Photo by Christina Morillo
It may seem like the Great Resignation is old news at this point, especially with a global recession on the horizon. But the mass exodus we saw in early 2021 was just the leading edge of a big shift in workplace culture. Essence and Fortune have both reported that up to one third of workers still plan to leave their jobs despite the threat of recession, and burnout rates now match what they were at the height of the pandemic in 2020. Employees are demanding big changes, including lighter workloads, more caring leadership, flexibility, and better benefits.
At first glance, it’s easy to dismiss these requests because of what it might cost, not just financially but also when considering productivity. What executives and HR teams are really facing is a crisis of priorities. Making the shift to put employees first is a huge undertaking, but it has proven to be a successful strategy for business growth in the long term. In this blog, we’ll take a look at why an employee-first values system is effective, some examples of how this has worked for different organizations, and how to navigate this shift in five steps.
A Crisis of Priorities
Traditional business models put the customer first: “the customer is always right” is so ingrained in U.S. commerce that it may as well be our national motto. The underlying assumption is that making customers happy should create enough revenue to make everyone else happy—but clearly that that isn’t how it usually works out. The only other party with nearly as much sway at larger companies is shareholders, while nonprofits tend to prioritize their donors and grant funders.
The question becomes: if employees are vying against customers, shareholders, donors, executives, and others for the same dollars and resources, what do you sacrifice or reallocate to grant them more support? But this question doesn’t account for the incalculable cost savings and efficiency companies see when employees are healthy and adequately supported. Your system of priorities and values can be flexible, and it’s not a zero-sum game.
Some of the best examples actually come from big conglomerates of the industrial age. Johnson & Johnson has a legacy of putting employees first. In the past, by providing food and first aid onsite long before anyone else had thought to do this. Today, by offering great benefits like parental leave and childcare. As a result, it has outlived many other companies that were founded around the same time. In contrast, General Electric focused more on creating competitive value propositions and innovations, effectively putting the customer first. They found that customers’ immediate preferences didn’t always match up with the most valuable solutions. The rising costs of innovating with newer technology outpaced the financial strategies they used to fund R&D, and in 2022, GE announced its plan to split into three smaller companies.
How To Invest in Your People
The same principles that worked for J&J and GE apply to companies of every size and scale. To reap the benefits of putting employees first across your organization, you will need to look at your plans in the long term and shift some of your priorities.
Follow these five steps to create better all-around outcomes by putting your employees first:
1. Understand their needs.
To make a real difference with your team, you need to see from their perspective so you can understand both what they need most urgently and what’s most important to them. These can be two very different things, and it can vary among different groups of employees. This Fast Company article presents a framework to evaluate if you’re happy at work based on five factors: people, value, impact, role, and compensation. You can use the same framework to develop questions and uncover employee sentiments.
Our prescriptive analytics platform pairs a detailed employee survey with an organizational assessment to determine what changes are likely to make the biggest improvement for different groups. For example, in order to meet client demand, a manufacturing company we worked with started requiring their team to work on Saturdays. Our survey showed that employees felt they had no work/life balance: they were burned out and didn’t feel the schedule was sustainable. Making Saturdays optional has begun to restore employees’ energy and job satisfaction, and company leadership has started exploring other ways to increase productivity. However, if employees had been seen as the primary stakeholder from the beginning, the plan to scale the company may have been approached in a different way.
2. Evaluate other priorities.
Remember those other priorities we talked about that compete with employees’ needs and wellbeing—customers, shareholders, and donors? Once you know what your employees need, you can re-evaluate specific policies, processes, and priorities that might be getting in the way. Even values like corporate social responsibility and commitments to your community and environment can outrank employees for time, budget, and resources. The idea is not to de-prioritize these other values and outcomes, but to re-envision what it might look like to achieve them with a strategy that also highly values your employees.
This doesn’t necessarily mean making sacrifices, but it could mean you have to get creative and find some alternate solutions. In the nonprofit world, donors and grantmakers like to offer restricted funds so they can point to specific projects and outcomes they funded directly. Unfortunately, paying staff and funding basic operations aren’t usually high priorities for donors. The overall effect is that nonprofit employees are often asked to work for low wages and few benefits. With some strategic planning, these same organizations have an opportunity to guide donors in redefining their traditional approach to metrics. In doing so, we can build a compelling case for the exponential impact a donor can have when they shift from the storytelling of supporting a single program’s success to instead showcasing the far-reaching implications of investment in hiring more people to scale the work, retaining effective leaders, and contributing to responsive innovation.
3. Respond intentionally.
Providing adequate pay is a must, but don’t forget that your active commitment to continuously fostering inclusion and reliable access to responsive resources can also make a big impact on employee experience in different ways. When you’ve decided how you will address the employee needs you learned about in step one, treat it like any other initiative. Make a specific plan to roll out this support and determine how you will measure its effectiveness. Create some clear communications to let employees know what you’re doing for them and why, and encourage them to get the most out of whatever new solutions you’re introducing. Finally, develop strategies for sustainability that proactively embed these new solutions into daily practice, such as providing manager training and offering varied modalities of follow-up communication for all employees.
Throughout the decision-making and implementation process, other things are bound to come up that seem more urgent or important in the moment—but don’t let your team become an afterthought. Change your mindset on employee support to view it as a strategic priority: instead of “if we have time,” start saying “let’s make time.”
4. Evaluate unclear, inefficient processes.
There are tons of things you can do to respond to employee needs that don’t cost money but require intentional thought. For one thing, unclear, inefficient processes are a primary source of work-related stress. Less than two-thirds (65%) of workers say work processes enable them to be productive, down from 68% a year ago, and only 63% of employees say their technology helps them be productive compared to 68% last year. Dedicating some time and attention to understanding current obstacles and streamlining processes is good for both employee satisfaction and productivity.
5. Understand that not all employees need the same things.
If you’ve recruited a diverse team (and even if you’re still working on it), your employees are sure to have different lifestyles, families, and life goals that come with different challenges. The same thing is true for every kind of employee support, but especially when it comes to DEI interventions, one size does not fit all.
In Lily Zeng’s sobering article on The Failure of the DEI-Industrial Complex, they point out that when executives ask for generalized, short-term DEI interventions (the bare minimum), underrepresented employees are the ones who lose the most. The C-suite can take credit for spending money on a solution, but nothing really changes. What organizations should seek out instead are customized solutions that account for different perspectives and needs across different employee groups—especially those employees with marginalized identities (i.e. BIPOC, women, LGBTQ+, low income, etc).
Show Your Employees You Care
Many leaders still operate with the outdated assumption that people will (and should) do whatever it takes to get and keep a job. If an employee thinks their workload is too much, there’s someone else in line who would be grateful to have that job. The Great Resignation is hard evidence that that’s changing. People want to build meaningful careers: they expect more than the bare minimum, and they deserve it.
We believe that an abundance mindset shouldn’t be limited to the C-suite or the employees that are perceived as the most valuable. Employers who meet employee needs in a targeted way, with the understanding that they all need different things, will establish loyalty with their teams to drive success during uncertain times.
Are you curious about how your systems impact your people? Want to access other proven low or no-cost DEI strategies? With an Ellequate membership, you can develop a data-driven DEI strategy at your own pace—all for a price that allows you to spend less on consulting and more on implementation.
