People strategy is C-suite strategy because employee engagement is crucial to your organization's bottom line. In order to feel engaged, employees are seeking to align their values and their work. They want to feel purpose at work. Purpose means different things to different people. Some people are looking for social and environmental impact. Others are looking to contribute fully and to bring their full selves to work. A recent study from McKinsey & Co found that millennials are three times more likely to require purpose at work.
Aligning social and environmental justice into your organization's strategy is crucial to create authenticity and employee engagement . Actionable steps are provided in Kristina Kohl's book, Becoming a Sustainable Organization. Incorporating environmental, social, and governance (ESG) into your organization's strategy is a journey requiring leadership to engage with internal and external stakeholders to inform and implement this strategic vision.
Millennials are 3x more likely to require purpose at work for effective engagement.
Employees are seeking a work experience where they feel that they are contributing fully and that their contributions are valued by their team and manager. They are also looking for flexibility in scheduling and resource support to allow for life-work integration. Organizations must differentiate their work structures, benefits, and management styles to support individual employees. Moving from a dominant culture, which requires employees to conform, to an equitable culture, which supports the uniques needs of employees, supports purpose alignment. In order to support a diverse workforce, leaders and managers need to offer a more personalized approach to offering and managing work to employees.
Empowering people drive success.
In order to support this new structure, organizations need to align people systems to support life-work integration. Organizations like our partner, UKG, are rolling out new Life-work Technology to support integrating purpose into employees' lives. These include natural language processing (NLP) survey tools to gain perspective on employee sentiment and support data driven decision-making. Innovations include accessing pay when worked rather than awaiting for a pay day, scheduling flexibility and access, identifying internal mobility options and training to support growth, and easing access to company resources and information. Empowering people drives organizational success!
