Organizations are a MESS and More to Come

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The Wall Street Journal reported in May that job satisfaction hit a 36-year high in 2022, “reflecting two effects of the tight pandemic labor market: The quality of jobs improved as wages and work flexibility increased, and workers moved into positions that were a better fit.”

Betterworks did an extensive study in a 2023 Global HR Research Report, and noted the following summary:

Employees are feeling positive but are still eyeing the exit door.
Bias in performance management is lowering employee feelings of belonging and increasing distrust.
A significant percentage of employees see performance management as a failure at their organizations and a waste of time.
Most employees want to grow in their current roles but don’t get the career development they crave.
A sense of fairness colors the entire employee experience.
Managers feel ill-equipped to coach their employees for career development and want more support from their organizations.
The right performance enablement leads to higher productivity, confidence, and engagement.

The 2Q 2023 Inspirus Trends & Forecasts Report has some interesting insights. One of the main ones is a large leadership gap causing disconnect: “Nearly half of survey respondents said their organization’s leaders are overwhelmed and struggling to identify what they should prioritize in this ‘new normal.’”

So what’s really going on? My observation is that workers have almost become chronically discontented or distracted, and simultaneously, leaders are ill equipped to lead differently. Furthermore, organizations are trying to force fit a different work world back into a “box” that is no longer suitable.

Workers do not want to go back to the way it was pre-Covid for tons of good reasons, and many are constantly wary of their current employment status. Nothing feels very secure. The sudden layoffs in the tech sector is a recent example. And leaders are trying to figure out how to manage distributed workforces and people with changed expectations. There is no historical roadmap for this. Even where work groups are localized and in person, people are looking for more flexibility to better match the highly variable lives they are living. Adding to the tentative mix is a nervous (pretending to be confident and decisive) C-suite, not helped by boards of directors providing questionable value and guidance (e.g. the Silicon Valley Bank Board)? Throw massively disruptive technology like AI and all the other “swirl” around us, and it’s WILD! (And we intuitively know it’s not going to zen out).

So what to do? Without over simplifying, the following may give some guidance:

Boards: Allow for more of your risk/value guidance to be about the health of the organization culture and leadership effectiveness.

C-Suite: Invest in culture, build more modern organization structures that provide for valued work to be distributed and highly flexible. Learn how to lead that way. Stop trying to have total control, and to manage by out of date biases and constructs. Help leaders learn how to lead differently… Free them up from being the BOSS. And remember people are THE SOURCE through almost anything. Listen and engage them fully. Stop just telling them what to do.

People: Focus on growing your personal equity and personal portfolio to make you highly valuable to your organization and in the marketplace. Do not expect stability from your work environment. Do not chase happiness by itself. Do not expect perfect leaders. They need your help more than you think. Try to conclude each day knowing you made a meaningful difference, adding to your personal skill set and receiving a fair return on your energy investment. Focus on growing and improving, more than job hopping or looking for the perfect job. It doesn’t exist. If you do that, the right opportunities and results will come.

As we often say, it’s that simple and hard.

Think Big, Start Small, Act Now,

- Lorne

One Millennial View: Thank you for some spot-on guidance, especially on the people level. Some unsavory terms seem to be perpetuating a level of stuckness that affords individuals the excuse to stop in their tracks. When I read about biases (especially of the unconscious variety), new normals, and even the term equity (which some mistakenly assume suggests fairness of outcome, not opportunity), these do not offer solutions, they make people throw their hands in the air and succumb to a whirlwind of invisible barricades. Instead, what ARE we in control of? Each organization makes their own rules. If we know this wild wild west is not going to zen out, then what can we do to curb our own company chaos, and offer the best experience for our people, our c-suite, and our board? It’ll never be perfect, however we can always manually course correct, starting with ourselves first, before careening into oblivion.

- Garrett

Edited and published by Garrett Rubis

Organizations are a MESS and More to Come

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