What are NFTs?

Non-fungible tokens are unique digital identities connected with an asset and are issued to people or organisations to mark their ownership over the asset. An NFT owned by a person on an organisation is unlike a currency note or crypto because the NFT is unique and owned; the rights can be transferred to someone else at the will of its owner. This is like someone’s home, mobile phone, jewellery, book, collection of music, email account and social media profile. Some of these assets can be transferred or sold in exchange for money or a consideration only at the behest of its rightful owner. Legal systems of the State ensure that the transfer of these rights is governed fairly and uniformly.

NFTs have been in use for a few years now; however, they have not been quite common in our discussions until recently when the Founder of Twitter, Jack Dorsey monetised his first tweet (“just setting up my twttr”) by auctioning its NFT for USD 2.9 Million and at an auction at the Christie’s, an American digital artist, graphic designer and animator auctioned a piece of his digital art by its NFT for USD 69 Million.

Who is using them?

The point is, NFTs are new and there are enough fans in the world who want to be first-movers and pioneers in their circle. Hence, there is a demand for NFTs now; companies like Microsoft, Coca-Cola, and Nike are among these pioneers to have introduced NFTs.

Imagine a situation where Nike develops a limited-edition logo that entitles its owners certain privileges such as meeting some of its brand ambassadors as an exclusive event and life-long passes to premium booths in the sporting events it sponsors around the world. This super-exclusive club can be digital, by an auction among a curated list of participants and the winners of the auction are issued personalised NFTs. The value of the membership status of this unique club can keep appreciating and the fan club gets stronger over time. Nike will get the impact of the positive influence that the Fanclub members create on its brand, amplify the impact over time and can draw many other secondary benefits from these NFT-based memberships which can be transferred from the first owner to the next owner and so on.

How different it is from the traditional methods of marketing?

Firstly, NFTs are personalised and cannot be copied or faked unless there is a new technology that can break into the blockchain level of security. For example, a rare painting of Van Gogh can be copied or printed; however, the situation can change if there is an NFT of the painting and the museum sells just a few of these tokens. These NFTs will represent the original painting, an extremely precious asset and create significant revenues for the museum. As a part of the NFT, they can offer some special privileges for the owner to the museum, events celebrating Van Gogh’s greatness and public acknowledgement of ownership if the owner permits. This can make the owner of the NFT truly special.

For this situation, we cannot create a marketing program using the traditional methods to generate a similar impact. Hence, the NFT market is fast-growing. People are increasingly interested in buying NFTs for digital artwork, music, photos, multimedia, rare moments in history, video games and so on. Going forward, companies can issue NFTs to their customers and fans who contribute to co-creating products and influencing communities; engage with the society at large to raise money for charities and influence policies. It is a new line of thinking!

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Metaverse is the next big thing which the tech giants around the world are hugely investing in. As a result, every human being will create multiple digital avatars or identities which will interact with other such profiles, human beings and machines. So, we will have billions of digital avatars fulfilling our needs of meeting people, engaging with them. Our needs of shopping, entertainment, education, healthcare, transportation, manufacturing, construction and many such activities will undergo a huge change.

What it is likely to be?

We have watched sci-fi movies, read fiction and heard mythological stories. Our reality in the future could be similar to the situations imagined in these stories.

During the pandemic time, travel came down by 90%. However, the lives of the travellers were not impacted by 90%. Their objectives and efficiencies were not adversely impacted by 90%. This shows, we spend a lot of our time and energy in activities just to socialise and physically be with others. Metaverse promises to bring us a new world of experience where we can feel the presence of the others in their respective 3D spaces rather than through a grid on the surface of a phone screen.

For companies, it is going to be a new world. Today they are still figuring out how to implement a hybrid work environment; some of them have gone back to their old norms and practices. Given this backdrop, it is not easy for companies to imagine the changes which are likely to take place when metaverse becomes a reality. Yet this is coming; we have to accept this reality, take it in our strides and prepare for the new world.

What preparations are needed?

Every business survives based on its interactions with the stakeholders. Tomorrow’s business environment is going to have stakeholders who are sometimes going to interact with them as real people and sometimes as their digital avatars.

Firstly, businesses have to transform their interaction systems which are secure and intelligent enough to recognise who they are engaging with. They need to understand the profile of the physical or digital persona in terms of the past interactions, the tenor and tone of interactions, transactions if any and the analytics of those transactions. Further, their systems have to be intelligent enough to project what the future interactions are likely to be and hence, run appropriate programmes to engage the stakeholder.

This holds good for customers, suppliers, employees, government authorities, competitors and society at large.

What’s going to change in the real world?

We can see the need for a huge transformation in the technology environment and all the business processes in an organisation.

Companies need to review the relevance of their products or services in the metaverse. Like the companies making cameras and selling them went out of business due to the mobile phones, some are likely to face risks of extinction. Hence, they need to quickly plan the next line of business or introduce new products and services.

Manufacturing and delivery of services are going to undergo major changes in the metaverse because of the extensive use of AI (artificial intelligence), robotics and mixed reality. Large areas of a factory, warehouse, store and office are likely to remain in the format of dark themes because the handling of materials and products is going to be automated. Ordering processes will undergo huge changes where customers could directly place orders on platforms that seamlessly flow into the manufacturing and supply chain systems.

Further, the sales and marketing function has to engage with customers directly and customise offers for them based on the understanding of their consumption patterns and their context at that time. They have to be intelligent enough to project the needs of customers and bring those proactively to them.

On the whole, it is going to be a play of information and insights among multiple entities, humans included!

Read also:

• #GetTheBestOutofUs: Web3 is Redefining HR
• #BuildingTomorrow: How Brands can use NFTs to reshape Digital Consumerism
• #BuildingTomorrow: Future of Business in a Digital Universe – Metaverse
• #BuildingTomorrow: In the Age of Disruption
• #BuildingTomorrow: Creating Macro-Effects with Micro-Experiences
• #BuildingTomorrow: People practices for the Future

The post #BuildingTomorrow: Future of Business in a Digital Universe – Metaverse appeared first on CIEL HR.

For example, in the current times, most employees need transparency and flexibility while the business leaders expect their workforce to understand the challenges posed by the environment and expect unclarity and ambiguity. Sometimes, the pulls are in multiple directions and the leaders are unable to address all of them with the desired level of agility. However, the need of the hour is to be agile and meet the expectations of all stakeholders.

As companies have been in a transformational mode almost always, they need many things to fall in place. Among several factors, getting the employees to stay engaged and contribute at their best is one of the most crucial asks now. Employees expect attractive rewards and benefits; they need at the same time a whole lot of other things which make their job worth their while. Since there are many opportunities in the market competing against one another to attract talent, business leaders have to review their employee value proposition and improve its impact.

What do leaders want of their employees?

Leaders want their employees to understand why the organisation exists and perform in the best interest of the organisation always.

For example, the employees at the project site of a construction company need to understand that they are building a shopping mall that is going to house three hundred businesses fulfil their dreams and plans; help ten to fifty thousand visitors enjoy their time there through shopping, dining, gaming and watching movies daily.

Businesses rise to great heights of success when this kind of alignment happens. Their employees will make the right decisions, take ownership of the goals and walk the extra mile to see the business achieve its long-term vision as well as short-term objectives.

What can be done to make the work engaging for the employees?

Everyone wants their work to count; all of us have similar levels of psychological needs to be respected, challenged, recognised and valued. These are basic human traits we have observed, experienced and studied. Yet, business leaders forget about these basics often and end up not giving away enough independence and freedom; they do not offer feedback at the right time; sometimes they get impatient, lose their temper with people and express their frustration. As a result, people feel disrespected and undervalued. We have to reflect these basics in our day-to-day behaviours and practices.

We have to offer the right amount of money, fair levels of benefits, equitable promotion and development opportunities to our people; our work has to be safe, empowering, dignified and flexible. These are the bare minimum anyone expects these days from his or her employer. However, providing these aren’t going to make us a winning team.

How do we make work meaningful?

Some jobs can be repetitive like operating a machine or performing a series of steps multiple times a day; some jobs can be very stressful because one is dealing with uncertainties and cannot plan for the tasks that can land on one’s desk. Paying right, offering salary hikes, sending one for training, recognising one by incentives, making the workplace filled with fun and several perks and similar such steps are desirable. However, they do not make the job interesting and exciting. An employee cannot feel enthused for long with these interventions. We have to make the job seem valuable and meaningful; we have to make the employee feel that the efforts put in each day by him or her to do the job well are worthwhile.

Going back to the shopping mall example, we should possibly get the visitors to talk about the mall, the employees working there and the businesses operating there talk about the mall to the people who built the mall. Similarly, our milkman, delivery person, driver, grocer, domestic help, call centre executives, the admin person at the office, the assistant at the pantry, member of the housekeeping staff and many such people will find the meaning of their jobs when the stakeholders benefit by them can describe their experiences and offer gratitude to them.

And the millions who are in white-collar jobs will similarly find their jobs meaningful when we can get the ultimate beneficiaries of their work to express their gratitude. Businesses have to organise stakeholder meetings that can help their people understand customer needs and stakeholder expectations directly from the horse’s mouth. Further, these sessions develop an appreciation of the purpose and impact of one’s work in others’ lives. We build a better future together!

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Why can’t organisations and their leaders implement the obvious?

All leaders are seeing the digitisation around them right from the way we organise our travel, buy goods and services to the way we manage our money. However, all of them have not been able to get their business to take advantage of the possibilities offered by digital. From the smallest of businesses to the large ones, data helps in shaping business decisions – operational as well as strategic. There is no uncertainty around the ROI (returns on investment). Business leaders need to understand this and drive the business accordingly.

Some others have digitised their workflows and asked their ecosystem to go digital. And they want to analyse the data around them, but think that the capabilities and technologies needed to do that are expensive and hard to build. As cloud-based technologies galore, they have been caught contemplating and procrastinating. Forrester says that 74% of businesses want to be data-driven, but only 29% are successful at putting analytics into action.

All businesses do not need to buy a supercomputer or invest in data lakes and hire the smartest engineers to analyse the data their businesses generate. Several tools and systems are now available for each industry sector; these are fairly easy to implement and adapt. We need the leadership team’s belief and resolve to monitor and leverage whatever happens around them objectively.

Making a start is not enough!

Many companies have invested a good amount of effort and money in creating the analytics. The biggest challenge in these firms has been to get the rank and file to absorb the information and analytics being presented to them. Like we need to have the capability to read, write and speak in a certain language, our workforce needs literacy around data to be able to understand and appreciate them; leverage the insights drawn from the information.

A study by McKinsey shows that a large number (~70%) of digital transformation projects don’t meet their objectives. Hence, billions of dollars spent by enterprises failed to deliver the ROI. One of the reasons behind this is the fact that most organisations lack AI and data literacy. Thus, they fail to use the systems provided to them, do not appreciate and understand the reports that come out of the systems, let alone the possibility of leveraging data.

What can we do?

Firstly, the leaders have to align their teams on the significance of data literacy and show them what they can do if they are data literate. The leaders across the spectrum need to understand that they need to develop the desired skills to interpret data and take decisions based on the data. Then, the entire organisation from the top to the bottom needs to cultivate the habit of reading the data, relying on the information that stems out of the data and drawing the underlying trends and insights from the information. This is the hardest part of the execution.

Last, but not least is to identify opportunities for gathering data, building systems for it and developing the layer of analytics on top of it so that new insights can be generated. Business leaders have to anchor their annual operating plans on data-driven insights rather than gut-level presumptions, feelings and opinions. They need to call out the continual improvements they will make in their business in terms of systems and processes.

Organisations capable of making their organisation data-literate will win in the marketplace of tomorrow. It will be a competitive advantage that creates superior value for their stakeholders.

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Can one expect one’s employer to take care of his or her wellbeing?

Organisations know that their employees must remain in good health to be able to deliver outcomes on a sustained basis. Typically, organisations allow paid leaves to cater to certain days of sickness and the large ones go a step ahead to organise healthcare facilities and provide insurance benefits. Recent events have shown that these arrangements could not prevent the pandemic; many organisations were caught napping in adapting to the volatile situations around the pandemic. Some of them were agile and stood out in the market as stronger employers.

Given this context, organisations are taking a hard look at the employee benefits offered by them and employees are networking among members of various online communities to benchmark their employer against the best-in-class. However, employees must not outsource thinking about their wellbeing needs and acting on them to their employers.

Each human being has his or her unique needs to stay healthy and strong enough to ward off the risks. It is hard for employers to run their business competitively and harder to take care of each employee’s unique health needs. Hence, it is impractical to expect that the employer will provide personalised care for each employee and ensure that the employee stays fit in the short-run as well as the long run.

What can an organisation do?

We know, it is tough and possibly foolhardy to attempt to provide wellbeing solutions to each employee matching his or her unique needs. At the same time, organisations are competing in the marketplace to attract, engage and retain talent. They need to think creatively of methods in which awareness among employees can rise about staying healthy and well; personalised care can be facilitated for each employee and genuine care is felt among employees far and wide.

Doing more of the same may not be the answer. On one hand, companies are worried about rising healthcare expenses and at the same time, they are unsure if the expenses are generating the desired value. Hence, they need to review the processes followed in their organisations and bring in improvements.

Secondly, they need to go to the root causes behind rising healthcare expenses incurred by them as well as their employees. Some of these are not getting addressed by the existing programmes. For example, mental health and wellbeing are ignored most often and thus, productivity takes a backseat. Similarly, with remote working as a new practice, the social capital of the organisations has started eroding and thus, work-related stress has been on the rise and consequentially, productivity has been negatively impacted. Another case in point is the need for regular health screening or checks leading to early warning of pressure points which can prevent major disruptions in future.

How do we make these work?

Organisations need to make it an absolute must for the leaders to lead by example and get their hands dirty in designing the right programmes. The leaders have to come forward and be hands-on in reviewing what is working and what is not. Very few companies count sick days, track healthcare expenses and stratify the data to analyse the development opportunities. Fewer organisations involve their employees in designing a practical programme that serves the purpose well. Leaders have to communicate the importance of wellbeing throughout the organisation.

They need to offer platforms where their employees can discover what they need and what the members of their family need, personalise the programme that works for them. They must use a combination of carrots and stick to implement this because the program delivers business results. An example of a stick approach can be to deny performance bonuses and salary hikes for the employees who do not go for annual health screening and design their personalised health programme. An example of a carrot could be to give a 20% bump in annual bonus for the employee diligently reporting progress made against the plan designed in the programme.

Wellbeing programmes are no less significant than the annual operating plan for sales or supply chain. It needs careful thought and rigorous execution!

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Context: Great Resignation

Acquiring new talent is one of the commonest tools used by companies to grab the opportunities the market presents them with. Secondly, given the current investment climate, many companies have rich coffers and are in a hurry to deploy those funds to go to market fast and grow their market share. This has resulted in fierce competition among employers to attract and retain talent. These companies have many more jobs open than they ever had in the past. For the jobseekers with skills matching the demand of these fast-growing sectors, it is a situation of plenty.

Moreover, new-found remote working and virtual methods make it very easy for candidates to explore job opportunities in the market. In a demand-led market, the supply side tries to maximise the returns for itself. Hence, it is natural to expect that salaries go up and candidates will trade offers from competing employers.

According to a Gallup study, half of the workers in the US are following the open job roles or actively searching for jobs and 60% of the millennials are open to new opportunities. These are largely in the roles of technology – new tools and methodologies to drive efficiencies and adapt to the new world of working remotely, shopping online, e-sports, new ways of entertainment and the like.

Companies are challenged to innovate and adapt to the new reality. Despite their best efforts, they have been losing people. This is the time of great resignation.

Let’s embrace this new reality

Traditionally, businesses raised their eyebrows and despised profiles with frequent job changes. They believed, job-hoppers are impractical and inflexible; lack adaptability; are not adequately seasoned and hence, lack the depth of experience.

Currently, candidates are surrounded by multiple stimuli and attractive job offers; our social environment encourages quick decisions and fast-paced growth. So we see employees taking quick decisions to leave as soon as they face discomfort in their job even if it is not too intense or they see greener pastures elsewhere. This is a new reality that business leaders and HR teams have to embrace.

Job hoppers are not necessarily what we believed in the past; we have to listen to the candidate empathetically and determine if the person is habitually impulsive, generally inflexible and shy of facing challenges or was a victim of the situation. We have to deep-dive, peel the onion layer by layer to know the personality traits. This is a higher-order challenge in recruitment and selection; leaders who are selecting people for their teams need to embrace the reality that job hoppers aren’t misfits and upgrade their skills in selecting the right candidates.

We have to grow with job hoppers!

There is no choice! We have to take several steps proactively rather than react to situations. What could they be?

We spoke of the right selection already. Secondly, we need to make sure that our employees have the trust in our HR team that their voices are welcome, heard and acted upon. Often employees do not think that their feelings of discomfort aren’t welcome and hence, they should do whatever best they can. They spread the word about their negative experience, distance themselves from the long-term goals of the company, lessen their efforts in achieving the short-term objectives and start hurting the organisation. This is a vicious circle that any organisation has to protect itself against.

Most people around us are looking for instant gratification, quick results and timely feedback. Hence, the organisation has to build a culture of transparency, frequent communication, recognise good work and quick feedback. In order to achieve this, leaders have to take a deep interest in their team members, build a personal rapport with them, co-create the solutions needed at work and genuinely care for their lives at work as well as home. They have to understand the ambitions of their team members, gently shape those and be honest in mentoring their team members in shaping their careers.

We have to embrace reality and adapt our ways of dealing with them rather than being imprisoned by our past experiences.

The post #BuildingTomorrow: Growing a Company with Job Hoppers appeared first on CIEL HR.

Businesses have been moving at a pace they never did in the past because there is a high degree of uncertainty in our environment. Leaders are on their toes; they are keeping a close watch on the environment and making adjustments in their plans continually. Naturally, creativity is the most premium ability we are seeking among talented people.

What’s at the core?

Technology companies like Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Samsung, IBM are well-known for the innovation culture they live; new-age companies like Tesla are built on the premise of developing alternate solutions; old companies like P&G, Coca Cola, Merck, Abbott, Bosch, Ikea, Sony and Hyundai have remained relevant because they have been agile in responding to the opportunities in the market and addressing the weaknesses. In each of these examples, their leaders have believed in a nimble-footed approach and made it a part of their organizational culture.

Which aspects of their culture promote creativity?

Frederick Wallace Smith is the Founder of FedEx, a global leader in logistics. He said, “My innovation involved taking an idea from telecommunications and banking industries, and applying that idea to transportation business.” This guides us to sow the seeds of creativity in the business.

We have to observe what’s happening around us and take a keen interest in understanding how the dots are getting connected. Talented people capable of lateral thinking can observe the events, interpret them and project those ideas onto our own situation. Hence, the first step is to have a team of people capable of keen observance and lateral thinking.

The leaders have to empower the team of people to look for opportunities, innovate methods to leverage them and improve their internal context. The idea is to cater to existing customers better, add new segments of customers and hence, new sources of revenue, create greater value for the customer and hence, for the business.

Hence, it is mainly getting the right people on board and empowering them to generate ideas, run experiments and choose the ones which work well.

Need rigour in execution

P&G, one of the most innovative companies in the world has a culture of innovation; A G Lafley, one of its respected CEOs drove this culture hard within the organisation. The practices he espoused are well-documented. He said, “Let’s execute along this strategy, but know that we’ll probably get some of this wrong, so be open to changing it.”

He said, “A strategy is a coordinated and integrated set of where-to-play, how-to-win, core capability, and management system choices that uniquely meet a consumer’s needs, thereby creating competitive advantage and superior value for a business. Strategy is a way to win – and nothing less.”

Organisations often get excited about innovation and building the culture to facilitate innovation. However, they do not pursue this culture rigorously. They adopt the best practices but do not follow them consistently.

To build a culture of agility and creativity, leaders have to not only staff the roles with the right people, empower them to evolve new ideas and shape those ideas into reality, but also, they need to follow these practices rigorously. Leaders have to walk the talk by consistently rewarding creativity, offering flexibility and allowing employees the wiggle room to experiment.

Read also:

• #GetTheBestOutofUs: Be Proactive to get First-Mover Advantage
• #GetTheBestOutofUs: Cause the Positive Effect
• #GetTheBestOutofUs : The Purpose-Led Brand
• #GetTheBestOutofUs: Benefits of Leading with Values
• #BuildingTomorrow: A Reliability Centric Organisation
• #BuildingTomorrow: How Brands can use NFTs to reshape Digital Consumerism

The post #BuildingTomorrow: Importance of Creativity in Business appeared first on CIEL HR.

What can we foresee now? What will be the prized skills for the future?

No prizes for guessing that we will have more automation and technology in what we do! Human talent will be majorly needed to interact with machines and collaborate with them. And a premium will be on the abilities of unstructured thinking, leveraging the capabilities of machines and responding to emotion-laden behaviours.

Over the last few years, we have seen some enterprises stand apart in the crowd because they could leverage the power of machines, the internet and other technologies to make someone’s life simpler or better in a significant way. These enterprises are addressing some basic needs of people: could be in travelling from one place to the other, finding a doctor, ordering food, choosing to buy a pair of trousers or buying supplies for home or a business and hundreds of such areas. We have to learn from these innovations and project into the future.

Also, we need to look around the world for social changes, political environment and economic developments. If we combine all these, we can see that the years ahead are going to promote behaviours around flexibility, freedom, independence, convenience, speed, dignity and purposefulness. One is not sure about the trends around globalisation, diversity, charity, equity in future. Considering this scenario, business leaders and visionaries must determine the skills which are going to be particularly critical for their success.

Timeliness matters!

Great companies like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Tesla, Toyota, Wal Mart and many others, have been able to time their moves perfectly. Their leaders have been wise and smart; they have listened to the signals from the environment and have been able to separate the noise from all that they received and acted upon them. By the time, others caught up with them, they have already established themselves as a leader and are already planning their next move. The time- period for each of these cycles is reducing and hence, the error of margin is very low.

One may wonder if the great companies never made wrong moves or made delays in making the right moves. Of course, they do! And that is why companies like Kodak, Sony, GE, Nokia, Blackberry and many others have suffered.

While building for the future, we have to actively think about the shape of our business in future, gather inputs from the environment, analyse them and make quick moves about the skills that our business needs.

Tenure will continue to remain short. We have to make the most out of them.

One of the factors in our world of work that has been changing fast is the tenure of an employee. There was a time when people considered loyalty as tenure in an organisation and the business owners treated their employees as their prized resources like land, buildings and capital. And the prevalent social norms promoted employees to make personal sacrifices to treat their employer and their work above anything else. Work typically was for a lifetime and primarily, the source of livelihood.

In the current times, work is an avenue of one’s expression, an opportunity to pursue one’s passion and an instrument to fulfil one’s ambitions. Work and employment are by no means for the lifetime. In the world of work, people are changing lanes as if they are driving on the roads of small towns in India. People holding engineering degrees are driving an Uber, turning into bankers, marketers of consumer goods, teachers and entrepreneurs.

Hence, the leaders and business owners have to design their work in such a way that people can come for short durations, engage intensely and passionately, chart their own to a large extent while leveraging the ecosystem provided by the firm, find meaningful advancement for themselves and at the same time, create value for the stakeholders of the business.

The post #BuildingTomorrow: Skill Economy appeared first on CIEL HR.

What are the implications?

Employees get the flexibility to work from their homes or whichever place they are comfortable with and come into offices occasionally or whenever their job role demands. As a result, they save time and money which would have been spent commuting and working out of the office. Many of them find it less distracting to work from their homes and feel proud of having reduced their carbon footprint on our mother earth. Employers also save some costs in office infrastructure and get higher productivity in many cases.

While there are positive implications in many cases, organisations are worried about the decline in the social capital they had built by bringing people together under one roof. Employees could actively participate in building the company culture and following the norms around the culture. In the remote-working situation, employees tend to lose touch with the company norms and develop their styles that suit their tastes. They tend to dissociate from their colleagues and hence, in the process weaken the linkage with the team, its objectives and purpose. The propensity of walking the extra mile gradually declines. Leaders are worried about it and see the impact on the horizon in terms of a drop in employee engagement scores, customer satisfaction levels and hence, sustainability in the long term.

What can be done?

Our world has changed in many ways after the pandemic. However, human beings have not changed their preferences and instincts yet.

We continue to look for belongingness to a range of social systems; we stay hungry for challenging work; we seek trust from others; we need successes and achievements from time to time; our motivation is linked with the recognition and rewards we receive from people who matter. Organisations had their ways of fulfilling all these aspects when work happened in the physical workplaces.

Given the change in the world of work, we have to re-examine the relevance of the old methods such as celebrating successes, conducting events, holding stand-up meetings to showcase successes and plan the activities for the time ahead, giving away certificates and awards to the achievers, holding classroom training programmes, using scoreboards and so on.

Leaders hold the key

In our new way of work, colleagues are mostly connecting over digital channels rather than the traditional practice of in-person connections. Digital platforms aren’t yet able to match the effectiveness of in-person communication. Leaders have to take cognizance of this limitation and plan methods that can bridge the gaps.

Firstly, we have to review the communication methods, style and frequency if they are serving the purpose. In most organisations, there is a need for change such as using new methods such as the use of videos, short messages, use of platforms that promote expression and collaboration, increasing the frequency and encouraging employees at multiple levels in the organisation to actively post updates, reactions, suggestions and questions.

Secondly, we have to realise that the current methods of virtual meetings cannot generate the level of camaraderie, energy and friendship employees experienced in the water-cooler conversations, chats over lunch, sipping tea or stepping out for snacks together. So, the least that leaders can do is to lead by example in driving a change in the newfound hybrid workplace. They need to regularly catch up with their direct reports or one level below one-to-one or in very small groups of three or four people. The catch-up needs to focus on building personal networks and connections.

Last but not the least, work has to be structured well with clear goals and metrics. Feedback on regular basis must be offered to people so that they do not meander, waste efforts and feel frustrated later due to the unavoidable rework or a sense of underachievement. This is easier said than done.

Leaders have a task now and they must challenge themselves to meet the expectations. They have to ensure value delivery for all stakeholders in the business.

The post #BuildingTomorrow: Employee Engagement for the Future Workforce appeared first on CIEL HR.

Digitisation

Thanks to the pandemic, all of us have realised the power of digitisation faster than expected. We realised that work can be done remotely and the air we breathe can be purer. Buying and selling can happen without in-person interactions with the same level of efficacy as the previous methods. Global supply chains got disrupted and local suppliers emerged to address the gaps; currently, the local ones have started occupying the centre-stage in many organisations. Customers have changed their habits; employees and their managers have adapted to a new way of working.

All these changes have been possible due to tech adoption. Businesses have learnt how to take this development in their stride and respond to this by aligning their systems and processes with the changed realities. When the pandemic hit us, smart and agile organisations were quick to recognise the changes and opportunities; they could respond faster and stay relevant. As we move into the next phase, to win the race in the marketplace, organisations have to transition into a stage of proactive innovation of new products, methods and business models.

Customer focus has to be greater than ever before

Since changes are fast and frequent, it is more critical than ever before to put our ears and eyes on the ground. We have to embed ourselves in the customers’ lives to understand the challenges they face while they lead their lives using our products and services; we have to also discover opportunities to fulfil their unmet and latent needs. The life cycle of products and services is getting shorter than in the past and hence, we have to get the design, pricing and distribution right in our first attempt; we do not have the luxury of revamping or making frequent course corrections.

Adaptability has to be all-pervasive

Someone said data is the new oil. However, in the current context, adaptability is the new oil.

We need our employees to be adaptable so that they can observe, learn and make course corrections to deliver the desired impact in the business. In order to inject heavy doses of adaptability into the culture, the leaders have to stand up and lead the way. They will need to communicate honestly and make decisions promptly. All the people process right from recruitment and onboarding to learning, development and performance management have to make sure that the new employees understand why and how they need to be agile and adapt; similarly, the existing ones need to appreciate the changes in the environment and make conscious efforts in this direction.

We have to thrive and grow in the marketplace by combining the power of our customer insights, the prowess of technology and the pervasiveness of adaptability in all aspects of a business.

Ref: https://www2.deloitte.com/xe/en/insights/topics/strategy/european-cfo-survey-post-pandemic.html

https://www.warc.com/newsandopinion/news/strategies-for-marketing-teams-looking-towards-rebound-and-recovery/44403

https://industrialsupplymagazine.com/pages/Sales—Rebound,-recover,-restart.php

https://www.crisil.com/en/home/newsroom/press-releases/2021/09/economic-recovery-to-drive-road-traffic-up-12-14percent-this-fiscal.html#

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