The Great Resignation & The Future Of Work: Jess Von Bank of Leapgen On How Employers and Managers Need To Adjust To The Future Of Work

Change is difficult, and people resist it even if they know it’s good for them. It’s like trying to establish a new workout routine. You know it’s good for you, but you still need to commit to seeing progress. Today’s organizations are trying to build new muscle, and I think that will be easier when we forget all about the unhealthy practices we were so used to in the past.

As a part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Jess Von Bank.

Jess is the Head of Marketing and Brand Strategy for Leapgen, a digital transformation company and consulting firm that works with organizations globally to challenge established thinking and better design and deliver workforce services. She also runs the Now of Work, Leapgen’s global community for HR, Talent, and workforce experience professionals. Jess is an active community emcee, ambassador for women’s and girls’ organizations, and President of Diverse Daisies, a nonprofit for girls’ enrichment and empowerment.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you please tell us about one or two life experiences that most shaped who you are today?

I grew up in a small town in North Dakota. Many people who are born there never leave a 50-mile radius of your little town. My dad was a farmer, my mom was a nurse, and few people in my family went to college. The fact that I went into Human Resources still surprises my family, if they even understand it. Nobody before me held a corporate job, so it’s kind of funny that I do what I do: championing people at work.

The fact that I have a passion for the future of talent sometimes surprises even me, but I love that I bring such a unique perspective. I see things differently. I don’t think anyone ever cut my dad a paycheck in his entire life; how many people can say that? And I watched my mom work her entire career on the frontline of healthcare. Now, as a working mom to three young daughters, it’s even more important that I champion the underrepresented, marginalized, and everyone who deserves a better experience of work.

My first experience in the people space was as a recruiter, matchmaking talent to opportunity. I had this overly optimistic view of being part of an industry entirely devoted to helping people find the potential within themselves. I saw everyone’s career transition as a life-improving, maybe even life-changing, moment. As a recruiter, I loved extending job offers late into a Friday afternoon, knowing somebody was going into the weekend celebrating a pay increase or a promotion. I envisioned each of them hanging up the phone with me in excitement to tell their family the good news. Of course, I came to understand how broken talent systems and tools were, and how terrible the candidate and recruiter experience could be. That’s how I fell in love with tech and made the move from a practitioner to a solution provider. I’m so grateful for perspective on both sides of solutions; it helps me better represent underseen and undervalued groups in the workforce, such as women, working moms, people of color, and other marginalized groups. I’ve become known as a champion for inclusive talent practices.

I love the way I was able to approach this space with a fresh point of view. I never think of it as bold, but some people do. I believe inclusivity and compassion are the future of talent. We are moving toward an HR model that gives people agency over their career development and skills path. We’re democratizing workforce experience in ways we never have before. We’re seeing that people can work on their own terms and that people and the business can both win.

What do you predict will be the same about work, the workforce, and the workplace 10–15 years from now? What do you predict will be different?

Unfortunately, 10 years from now, I think we will still be talking about employee experience, employee engagement, culture, and organizational purpose. None of those are bad things; I simply worry we’ve beat the same drum for so long that we don’t know how to stop beating it, let alone play a different tune. We’ve made these areas of discussion such lofty concepts, but I fear we’ve made the definitions too broad. Which means we overshoot when we try to deliver basic fundamentals. This morning, I downloaded another annual report and saw no shift from last year. We’re still missing the mark. We’re still not delivering. The chasm between employee experience and employee expectations is still massive.

Employees want their employers to show them they care. They want basic things like fair pay, transparency, and respect to feel valued. Meanwhile, we’re trying to meet their needs with crazy benefits and more technology they don’t want to use. We keep missing the mark, which is why we continue to rehash the same old topics over and over.

Power is shifting, though. People have more agency. They’re leaving undesirable workplaces and sitting on the sidelines by choice. Once people began making their own decisions, they opened the door to employers listening and getting things right. Employees want to work on their own terms, and they expect choice and flexibility. That’s not a privileged conversation anymore. In the past, if you had a special skill or were at a higher level, you got a little agency, choice, and flexibility. Today, things are different. Everyone believes they deserve these basic considerations, and we can’t go back. We can’t compete for talent and not be willing to offer work on their terms.

This power shift is extremely exciting. We’ll have real conversations about employee experience, engagement, and culture when people are able to make their own decisions. For this to happen, we need to establish trust, offer work flexibility, and create the kinds of systems and infrastructure that allow talent to move, grow, and develop. Those aren’t crazy employee expectations and shouldn’t be reserved for the elite. We owe it to everybody. Everybody deserves a better work experience. Everybody deserves mobility options. Everybody deserves to be professionally mentored and developed. The next 10 years will see this becoming the norm.

What do you predict will be the biggest gaps between what employers are willing to offer and what employees expect as we move forward? How can employers reconcile those gaps?

I’ll have to get a little technical because shaking up the talent marketplace to increase flexibility is easier said than done. We have to start assessing talent based on skills and capabilities not found on a typical resume. Resumes are the worst criteria for who will best meet the responsibilities in your (also terrible) job descriptions.

So often, employers completely ignore their internal talent when they almost always already have people who can do the work well. They don’t have procedures allowing them to see the people right in front of their eyeballs. We have to get much better at this. It’s going to require us to deconstruct jobs and reconstruct people based on validated active skills and desired future skills. We also need to know people’s capabilities. This all means we need to assess people on a different basis than employment history and education alone.

I say it’s easier said than done because it involves changing everything about how an organization describes and configures jobs. They might even have to approach projects and teams in a whole new way. Employers may start establishing groups of people and roles based on who is capable of working on a project at any given moment.

At present, companies are far too boxed in and rigid in their thinking. Deconstructing jobs and learning to assess talent based on skills and capabilities is the most interesting shift we’ll make in this sector. It’s going to be a heavy lift, and we’ll have to eat the elephant one bite at a time. However, if we can do it, it will solve a lot of things in the talent conversation. It’s foundational work, and we need to get started.

We’ve all read the headlines about how the pandemic reshaped the workforce. What societal changes do you foresee as necessary to support a future of work that works for everyone?

One topic that we don’t talk much about is the increase in global poverty. We talk about how the talent market is responding to economic factors and how the stock market is behaving, but this is short-sighted. We look at all these micro cycles, but we forget that we have a global labor market that is not responding in the ways we expect it to.

Global poverty has actually increased in spite of the fact that we went through a massive talent cycle. We should have improved in activating hidden pools of talent, but we didn’t. A lot of things are in play that we’re not fully grasping. I recently saw Brian Wilkerson give a talk at an hrQ Blueprint Speaker series where he claimed that the labor market should be three times larger than it is based on population demographics. Everyone is talking about the labor shortage and saying they can’t find people. The real issue is a macro issue; we’re not skilling enough of the world’s available labor.

When it comes down to it, we’re not even seeing enough of the world’s available labor. For example, working moms make up the biggest pool of diverse talent, but we’re not activating them. We’re not creating the kind of flexibility or systemic change that allows them to return to work or fully participate in the system of work on their own terms. Look at all of the other groups of available labor that could be activated, skilled, and career-developed. We get hung up in short-term economic cycles and fail to talk enough about the broader talent issue at play. It’s sort of lazy to say there aren’t enough people to do all the work when so many people are underrepresented, underpaid, underpromoted, underemployed, and largely underskilled. Wouldn’t it be more forward-looking to ask all the possible ways work can get done, then consider all the possible people who could do it, then offer creative ways to allow them to do it best?

What is your greatest source of optimism about the future of work?

Currently, four generations are represented in today’s workforce. At some near point in time, we’re going to have more digital natives in the workforce than digital immigrants. When that happens, our expectations will be different. As this fresh wave of digital natives enters the workforce, we won’t have to fight the old stereotypes of work. Nobody will remember that people used to have to commute at 8am every morning, punch a clock at 9am, sit in meetings for eight hours, attend happy hour after work to look engaged, and then rush to pick up kids from daycare before a late pickup fee kicks in. That’s insanity. There’s no flexibility in that old model. No wonder working moms and other caregivers break.

Change is difficult, and people resist it even if they know it’s good for them. It’s like trying to establish a new workout routine. You know it’s good for you, but you still need to commit to seeing progress. Today’s organizations are trying to build new muscle, and I think that will be easier when we forget all about the unhealthy practices we were so used to in the past.

What innovative strategies do you see employers offering to help improve and optimize their employee’s mental health and wellbeing?

Every organization is trying to say they are people-first, that they design their workforce experience and culture around and for people. However, you need to have a framework and approach for doing this, and that includes actual human-centered design thinking. You also need a whole-person approach which entails seeing and knowing employees. When employers measure the success of their well-being programs, initiatives, or technologies, they need to know whether or not they impact how employees work and feel about their work.

When we used to talk about employee experience, the conversation centered on the physical workplace and all the tools for collaboration and project achievement. It was about office, culture, and systems. Today, well-being is a part of the equation, and everybody’s trying to figure out how to have that conversation. Instead of measuring employees’ engagement by whether or not they are meeting goals, showing up to deliver, and maintaining happy customers, we’re talking about their well-being at work. Now we’re asking them, “How are you, and how can I support you?” It’s about checking in on people, not checking up on people. We’re talking about taking care of the whole person.

Before we earn the right to do that, we have to establish trust. If employees don’t feel like their managers know them, they don’t feel they can trust them. Employers have never had these conversations — or worse, maybe they’ve had the conversation before and didn’t respond in a positive way.

Employees are looking to their employers and saying, “We’ve blurred the lines between work and home, personal and professional. I’m inviting you into my living room and bringing my whole self to work as you asked. Where do you want to go from here?”

Before we can have any kind of mental health and well-being conversation, trust needs to be established. And it’s interesting because we’re establishing that trust through screens and polls. We have to trust the tools, but more importantly, we have to trust the people who are using them. A lot of people say we’ve made enormous strides in well-being, but we’re barely scratching the surface.

It seems like there’s a new headline every day: ‘The Great Resignation’. ‘The Great Reconfiguration’, and now the ‘Great Reevaluation’. What are the most important messages leaders need to hear from these headlines? How do company cultures need to evolve?

Companies need to give choices back. People want to work on their own terms. All the Covid perks, stimulus packages, and unemployment supports are gone. That’s not why people are sitting on the sidelines — they’re reevaluating the boundaries and relationships they want to have with employers. Some of them have figured out how to make it as their own employers.

We can get a lot more people activated, but it won’t look the same. We have to free ourselves from traditional constructs such as nine-to-five business hours and office environments. We have to find out what people want and how we can offer that in a way that works for them and still delivers the performance, outcomes, and productivity that businesses need. I believe we can do this through innovation, creativity, and empathy, but the process requires trust as we create and experiment with new models of work.

In the midst of the pandemic, I had a marketing team reporting to me. We figured out how to meet deadlines, stay in contact, and create content collaboratively. I executed my role in this pandemic machine with three kids doing virtual learning behind me on their own little machines. We were all on camera, together, all the time. Out of necessity, I realized my team and I didn’t always have to be working on the same schedule, and we don’t always have to be on video together. We started synchronous and asynchronous workstreams, just like my kids leveraged synchronous and asynchronous learning techniques. Now, there are so many tools allowing us to work asynchronously and come together for key activities. What a great opportunity for us to reimagine models of work, but it requires a growth mindset and a willingness to unlearn what you think you know and take people on a journey of experimentation.

What’s your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? And how has this quote shaped your perspective?

I was an avid reader from a really young age, and one of my favorite book characters of all time is Scout in “To Kill a Mockingbird.” She’s bold, maybe a little combative, a tomboy by the standards of her time, curious, unexpected, highly intelligent, and highly optimistic about the innate goodness of people. I kind of feel like I just described how I raise girls, now that I think about it.

Harper Lee wrote, “Real courage is when you know you’re licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.” Of course, the book references Scout’s father Atticus’ doomed trial representing someone who couldn’t possibly win. I think the quote represents my own belief in challenging preconceived notions, systems that weren’t designed by us, and the power of standing up for a tomorrow that looks different than today. If you want to change the way something has always been, has always been done, you have to look for and take opportunities to change little things along the way. This requires you to question everything, accept a few things, and be willing to advocate for changing a lot of things, no matter how exhausting the process can be.

Our readers often like to continue the conversation with our featured interviewees. How can they best connect with you and stay current on what you’re discovering?

I’m active on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

This was so informative, thank you so much! We wish you continued success!

Thank you, as well!