The Year of the Employee
THE YEAR OF THE EMPLOYEE
When uncertainty is the only certainty, it takes a toll on mental health.
Business as usual is anything but these days. The last two years brought employees around the globe, face to face with a shared need to innovate creative working solutions. For many of us, it also triggered an internal challenge to re-examine purpose, sustain intrinsic motivation and find personal balance. With a daily onslaught of disorienting dilemmas, we were thrust out of our comfort zones and straight into disruptive change. In some cases, we identified under-developed strengths and discovered inherent gifts. In others, we learned through fast failure and rapid experimentation, upskilling as quickly as possible, to move through ‘business as unusual’. But what’s the evolutionary impact of having to build and sustain such resilience? More specifically, what’s the impact on organizational talent?
Looking back to the future
In 1972, President Nixon signed Title IX of the Education Amendments into law, removing barriers preventing people on the basis of sex, from participating in educational opportunities and careers of their choice. Following this, in the late 1970’s Jack Mezirow, an American Sociologist and Professor at Columbia University, launched a study to explore the increasing phenomenon of adult women choosing to re-enter higher education. As Mezirow reflected on the ideologies held by early colonial society regarding women’s access to education, he pondered the impact of disrupting historical positions of intellectual power and control and anticipated a transformative evolutionary impact on the adult learning system, from such a disruption.
Mezirow curated the Theory of Transformative Learning, highlighting the influence of past experiences on an adult learner, in how they learn and find meaning in their lives. To simplify his concept:
Adults can and do adjust their thinking, based on new information that forces us to reflect on and change our existing perspectives. We start to question what we think we know when we examine things from a new perspective, making room for new insights and information.
Over the years, Mezirow’s theory has expanded into a generally accepted idea today; that our world view is expanded the more we learn. Many experts agree that this kind of transformative learning leads to freedom of thought which encourages critical reflection, and often results in fundamental changes.
A new culture of employee adhocracy
As organizations work now to reunify operations amidst shifting customer expectations, supply chain realities and a new hybrid working environment, we see evidence of a post-pandemic culture of employee adhocracy emerging. Employees are expected to continue thinking creatively, sharing decision-making and staying agile. But at what cost?
The ‘Great Resignation’ has forced a necessary hyper focus on the issues that matter most in retaining change-ready talent: employees’ needs.
Organizations that understand the inherent opportunity to create competitive advantage, through retention of resilient and innovative employees, have already begun the daunting task of evolving their culture to a more human-centric one. This is especially challenging, as today’s leaders must continue to anticipate customer needs while staying closely connected to emerging environmental, social and governance influences that define our new normal.
What’s becoming painfully obvious is that staying ahead of the competition, requires a laser focus on employee needs, in order to successfully navigate both customer demands and daily disruptions.
The ‘Great Reset’
Employee wellness, engagement and retention are now prioritized 2022 Board-level topics, requiring a re-alignment between organizational and individual values.
Leaders responsible for talent development are seeking new perspectives to answer questions like:
How do we coordinate training efforts in such a hybrid world?
How do we flatline skill expectations across a particular function?
When should we redefine competency development?
How will we meet the growing health and wellness needs?
What does real inclusive leadership behavior look like in action?
Where should we deploy personalized learning technologies at scale in contrast to executive off-sites and in-person leadership development programs?
What is the right amount of time to dedicate to upskilling and training?
What do we do with over-qualified employees with skillsets beyond the needs of their functional duties?
How do we redefine employee engagement and what’s needed to retain talent?
Aligning Employee & Organizational Values
While learning and work have traditionally occupied separate spaces in organizational life, as employees take more control over the where, when and how they deliver on innovation, the lines between the two are quickly blurring.
Being forced to close their own skill gaps through autonomous learning, employees have self-validated the value of on-demand learning in the last two years. In a digital world, it’s easier to access a wider network of best practices and on-the-job coaching.
So… what do employers do now? What’s the future of talent development?
Welcome to the ‘expertise economy’, and a new era of employee-centricity that demands nothing short of total culture transformation:
Rather than emphasizing the transfer of information, organizations will now need to prioritize the transformation of their employees.
Leaders will need to sustain a culture of learning through execution that values curiosity and liberates creative thinking.
Mobilizing self-directed community-based learning networks will encourage peer-to-peer and cross-functional connections for best practice sharing.
Investing in on-demand learning technologies to support personalized learning by doing, will accelerate capability and skills development, yielding to employee demand for continuous growth opportunities.
Traditional leaders who steadfastly hold onto hierarchical structures and top down decision-making will ultimately lose their impact, and their best people.
Transformative Leaders will invest in deliberate disruptive thinking through enterprise-wide continuous learning efforts that reward critical reflection and mindset shifts.
Using data-driven decisions with input from diverse sets of stakeholders, culture-change leaders will set their organizations apart from their competitors, harvesting innovative advantages to cope with the continued ambiguity surfacing in Marketplace 2.0.
As we transition from the industrial revolution to corporate evolution, where organizational culture serves both economic and social value, what efforts will your organization make to expand beyond traditional operational processes and leadership practices? What learning pathways will curate the expansion of BOTH the organization as an entity AND the individual within it? How will your leadership action foster rapid growth through expertise building? Welcome to the Year of the Employee !