The Great Resignation & The Future Of Work: Salesforce VP Karen Mangia On How Employers and Employees Are Reworking Work Together

Create choices rather than controls. No spyware! Undermines trust!

When it comes to designing the future of work, one size fits none. Discovering success isn’t about a hybrid model or offering remote work options. Individuals and organizations are looking for more freedom. The freedom to choose the work model that makes the most sense. The freedom to choose their own values. And the freedom to pursue what matters most. We reached out to successful leaders and thought leaders across all industries to glean their insights and predictions about how to create a future that works.

As a part of our interview series called “How Employers and Employees are Reworking Work Together,” we had the pleasure to interview Karen Mangia.

Karen Mangia is an internationally-recognized thought leader whose TEDx appearance, keynotes, blogs and books reach hundreds of thousands of business leaders each year. She is the author of Working from Home: Making the New Normal Work for You (Wiley), Listen UP! How to Tune Into Customers and Turn Down the Noise (Wiley) and also Success With Less (Marie Street Press). A prolific blogger and sought-after media interview, she has been featured in Forbes and regularly contributes to Thrive Global and ZDNet.

As Vice President of Customer and Market Insights at Salesforce, she engages current and future customers around the world to discover new ways of creating success and growth together. She serves on the company’s Work from Home Taskforce, where she is helping the company’s 50,000+ worldwide employees to better adapt to a work-from-home environment. Passionate about diversity and inclusion, she also serves on the company’s Racial Equality and Justice Taskforce. Prior to Salesforce, she spearheaded Customer Satisfaction and Experience at Cisco Systems.

Recognized with the Centurion Award, Hall of Fame Honoree and a Graduate of Distinction from Ball State University; part of the 40 under 40 in the Indianapolis Business Journal; and Ivy Tech Distinguished Alumni Award. She is a trained chef, and is active in numerous community organizations, including serving on the board of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra and Ball State University.

Let’s jump right in. Some experts have warned of the “Great Resignation” as early as the 1980s and yet so many companies seem to have been completely unprepared when it finally happened. What do you think caused this disconnect? Why do you think the business world was caught by surprise?

Hiring is the new housing. And it’s a candidate’s market. The disconnect results from a growing gap between what employees expect and what employers are willing to give. The past playbook for success was based on the premise of more — more activities and more accomplishments that lead to more products, more profits, and more promotions. And then along comes the Great Resignation, where employees are sending their employers an urgent signal in mass that the “more” that’s being offered — even if that’s more pay, more PTO and more perks — isn’t summing up to success for them.

Employers are left asking a critical question: More…of what?

Employees are responding: More…of what matters.

Employee experience is no longer defined by the employer. Employee experience is defined by the employees. And that’s a major shift for most organizations.

What do you think employers have to do to adapt to this new reality?

Consider these words of Mark Twain: It ain’t what you don’t know that can hurt you. It’s what you know for certain that just ain’t so.

We all have our own understanding of the world of work. Some would call this “culture,” but at a more plainspoken level, it’s just a set of beliefs. Things that look true, but ain’t necessarily so.

We look to the past to create the future. It’s only natural: we use our past experiences to build new ones. Notice that what looks rigid and fixed (“Work means everyone has to be in the office,” for example). What looks solid really isn’t. We can always think about things in a new way. Innovation is infinite. Time marches on, and so do we. Clinging to the past isn’t the way to the future, and it never will be.

Having gone through the pandemic, we all experienced lots and lots of cancellations and changes. We learned how to be okay with things not being okay. Experience teaches us that new possibilities are always available. And even when we don’t like our circumstances, we are often more capable than we realize.

Organizations need to look at what they think they know about world of work. And make time to discover that what they think they know just ain’t so. Here are some questions to open up the conversation;

1. What did you know to be true about work, before the pandemic began, that isn’t true anymore?

2. What’s good about this? Consider a difficult situation or challenge at work. (Dealing with the pandemic is a global example, but you can use something more specific from inside your organization.) Ask yourself and your team this simple, four-word question: What’s good about this? For example, when you think about what you went through during the pandemic, what was good about it?

3. What else could this mean? Choose a particular challenge or difficult situation at work. It can be the same one as item 2, or a different one. Ask yourself and your team this simple, five-word question — to make sure there’s no misunderstanding of what’s really going on: What else could this mean?

When we see what’s not right about the past, we take the first steps toward change. The more myths you bust, the better. The more old thinking goes away, the better. The more that we can discover what’s good about this, the better off we will all be.

Based on your opinion and experience, what do you think were the main pain points that caused the great resignation? Why is so much of the workforce unhappy?

The pandemic brought us all to a simultaneous stop: a full stop in a space called the Day of Reckoning. And what our collective Day of Reckoning revealed is a tally of who’s winning and who’s losing in life. In real terms. With real people. Real people we know. Real people we care about. Real people who want to win at the game of life. I’m talking about our families. Our friends. Our local business owners. Our frontline workers. Ourselves.

And now we are all taking big and small steps to close the gaps between what we’ve been settling for and what we’re no longer willing to settle for any longer.

Living outside of your values — outside of what matters most to you — for an extended period of time leads to unhappiness.

Many employers extoll the advantages of the entrepreneurial spirit and the possibilities of an expanded “gig economy”. But this does come with the cost of a lack of loyalty of gig workers. Is there a way to balance this? Can an employer look for single use sources of services and expect long-term loyalty? Is there a way to hire a freelancer and expect dependability and loyalty? Can you please explain what you mean?

Employee loyalty results from treatment rather than terms. Everyone wants to feel seen and heard. Everyone wants the opportunity to realize his, her or their full potential. And that is true whether the employee is part time, flex time, full time or contracted time.

What Scott Miller, CEO of Centerpost Media, taught me about employee loyalty blew my mind. He embraces employee side hustles.

You heard me correctly.

He hired two full-tine VP’s this year who are both top performers in multi-level sales organizations. They work full time for him and still bring in sales for their other jobs.

How loyal do you think those employees are likely to be?

It has been said that “people don’t quit jobs, they quit bosses”. How do you think this has been true during the Great Resignation? Can you explain what you mean?

Yes, and I would add employees quit corporate cultures. Employees want meaning, not mandates.

Consider return to office mandates as one use case. A new Bloomberg Wealth survey shows 65% of workers who said their jobs could be done entirely remotely were willing to take a 5% reduction in pay to continue to work from anywhere. In addition, 15% of respondents said they’d be willing to shave 25% off their salary to continue to work from anywhere. Nearly half — 46% — said they would give up a quarter of their days off, and 15% said they would give up all paid time off to be able to work from anywhere.

The firm also asked what else people would give up for option to work from anywhere. More than half said they’d give up Netflix, social media, or Amazon for a year. A third of respondents even said they’d give up the right to vote in all future national and local elections. Gen Z was most likely — 44% — to say they would give up their right to vote.

Think about that — Gen Z employees would give up TikTok and time off to preserve flexibility, autonomy and choice.

Work is no longer a popular serial called “Boss Knows Best.”

How important is it that employees enjoy their jobs? How do you think an unhappy workforce will impact a) company productivity b) company profitability c) and employee health and wellbeing?

What if work could become play? How happy (and productive and well) might we all be then?

Play is vital to our understanding of new possibilities. There’s plenty of work. We go to work in order to work. Then we come home to work. Sometimes home is where we work. So work is always home. We need to work on what’s missing. And it’s not more work. We need more play.

Peter Gray is a professor of psychology at Boston University. He says that more play is what we all need in our lives. What’s true for children and chimpanzees and every animal on this great planet is especially true for you and me. We are wired to play — and there is a purpose to learning to play by your own rules.

Before you decide that playing by your own rules means creating anarchy, think again. Thinking about work in new ways requires new plays. Innovation doesn’t come from what you already know. And playing provides a safe and clear path to new ideas, new responses, and, ultimately, new opportunities for success. In his compelling and powerful TEDx Talk, Dr. Gray says that play is by definition “creative and innovative.”

In a 2018 survey, conducted by PWC, 77% of CEOs described the top two skills that they wanted above all others. Do you know what they were? Creativity and innovation. Coincidence, or insight? Could accessing greater creativity and innovation be the first step toward greater success and happiness?

Play is vital to the development of children, but it’s also vital to our success and happiness at work. Scientific research shows that play can help:

• Reduce stress and beat back burnout, by releasing endorphins, the brain’s natural feel-good chemical. The end result? An overall sense of well-being and overall mental health. Endorphins can even reduce pain!

• Improve brain function. Playing chess, completing puzzles, or pursuing other fun activities that challenge the brain can help prevent memory problems and improve brain function. The social interaction of playing with family and friends can also help ward off stress and depression.

• Stimulate the mind and boost creativity. Young children often learn best when they are playing — a principle that applies to adults as well. You’ll learn a new task better when it’s fun and you’re in a relaxed and playful mood. Play can also stimulate your imagination, helping you adapt and solve problems.

• Improve relationships and your connection to others. Sharing laughter and fun can foster empathy, compassion, trust, and intimacy with others. Play doesn’t have to include a specific activity; it can also be a state of mind. Developing a playful nature can help you loosen up in stressful situations, break the ice with strangers, make new friends, and form new business relationships. There’s also a huge connection between play and emotional intelligence. the most to learn, play the most. Human children, when they are free to do so, play far, far more than any of the other mammals.”

What are a few things that employers, managers and executives can do to ensure that workers enjoy their jobs?

- Ask great questions, rather than provide automatic answers: Knowing is the enemy of discovering.

-Turn down the noise: Take ego out of the conversation so that hard hitting feedback can be heard and actioned.

-Create choices: Choices are a powerful tool to close the gap between what employers are willing to offer and what employees expect.

-Create ownership: We all feel greater ownership of what we help to create, and that means there’s room for everyone at the virtual create table.

-Understand the difference between benefits and beneficial: Benefits like the free bikeshare program are not showing up as beneficial to employees right now. What might? Perhaps it’s a student loan repayment program, a block of tutoring hours for children or a block of hours with a personal concierge service.

-Stop giving meaningless gifts: Oprah is famous for saying the love is in the details. And company swag as a thank you for going above and beyond is as effective a thank you as a slap in the face.

Can you share a few things that employers, managers and executives should be doing to improve their company work culture?

Culture is not perks. It’s not a process. It’s not proximity. Culture is personality. People are able to connect with that corporate personality, just as we click with individual personalities.

And you don’t have to be in the same room with somebody in order to connect with them.

Most companies don’t know what a connected culture looks like. As a result, many managers are scrambling to find their way. Trust is one of the first things that gets dismissed. Consider employers who install employee spyware or who require hourly check-ins as a starting point.

What might change in your relationships with your employees if your curiosity surfaced through conversations rather than through control tactics?

Employers need visibility into employees’ output. That’s not going to change. But how you empower that output is key to your entire organization’s success and more indicative of your company culture than any mission statement..

How do managers learn to measure and trust in a distributed work world? Has your company had that conversation?

The effective distributed work culture needs crystal clear expectations about the outcomes every employee is expected to deliver. Clear outcomes that translate into observable, measurable behaviors and clear ownership. And inherent within ownership is trust.

We all feel greater ownership of what we help to create. And it is the responsibility of both the employer and the employee to create these conditions together. To set clear priorities and reasonable expectations. To distribute and redistribute workload. To reduce distractions and alleviate unnecessary stress. To allow for flexibility, autonomy, and choice. When we build this into our culture, we build the trust that allows us to do our best work.

How could you engage your employees to revisit expected outcomes? How could you redraw lines of ownership as a tool to signal greater trust?

Okay, wonderful. Here is the main question of our interview. What are your “5 things employers should do to attract and retain top talent during the labor shortage?”

(1). Ask rather than answer. I hear you…the three most powerful words in leadership.

(2). Create choices rather than controls. No spyware! Undermines trust!

(3). Give gifts of meaning. As defined by your employees. And if you’re struggling to find ideas, check out the genius business Giftpack, which uses AI technology to match gifts with recipients for businesses.

(4). Discover rather than know: Knowing is the enemy of discovering. What might you be missing?

(5). Create ownership. We all feel greater ownership of what we help to create.

Thank you for sharing your insights and predictions. We appreciate the gift of your time and wish you continued success and good health.