As we face the realities ahead in 2021 it will be the HR teams that embrace a higher order set of cultural team traits that will generate the levels of trust and loyalty required to future-proof their workforce As 2021 opens with further disruption to our world we are all being driven by the need for leadership that goes beyond the rational, and proves connection with staff on a far more authentic and motivating level, within a context that values holistic employee health. Regenerative Leadership, leadership that heroes team morale, and its relation to output, is now the new normal. For the
senior leaders, this move to repurpose their culture and processes is an intense one and it will be vastly reliant on HR teams and systems to create the pathway for this shift. From the initial mapping of current organizational empathy to the road maps to roll out corporate understanding as a cultural currency at scale, HR teams will be responsible for turning this employee need state into a business status quo. As we face the realities ahead in 2021 it will be the HR teams that embrace a higher order set of cultural team traits that will generate the levels of trust and loyalty required to futureproof their workforce. Understanding of our colleagues and teams is no longer a nice to have but a mandate for staff and stakeholders equally. A secret sauce, or the source of all corporate human potential? Either way, without empathy being deeply baked into our strategic priorities for 2021, as a baseline requirement across all teams and industries, we won’t only lose out to dwindling performance levels from our teams, but we might lose each other entirely.
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still a wide gap between the C-suite’s definition and ability to execute an empathy shift to make it in line with their team's expectation to do so. The report highlights that whilst 91 percent of CEOs say their company is already “empathetic”, only 68 percent of their employees agree! There is a clear gap, an empathy gap, in the understanding as to what this shift truly means for organizational behavior. Also of note is that beyond levels of motivation and morale this same report showed that 78 percent of employees stated that higher empathy directly leads to greater motivation, and 76 percent said it resulted in greater productivity. Employees who feel seen, heard and recognized, perform better, think more strategically, and stay in their roles longer. The picture paints a very strong case for HR teams to move empathy indexing and training far higher up the agenda as they map the months ahead. As the new requirement for empathy at work fast tracks ever forward, the necessity to expand on the types of programs that train this skill set will be 2021’s greatest HR shift. We will now need programs that teach and embed these emotional intelligence skills as well as establish them within the KPI and appraisal systems.
Mimi Nicklin is the Bestselling Author of Softening The Edge FEBRUARY 2021 |
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