First in a Three-Part Series on the Challenges Facing Future Leaders–and the Skills They’ll Need to Handle Them
The pandemic prompted people to rethink and reprioritize why, how and where they work. The literal terms of employment may not have changed, but the expectations – the psychological contract between employee and employer as well as among team members and between them and the work – has also evolved.
“We have moved away from a transactional model of work,” said Dr. Erin Eatough, Director, Labs at BetterUp. “What employees really want is a place to find things that maybe in the past we have taken for granted or haven't invested in fully – things like belonging, meaning, purpose and self-actualization.”
The three years’ radical changes prompted GoForwardToWork.com, Ferrazzi Greenlight’s research institute, and BetterUp, the human transformation platform, to convene a series of in-person and virtual roundtables focused on the ways work will shift in the next five years and how leaders will have to adjust. Understanding this new psychological contract and taking responsibility for leading under its terms is their first task.
Start with work’s changing ‘why.’ The number of workers who expect companies to connect them with purpose increased by 5 percent between 2021 and 2022, according to Accenture. So organizations providing what it calls an “omni-connected experience” – where people are included and feel they belong, regardless of where they physically work – are producing better work experiences.
Future leaders have to understand the new accountability they have to their workers and teams and ... [+]
These new expectations involve a more holistic view of health, including mental health and wellbeing. Workers also expect their jobs to support them as complete people, with space to self-define and be true to their authentic selves without judgment or repercussions. “Let's move away from the idea of ‘work-life balance,’ because it's not a thing,” said Bill Baker of Wolters Kluwer. “It hasn't been a thing since the internet.”
Pandemic life left people feeling isolated and untethered. According to BetterUp, the percentage of people reporting loneliness increased 10 percent since 2019, while the number feeling belonging decreased 13 percent since 2020. Such changes are critical, as BetterUp has found a sense of belonging is the second-highest predictor of employee intent to stay. Engaged workers are 41 percent less likely to plan on leaving than those who are not. Don’t fool yourself that a slowing economy will mitigate this trend. Workers who can’t move are candidates for ‘quiet-quitting.’
The ‘where’ of work has become perhaps the highest-profile friction point in the drive to the future. According to Accenture, 83 percent of workers prefer a hybrid work model, but only 35 percent are satisfied with their company’s approach. No wonder: They have learned that work flexibility and even location independence are possible, so why should they return to a rigid, outdated status quo?
Merely making hours more flexible while otherwise recreating pre-2020 collaborative practices will not address this challenge, however. Leaders must deliberately redesign how their teams collaborate and bond. Pre-pandemic, team-building relied too much on serendipity, but we have proactive bonding techniques available which lend themselves to hybrid work. One simple way: Conduct a weekly energy check-in with your team to build co-elevating relationships. Teams which adopt this model have thrived. Those who haven’t? Accenture found that 42 percent of fully on-site employees feel less connected than those in hybrid models, while fully-remote employees at companies that haven’t updated their relationship practices have friendship networks 36 percent smaller than their in-office and hybrid colleagues’, according to BetterUp.
Although in-person time remains essential – for collaboration, learning, knowledge-sharing and connection-building – there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. Leaders need to make their work models flexible enough to support their people’s needs.
Expectations are also changing around ‘how’ – specifically, technology. Pandemic exigencies spurred the greatest technological acceleration in history. With necessity nursing invention, leaning into digital became a baseline for communications and productivity. The companies which thrived understood that dividing employees between technical and nontechnical workers wasted the most radically human and readily available resource of all: talent. Companies with the most equitable approach to technology are six times more likely to have employees with an “innovation mindset,” Accenture found.
This technological rush into the future brings upside and risk. AI may eliminate up to 10 percent of jobs, while 60 percent will have at least one-third of their tasks automated, Google’s James Manyika has estimated. That change is already occurring. WorkFusion has released a line of Digital Workers which are fully-trained and ready to work seamlessly alongside human employees from day one, alleviating them of rote tasks. Google and Microsoft have unveiled AI personal assistants.
These tools will alleviate repetitive and time-consuming tasks – a relief to eschew. That will mean leaders’ remaining duties disproportionately requiring soft skills such as communication and empathy. No wonder interpersonal skills are increasingly in demand for CEOs.
Future leaders have to understand the new accountability they have to their workers and teams and rethink the work experience to accommodate it. In our next installment, we’ll dig deeper on the kind of next-generation emotional and social qualities that will entail.
