Humanizing the Workplace

This article was originally published on Coach U Insights on March 21, 2023.

Inclusive and psychologically safe cultures - the success of your organization and your tenure as CEO will be dependent on it.

In a hybrid work environment your Line Managers will be even more critical to your business success in terms of how they care for and employees and maximize their agility, efficiency and productivity

The Pandemic has accelerated the long overdue changes needed in the workplace. Now is the time to fundamentally re-examine the employer-employee relationship. The forced shift to more flexible ways of working has demanded that many Line Managers, who were slow to adapt to best practices even when productivity and motivation of direct reports flagged, re-evaluate the way they manage their teams. In a hybrid work environment your Line Managers will be the key to your business success in terms of how they care for and motivate employees and maximize their agility, efficiency and productivity. And they will need new skills - those with highly developed social abilities, including the capacity to interact with an unfamiliar person effectively, good listening skills, real-time processing skills and effective EQ.

In addition, without the need for an office for all tasks, the talent pool now available to you is from anywhere in the world, not just where your offices are based. https://www.ft.com/content/01fd6ad5-b062-4699-b098-ab81bdc8f7b2. But how do you and your Line Managers best support that talent and use it effectively when it is so widely distributed?

Furthermore,

Are job titles really necessary?
Are you evaluating output or 'presenteeism'?
Are you resourcing projects by skills or by existing organizational structures?
Are you a collection of talented individuals or a team of great pooled talent?
How will you flow talent across the business but also "plug in external talent" when needed?
How do you track, measure and support employee well-being?
Do your employees have a voice and feel safe to speak up?

The circumstances of each individual employee will need to be taken into account in far more detail and employees having a say in how their role is designed will also have a major impact on employee motivation as evidenced by Harvard Professors Doshi and McGregor https://hbr.org/2015/11/how-company-culture-shapes-employee-motivation. Employees, inspired by investors, are increasingly calling for companies to address environmental, social and governance (ESG) problems. Staff want employers to stand for certain values and will agitate when necessary, with many younger employees valuing purpose as well as pay. Having a voice and not feeling afraid to speak up will only occur when employees feel they have psychological safety. Rungway is a mentoring at scale platform that helps drive an inclusive and psychologically safe culture especially with a fragmented, distributed employee work force. https://www.rungway.com/

Creating such an environment and having a truly inclusive culture need to be your top priorities. Do you have this on your strategic agenda? Is it something you review, measure and share the data with employees regularly? Do you have adequate resources, especially people, focused on tackling these issues?

The success of your organization and your tenure as CEO will be dependent on it.

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The author of this article

Annie COLEMAN CEO of Cerebellum Partners Ltd