The "Future Of Work" Is Now A Modern-Day Reality
The global workforce faces a disengagement crisis. Only 15% report being engaged. This costs $7 trillion in lost productivity. What’s the solution? It’s more pertinent now that we collectively embrace workforce success, due to the uncertainty of the current work climate. Workforce success is only achieved when you have empowered and motivated people working for your company or organization. They are informed and they feel a sense of belonging. We’ve never been at a more critical moment when it comes to instilling belonging. When we are all dispersed and isolated, motivation, engagement, and productivity are vulnerable.
So how do you engage and motivate your people? On a fundamental level, by giving them the tools and the control to perform at their best.
Surface relevant information at an appropriate time and you’ll be able to build a sense of community and reinforce your culture, breeding productivity and loyalty. Employee loyalty is especially important to capture as it is at an all-time low [1]—80% report actively or passively seeking other job opportunities. And lack of loyalty is more rife among millennials, who will grow up to make 75% of the workforce by 2025 [2]. It’s essential the tide is turned. Workforces aren’t static. A workforce is a living organism made up of individuals and the resulting group dynamics that emerge when these individuals interact with each other. It’s a living, breathing entity.
When feelings of isolation creep in, a disconnect occurs—a void between you, the company, and them, the workforce. Isolated workers are five times as likely to miss a day of work due to stress. When they do work, their work is of lower quality than their non-lonely counterparts. They think about quitting their job twice as often and are 9% less productive. Your people need belonging, context, and a vital sense of purpose now more than ever. They need a voice. Companies who are at the forefront of their industries, like Uber, Airbnb, Deloitte, and Vodafone, have already all joined the workforce success revolution.
How Can You Join Them?
What your value proposition needs to truly achieve workforce success is the emotional dimension, symbolized by the "heart," rather than just the "head" (i.e., How can I empower my people by providing them with on-demand learning?)
The Head thinks. It informs your people and makes their learning journey continuous, seamless, relevant, and accessible. It puts the power back in their hands. The Heart feels. It provides your team with a voice and a sense of value. It also gives context to their professional life when they aren’t able to see or interact with team members in a traditional sense. The "heart" is the missing piece to the workforce success puzzle. 85% of the global workforce may be disengaged, but instilling them with a voice is the remedy. The numbers agree—those who feel heard are 4.6 times [3] more likely to perform at their very best.
Introduce Surveys
"How do I know what my team members think about the content we’re sending out?" was a question we kept hearing from clients. Surveys are a simple way for a team leader to send out questions that enable them to become more in tune with their workforce. Surveys should be quick and easy to create and respond to. Make sure they’re focused and single-question only to maximize response rate, generating useful, actionable data for leaders in a team.
When ready, fire your survey off to the relevant segment—to whichever team or individual it is relevant to. You can use surveys to identify knowledge gaps, which will inform the future learning content you create. Most importantly, they enable you to keep a vital finger on the "pulse" of your workforce. By implementing surveys as part of your training, communication and engagement strategy, you motivate your people—whether they’re frontline or remote—by turning one-sided communications into a dialogue.
The Takeaway
If there’s one certainty, it’s that the workforce is in a constant state of flux. The current context of the pandemic we’re living through has shaken things up and turned traditional employee-employer relationships and expectations upside down. It has forced characteristics we once attributed to the "future of work"—remote, deskless, technology-oriented—to become our present-day reality. This means that to meet the needs of the modern workforce, any good solution must constantly evolve alongside—and in response to—this flux. And empowering your people to achieve workforce success by giving them a voice is the next frontier that needs to be addressed to satisfy the needs of this ever-changing work landscape.
References:
[2] The Rise of the Deskless Workforce
[3] 10 Timely Statistics About The Connection Between Employee Engagement And Wellness
