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The Art Of "People First" Strategy At Work

Remote work can become more satisfying when managers set expectations for the teams, communicate regularly, and set aside time to touch in beyond the needs of job delivery with team members

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The need to create people-centric work cultures and the impact of employee happiness on the organisation's bottom-line is a well-researched and established aspect of people philosophies. An entity powered by the force of human intentions does not only succeed in terms of business outcomes but also is resilient and provident of future requirements. The pandemic and its impact of it on organizations in the initial stages reaffirms that with a strong people pillar, adversities are easier to overcome. Organizations realized the value of focusing on overall employee wellness through core actions and those mechanisms will continue to reap benefits, since it has now been embedded in the workplace of the future.

We have all come to agree, that the future of workplace is distributed and hybrid. While that is no further an uncharted territory for all us, but several elements of people operations need to be re-engineered accordingly to keep a dispersed setup well connected. One of the major challenges that organizations are facing in this regards is the dilution of culture and values of the organisation, since remote work can lead into social isolation. To curb this outcome, organizations need to build more humane leaders. There are specific, research-based steps that managers can take to improve the engagement and productivity of remote employees. Remote work can become more satisfying when managers set expectations for the teams, communicate regularly, and set aside time to touch in beyond the needs of job delivery with team members. The future workplace is also to demand the need for Culture Officers, in such “phygital environments”, to keep the cultural weave uninterrupted.

The future shall also accelerate the extremes of automation. While automation poses a threat to manual labour, it shall also create humongous opportunities in newer capacities. This shall intensify the war for talent, which shouts out the importance of building talent at all levels. Upskilling shall be the key differentiator for future success and organizations must invest to ensure that their talent pools are not rendered redundant. Leadership must revamp and inculcate traits that will keep employee touch-points human in a very tech-enabled setup. Leaders must demonstrate in practice, empathy towards people, ownership of outcomes and perseverance in adversity. Such investment in development across levels will contribute to the engagement of the teams and prep the organizations for demands and opportunities hitherto unknown.

Often discussed upon is the need for diversity and inclusion in workplaces, and the hybrid environment presents golden opportunity to drive this agenda, and utilize untapped potential. Diversity beyond the boundary of gender and race, opens opportunity to cognitive diversity, which is the most beneficial outcome and will build sturdy organizations that encompass perspectives of all kinds. Businesses shall benefit from idea pools, may discover newer markets, identify a niche which was not already on portfolio and the count of such benefits shall only increase, when diversity becomes a practice.

Social Sustainability is another key aspect for the future of workplace to be people centric. Post pandemic era, has generated a renewed sense of purpose amongst us all and the sense of contribution to greater good presents as a key motivator. Organizations must act upon to create structures that channelize such needs of employees and start taking rapid strides in their commitment of sustainability towards employees, external communities, resources and the planet as a whole. Establishing explicitly the positive connection of individual actions to future sustainability and providing more and more opportunities for such activities, shall impetus engagement further for organizations in hybrid work setup.

Lastly, the workplace of future is cross-generational and cookie cutting shall not work in such a melting pot. Organizations must create generation-based value propositions and prioritize the engagement of different generations on parallel with emergent need. Customer centricity leads us to innovate products based on needs, build services to ensure satisfaction and build relationships for continued business. Employee centricity must be driven on the same principles and rigor for an inter-generational workforce to operate in collaboration. Agility in offerings shall be a key principle in talent attraction and engagement for the future.

Great organizations, let employees have the opportunity to learn earn and grow. The workplace may be vastly different from what we understand today, but establishing human connections shall continue to stay a prime factor for success and the value of strong organisation culture shall only be multifold in building a people-centric workplace in a tech enabled setup in future.

(The article has been penned down by Rajendra Mehta, Group CHRO Welspun specifically for BW People publication)


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