Mac October 2020: Three Things We’re Thinking About | Gagen MacDonald

Insights & Events / Mac Newsletter

Mac October 2020: Three Things We’re Thinking About

Oct 12, 2020
1. When it comes to employee value proposition, trust is the forgotten benefit. Employee value propositions that have been carefully crafted over years have suddenly been rendered obsolete. Every company’s EVP must be reconsidered and reformulated for the pandemic and beyond. In particular, as employees suffer from escalating burnout, there’s one element that will too often go overlooked as a differentiating benefit: trust. Companies that truly trust their employees to make decisions to protect their own wellbeing, maintain their energy, and juggle personal and professional demands are going to stand out over the coming years. What are concrete policy changes you can make that would demonstrate that you trust the people who make your business possible? What are tools or permissions can you institute that would allow employees to more independently manage the sum of their lives? People want to work for companies where trust runs two ways, now more than ever.2. When it comes to your organizational design, now is the time to create your future.For years, we’ve forecasted a “next normal” on the horizon. We’ve seen a coming world where the lines that demarcate teams, functions, business units, and even the interior and exterior world are blurry and fluid. We’ve seen a world where employees will be relied on less for discrete technical skills, and more general for general set of business acumen and capabilities such as problem solving, creative thinking, and emotional intelligence.When it comes to organizational structure and design, we tend to think in terms of incremental change. But with so much in flux, and so many artifacts that have tethered us to old ways of doing things now retired, you have an amazing opportunity to create your organization of the future. As we sit in limbo, now is the time to wipe the slate clean and ask yourself, how would we best be organized to serve our stakeholders’ needs? What gets in our way today? Where can we knock down barriers to make our teams greater than the sum of their parts? When pandemic recedes and the “next normal” arrives, you’ll be grateful to have done this work already.3. When it comes to your communication, now is the time for changing the channel.Recently, we were working with a client who had always maintained a bare bones internal communication apparatus (think: all email, all the time). They’ve never even had a corporate intranet. This spring, as they tried to pulse out regular coronavirus updates to employees, gaps in their communication infrastructure turned into gaping holes. Their CEO made the active choice. He decided they wouldn’t just improve on the edges, but leap forward. In six weeks, we worked together to design and unveil a state of the art employee communication mobile app. They skipped over the intranet entirely! Today, the app has transformed how they communicate as an organization. Now is a great opportunity to think about the types of “leaping” advancements you’d like to make in your own communication infrastructure.
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