The Great Realisation 

In the past 18 months, COVID, and the new ways we have had to work together, has revealed more about who we are as individuals. No longer separate identities, our work and life personas have become blended and the new ‘kid on the block’ is the whole-person employee.  

Historically, most people have adopted a work/life persona and this is no longer mutually exclusive. We’ve had a glimpse into peoples’ personal lives, beds and living rooms. We’ve met children, families, flatmates and pets and encountered the anxiety, stressors and challenges of trying to ‘juggle it all and then, experienced the subsequent burnout. 

The Employee – The Great Realisation and Awakening.  

Faced with chaos, separation and isolation, your employees have had time for deep introspection and self-reflection. The outcome: a new expectation for a more intimate and holistic understanding of their needs, greater recognition and reward for their experience, skills and time, and the desire to feel fully valued and supported in every aspect of their lives. And, it’s non-negotiable.  

Managing Employee Expectations and Benefit 

Working from home has allowed employees to enjoy some individual benefits.  No commuting times, relaxed work hours and schedules, and increased time to spend with family/friends/loved ones. Yet, businesses have failed to truly understand their actual needs. There has been an overwhelming number of stories of employee burnout, the outcome of which is having severe and detrimental effects on wellbeing (mental, physical and emotionally), and their perceived sense of value and self-worth. 

Organisations have had greater levels of expectation, scrambling to make up for their financial losses and the stakes are high. There have been expectations that your employee will accept a reduced income, lack of exposure and collaboration with the team, access to adequate leadership/coaching, and a blurred visibility and achievable metrics around career progression/promotion. Alongside this, organisations continue setting unrealistic deadlines – expecting employees to be constantly available.  And this comes at their personal expense when experiencing the overwhelm of juggling children and extended family groups, elder responsibilities, inadequate working from home set up and the impact on their wellbeing. And they’ve had enough, enter the ‘Great Realisation’.  

There has been a complete paradigm shift – ‘ask not what you can do for your company but what can your company do for you’ and your talent are not going to wait long for you to work it out. 

Businesses need to respond quickly, adopting a ‘whole-person people strategy’, where individual employee value intersects and aligns with organisational value. Failure to adapt, where your talent are viewed not as commodities or as transactional assets ‘we employ you, you work, we pay you model’, will see organisations face mass attrition rates, and it’s happening, fast.  

You will not be able to afford the business risk associated with non-adoption, as lower levels of productivity, damage to team morale and subsequent cannibalisation of the employer brand, company DNA and culture, will hinder progress and have a significant impact on your business.  

McKinsey reports from April 2021 states 40% of people are actively looking to leave their job with Microsoft reporting that 50% of people inside of organisations will move within the next 3-6 months. 

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index/hybrid-work 

Attracting and retaining talent: 

Whole-person employment strategies must include benefit programs and development milestones that will enable your talent to have the best experience with your brand and your company. Benefits will need to include, flex, remote working, a safe and inclusive place to work, human-centred people strategies, tools and technologies that emulate company values and these will become an integral part of every employee touchpoint and experience. In conjunction with this, your employer/talent brand will require full transparency and clearer communication strategies to demonstrate the intimate stories from your team on what it is truly like to be working in your organisation.   

Companies will need to become adept at telling better value stories and these will need to be executed with honesty and transparency over your entire employee lifecycle. Showing the reality of how you embed wellness programs, learning and development and performance management, monitoring of an employee’s health and family needs, will need to be clearly planned and defined. 

Organisational change – Build a whole-person people strategy 

A whole-person employment strategy will become the cornerstone for organisational success and the future of thriving workplaces.  

Organisations will need to embrace strong employer brand and employee experience strategies that include a holistic responsibility for their people, encouraging every person to have more success in every aspect of their lives. There will need to be a greater alignment of purpose and values and this will be pivotal to how you will attract, engage and retain talent. 

In this new version of how we work, recognising the importance of what makes your business successful, the people within it will soon be the difference between businesses that survive and those that don’t. Get building your strategy now before it’s too late.