4 Ways Modern Organizations Can Magnify The Importance Of Employees

A company that is united in purpose and shared values contains a universe of experiences

The world’s experience with Covid-19 has affirmed the importance of work as the new community. When millions of employees pivoted to working at home, we had the universal shared experience of feeling both together and isolated. Cultures of support, inclusion, transparency, and trustworthiness became even more notable – and a larger business advantage than ever before – because they attract talent longing for belonging.

A company that is united in purpose and shared values contains a universe of experiences. In the past, people might have buried their individuality for the sake of corporate unity. Today, an enlightened company culture recognizes that everyone’s story is unique and integrates that fact into its culture. All employees are at the center of their individual journeys with the company, telling their own story and writing their own professional narrative. 

Here are four ways modern organizations can magnify the importance of the individual – and reap the many benefits.

The new community of work works because of people’s differences, a cultural change that reflects the globalized outlook of today’s employees. Diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging align organizational culture with the need to hire and retain the best talent. They broaden the pool of available talent. They make companies attractive to more people. A team composed of diverse people brings a wider set of knowledge and experience to a problem. They understand a larger group of customers. They bring more ideas to innovation efforts. 

If a culture stresses open communication, the employees also educate each other in their individual expertise, lifting the performance of all. 

The term continuous improvement was coined years ago to express nonstop improvements in processes, products, profits, and other business outcomes that could be measured.

Today’s technology makes it possible for HR to make continuous improvement a goal for people as well. Employees can understand and track their performance on tasks and even values with instant, crowdsourced feedback from everyone they come in contact with, from team members to customers. Continuous performance management records the degrees to which employees are growing and improving in their lives at work, adding new data points and establishing causality. Broad-based feedback, recognition, continuous conversations, and check-ins can humanize the way we motivate and develop our people – and this change is long overdue.

Compensation decisions have traditionally been more subjective than most leaders would like to admit. The defects in compensation are glaringly obvious in decades of studies proving, for example, that women are paid less than men for doing the same job and achieving the same goals, or in the inability of so many managers to fully quantify reasoning for giving one employee 2 percent more than another at the end of the year. 

Based on new ways of understanding and documenting performance, HR is heading toward a more agile form of compensation. The future of pay is going to be more personalized and thus more variable among employees. Social recognition applications make this possible. They can measure, for example, the number of times that individuals go out of their way to help others outside their immediate team. They collect critical but hard-to-recognize moments of inspiration, communication, and insight. With centralized, documented, peer-to-peer employee recognition connected to some portion of a person’s pay, the “intangible” contributions can finally receive the reward they are due. 

Although human beings have always seen the workplace through the lens of our feelings, beliefs, and experiences, this narrative has been only vaguely visible – in an annual performance review, a résumé, or a years-of-service plaque. Immediate teammates or good friends at work might celebrate the arrival of a child, a gold-star performance review, or a promotion, but few organizations had a culture that honored the individual story. 

The new community of work broadens that celebration by opening up lines of communication around the personal life events and service milestones of their peers. Through a platform such as Workhuman Cloud^®, life-affirming events are presented through an online feed, making it easy for co-workers to participate in and celebrate their entire work family. 

Organizations that become more attuned to individual experience have the potential for deeper relationships with and among employees. The value proposition between employer and employee moves from “You work, and we pay you” to creating an environment where employees eagerly give their best.

Personalization has evolved from a convenience for daily activities like communicating or shopping into an expectation that the most important activities, including work, can be adjusted to fit a person’s individual needs. Organizations with the imagination to personalize life at work offer a compelling experience and a logical extension of proven benefits like flexible schedules or relaxed dress codes. 

And personalization does not mean compromising on performance; in fact, the purpose of maximizing every employee’s experience is to enable people to choose their own best path to productivity. This brings an employee’s uniqueness and needs to the forefront, using technology to create a better human connection and relevance to the employee experience.