Richard Branson famously once said “If you look after your staff, they will look after your customers. It’s that simple. Healthy, engaged employees are your top competitive advantage.”
I have been looking through some of the recent, post-covid-type, research about employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction. Comparing these is enlightening – or should be for any business leader.
What is glaringly evident is:
- Employers (managers) want staff back in the office
- Employees prefer a “hybrid” arrangement.
Some research findings:
- 50% of organisations want employees back in the office
BUT
- 74% of professionals expect remote work to become a standard
- 79% of knowledge workers say they want location flexibility
- 94% of knowledge workers say they want schedule flexibility
- 97% of employees don’t want to return to the office full time
- Remote work is the biggest draw for top talent
In this article in Forbes magazine, the reason given for leaders and managers to be so insistent of having employees back in the office is more about their own need for “command and control” – the management style taught over so many years, than it is to do what is best for the organisation.
According to Gartner:
“Organisations have a unique opportunity to break from a location-centric model of work designed around industrial-era constraints — and to redesign work around a human-centric model to secure digital-era talent and deliver business outcomes.”
What’s your choice?
What are you going to choose? Choose to stay within “industrial-era constraints”? Or choose to attract and retain “digital-era talent”?
If your choice is the latter, we’d love to work with you. Using Lean Change Management principles and processes, we first understand more about your organisation, then, together, we map a path forward. The path consists of small steps – this lets us see what works and what doesn’t. We can make adjustments if moving too fast or too slow.
If you would like to know more, please email us at gails@talentalign.com, or click here to set up an appointment, or fill in the form below and we will be in touch directly.
We look forward to engaging with you.
Gail Sturgess
Agile OD Facilitator/Coach/Consultant
We provide modern Organisation Development advice, solutions, services, and products, at the intersection of business, technology, and people, to help our clients adopt and adapt to the New Ways of Working – Agile, Digital, Work-from-Anywhere – and become Future Fit. We’d love to work with you too.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gailsturgess/
Website: www.talentalign.com