Much has been written about the importance of organizations and leaders getting the ‘Future of Work’ RIGHT (we covered it last week!), and the best way to start defining it is by discovering what moments of ‘working’ in your organization truly resonate with your employees.
This is the foundation.
What may surprise you is that, although important, a great employee experience has less to do with the technology and processes that they interact with during their day-to-day (e.g. meeting technology, software, performance reviews, etc.), and more to do with what makes them human - connection, belonging, and joy.
Even though, the business and employment landscape has shifted, and it is tempting to say that this is no longer as critical as it was during the ‘great resignation’ last year, hybrid and remote work are here to stay, and AI is advancing at lightning speed, daily.
We strongly believe that this is no time for leaders and organizations to take their focus away from architecting the best ‘Future of Work’. The next 12 months will continue to present scenarios in the world of work that none of us were expecting.
The cost of doing nothing is too high.
In this week’s issue, we’ll be outlining the exact steps that you can engage with your team members to have a meaningful dialogue about building the foundation for a desirable future workplace experience.
Step 1: Assemble the Right Team
We need a group of team members to gain great insights and identify the right actions. If you gather too large a group (more than 15), only a few will be willing to contribute; if you go too small (2 or 3), you may not get the depth that you need. So the sweet spot is somewhere between 8 - 15 people.
Now that we have the right number, we need diverse perspectives and experiences.
A cross-section of employees from every function in your organization is vital (e.g. finance, tech & ops, customer service, sales, etc.), but we also need varied employee tenures (e.g. started 3 months ago, been here for 17 years, etc.), as well as ‘seniority’ in role (e.g. junior designer vs. senior designer).
Furthermore, the more diverse our team members are (including gender, culture, and education), the more varied and rich the insights will be.
Getting this right will be pay in spades.
Pro tip: Depending on the size of your employee base, you may need to run 3 - 5 group sessions to get great insights that fully represent the organization. |
Step 2: Define the Moments
We need to start with the end in mind.
If we are able to determine what those key moments are that matter to our employees, it will be simpler (not easier) to build the ‘Future of Work’ that we need.
When we start down the path of discovery with employees, it is important to baseline what we mean by ‘moments that matter’ and why these are important.
We “stoke the fire” by asking two straight-forward questions for which we want them to provide as many answers and insights as possible: 1 - What are moments that matter to your employee experience? 2 - Why are these moments important you?
What starts to emerge from of all the inputs and dialogue from employees are major themes. You’ll start to find connection points and overlaps between the different points that team members are offering.
With this step, you now emerge with a set of 3-5 top themes that the group has dialogued about and have indicated are key to their employee experience.
Pro tip: If you are running an employee session with a larger group size, you’ll benefit from a co-facilitator to split the group in two and have deeper dialogue with of the smaller groups. |
Step 3: Get on a Sailboat
Now that we’ve aligned with this employee group on what thematically are the most important moments for them in the employee experience, it’s even more critical to understand what this organization has working for it and what could hold it back from replicating and scaling those key experiences even further.
Here we leverage a very well tested and established design thinking exercise to determine what is going to propel you forward to achieve what employees are telling you is important at work, as well as what will get in the way.
This exercise answers the following question:
Given the key moments that matter that we have identified, what is working in our favour (wind in our sails) and what’s getting in the way (anchors)?
This exercise is brimming with promise, and has the possibility of harnessing priceless perspectives that can aid your focus for future investments (of time and money) in the workplace, as well as solving the key impediments to your progress.
Pro tips:
- Starting with the ‘wind in our sails’ portion is critically important to gain employees' perspectives of the strengths of the organization, but it also sets the team up with a sense of appreciation to engage in the next important step of identifying impediments. - As part of the “anchor / holding us back” segment of this exercise, it is important that you emerge with the top 3 - 5 challenges that are most critical to solve. You can do that by using a dot voting exercise. |
Step 4: Ideate!
Amazing! We now have the moments that matter, the strengths in our organizations that are the wind in our sails, and a clear understanding of what could potentially hold us back. Yay!!
The last step is to surface with this group of employees the possible ways to start tackling the top impediments we have identified.
This step seeks to answer the following: What are the ideas/potential solutions to some of the most critical challenges that, if solved, would give us the biggest “lift”?
We’ve taken a sure-fire way of ideation through a ‘5-4-5’ exercise (a variation of the famous 10 for 10) where we then focus the employees’ energy and efforts on ideating 5 potential solutions in 5 minutes.
Following some clustering and theming (and potentially some voting) we’ll emerge with a ranked order of potential solutions (and sometime initiatives) that can set the path to scaling the experiences that most matter to employees.
Pro-tip: Ideating is half the battle. Ensure that you get a perspective from the team on which ideas are going to have the biggest impact with the least effort (those ideas are ‘slam dunks’). |
In Summary
Getting crystal clear on the moments that matter for your team members helps you to focus your efforts on the workplace of the future that you need and want to create.
Not only that, but in 4 straight-forward steps over 90 high-energy minutes, you are sparking meaningful dialogue with the people that matter and that will continue to pay dividends for years to come.
Those key steps are:
Assemble the right team
Define the moments
Get on a sailboat
Ideate!
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Thanks for reading. See you again next week!
We hope you enjoyed this newsletter. Whenever you're ready, there are more ways we can help you:
Run workshops with your team to help you define your Future of Work strategy, design employee experiences, and/or define a target culture.
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