs to resolve—without offering much engagement or support. CHROs could use the survey findings to convince the CEO and the rest of the leadership team to engage, invest, and drive the effort to build a better workplace.