A blog from my white paper partner in crime Neil Harrison, who continues to write with great insight and in a wonderfully compelling way. Click here to download the Culture & EVP - transformational soulmates driving transformational change white paper.
We’ve all seen tweets and texts that haven’t aged well. Their sentiment and message quickly overtaken by events and rendered, at best, obsolete.
There’s a section in the white paper that Joss Sargent and I have very recently put together that has similarly been overtaken by events – positively, or so we’d like to think. The section of our white paper, ‘Culture and EVP – transformational soul mates driving organisational change’, touches on ensuring that culture extends beyond the confines of the immediate workplace.
All of a Covid-19 sudden, with the heroic exception of key workers, we’re all working from home and everyone’s workplace extends as far as their dining room table, a telephone and a laptop.
These are truly unique times through which we are all navigating via science, trust and crossed digits. One of the issues we can be confident about today is the need for an organisation’s culture and employee value proposition to have reach and relevance outside the office, the shop, the factory.
For employees to continue to feel as if they belong, employers need to ensure that culture and their organisational ‘why’ is just as relevant, just as tangible at 34 Acacia Avenue as it is in a city centre open plan.
Our white paper, in the quaint pre-coronavirus days of maybe a month ago, suggests that with more and more people wanting to work increasingly from home, organisations have to think more clearly about ensuring such people feel part of their organisation, rather than apart from it.
And if this was a challenge before house confinement, then it is even more pressing now we are all waiting behind closed doors for what might lie ahead.
People are increasingly attracted to a job because of the time they are not working, rather than the time they are working there. We are spending less and less physical time at and with our employer. We potentially have a more distant and diluted cultural relationship with our employer. We have less and less line of sight of cultural role models and exemplars. And there are more and more people who have an increasingly transactional relationship with not one employer, but any number of organisations, contacts, side hustles and networks.
Whilst the advantages of landing a robust and inspiring culture and EVP have never been greater, the challenges are not getting any easier. Workforces are less and less homogenous, in terms of gender, ethnicity, age and education, and we can increasingly add location and geography to such a list.
For those old enough to remember, a digital camera evolved soon enough into, well, a camera; the mobile phone became the phone; and electric cars will, perhaps sooner than we think, be simply cars. The virus means that WFH will lose its meaning – we work where we work.
One of the other key points to emerge from our research touched on being much more nimble and intuitive when we gauge and measure the continued effectiveness of our culture and EVP. Markets, competitors, products evolve constantly, nothing stays the same.
It’s likely that we are living through perhaps the greatest change to our living and working parameters ever.
The notion of where we work has very quickly been knocked on its head. To reach out to workforces, employers have to go far beyond the workplace, in order to convey a sense of culture and the ‘why’ to people who suddenly have little obvious daily reminder of it.
If you have a spare moment, have a look at our white paper for more thoughts around this and other subjects.