The workers are revolting

There has been a transformation in employee expectations and it requires employers to transform too. Conceptualising a new employee experience needs innovation and reinvention. We’ve identified three primary tensions that need to be resolved.

As businesses and employees navigate a succession of world-changing events, crises and economic challenges, there’s been a shift in people’s relationships with work, and a disconnect between leaders and staff.

Average pay has dropped by 2.6%, inflation is soaring and 2023/24 could bring our biggest drop in living standards for 60 years. We’re faced with cost cutting, recession, redundancy, financial instability and pay cuts. Most senior leaders assume staff are being lazy when working remotely. No wonder only 9% of UK workers feel engaged at work.

Work-life balance is being reclaimed, and wellbeing is a new battleground for recruitment and retention. A new EX (employee experience) is required for this new era and it’s yet to be pieced together. We need fresh thinking to solve new problems that have arisen.

It’s a complex design challenge, and different for every company and every employee. There is no one-size-fits-all. We’re seeing leaders across sectors increasingly pivoting their innovation efforts from customers to employees, to uncover people’s needs, conceptualise solutions and add value to end users.

Talent retention and investing into people’s skills and development are crucial. Even for a person who stays in their role for the next five years, the skills required are predicted to change by as much as 50%. Find ways to make use of existing talent, such as creating cross-functional roles and opportunities for long-term growth, and providing access to training. Failure to invest in people could affect the future success of a business.

Our workforce deserves more. These tensions need to be resolved if you want to retain your talent.

Creating the new EX

• Leaders must create a new employee experience and innovate fast to meet employee expectations.
• Treat staff like customers, with care and consideration.
• Be adaptable and empathetic, and trust people.
• Empathise with individual needs and values.
• Care about outcomes delivered, not hours spent.
• Don’t assume the office is a great place to be. Create compelling pull factors. It can make your culture stronger.
• Across all roles, develop existing talent, invest in skills development and create growth opportunities.
• Retention over recruitment. Invest in people’s wellbeing.
• Purpose cannot waver in a crisis. Social equality and the future of the planet are what inspire people.
• Map out the potential unintended consequences of your decisions. Iterate on findings. Be OK with getting things wrong; that’s how innovation works.

Personalisation vs parity

Personalisation is everywhere in our lives — streaming, e-commerce, social media, wellness and more. People also want to be treated as individuals at work, with differing needs and preferences to their colleagues. For leaders, this raises a conflict: how to create fairness and parity alongside personalisation.

There are some excellent data driven innovations in HR tech and tools, but it’s a stretch to suggest that they fully meet expectations or answer the fairness question. How can data ensure that everyone is treated consistently yet individually, and not dehumanise them as a series of data points?

Managers need to play an active role, with radical empathy towards people and their needs. When employee experience is approached from a customer-centric perspective, fairness and consistency become integral to the conversation, showing that serving one part of the workforce at the expense of another won’t work. Then, technology can be leveraged alongside human connection, in service of a guiding principle: your employees are your customers

Mars: Personalising work

Mars is the world’s biggest family owned company, with annual revenue of $45bn — bigger than Coca-Cola and Unilever. During the pandemic, they knew they had to disregard past assumptions and create an entirely new employee experience. We used a human-centric approach to build a new model: the Mars Future of Work Deployment Kit. It was distributed globally, allowing teams to personalise their approach to work and adopt new behaviours while still maintaining a OneMars approach, anchored in Mars’ purpose and Five Principles. It has set the scene for a new era of leadership that embeds a more personalised experience.

Flexibility vs unity

People are demanding more choice in where, when and how to work. How can leaders reconcile the right to freedom and flexibility with the need to create a strong, cohesive and unified team culture? How do you foster a sense of belonging and unity when staff work to their own cadence and preferences?

A first step is to shed the biases associated with hybrid working. Productivity paranoia is prevalent among leaders: 87% are not confident that people at home are productive. Yet 80% of employees are confident they’re more productive — and many are burnt out. This disconnect is fertile ground for distrust.

Forcing people back to the office risks sabotaging your culture. If a business wants to fully go back to the office it could lose up to 39% of its workforce. People need compelling reasons to come in, rather than empty promises of productivity and boundless creativity. New work models have to be intentional, and this requires leaders to be open, keep your finger on the pulse of how employees feel, and be agile in your response.

Bupa: Empowering people to choose

Bupa Healthcare has 80,000+ employees globally, and a complex workforce including care workers, dentists, doctors and head office staff. It didn’t want to set arbitrary rules on when to come in. After immersive research and interviews with frontline teams and managers, we used a human-centred design approach to help develop a clear decision-making framework for people to use, tailored to Bupa’s culture. It enables everyone to make their own choices based on the needs of their team, the organisation and their own preferences. We also prepared managers for conversations with their teams, encompassing trust, expectations around rituals, community and belonging, and role modelling best practice

Inspiring vs empowering

Good leaders motivate, encourage and empathise. But that’s not enough. Modern leaders must also empower employees and respect their freedom. That’s tricky: how can you be hands-on and hands-off at the same time? Currently, with the rise of terms like quiet quitting reflecting a negative emotional shift, the consensus is hands-off.

Asking hard questions is crucial. Is my leadership style right for this person? Have I been an open source of communication they can trust? Has my conduct affected my team’s morale? Managers have to model wellbeing, and be capable of having regular and honest conversations. Alongside effective rituals, capability training and leveraging tools and technology, teams can be enabled to work more effectively, with trust and autonomy.

Leadership in the digital and hybrid age requires that qualities such as deep domain expertise, decisiveness, authority and short term focus give way to softer skills: empathy, humility, adaptability, purpose, communication, transparency, empowerment and building community.

Patrizia AG: Nurturing future leaders

Patrizia AG is one of Europe’s largest real asset investment managers, with €56 billion of assets under management. To help it go global, it wanted to develop the capabilities of emerging talent. We examined the needs and challenges of the organisation and designed a bespoke programme. We delivered it to the first two cohorts, equipping them with techniques to create change, break down boundaries and solve problems. We measured its success, so it could become a repeatable model. We helped the Executive Team understand and create the conditions for innovation and design thinking. This was more than a one-off programme; it was the start of a new way of working.

This is an excerpt from our latest book Purpose: Built, it’s all about making change happen and designing a brighter, better future. If you’d like a copy of request one here.

Magnetic is a design and innovation company that helps design better futures. We’ve worked with global businesses to build capabilities, products, services and transform organisations. To find out more get in touch: hello@wearemagnetic.com.