This long weekend gave me a chance to reflect on how my perceptions of the world have been challenged by the “here and now” media speak. The “Doom & Gloom” media channels are exploiting the rich environment of negative news with gusto – war, poverty, shootings et al. If we run a sentiment analysis of any media channel, I would not be surprised if it is classified as 90% negative
Is it that Bad?
I want to focus specifically on the negative news as it relates to work. We relentlessly hear about how the economy is going to get more challenging – we hear constantly about the need to re-align organizations to do significantly more with significantly less resources
Then we hear about how these sentiments are manifesting – Layoffs and retrenchments which are bad news by themselves, are further exacerbated by the special media attention these events attract when interesting people like Musk are involved – bad news is portrayed worse than it really is. This has led to a dystopian light being cast on the future of work and there are more takers these days to this point of view – which gets immediately classified as trends with attractive names like “Great Resignation”, “Quiet quitting” …
Thinking of it, for a business to be successful and deliver value to both its customers and shareholders and outrun competitors, it must be both effective and efficient – which is exactly being setup to do more with less. When an organization has not defined a consistent framework to implement, nurture and measure effectiveness and efficiency, they end up hiring more to compensate for the inefficiency and when the economy gets challenging, they have to retrench and continue as a less robust company vis a vis competitors – this is more or less the case but there are genuine exceptions.
Humanize Work and Unleash Performance
Motivated employees and teams deliver 10X more than quiet quitters. This performance range is so wide that it is important for organizations to be mindful of the significant disparity in outcomes that their competitors are achieving by consciously focusing on creating and sustaining motivation
One of the most available levers for any organization, big or small and in any industry or domain to consistently nurture high performance is through motivating by “Humanizing Work”. Humanizing work is how empathy manifests in a form that can be seen and felt and creates a winning culture.
Humanizing work is about creating a culture of mutual trust and respect between employees and leaders and helping employees realize how important they are by doing many things but more importantly:
- Employees want to feel like they are part of something larger than themselves. Humanizing is a way of communicating that you understand and care about your employees’ needs and help them easily attribute their work directly to an organizational goal they are helping to accomplish – irrespective of whether they are mentally tired fixing a bug or physically tired delivering a heavy package
- Employees appreciate frequent in-context feedback and recognition for positive performance – this requires a consistent collaboration framework
- Employees and teams appreciate clarity of what needs to be done, possible impediments and an effective and consistent resolution process to solve them
At NimbleWork, we started to focus on creating this culture of trust, collaboration, and alignment of a team’s work to a higher purpose consciously, and we are seeing significant benefits to outcomes and the positivity it is creating. This has enabled us to effectively compete with companies in our space having thousands of employees, with our size of less than a couple of hundred employees
We would love your Feedback
Though humanizing work is a “soft factor” that needs to permeate within an organization, we found areas of humanization that can benefit from a work management solution that is designed with “Humanizing Work” as a core philosophy. We are creating a solution called Nimble, currently in late beta that is a feature-rich work management platform centered around the philosophy of humanizing work. You can access it here: Signup for Nimble
Humanizing work is a journey – we would really appreciate your thoughts on what we have today in Nimble and what we should be implementing additionally – and you can continue to use Nimble for free for your team for the entire 2023, if you start seeing benefits.
