In January 2023, I described in “The Perfect Storm for Leadership Skills” how the Jack Welch “command-and-control” model of leadership was no longer (or ever really) appropriate. The pandemic was the “perfect storm” for a shift in how we need to lead. But one significant silver lining for employees is how they have been empowered to express how they want to be treated in order to be most productive and satisfied. Leaders have had a wake-up call about how to behave, which is an anti-Jack Welch style.
In another article, I wrote how some leadership experts are emphasizing qualitative skills such as empathy and communication with as much rigor as quantitative skills such as finance and engineering. In fact, some authors advocate not calling interpersonal skills soft. In the article, “Stop Calling Them Soft: Why Today’s Essential Skills Are Anything But,” Lindsay Galloway interviews hiring managers who believe these skills should be renamed as core competencies or critical skills, and who train for them just as they do for technical ones.
There is nothing soft about these skills.
I also concluded that the hybrid workplace was here to stay in my February 2023 article. While the benefits of working from home include flexibility and less commute time, a hybrid model seems to integrate the best of both options. And attrition rates are lower where hybrid is the norm. It is important to make these workplace decisions in a dialogue. It will take time to weave organizations back together again so everyone feels a sense of agency over their work/life integration.
Effects on Employee Engagement
While workplaces and leaders within were adjusting to a new normal during the pandemic and trying to survive, the statistics on employee engagement are surprisingly interesting. According to a Korn Ferry study, analysis indicated that engagement and enablement actually improved over the span of the pandemic.
But in 2023, Korn Ferry’s research has found employees in the U.S. continued to feel more detached from their employers, with “less clear expectations, lower levels of satisfaction with their organization, and less connection to its mission or purpose than they did four years ago. They are also less likely to feel someone at work cares about them as a person.”
Gallup’s recent survey of employee engagement found the largest decline was associated with the extent to which employees perceived that they have had meaningful feedback. Gallup found meaningful feedback includes “recognition and discussion about collaboration, goals, and priorities, and the employee’s strengths.” These conversations help employees feel connected to the organization. Managers can emphasize individually what employees contribute and can then connect how their work affects the larger organization.
New Direction Needed
Peter Cappelli and Ranya Nehmeh explain in their Harvard Business Review article, “HR’s New Role” (May-June 2024), that cost-cutting strategies must be changed to a focus on how employees are affected. They conclude HR professionals need to focus again on “taking care of workers and persuade management to change outdated policies on compensation, training and development, layoffs, vacancies, outsourcing, and restructuring.”
Cappelli and Nehmeh suggest HR professionals educate leaders by creating dashboards on the true costs of turnover, absenteeism, reasons for quitting, illness, and disengagement. “Telling leaders that the approach they’ve been following for 40 years—and the one thing investors seem to understand about human capital (“cut it!”)—is all wrong does not seem like a career-building move. Nonetheless, HR executives can—and must—make the case to their CEOs and operating executives that the old way is no longer working and that their companies need to change direction.”
Turnover is expensive. There are recruiting and training costs. Turnover disrupts social systems at a time when loneliness is an epidemic and belonging is a yearning. Employees left behind often suffer from “survivor syndrome,” feeling guilty for not being cut, but are stressed wondering if they will be next.
Cappelli and Nehmeh summarize that cost cutting such as “not filling vacancies and letting the remaining employees figure out how to get additional work done … shrinking training and development budgets” is a model that is no longer working. “Yet companies continue with it out of inertia and because costs like turnover, unstaffed positions, and disengaged employees have no line item in the financial accounting systems of enterprises in the United States and many other countries.”
Leaders Need to Listen and Learn
It appears some leaders have returned to their old ways of behaving out of habit. It is time to remember that soft skills are the core competencies needed now and in the future. Korn Ferry stressed that leaders need to be listening to their employees and utilizing their input for improvement. Leaders should continue to demonstrate empathy and compassion as many displayed during the pandemic. HR professionals need to remind leaders of the importance of helping employees feel connected. When employees know someone cares about them, they are more likely to sustain the commitment and energy needed to address future challenges.