Making sense of the current economy has become our superpower: distinguishing what we could do from what we should do; conciliating business success with personal well-being for everyone involved. Or is that utopian?
There needs to be a more human approach to high performance. Organizations are combating high pressure to perform, which leads to skyrocketing work-related stress rates. There is an illusionary peak to climb: the name of this game is raising productivity levels, scaling and hitting multiplications of previous years’ key progress indicators (KPIs) — even in a recession. However, in a 2022 report, Gallup estimated that disengaged employees cost organizations $7.8 trillion globally.
This is why companies need to foster a more sustainable, human-centered approach to growth.
Redefining Growth With Values
Human-centered growth measures growth from the perspective of all humans who take part in growing the organization either as a client, shareholder, employee or ecosystem partner and defines both quality and quantity metrics that showcase how each stakeholder benefits from growing a company in terms of revenue, profit, number of employees and its product or service offerings, as well as other quantitative metrics. It adds quality goals to the usual business KPIs and so, it defines value. With that, we transform the long-term vision, mission and purpose of the company into mid-term objectives and key results that are valuable to people.
High-performing companies set both impactful objectives and long-term north star metrics. The north star metric is never measured in terms of revenue. Employees grow best when all teams in the company can transform the mission to a single goal that reflects on product or service quality. The metric is derived from a true understanding of what action provides the most realized value to the customer. Try to get as close to defining impact as possible. It provides clarity for teams to perform best and define goals, sprint by sprint.
Growth Metrics vs. Employee Wellness
People tend to overvalue work-related goals and tasks because there is a certain positive feeling associated with the experience of constant progress. Career pathways are important because they often reinforce this feeling of progressing. To find balance, take on everyday challenges that employees can solve with the skills they have — and let go of the rest. Those who are engaged at work but not thriving have a 61% higher likelihood of ongoing burnout than those who are engaged and thriving.
Since The Great Resignation, many people have raised questions on where they are going with their careers. It isn’t just due to budget cuts and layoffs — they want to imagine new ways of creating value. Swapping out full-time, permanent employees with contractors and gig workers might make sense to freshen up the perspective and keep the focus concentrated. It makes companies nimble and easier to maneuver. The question arises: Can companies craft job descriptions that hold the opportunity for employees to get gig work internally? When people are aligned on their personal growth path to the company’s goals, their capabilities and the magnitude of the challenge are in balance, it not only makes people more engaged, but it also contributes to higher profitability for the company and, if done right, increased overall well-being for the individual.
Motivating and Coaching Distributed Teams
Empowering people got even more complex in the post-pandemic world. Sudden changes in the work style didn’t provide an ultimate recipe for maintaining trust and a positive culture. There is still an ongoing interest in how to create a human-centered workplace that supports remote work and flexibility, as more organizations embrace the flexibility of hybrid work, and the number of fully remote companies keeps growing. This is great, since over 87% of employees value the opportunity to work flexibly. Achieving meaningful goals that people feel proud of doesn’t require anyone to spend their time in an office every day. It just calls for shifting the mindset from attendance-driven to boldly outcome-driven.
According to a recent MIT report, meeting-free days contribute to improvements in factors like autonomy and cooperation and decreases in stress and micromanagement. Researchers interviewed 76 companies, and they found that even when one single no-meeting day per week was introduced, autonomy, communication, engagement and satisfaction all improved, resulting in decreased micromanagement and stress, which increased productivity. However, with 2-3 meeting free days, productivity rose by 71% because employees felt more empowered and autonomous. Not dictated by a fixed schedule, they had more flexibility to complete their tasks on their own timeline, which increased employee satisfaction rates by 52%.
To create a human-centered remote or hybrid workplace it is equally important to be conscious about hiring for value-fit candidates. This way, team leads can focus on practice, coaching, reflection and learning in the flow of work with their team members — which provides a feeling of progress while doing in-person or virtual project-work. This is why one-on-one sessions are so important — learning and development (L&D) is not a human resources (HR) task. In the long run, trying new things and learning from experience makes all employees resilient, productive, creative and capable of driving change.
Beyond stress management, it is vital that leaders develop curiosity about their team members’ strengths, drivers and interests, where they want to develop and what keeps them at the company, just as well as how they feel and what makes them thrive. It is particularly important to find out if the employee can keep pace or, the other way round, doesn’t feel the tasks are challenging enough anymore. By proactively discussing the types of projects they particularly liked recently or believe they can create the most impact within the near future, they are empowered to set goals that motivate them, yet don’t cause burnout.
It is also an opportunity for every team lead to get additional ideas about what projects to prioritize based on perceived impact. Team leads can all address these topics in one-on-one sessions and craft new goals together — whether it be in person or online. They can practice listening through a simple workshop or virtual call, personal yet asynchronous messages via Loom or VideoAsk or by a coaching and active learning platform such as BetterUp or Superflow. Companies can also adopt comprehensive employee listening platforms like Leapsome and Culture Amp. Combined with technology and a human touch, not merely leaving people to go through the journey on their own, listening, learning and growing becomes scalable and measurable. These techniques create a feeling of social connectedness within a team. And this social connectedness can help prevent depression, improve company culture and form high-performing teams around shared goals with a feeling of purpose.
Diversity, Equity & Inclusion From the Core
Human-centric workplaces thrive in a diverse, inclusive environment, where leadership provides equal opportunities for employees. Especially for listening to suggestions and ideas, we might consider using anonymous means of contributing, and only start discussing after we selected the most impactful and feasible ones with the team. This way we can provide equal chances for anyone to learn and be discovered for the positive impact they create, regardless of their position or tenure with the team to mitigate unconscious biases around demographics such as race, gender identify, ability, etc. Companies should be mindful of the data about users, employees and new hires they track and what they do with it. It is extremely easy to reinforce biases by distinguishing a group of people when analyzing metrics. If team leaders evaluate what people have to say based solely on the content, regardless of the person’s introversion or extraversion, how many social connections they have, their nationality, gender, lived experiences, ability, and generation, it creates a feeling of trust and psychological safety that is the most common characteristic of high-performing teams.
Reflection Brings Unity
With frequent reflection on how to be helpful and add value, what a team has achieved together and what was the role of the individuals in it, we give clarity and alignment for our teams on how to progress, learn and grow: what features to design, test, build and ship, and what can be traded off. It also gives people the feeling of growth on real outcomes. A north star metric and relevant KPIs can help us get closer to our product vision, and as Rand Fishkin said about marketing, the north star metric as well as the way employees see the impact they create can provide an insight into the soul of a company. And we need to show heart for our public audience and clients just as much as our internal team.
The road to happiness is not only to go faster and live longer but to live better, balanced and driven by our vision and values. It is possible to add quality-based mid-term goals to our regular quantitative objectives like increasing revenue and improving user engagement metrics. We should be able to tell how our future is going to be better than our present by improving products and work experiences for our own sake and for everyone involved.
