Alexandra Levit's Water Cooler Wisdom

Building Culture with a Distributed Workforce

As we close out 2023, the post-pandemic return-to-office question seems to have resolved. Most organizations have embraced a hybrid model, mandating that non-frontline employees work onsite between one and three days per week. However, this structure doesn’t necessarily equate to a positive work culture that employees are reluctant to leave.

According to the forthcoming Dayforce 2024 Pulse of Talent research, nearly 70% of employees are either looking for a new job or would leave their current organizations if the right opportunity came along. Thirty-eight percent said they had issues achieving their performance goals in the last year, with the main reason being too large of a workload. Only eight percent said their employer is giving them everything they need to be productive.

It's clear that despite having more flexibility than ever before, employees are not as satisfied as they could be. And this does not bode well for a business climate that will continue to be plagued by labor and skills shortages.

Understanding how to build a strong culture in a distributed work environment, a task that few attempted before the pandemic, has now become an organizational imperative. The following five strategies infused with the right employee experience technology may prove useful as you navigate this new terrain.

Conduct ongoing employee needs assessments.

The move to permanent distributed work requires a culture shift in all organizations, but instead of viewing this as an insurmountable task, leaders should look at it as a valuable opportunity to understand the unique requirements of all your employees and address concerns impacting specific groups.

For example, caregivers may report that office commutes are a hardship, while employees who are underrepresented minorities may experience greater bias and more microaggressions in an in-person office environment. Leaders should know about these issues before they result in quiet or actual quitting.

Employee pulse taking doesn’t have to be a ton of work. You can automate an employee experience platform to survey your employees on a regular cadence and determine what they need and want as well as general workplace sentiment.

You can also leverage an employee experience platform to create a real-time, two-way path to more in-depth dialogue and feedback with senior leaders and HR representatives. Once upon a time, the flow of information from the top to the bottom of the organization might have been more of a trickle, and c-suite communication may have lacked transparency, vision, and purpose. When an organization is empowered by employee experience technology, this no longer has to be the case.

Reimagine office space as a destination.

Since employees are in the office less frequently and often have a choice whether to be there on a given day, leaders must make attendance worth their while. Facilities like onsite daycare, a gym, and open, casual lounges to support informal interaction are great-to-haves, but if your budget doesn’t allow for such things, offering a space employees want to visit could be as simple as providing extra time with leaders via scheduled and unscheduled office events. It’s also okay to spend a little money on offsite gatherings as the rapport-building that takes place at these is often priceless.

Finally, if your online employee experience is immersive enough, it will complement the -person experience beautifully. Used to market and generate excitement about upcoming events at the office and bring your employees’ great work to life, these platforms can add depth and creativity to your in-person culture and be a fun destination in their own right.

Watch out for proximity bias.

A Prezi survey found that over 66% of hybrid workers feel that workplaces favor employees who are together in a physical office. Additionally, according to my own research, a majority of employees feel they are not as effective when communicating via videoconference. Leaders can remedy this issue by restructuring meetings, revamping performance expectations to focus on output, and ensuring there is a fair mix of in-person and online platforms to network and show off one’s skills.

An employee experience platform can also assist with combatting proximity bias. Select technology that can highlight individual employee profiles on the manager’s home page so everyone on the team – remote and non-remote – is front and center. Managers can also be offered the option to easily develop and send targeted employee communication that calls attention to each direct report’s personal and professional development.

Offer assistance specific to distributed work challenges.

Always-on employees require easy access to systems that allow them to complete work wherever they are, and “hoteling” at the office should be a seamless, non-chaotic experience. Match your in-office policy with more flexible benefits for taking time off when needed, and coordinate team office time so your employees reap the full benefits of in-person collaboration and aren’t simply sitting in an empty cubicle farm alone.

A distributed work environment in a constantly changing business climate also requires your HR information delivery to be comprehensive and on point. Consider an employee experience platform with mobile and device agnostic capabilities, which can customize content for particular teams and roles, and help employees find what they need through intelligent search.

An AI-enabled platform has the additional benefit of screening incoming HR issues and quickly routing them to the correct person, which is essential when leaders cannot guarantee that an employee who walks down the hall to HR will be able to speak to a live human.

When your people are running at a million miles an hour and spread out all over the country or world, it is unfortunately easy to lose sight of what makes your organization a special place to work. While a distributed work environment requires leaders to put more conscious effort into culture, ultimately this renewed focus is probably for the best!

This article was originally published on Ceridian.com.

 

Career Durability: Ensure You Have a Job As Long As You Want One

You might remember that last fall, I helped DeVry University with a survey about workplace sentiment during the COVID-19 pandemic. At a time when employees should be feeling recognized and celebrated, nearly one in four employed Americans said they believed that American workers are not valued. And, more than a third of survey respondents claimed that based on their employer’s actions since the start of the pandemic, they feel disposable.

Were these feelings valid? Could employers actually take or leave employees, not caring if they were successful or unsuccessful, contributing or not contributing, employed with the company or leaving to go somewhere else?

The workforce is changing in major ways. The pandemic sped up a movement from strict scheduling to flexible “work on your own time” engagements. Prior to COVID-19, we were already seeing smart machines and automation as part of daily work, and the tremendous growth of the gig economy.

Taken together, these trends show that the old ways of sustaining a career no longer work. In past decades, you could go to college or a trade school, get a degree, and use the skills associated with that degree to work for one – or maybe a few – organizations over the course of your working life.

That is no longer the case. Jobs – and the skills required for those jobs – are changing rapidly.

In these times, nothing is certain except change, and this is unnerving. In fact, Ceridian’s 2021 Pulse of Talent report, which surveyed more than 5,000 people across five regions, found that 66% of individuals are taking job security into account more now than before the pandemic.

Career durability is a ticket to long-term security

To avoid feeling – and indeed being – disposable, today’s employees need to be the leaders of their own careers. They must build what we call career durability.

Career durability involves acquiring the skills, mindset, and knowledge to be an engaged and productive member of the workforce – continuously. On LinkedIn, I explained career durability as including these five areas:

• Hard skills: skills that allow you to complete tasks in a specific job.
• Soft skills: skills for collaborating effectively with others.
• Applied technology skills: skills that allow you to leverage available technology to do your job better.
• Institutional knowledge: job or industry expertise gained through experience.
• Growth mindset: being willing to improve, learn, and reconsider existing ways of doing things.

For more where this came from, read the full article at the Ceridian Dayforce Wallet blog.

If You Could Go Back to the Office, Would You?

If you could return to your pre-pandemic work arrangement right now, would you do it?

I conducted an informal email survey last month to hear how 9-to-5 professionals would answer that question. What were their reasons for wanting a more traditional in-office or an alternative working-from-home (WFH) arrangement?

I deduced some central themes from the about 100 responses I received. For one thing, people's decisions about whether or not they'd go back were nuanced. Of the approximately 75 percent of my respondents who said they would NOT go back, nearly all gave a qualifier such as "I'd be happier and more productive working from home permanently IF my kids weren't out of school."

 I also heard many of the same pros and cons time and time again.

Pros of Working From Home

Some of the recurring pros reflected that working from home gave individuals control over the typical, day-to-day stress of being in an office. Many find that working from home is a better fit for their comfort zones.

Freedom 

About half of respondents who said they would not go back to the office mentioned freedom specifically. These individuals relish the independence and flexibility that come with working from home.

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“It’s much less distracting and I don't have the wasted time of a commute twice a day,” says Jesse Silkoff, co-founder and president of MyRoofingPal. "It has also allowed my wife and I to have more time together since we can meet up for a coffee break. And, I’ve saved a ton of money having easy access to my own refrigerator, preferred coffee and the casual clothes I want to wear."

Interestingly, one-third of respondents who would not go back to the old way were positive about having a work environment full of kids and pets. When DevSkiller co-founder Tom Winter was working at the office, he was so exhausted when he came home, he didn’t have the energy to play with his children.

“Remote work has allowed me to enjoy family meals and park visits,” he says.

Pet safety company Huan's founder Gilad Rom feels he has a better quality of life with his dog Puppy Pie keeping him company as he works.

“He reminds me to take breaks, he reduces my stress and our bond is much stronger,” Rom says.

No More Sunday Blues

Jason VanDevere, CEO of Goal Crazy Planners, shared that many people who work Monday through Friday often feel mildly depressed on Sunday nights in anticipation of the work week ahead.

“When I was working in the office, it was the typical job and I was in an endless cycle of feeling excited for Friday and dreading the ensuing Monday two days later,” he says. “Working from home, I mostly maintain the same 9-to-5 routine. For some reason, though, I'm less negatively impacted by the prospect of getting back to work on Monday morning.”

Better for Introverts

Most self-proclaimed introverts agreed that overall, WFH better supports their natural tendencies. The extroverts who manage and work with introverts have also noticed the positive impact WFH has had on them.

“Before the pandemic, I would go to my clients’ offices to conduct in-person workshops,” says Dave Collins, CEO of corporate education firm Oak & Reeds. “Now, my company has pivoted to virtual-only training, and I’ve found that this format gives the quieter, more introspective workshop participants more of an opportunity. In a live group setting, I might have really had to push them, but the virtual privacy gives introverts a bit of cover when sharing their experiences.”

For more where this came from, check out the full piece at AMEX Business.

Guiding Your Team Through Evolving Work Structures

Whether you’ve been with the same organization or moved around, if you’ve been a manager for a while, you have probably experienced a lot of changes regarding how, where, and when people work. The boundaries for what’s acceptable and what isn’t have shifted dramatically over the last 10 years, and many agree that the waters are growing even murkier.

As we approach 2020, every organization is different with respect to policies on flexwork, technology-facilitated collaboration, virtual teaming, contract hiring, meetings scheduling and logistics, and the like. And because the dos and don’ts frequently evolve, your responsibility as a leader is to ensure that protocol is clear and that your employees can function happily and productively in the context of new structures. Here are a few suggestions for a successful transition.

Understand what the rest of your organization is doing

Before you provide guidance to your team, talk to HR or c-suite leaders about any top-down work structure-related policies, procedures, and resources that already exist and can be tweaked or updated to meet your team’s needs. If another leader is blazing an innovation trail, learn from their experience and aim to take workable arrangements to the next level.

Understand each individual’s unique needs

We now operate in a workforce of one, where every employee governs their career differently. Prior to revising a structure or process (or starting a new one), survey your team members about the most effective ways to get their jobs done with maximum impact and minimum stress, and notice commonalities in the feedback.

Choose pilot over permanent

Complete transitions to new structures gradually and on a small scale. For instance, if you want to move your team from 100 percent in-office to 80 percent, with the option of working from home or another location the remaining 20 percent, start with a three-month trial. Outline rules and expectations upfront and select a metric like productivity to ascertain how well the new protocol is working.

Educate your people on politics

If you’re reading this piece, your team may be on the cutting-edge of 21st century work. This means that your employees could run into snafus with other departments that operate differently. Think through potential complications early, manage perceptions, and ensure that your team can address objections from and continue to build trust with more traditional areas of the business. In other words, don’t let other leaders think your people are lazy or off the grid.

Encourage frequent communication

Any change process must be accompanied by more discussion than you think you need. Schedule group and individual check-ins at least twice a month so that your transition is smooth and hiccup-free as possible, protocols are consistently implemented from one team member to another, employees have an opportunity to provide feedback, and business is running as usual.  

In a business world where every employee’s journey is different, facilitating effective transitions is just as critical to engaging and retaining top talent as more traditional lifecycle focuses like onboarding and performance. Join sponsor SilkRoad and me for a webinar on August 29, 2019 at 2PM EST and come with questions!

 

Are You Engaging Your Remote Workers Properly?

Rapport building is essential for effective collaboration, but it's not as easy as in the days when you just walked into your retail store or office and greeted your employees hello. As a business owner and member of several virtual teams, I've picked up the following strategies for establishing and sustaining solid relationships with remote workers you rarely see.

1. Outline your expectations for remote workers.

Not all remote work scenarios are the same, and both you and your employee should have a concrete plan for navigating the situation effectively.

Draft a document that outlines the specifics for work hours, environment, communication, collaboration tools and anticipated performance outcomes. If an employee is new to your organization or to remote work, I recommend a three-month pilot for all parties to gauge how the arrangement is going and to iron out the wrinkles.

Also try to systematize your remote work policies as much as you can. Offering individuals too many choices and trying to keep on top of a dozen different arrangements is likely to cause confusion and misunderstandings.

2. Be visible to your remote workers.

After the initial three months, don't assume your remote workers are on autopilot. Being in different physical locations does not negate the need for regular oversight of your employees' activities. If anything, it requires more consideration so remote workers don't feel isolated and disconnected.

Plan a team meeting—preferably by videoconference so you can see each other at least once a month—and schedule individual check-in calls to troubleshoot issues, provide essential guidance and big-picture perspective. During those meetings, reiterate that you're alive and thinking about them. And, if you're relying on remote workers for a real-time, accurate picture of your working capital, initiate contact weekly if not daily.

For more where this came from, visit the AMEX Business site.

Workforce 2030 Podcast is on a Roll Thanks to Partner SilkRoad!

The Workforce 2030 podcast sponsored by SilkRoad is off and running, with several episodes now online. Please check these out and let us know what you think!

Episode 1: Disruption in the Changing Workforce

In this episode of Workforce 2030, Robert Dvorak, Chief Executive Officer and President of SilkRoad, joins Alexandra Levit to discuss disruptive changes affecting the workforce, today and in the future, as well as the importance of agility and continuous learning in this time of change. Dvorak brings more than 30 years of experience in executive leadership positions in strategic sales and marketing.

Episode 2: Mergers & Acquisitions and its effect on the Workforce

In this episode of Workforce 2030, Jennifer Fondrevay, Founder and Chief Humanity Officer of Day1 Ready™, joins Alexandra Levit to explore Mergers & Acquisitions and its effect on the Workforce. Jennifer works with forward-thinking business leaders, owners and executives to pre-plan their people strategy through the phases of M&A so their employees can contribute from Day 1.

Episode 3: How, When, and Where to Apply Automation in the Workplace

In this episode of Workforce 2030, Ravin Jesuthasan, Managing Director and Global Practice Leader at Willis Towers Watson, joins Alexandra Levit to discuss applying automation and AI to jobs and how organizations can optimize human-automation combinations. Ravin is a global thought leader on the future of work, automation and human capital. He has been recognized as one of the top 25 most influential consultants in the world by Consulting Magazine, one of the top 8 future of work influencers by Tech News and one of the top 100 HR influencers by HR Executive.

Episode 4: Agility and Adapting to Change: How to Future-Proof Your Career

In this episode of Workforce 2030, Marti Konstant, best-selling author of Activate Your Agile Career, joins Alexandra Levit to discuss agility and how to future-proof and take control of your career by adapting and responding to change. Marti has an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and is a former technology executive who has worked in Silicon Valley. She now works as a workplace futurist, keynote speaker, top-career influencer, best-selling author and expert in applying agile principles to workforce development.

Business Innovations of the Future

As a futurist, I often get asked to predict the business trends that organizations can afford to ignore, because, while they generate a lot of buzz, they are also likely to fizzle out. On the other hand, we must also pay attention to business innovations that are gathering such rapid strength that adoption is now essential. Let's look at a few.

Blockchain

A blockchain is a data structure that builds a digital ledger of transactions and shares it among a distributed network of computers. Using cryptography, each participant interacts with the ledger in a secure way without the need for a central authority. Bitcoin was the first app built using the platform in 2008, with a premise of sending digital payments between any two parties without the help of a financial institution. Bitcoin has now been joined by hundreds of other cryptocurrencies, and the model has moved out of financial services: organizations, employees, and customers are using it for all types of transactions.

Deep Learning

Deep learning (programming machines to mimic the actions of the human brain), is driving a whole new set of business innovations. It's the process of training computers to recognize patterns in data and then classify and categorize them as a human brain could. Together with complex algorithms, deep learning is already helping machines to participate in defining project scope, analyzing risks, developing budgets and allocating resources. It's catching on because it has massive implications. 

For the rest, have a look at the American Express Business site.

Key Findings from the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Survey (Part II)

Last week, I shared some compelling results from the World Economic Forum’s 2018 Future of Jobs Survey. To recap, this research set out to represent the current strategies, projections and estimates of global business, with a focus on large multinational companies and more localized companies of significance due to their employee or revenue size.

Let’s examine some additional highlights from the report:

• Emerging in-demand roles: Among the range of established roles that are set to experience increasing demand in the period up to 2022 are Data Analysts and Scientists, Software and Applications Developers, and Ecommerce and Social Media Specialists, roles that are significantly based on and enhanced by the use of technology. Also expected to grow are roles that leverage distinctively ‘human' skills, such as Customer Service Workers, Sales and Marketing Professionals, Training and Development, People and Culture, and Organizational Development Specialists. There will also be a variety of roles related to understanding and leveraging the latest emerging technologies: AI and Machine Learning Specialists, Big Data Specialists, Process Automation Experts, Information Security Analysts, User Experience and Human-Machine Interaction Designers, Robotics Engineers, and Blockchain.

• Growing skills instability: Given the wave of new technologies and trends disrupting business models and the changing division of labor between workers and machines transforming current job profiles, the vast majority of employers surveyed for this report expect that, by 2022, the skills required to perform most jobs will have shifted Global average skills stability—the proportion of core skills required to perform a job that will remain the same—is expected to be about 58%, meaning an average shift of 42% in required workforce skills over the 2018–2022 period.
• A reskilling imperative: By 2022, no less than 54% of all employees will require significant re- and upskilling. Of these, about 35% are expected to require additional training of up to six months, 9% will require reskilling lasting six to 12 months, while 10% will require additional skills training of more than a year. Skills continuing to grow in prominence by 2022 include analytical thinking and innovation as well as active learning and learning strategies. Sharply increasing importance of skills such as technology design and programming highlights the growing demand for various forms of technology competency identified by employers surveyed for this report. Proficiency in new technologies is only one part of the 2022 skills equation, however, as ‘human’ skills such as creativity, originality and initiative, critical thinking, persuasion and negotiation will likewise retain or increase their value, as will attention to detail, resilience, flexibility and complex problem-solving.
• Current strategies for addressing skills gaps: Companies highlight three future strategies to manage the skills gaps widened by the adoption of new technologies. They expect to hire wholly new permanent staff already possessing skills relevant to new technologies; seek to automate the work tasks concerned completely; and retrain existing employees. The likelihood of hiring new permanent staff with relevant skills is nearly twice the likelihood of strategic redundancies of staff lagging behind in new skills adoption. However, nearly a quarter of companies are undecided or unlikely to pursue the retraining of existing employees, and two-thirds expect workers to adapt and pick up skills in the course of their changing jobs. Between one-half and two-thirds are likely to turn to external contractors, temporary staff and freelancers to address their skills gaps.
• Insufficient reskilling and upskilling: Employers indicate that they are set to prioritize and focus their re- and upskilling efforts on employees currently performing high-value roles as a way of strengthening their enterprise’s strategic capacity, with 54% and 53% of companies, respectively, stating they intend to target employees in key roles and in frontline roles which will be using relevant new technologies. In addition, 41% of employers are set to focus their reskilling provision on high-performing employees while a much smaller proportion of 33% stated that they would prioritize at-risk employees in roles expected to be most affected by technological disruption.

Overall, said the World Economic Forum, the report’s findings suggest the need for a comprehensive ‘augmentation strategy’, an approach where businesses look to utilize the automation of some job tasks to complement and enhance their human workforces’ comparative strengths and ultimately to enable and empower employees to extend to their full potential. However, to unlock this positive vision, workers will need to have the appropriate skills enabling them to thrive in the workplace of the future and the ability to continue to retrain throughout their lives. Crafting a sound in-company lifelong learning system, investing in human capital and collaborating with other stakeholders on workforce strategy should thus be key business imperatives.  A mindset of agile learning will also be needed on the part of workers as they shift from the routines and limits of today’s jobs to new, previously unimagined futures.

Want to learn more about how you can prepare for the future of work? Check out the new book, Humanity Works: Merging Technologies and People for the Workforce of the Future.

 

The Real Story Behind Stretch Assignments

Stretch opportunities are all the rage in the workplace. But as popular as they are, it’s unclear why some people decide to accept a stretch assignment or role – and others step aside. It’s also unclear why women haven’t benefited from stretches as much as men.

Selena Rezvani is Be Leaderly’s VP of consulting and research and a recognized speaker on women and leadership. She recently led Be Leaderly’s original research on how both genders decide if they are ready for a stretch, and how they make that decision. The report also explores how employers can create a workplace that supports employees who step out of their comfort zones. Based on a survey of 1,549 U.S.- based professionals, the research uncovered the following:

• Men (48%) and women (52%) are equally interested in ultimately advancing into senior vice president or C-suite roles.
• However, the largest portion of women (45%) don’t feel their employers make it easy to gauge if they are ready for a promotion, while the largest portion of men (40%) think their employers help them know whether they are prepared to advance.
• Women are less engaged in and passionate (67%) about their jobs than men (77%), another possible explanation for why fewer women take on stretch opportunities. A strong correlation exists between employees who feel engaged and passionate about their work and those who perceive that their employer makes it easy to assess their readiness to advance.
• In order to apply for a job, both women and men feel that they need to meet, on average, 75% of the qualifications for the role – a surprising difference from accepted thinking about gender attitudes toward the qualifications people feel they need to try for a new position.
• Women may hold back from taking stretches because when assessing how ready they are for a new job, they are less likely than men to overestimate or “round up” their skills, and more likely to underestimate or “round down” what they know or can do. (73% of women disagree that they round up their skills while 60% of men disagree).
• For both men and women, the top criteria for deciding whether to take a stretch assignment are having the influence to create a positive outcome (40% women/43% men), and getting an assignment that lines up with their career goals (33% women/33% men). Both genders say office politics is the biggest practical challenge to taking a stretch assignment (38% women/33% men), with lack of time a close second (34% women, 31% men).
• Money matters. Men are 3.5 times more likely than women to cite pay as an important factor in evaluating the appeal of a new assignment, job or level.

So what do we make of this? Well, if the workplace is being disrupted by sweeping, large-scale trends, employees must have the opportunity to continually redefine and hone their skills. One way employers can offer that is through stretch assignments that provide intrapreneurial short-term “gig economy” type work with minimal risk and disruption, all within the organization’s dominion. Employees, especially millennials, want to “job-craft” their roles. Offering an internal gig economy – or stretch marketplace – delivers big.

How to Create an Agile Process

Many organizations pride themselves on having predictable policies and procedures that drive performance and growth. However, given the rate of change in today's business world, sometimes being inflexible can be a problem rather than a solution. Having an agile process can help.

Agile processes are plans that involve advance planning and organization but also allow you to quickly change course if needed. To learn how business owners create agile processes in the real world, I consulted Mary Ellen Slayter, CEO of Baton Rouge, Louisiana-based B2B content marketing agency Rep Cap and Matt Weinberg, president of interactive digital agency Vector Media Group in New York City.

Why Use An Agile Process?

An agile process can be advantageous because it mandates a close consideration of your business goals, but can also be adjusted as you gain more information or as circumstances evolve.

 

“The agile framework forces owners to make decisions quickly and communicate frequently," says Slayter. “The emphasis on testing frees you from best practices so you can pursue the surprising insights that are unique to your business. In the end, the risk is actually lower because you're making fewer big bets."

It's also important to realize what agile is—and what it isn't.

“Just because you're agile doesn't mean you don't have process," Slayter points out. “Agile is not about flying by the seat of your pants—it's dynamically deciding how to deploy your resources to achieve your goals."

For the rest, check out the AMEX OpenForum.