This year has been a major wake-up call for all organisations to rethink the real needs of their people if they want to thrive.
Smart companies know that top-down People “Management” won’t cut it. Instead, a bold commitment to truly looking afresh at the employee experience is what is called for.
For leaders, increasingly, that means getting clear about what the humans powering up their businesses really need to be on their A-Game and designing with their needs and experiences, truly at heart.
One thing’s clear – it’s those companies who refuse to be constrained by traditional top-down policy and HR conventions that are looking most resilient a year in. Savvy organisations know future-proofing the business is about looking afresh at the need of their most essential resource – the teams on the ground driving the work. And, In this new world – it’s the employees themselves, not a board of trustees or a People strategy on a page that are driving the agenda.
As a prime example of this, last year we partnered with one of the businesses at a client that’s at the cutting edge of development within their industry – an organisation that knows recruiting and retaining the right people is critical to remaining competitive and market-leading.
Fuelling the project was one big question – how do we make the employee experience we design genuinely serve the people and not the other way around?
The journey generated a bunch of powerful learnings for any organisation taking on the aspirational, if daunting task of reimagining their own employee experience.
So what did we learn? A year on we can look back and see some big drivers that fuelled the team, and the experimentation and transformation it spurred within the organisation. 5 stand-out principles fuelled the action: