Your team members - what do they want from you?
I appreciate that this might seem like a redundant question. They want a secure job and they want to paid regularly and consistently, right?
Well yes, that’s true, but that’s just the start of what they are truly looking for. I know it sounds a bit self-evident, but being “an employee” is a tiny fraction of what makes up the life of your team.
Think about your own life. Yes, as a business owner you have a lot more focus on the business than anyone else, but that’s because you have a lot more at stake than your people. If you don’t concentrate on making it all work, it might all just tumble into disrepair and then no-one has a job.
But it is unreasonable and unproductive for you to assume that this is how everyone else might feel. Recently I wrote a piece on servant leadership, which is a very grand name for being a decent bugger when it comes to employing people.
What people are really, really looking for is an employer who honours them as complete human beings that have lives that include working for you, but also encompasses their spouses, partners, kids, wider families, exes, extra-curricular activities and their beliefs, prejudices and preferences and especially their personality types.
The job you provide is one part of their life and yes, it is a very important one that has a huge impact on the quality of their life, but as an employer, you treat it as the most important thing for them at your peril.
While the nature of work continues to fracture with a combination of the gig economy, the move to working from home where possible and the very different take on life and work of the generations following Boomers, it feels like the soul is being sucked out of our work relationships.
It’s interesting to note that age changes perspective. Gen X thought we Boomers were ludicrous in our self-righteousness and lack of awareness of what we do to the world around us and they have a point. They were the new reality and they grew up with massively increasing divorce rates and both parents working outside the home. But living in an altered family environment only shifted the dial a bit. When they started working, we sneered at their lack of grooming and bad manners, but they are now dominating the 21st century tech and innovation space.
Millennials came along and we Boomers heads just about fell off and Gen X thought their younger siblings were entitled snowflakes needing constant validation and that they had no loyalty. Gen Z tends to have an expectation that they deserve fulfilment, recognition and flexibility in their work and they expect it to be balanced with the rest of their life. They witnessed some deep economic impacts on their parents and if they can’t get what they think they deserve where they work, they will move. We don’t know what Generation Alpha (the next lot) are going to be like, but we’ve got enough to grapple with in the preceding generations.
The fact is, although we Boomers are still dominant in many ways in political and financial control, we have a duty of care to the people who come after us.
As a Boomer, I am very aware of how my life was influenced by my parents who are summarised as being part of The Silent Generation. They were conformist and had very clear expectations around what life is like and will be like tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow till the end. They got their lessons from The Greatest Generation who were stoic and lived in a world of conformity just not recognisable today.
We are all effected in this way. The decisions we make seem to come down to a choice between “being our parents” or “not being our parents”. That’s the gravitational pull on who we become.
The point of all this is that we have over successive generations grown young people who are both similar and dissimilar to us and we need to reckon with this. The fact that some very high proportion of Gen Z are either ambivalent about their sexuality or identify as something other than heteronormative might feel like the sky is falling for many older people and those with religious convictions, but this tide isn’t turning.
I just want to bring the conversation about the workplace back to a family environment. You get a choice as a parent. You either rejoice in, adapt to and work hard to understand your kids, or you take a leaf from earlier generations which might be inclined to smack sense into them, shun them or pillory and alienate behaviour and values they don’t understand.
I am a terribly imperfect parent. I have kids from Millennial and Gen Z and I get it right about half the time I’m guessing. What I do know is that when I stop Boomer-ing and actually listen, my children have wisdom and insight far younger and more profound than I did and I was a pretty smart and liberal kid.
So, back to the workplace. Having gone on about the differences through generations, I now want to be reductive. Of the 8 billion or so people on the planet of any age, we know that there may be a few people out there who don’t care, but the rest of us want a few things.
We want to be seen, we want to be heard, we want to be values as human beings, we want that value to be reflected in meaningful ways such as being paid properly, we want to be provided with opportunities to grow and develop, we want our workplace to honour that we have a full life that isn’t subservient to work.
In my own experience and I have quantitative and qualitative evidence that this is true, viewing and treating our tem members as fully functioning human souls and not just economic units profoundly changes things.
Productivity increases, stickability increases, profitability increases and the workplace environment is transformed into somewhere people want to be because it feeds them what they need. As an employer, you hold the keys to this transformation and the beauty is, the biggest cost is the cost of you recognising that you could be better and allowing yourself to change.
I get it, if you’ve been a hardarse boss and it’s got you where you’ve got to, making a sea change will get you to a different place that I can almost guarantee that you’ll like just as much as your team members will.
I’d love to talk about this in more detail, so if you’d like to discuss how this process might roll out in your business, give me a shout and we can have a look. No obligation, but this is an area that SME owners everywhere can gain real results from.
We don’t know what Generation Alpha (the next lot) are going to be like, but we’ve got enough to grapple with in the preceding generations. The fact is, although we Boomers are still dominant in many ways in political and financial control, we have a duty of care to the people who come after us.
As a Boomer, I am very aware of how my life was influenced by my parents who are summarised as being part of The Silent Generation. They were conformist and had very clear expectations around what life is like and will be like tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow till the end. They got their lessons from The Greatest Generation who were stoic and lived in a world of conformity just not recognisable today.
We are all effected in this way. The decisions we make seem to come down to a choice between “being our parents” or “not being our parents”. That’s the gravitational pull on who we become. The point of all this is that we have over successive generations grown young people who are both similar and dissimilar to us and we need to reckon with this. The fact that some very high proportion of Gen Z are either ambivalent about their sexuality or identify as something other than heteronormative might feel like the sky is falling for many older people and those with religious convictions, but this tide isn’t turning.
I just want to bring the conversation about the workplace back to a family environment. You get a choice as a parent. You either rejoice in, adapt to and work hard to understand your kids, or you take a leaf from earlier generations which might be inclined to smack sense into them, shun them or pillory and alienate behaviour and values they don’t understand. I am a terribly imperfect parent.
I have kids from Millennial and Gen Z and I get it right about half the time I’m guessing. What I do know is that when I stop Boomer-ing and actually listen, my children have wisdom and insight far younger and more profound than I did and I was a pretty smart and liberal kid. So, back to the workplace.
Having gone on about the differences through generations, I now want to be reductive. Of the 8 billion or so people on the planet of any age, we know that there may be a few people out there who don’t care, but the rest of us want a few things. We want to be seen, we want to be heard, we want to be values as human beings, we want that value to be reflected in meaningful ways such as being paid properly, we want to be provided with opportunities to grow and develop, we want our workplace to honour that we have a full life that isn’t subservient to work.
In my own experience and I have quantitative and qualitative evidence that this is true, viewing and treating our tem members as fully functioning human souls and not just economic units profoundly changes things. Productivity increases, stickability increases, profitability increases and the workplace environment is transformed into somewhere people want to be because it feeds them what they need.
As an employer, you hold the keys to this transformation and the beauty is, the biggest cost is the cost of you recognising that you could be better and allowing yourself to change. I get it, if you’ve been a hardarse boss and it’s got you where you’ve got to, making a sea change will get you to a different place that I can almost guarantee that you’ll like just as much as your team members will.
I’d love to talk about this in more detail, so if you’d like to discuss how this process might roll out in your business, give me a shout and we can have a look. No obligation, but this is an area that SME owners everywhere can gain real results from.