The New Corporate Job Is Human

By Sandra William

In 2020 corporate employees experienced a transformation in their working day; from hours spent in trains and cars, work pods, meeting rooms, and company cafes, we spent endless hours within our homes sitting on desk chairs, couches, and room corners dialing into work. After this shock, a ripple effect appeared in the labor market, forcing corporations to deal with unprecedented human capital trends: from talent depletion as ~38 million workers quit their jobs in 2021 and ~12 million switched employers in less than 3 months in 2022, to lower productivity rates as 79% employees struggle with work-related stress and others adopted quiet quitting behaviors.

COVID-19: A messenger in disguise?

Covid-19 is not the only culprit in the emergence of these trends; the pandemic forced a disruption that made us evaluate our lives and bring light to long-brewing shifts. The rise of this employee rebellion originates from an inherent change in the way that younger workforce generations perceive and interpret work.

Employee priorities are changing

There are 6 employee archetypes, each with a different set of priorities that they seek in their work (e.g., compensation, flexibility, prestige, inspiration, purpose, etc.). The US mix of archetypes is diverging across generations, with almost double the share of Pioneers and Strivers in the younger workforce vs. those who are 55. The key differentiator of these archetypes is their emphasis on their need (1) To identify with and derive a sense of meaning from their jobs and (2) To connect their jobs to a personal long-term vision.

Work is becoming personal

This change in work perspective is the result of generational change in our socioeconomic conditions. First, increasing access to education in the last century has empowered people to choose their jobs and stirred a cultural shift in our upbringing on the importance of finding a “calling”. Additionally, technology not only mentally invited work to our homes, it enabled us to physically carry it in our pockets, blurring the boundaries between our work and personal life. Younger generations are stuck in an enmeshment trap with 51% of US workers drawing their sense of identity from their jobs.

The labor market has been seeing and living this work-identity marriage, making sense of it by inventing new terms to define: Instead of work-life balance, it is now work-life harmony, and instead of being an employee at Google, Bain, Twitter, or Amazon, we now identify as being a “Googlers”, “Bainies”, “Tweeps”, and “Amazonians”.

Employees are seeking change

All in all, we see the younger American workforce climbing Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs, seeking self-actualization, purpose, identity, and personal growth from their work. Employers face a higher risk of losing one of the most valuable assets of the 21st century: Talent. A mindset shift is due for Corporate America, one that relabels employees from “resources” to “humans” who have holistic needs beyond the hours clocked in and out.

The future of corporate is human, and it starts now.

How can Corporate become Human?

Threading the needle between Corporate and Individual

A company that offers human jobs is a company that can build a bridge connecting an organization’s purpose and community with its employee’s purpose and sense of identity. The key is in creating a balance between both islands. A company focusing on reinforcing a corporate mission and culture while ignoring individualistic purposes risks having unmotivated and unfulfilled employees. Likewise, a company that doubles down on flexibility to embrace the diverse individualistic needs of employees without creating a sense of shared values risks having a workforce that lacks a sense of belonging and camaraderie.

To strike that balance, corporations need to infuse their current culture with new practices and behaviors that build that bridge. There are three areas to start with.

1) Drop the one-size-fits-all mentality

One undeniable truth in our rising workforce is its increasing diversity, in race, gender, age, and archetype distribution. Increasing diversity requires an ability to match diverse needs with flexible employee value propositions. That’s complex and it's yet to be perfected. Still, organizations can adopt a few steps to kickstart a change in the right direction:

1. Discover who is critical – Identify your employee segments and which of them have a foundational impact on your business
2. Listen to their needs through interviews, focus groups, and/or surveys
3. Respond by designing and launching initiatives tailored to their needs, bringing them along the design process
4. Make it a habit by installing mechanisms to continue proactively listening and responding

These practices of flexibility are not revolutionary, companies and startups are already offering solutions to enable them:

• Dell provides flexible work schedules to respond to their employee's personal needs.
• Appen refined working norms to create a sense of community when employees expressed a sense of loneliness and disconnectedness at work
• Wiser works with companies to tailor their branding and employee journey to fit the needs of their prospective and current employees
• Gloat uses data to empower employees to build a personalized professional development journey based on their current skillsets and long-term aspirations
• More tactically, Roleshare and Handoff are developing online solutions to empower employees to “share” their workload to enable their personal lives. Think how helpful this could be for parents, students, and portfolio professionals

2) Weave individual purpose into the corporate fabric

As illuminated by Maslow’s hierarchy, finding purpose is a human need. As much as companies have tried to orient their employees towards a corporate goal or mission, it can only go so far— a purpose is personal, varying from one individual to the other. Companies should start supporting employees to identify the “why” and connect it to their jobs. The way to do that is to give space for individuals to weave in their personal purpose at work. Some great examples:

Give time and budget for employees to engage in personally meaningful tasks:

• Google’s 20 Percent Rule allows Googlers to dedicate 20% of their hours to any project of interest that is outside their function
• 3M embodies a 15% culture offering employees time to invest in ideas and activities that excite them
• Bain 10% is a norm embodied where Bainies allocate 10% of their time to causes they care about

Enable platforms offering purpose-driven activities and/or training:

• I ran a “Build Your Purpose” workshop for the women at the Bain DC to help them draft and link their purpose statement to their Bain career
• Offer holistic personal coaching and mentorship programs. The key word is holistic. Mentorship programs that coach employees in fulfilling their “life” goals, which include work, can enable a deeper connection between an employee and the workplace. Those can be run internally (e.g., Bain) or can be offered through numerous startups, such as Betterup, Legacy Shift, Torch, and Coach Hub.

3) Build personal capacity through mindful norms

In early 2022, APA reported 79% of US workers struggling with work-related stress. More recently, Future Forum reported a record 42% of the global workforce facing burnout symptoms. Work is increasingly influencing our mental health and well-being and HR leaders are recognizing the need to take responsibility. Mindfulness norms are becoming introduced to house-holds names like Google, Target, General Mills, Intel, Nike, NASA, and Apple to improve mental well-being and employee productivity. Similarly, start-ups like Headspace, Calm, and Breakthru are providing actionable business solutions.

Offering mindfulness solutions at work is the first step, but without embedding these solutions as habits in employees’ day-to-day work they will continue to feel like one-off events that may inspire us, but not norms that shape us. That shift requires agents that endorse these day-to-day habits, whether it is through leaders who advocate and sponsor them or team members who drive the habit. For instance, in several teams at Bain, I recreated mindful practice in a way that allows my team to practice it daily without disrupting their work schedule and to be able to relate to it, i.e., empathy practices were reframed around our clients/team members, etc.

No longer cogs in the machine

To do all of the above there is a requisite for the organization’s culture and leadership to recognize the change in employee needs, and believe in and promote human jobs that endorse individuality, authenticity, and overall well-being

The rising generation is no longer boxing work as “a job” or “a means of living”. Our work has become an essential thread that weaves the cloth of our identity, purpose, and source of joy. All of these are part of the human essence. Employees will no longer keep up as cogs in the machine, but rather humans who create their life purpose through their work.

Sandra William ('21) is an alumnus of Columbia Business School and a Manager at Bain & Company. She is passionate about unlocking the full potential of Talent and tackling topics around Education and Workforce Development.

Views expressed within this article are solely the author’s and do not reflect the views of their workplace.