Human-Centered Leadership in a Crisis
Safety, belonging, and value are the foundations for building employee resilience and well-being.
By Peter Talmers and Troy Wegner
One of the most discussed topics of the past year has been “How to lead in a crisis?” Today, over a year into the pandemic and with months of uncertainty to come, what do we know? How can leaders sustain employee well-being and performance on the road ahead?
According to Gallup research of more than 8,000 employees, creating an environment that energizes and motivates teams helps them reach their highest level of performance. Teams with a positive employee experience measured by employee engagement achieve 22% higher profitability and 21% higher productivity compared to teams with low engagement experience.
Today, a year into the pandemic, there is a shared experience of “we’re all in this together.” This feeling can build empathy and connection across diverse groups of employees. But sustaining it past the one-year mark will become increasingly difficult as working environments change. As teams splinter into remote, in-office, and hybrid arrangements, people will no longer be in the same boat and won’t have the benefits of a “pandemic bonding effect.”
This poses a risk to business health and human health. We know that a positive employee experience helps people perform at their best, but creating positive experiences in uncertain times presents unique challenges for leaders. The complexity of running an organization can pull a leader’s attention to operations. And while operations are important, they are not enough. Leaders must keep teams engaged and productive to run the operations well. They must cultivate community in the organization. They must sustain an organizational culture that flourishes across home, office, and field locations. Achieving those critical outcomes means leaders must bring an additional lens to their role: a human-centric lens.
The question is how?
Three workforce challenges for business leaders
Recently, we worked with the Chief Talent Officer of a Fortune 500 company. Her organization is adopting a new operational model until at least 2022. To help her navigate this change, she asked our perspective on three topics:
- How can we create community and connection to culture in a diverse, hybrid working environment?
- Have best practices for positive employee experiences emerged during COVID?
- What does good look like when cultivating culture in a hybrid office-remote-home workplace?
Given our work across many industries, we were happy to share insights on these universal questions.
How can we create community and connection to culture in a diverse, hybrid working environment?
There are two parts to this answer: First, identify the conditions that create community. Second, satisfy those conditions across the employee lifecycle (from applicants to alumni), work locations (home/work) and role types (field-based, office-based, home-based), and personal situations.
What conditions create community?
Creating community starts with meeting core human needs. Taking a needs-based view of human behavior has the benefit of keeping managers focused on fundamentals — rather than getting lost in lists of tactics. There are many useful models of human needs. From the popular Maslow’s Hierarchy to the SPACES model from neuroscience, the PERMA model from positive psychology, and the evolutionary approach of the Barrett Values System. Each adds a unique lens to defining what people need to flourish.
However, while these frameworks identify a variety of needs, in times of change, humans need their social and safety needs met above all. And most organizations struggle to prioritize a discrete set of core needs—the needs for safety, belonging, and value.
When these needs are not met, community and culture begin to erode, represented by holes in the image above. The takeaway for organizations is that during times of uncertainty like the pandemic, or times of change like the return to office, these needs matter most to people. When they are unmet performance and productivity decline. Thus, the primary focus of employers should be to help people meet these needs and repair any holes when needs are not being met. Creating clarity on what working teams need can unleash each leader’s creativity in providing support. Here’s an overview of the needs during times of change with illustrative strategies to help meet them.
Safety and security
There are two sides to consider: physical and psychological.
Physical. Employers must continue to show care for the physical well-being of their people, formally through policies and informally through 1:1 conversations between managers and each person on their team. As return-to-office plans begin, companies must remain sensitive to keep people safe from COVID-19. This means setting up in-office protocols if workplaces are open, allowing flexibility to work remotely, and supplying information on practices for health and well-being in any location. Working from home has also meant less physical activity and change of scenery. In the months ahead employers should keep offering people resources, learning, and encouragement to promote physical well-being.
Psychological. There is a deeper side to our safety needs that is more subtle: psychological safety. This term describes a workplace where people can bring new ideas and speak truthfully without fear of embarrassment or negative consequences. Meeting the need for psychological safety frees people to offer their best thinking and best work. This was the lesson Google learned when it identified psychological safety as the secret ingredient of its most impactful teams. In fact, wider research reveals this type of interpersonal safety to be a critical factor in adaptive, high-performing teams. In her recent book The Fearless Organization, Amy Edmundson of Harvard Business School shows how psychological safety helps teams perform better, learn and adapt faster, and innovate more. This source of safety can be an energizer and motivator for people and teams.
Keep in mind that the strains of the pandemic have led many people to feel unsafe to truly speak their mind (“I am struggling with how to shut work off and find balance”) or ask for accommodation (“My child has developed anxiety during COVID and I want to spend more time with her.”) To sustain this sense of safety as workers return to office, leaders must regularly ask their teams to voice these concerns without fear of reprisal. Managers and employees must make this a day-to-day reality by signaling safety through listening, empathy, and encouragement of each of their team members.
Belonging
Autonomy (free to present authentic self with others). Humans are social creatures who thrive on connection to others. But in connecting with others they also want the freedom to behave authentically. They want the autonomy to make individual choices without feeling a need to downplay or hide parts of themselves — a phenomenon known as covering. In short, they want to be themselves. Employees need to feel they can act authentically because when they feel they can’t the organizational costs are too high. The costs are high because the energy people invest in covering not only reduces the energy invested in work, but also erodes the sense of autonomy organizations need their people to have to perform at their best.
Be part of a group (connection to an organization /community / identity, etc.). To promote inclusion in a group or organization, leaders must communicate and promote a sense of belonging and identity to all employees and even contractors and partners. This is critical because in evolutionary terms, exclusion and isolation were risks to survival. In fact, neuroscience research shows that social exclusion activates the same neural pathways as physical pain. See research from UCLA’s Naomi Eisenberg on the neural basis for social rejection. In contrast, organizational inclusion can have a strengthening effect. Organizations whose employees experience inclusive and virtuous behavior such as compassion, integrity, forgiveness, trust, and optimism outperform organizations in business outcomes including profitability, productivity, innovation, quality, and customer retention.
According to research from Judith and Gary Olson, these feelings of connection are easier to keep remotely if people have first met in person. When they have not met in person, leaders can foster connection through video and audio calls where people discuss shared values, beliefs and ideals. Having common priorities creates a sense of belonging and also a sense of identity and community. In the hybrid, work environment that awaits us, this bonding will become increasingly important. Finding shared values builds connection to the larger organization and deepens purpose. According to author Bréne Brown of the University of Houston, the need for belonging is primal. She conducted a seven-year study of leadership with military, corporate, and community leaders which reinforced the finding of her earlier work: “Connection is why we’re here; it is what gives purpose and meaning to our lives.”
Value
There are two dimensions to value:
Appreciation (being valued by others). There is a large body of evidence, particularly from the field of positive psychology, that receiving praise, being appreciated, experiencing positive emotions, having energizing interactions boosts resilience and well-being (see Barbara Frederickson’s Broaden-and-Build theory). Remote teams who communicate actively and proactively around the importance of the work people are doing is essential. The role of leaders on such teams is to connect the work the team is doing to the impact and value it has on other people. The simple strategy of being valued by others for your contributions can build a culture of service. One leader at a large North American insurance company required every member of his team to set aside four hours each week — 10% of working time — for personal learning and development. This action set an expectation for his team to build new skills, but also sent a signal that he values their potential and their ability to grow. His organization became known over time as one of the most innovative groups for its forward-thinking interpretations of new events.
Contribution (being of value to others). Significant research shows how doing work that benefits others can increase employee engagement, strengthen team performance, and increase immune function. Organizations that promote a sense of generativity and giving back to others create tangible benefits for their employees, and also build a culture of contribution that engages colleagues, customers, and/or communities.
While these are challenging times, they are challenging for everyone. Leaders and organizations who master meeting these needs can outperform peers who do not — meaning positive employee experience and positive business outcomes.
Have best practices for managing positive employee experiences emerged during remote work of COVID?
Yes, the first practice is engaging employees as whole people. COVID has helped humanize business this past year. Companies who enacted policies to support the broad range of personal, social, and financial challenges of their workforce were rewarded with enormous loyalty and appreciation. These policies include stipends for home office equipment, flexible working hours, expanded mental health and therapy options, and supplemental pay for frontline essential workers. Combined with COVID, the nationwide demonstrations in reaction to the death of George Floyd and broader social inequality also brought human injustice and suffering front and center in the workplace. Companies who responded with care and sensitivity toward this issue often found their employees posting positive comments on social media about their company. People took pride in the way their employer sought to support its Black employees and take a public stand on a racial issue important to its workforce not simply as employees, but also as people.
A second practice emerging is building stronger “sense & respond” capabilities. Companies traditionally ask employees for their input once a year during an annual employee survey, but during COVID many organizations asked employees directly for concerns and challenges they were facing on a weekly and monthly basis. In a world that is increasingly characterized as VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous), the need for an adaptive capacity is essential to mobilize toward the next opportunities. One company asked all people leaders, from front-line supervisors to senior executives, to increase frequency of 1:1 contact with employees in order to understand how they were doing in managing stress, wellness, and work and to seek ways to further listen and support them.
A third practice gaining ground is establishing a lifecycle view of employees. This helps to counter biases toward specific employee segments and plan for the entire workforce. Many leaders are also overlaying this lifecycle view with a lens of work/home integration and chronic uncertainty. One way to conceptualize this lifecycle is through five stages of employee experience in chronological order. Combining the three foundational needs across each of the five stages creates a matrix of needs by stage. The resulting visual can serve as both an assessment and action planning template to operationalize practices at scale that meet employee needs.
Organizations can bring this framework to life with strategies that fulfill employee needs across the employee lifecycle phases:
- Join. Cultivate ongoing contact with potential candidates to drive belonging, offering transparency into the future processes and timelines, and honor pre-existing offers to new joiners to build security.
- Engage. Given the challenges of building connection and belonging through virtual means, plan for longer onboarding times for new hires and perhaps higher frequency touchpoints with direct manager and immediate team members to create bonds. Design intentional networking building introductions across the organization to create sense of belonging and safety.
- Grow. Focus on employee development to signal value and create sense of security through ongoing skill development. Help employees grow to meet new challenges and assignments by providing challenge and feedback to fuel their development.
- Achieve. Foster collaboration and teamwork to help employees make progress every day at work. Recognize the successes to create a tangible sense of contribution and appreciation.
- Champion. Help employees feel the organization is “in their corner” and on their side. Double down on the organization’s core values and purpose, offer new ways to support employees as new challenges appear. Even when employees leave maintain a sense of belonging by not considering them “former employees” but instead as alumni.
What does good look like when cultivating culture in a hybrid workplace?
Here are some examples from Slalom’s client experiences during COVID that will help navigate future flexible work environments. Leaders can guide their focus by asking three simple questions:
- Do our people feel safe? In practice this is a combination of empathy and safety. One company held a town hall where the company president communicated that their top priority was the physical, emotional, and financial care of employees. Senior executives spoke personally and candidly about the difficulties they’ve experienced during COVID. This emotional authenticity allowed thousands of employees to feel a sense of empathy for leaders who themselves were suffering. By seeing leaders model vulnerability, employees felt safe to do so themselves. This “vulnerability loop” created a sense of safety and solidarity across the organization. The executives then outlined the priorities and policies that demonstrated that care. The company’s top financial priority was no layoffs. The goal was job protection. To make that financial commitment possible the company president announced that all people in formal leadership roles globally would take a 25% reduction in bonus compensation and more if needed to protect jobs. In the context of high uncertainty, financial stability generated a strong sense of safety. As some employees return to the office and others stay at home, leaders must continue to generate a sense of safety in both environments.
- Do our people feel they belong? Feeling part of a larger group not only creates a sense of belonging, but also creates safety — as we know from the adage “there is strength in numbers.” To create a sense of belonging, one professional services firm uses human-centered design to create experiences of belonging, from the beginning of their employment. For example, during new hire onboarding, rather than emphasize company policy and HR forms, the focus is building social capital. This means meeting, greeting, and bonding with many different co-workers. These introductions are intentionally chosen and facilitated by experienced employees who take new hires under their wing to ensure they feel included and treated like part of the team. Some organizations go a step further and encourage leaders to reach out to new hires and proactively invite them into their networks which creates a strong sense of inclusion and belonging. As one new employee said, “People see me, they care about me, and they help me get connected. I’m only one week in but people already see me as part of the fabric.” As more staff begin to commute to physical offices and others continue at home, it is essential to create a sense of belonging and identity through intentional relationship-building across both segments.
- Do our people feel valued? Showing appreciation and gratitude to co-workers is a key practice that some companies have integrated into the flow of the work week as informal rituals. For example, one technology company hosts an office-wide Zoom call every Thursday morning for all employees to share updates on customers, colleagues, and the community. At the end of the call, attended by hundreds of employees, the leadership team will say, “Ok, let’s start our Thankful Thursday messages.” And the Zoom chat begins to flood with messages of gratitude, “I’m thankful for _______.” Most often gratitude is for a coworker who has helped them out in some way. In other companies, leadership meetings begin with recognizing people for great work and callouts in the past week. This is a far cry from the “employee of the month” award which by comparison seems stingy. Rather than recognizing one person every 30 days in a sometimes forced manner, these new practices recognize dozens of people every week in natural and conversational ways. In times of transition and change ahead, leaders must send continuous signals of value to their workforce to provide them a sense of appreciation and recognition.
Looking Ahead
In a recent talk about leadership during the pandemic, Bréne Brown stated the obvious about human needs at work: “The thing we also don’t talk about, which doesn’t make sense, is that care and connection and affection for each other is an irreducible need for people at work.”
This is especially true during times of uncertainty and change. Adopting a human-centric mindset can create the community and culture to build social and emotional bonds that build resilience and help people adapt to change. As people return to offices, wise leaders will prioritize helping people meet their fundamental needs. Organizations will likely find those same people helping the organization meet its needs, through COVID and beyond.
At Slalom, we spend a lot of time focused on helping people love their work and life. If you’d like to explore these issues together, let’s connect!
Slalom is a modern consulting firm focused on strategy, technology and business transformation. Learn more and reach out today.
