Designing a Culture of Engagement During the Pandemic (Part Three)
And so here we are, ready to review some of the structural change your organisation can implement to adapt to the chaos currently around people management. The insights from the first and second part of this series will be encompassed by the below recommendations.
The Organisation
How does exclusion impact your ability to perform at work? Damon Klotz speaks of how belonging is an emotional need for your own safety, whilst inclusion is creating safety for others. Organisations can design and implement volunteer-led initiatives. Whether it’s forming a group with the innovative objective of changing the way the business operates, or committing to corporate social responsibility by coordinating employees that are willing to offer relief to pandemic victims. Our primary motivators for volunteering satisfy our personal values, community concerns, self-esteem, empathy for others, and personal development. This enhances our ability to be able to notice, receive and integrate this feedback, which is essential for the greater sense of belonging and inclusion.
Organisations also have to adopt a more data-centric approach to observe the culture allowing for visibility of current challenges faced by employees. You get a less distorted view of the current state of the organisation. When evaluating a single employee’s drive and experience, you can identify from who requires early intervention, to who needs immediate mediation. Most importantly, this strategy needs to be well adopted by leadership so as to instil assurance within employees, because they may sense this change in behaviour as subjection to scrutiny.
Effective employee engagement can be sustained by the digital transformation of the existing work models. Some platforms and tools are only useful for disseminating information, so organisations need to look towards digital communication tools that already exist in the market, or internally developed applications to facilitate information sharing and employee interaction. There is however, a need to monitor the frequency of using these appropriate channels. With a third of value-add collaborations deriving from 3%-5% of the workforce, enabling effective collaboration may require:
Redistribution of responsibilities — using electronic communications tracking systems you are able to track an employee’s use of emails (whether they send too many emails, affecting their productivity), identify employee networks and communication mediums that spur innovation and creativity, or monitor time spent in meetings versus on the individual’s work
Structured behavioural shifts — conventionally organisations reward individual efforts, as opposed to top collaborative contributors. Ideally a system should be designed that allows for both types of employees to be rewarded
Traditional office designs have historically been suited for siloed organisations. The potential improvements foreseen by the integration of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in organisations will introduce a data-oriented approach. Within businesses this could look like:
o Fundamentally redefining job responsibilities from mere routine tasks to value-driven — democratising the type of work an employee performs
o Shifting our objective from skills-based work to capabilities-based work
o Reducing organisational bureaucracy
o Automation of routine activities
Reshaping the organisational design will allow for an adaptive business model with agile and effective cross-functional work, creating opportunities for an employee to expand their network of connections and collaborations. So how will you redesign the structure of your organisation into an optimal culture?
Simple yet insightful tactics can be used to improve employee experience (and ultimately engagement) through reforming the Learning & Development strategies;
o Allowing for approved internal employees to facilitate skills-based workshops on e.g., Python training, Financial Modelling, Excel basics
o Providing an opportunity for C-suite leaders to share their experiences and knowledge to employee training groups through an online platform
o by introducing micro-learning, and also putting the user at the centre of your thinking
The emergence of Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) in an employee’s learning capabilities has the potential to enhance both engagement and effectiveness. To differentiate between the two technologies, one must understand VR to be a three-dimensional virtual environment, powered by technology to simulate realistic scenarios and AR as a tool that transforms data into digital images, that are then overlaid on real objects or environments. Both methods can be interpreted as immersive, placing the employee at the centre of the learning experience. These mediums of learning and development can be implemented across the organisation through:
New hire orientation — an automated orientation experience through AR infused images, allowing for a personalised approach to the employee’s role and experience, as well as improved onboarding for new employees
Interactive training — a conventional method of training inherently bears high costs, is also time-consuming and labour intensive. With technology systems like Google Glass or HoloLens, AR can be used to implement more effective training in real-time, at a lower cost, providing visual guidance on tasks. The use of VR will allow for geographically dispersed employees to collaborate in virtual workshops. These shared virtual environments can improve teamwork, communication and engagement
This brings us to the end of the series, but simultaneously what I hope to be more constructive dialogue and deliberation on how we can improve our workspaces to adapt to the dynamic environment brought by the pandemic.
