Are HRs all set to unfold what 2021 brings on?

2020 has broken the age-old paradigms in organizational constructs of working together in the luxury, cohesiveness and comfort of the office spaces. COVID 19 has left its mark on the way organizations used to run business. With over 9 months of restrictions and lockdowns, organizations around the world quickly reinvented themselves to ensure uninterrupted businesses. From swiftly adapting to the remote work culture to creating their tech worthiness, companies have scaled a change never fathomed before. But somewhere in this haste to re-invent, the heart and soul of an organization, its people and their sentiment, got discounted. The challenge in the hands of the organizations is to manage the health and well being of their people. How are their employees managing their physical, emotional and mental wellbeing? What do they aspire? Are they in sync with the organizational purpose and goals? Organizations have to have increased focus on employee experience and a large part of it can be achieved by keeping them constantly in-the-know, of hearing them and engaging them in real time.

People are the heartbeat of an organization, yet as per Gallup, 85% of workforce around the world feels disengaged at work leading to loss of productivity, attrition, lower customer satisfaction thus lower profitability. This in itself costs the world economy $7 trillion in disengagement cost. This cost in-efficiency is rather unknown in organizations. With the advent of remote working, it has becoming increasingly difficult to engage people without the right tools.

As the entire world waits for 2021 to unfold with new hopes and possibilities, the organizations have a role to embrace the changes brought in by 2020. Here are a few important engagement gaps for companies to address if they wish to seek higher productivity from its people:

1. Understand real time pulse of the organization — gone are the days when once in a year organizations would hold annual engagement survey for their teams to understand their sentiment. There are 3 tops reasons to define the ineffectiveness of these surveys:

a. These surveys have always been unidirectional and not impactful because the replies are usually built on the past 3 months of experience instead of the employees’ year long experience with the organization

b. Majority people lose interest in filling any questionnaire with more than 5 -7questions, as it brings in survey fatigue.

c. Most importantly there is a lack of detailed analytics because it points towards lagging indicators like attrition, profitability loss etc instead of leading indicators, that could be data led predictions. Such that a possible proactive cure can be administered to a particular concern. For example, if you ascertain that a team is facing a concern on the lack of tools being available to complete its tasks, you should be able to cure this in real time rather than it leading to attrition and lower customer satisfaction.

The need of the hour is to understand real-time pulse of your team to understand, engage and empower your workforce to deliver higher productivity.

2. New generation at work — by 2021, it is known that 50% of workforce will be millennials. Are we ready to offer a suitable workplace to this tech savvy generation. There are 4 important factors that the millennials seek

a. Information at the click of a button — As a consumer, the millennials are privy to single button clicks to order food, transport. They have grown up in a time where information has become available instantly. Through a Google or Wikipedia search, answers to even quite complicated questions can be found. However, when they are at work, they need to seek multiple systems to find what they are seeking.

b. Less attention span — According to a study from Microsoft, the average consumer’s attention span has dropped to eight seconds — one second less than that of a goldfish. Your employee is also a customer of many brands as well as your internal customer for many units like HR, learning, IT etc. How does one capture attention in these 8 seconds?

c. More purpose in work than just flexibility — As per Deloitte’s HR reports for 2020, organizations today have to do 4 things,

(i) help improve individuals’ lives,

(ii) address societal problems,

(iii) mitigate technology’s unintended consequences,

(iv) act equitably and ethically.

All of the above, makes us think whether we are ready for the new-age workforce. Organizations need to define whether they know their employees as much as they know their customers.

4. One size fit all approach — does not work for new age talent. By 2025, millennials will form 75% of the global workforce. From Amazon to Netflix, every consumer company, understands their personal needs and drives recommendations. More importantly, millennials view their work as a central part of their lives, not as a distinct activity to be balanced. They thrive on a purpose-driven challenge and fulfillment. Hence they look for mentors at work and not managers or being micro-managed.

Will conducting just an annual survey give you clarity of what your new age employees are thinking about manager performance, transparency, diversity etc?

5. Co-relation between people data and business outcomes — Another challenge organizations face is to draw a co-relation between their people data and business outcomes. People data is scattered over multiple platforms ranging from engagement, attendance, leave records, learning & development, attrition, etc. and it is challenging for organizations to co-relate this data to get actionable people insights. These actionable insights form an integral part of the business goals and outcomes. For eg: how is your customer experience linked to employee engagement. How is your attrition leading to loss of revenue?

With Personifwy, now drive business success with right Talent Enablement

Employee enablement ensures that not only will your workforce is engaged but you are genuinely interested in their growth. In short, a great employee enablement plan can make your organization achieve business success faster. Personifwy mission to help you in this endeavor. Talk to one of our experts to today to see how to use workforce experience as a competitive advantage to ensure business success.

Contact@Personifwy.com

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