work3: The Rise of Personalization and Flexibility🤹

Hello fellow supporters of The Chase!

This week the most interesting article I’ve read has been McKinsey’s report on ‘The Great Attrition’ (or Resignation), which I summarize below and take as the stepping stone to describe Flexibility and Personalization; two key drivers of the future of work.

As always - please consider sharing the article if you’ve enjoyed it, to support my work🙏

🚅 It’s just an Acceleration

👨 Employers need to change from a ‘one-size-fits-all’ to a more multi-faceted, personalized approach - Covid has accelerated and created further fragmentation of employee’s needs and future objectives. Of course there have always been differences, but many have reconsidered their work-life relationship, creating what McKinsey calls:

• ‘Traditionalists’ (those who have stuck more to pre-existing values, ideas) - they will be harder to keep because they are easier to target and insufficient to satisfy the demand, so they will have more negotiation power.

• ‘Non-Traditionalists’ (those who have changed more/want to experiment new avenues). They need freedom, and a sense of purpose.

🛣 Employees’ main reason to quit: Lack of Career Advancement - Those who have felt more stuck in their roles, decided to quit to either:

• Re-shuffle: Making a ‘lateral move’ from an industry to another, changing up to advance or learn new skills and try out something new. Job Rotation inside the company is an option, but also temporary ‘leaves’ for re-skilling or up-skilling could be explored.

• Re-invent: Left full-time work for temporary, gig or part-time roles, or starting up their own businesses. Give them flexibility, wether through time-off or a ‘sand-box’ to do their own projects.

• Re-assess: These are people who have stepped out completely of the workforce, in order to cater to their own personal or family needs. Again, through flexibility they may decide staying in work is an option.

These two key points lead to the same place: the future of work (what I call work3) is about handling personalization of needs and objectives. 

One simple analogy, is the one we’ve already seen taking place with how digital marketing has evolved from one-size-fits-all, generic strategies, to now extremely granular and personalized advertising driven by the unprecedented access to data and development of new technologies.

Nowadays, starting from Google search results, all the way to Social Media feeds and reaching out to the physical world thanks to mobile devices, everyone is seeing their own set of results - as brands are using all possible ways to do 1-1 custom messaging.

From employee’s point of view, the rise of remote work has opened up a huge opportunity to re-shuffle, re-invent and re-assess without needing to relocate (therefore lowering barriers to entry, risk aversion and so on).

Employers, have been less quick to respond to this shift - partially because they don’t want to (general resistance to change, slow to react) but also because they don’t know how to. 

➡️ The Way Forward: Analysis, Measurement, Execution

🗺 Understand the different personas - much like in marketing, companies need to build personas to categorize their employees. This is yet another generalization, but at least it goes a level down, and will be used to go further at individual level.

🗓 Have a plan for each of the Attrition and Retention drivers for each persona - The graph below, (ideally customized to each industry/company’s reality) should be printed on the door of HR and CEO’s desks and there should be a clear plan (not the usual aspirational cultural objectives and slogans) of how to reach and measure each one.

🤝 Involve employees in the process - This is not going to be a straight road forward, and the key for companies will be to really ask and make employees part of this process. This will help a) understand better their needs b) understand better how to market and use levers to attract other talents

As you’ve seen, flexibility (changing objectives, way of working) and personalization go hand-in-hand and are the drivers of the Great Resignation and most importantly, the key to attract and retain talent in the future. 

Companies who recognize and plan for this, will be the ones emerging alive from this death-race.

Thanks for reading and would love to know your thoughts in the comments!

📚Other Newsletters I’ve been Reading

Deep Culture - Short, simple 20 interesting links, book snacks and wisdom bites sent out on a weekly basis.

M365 Weekly - Super-useful weekly list of links/tutorials to make the best of the suite.

C_NCENTRATE - Emerging side of things; technologies, territories, tools, strategies and ideas.

A Byte of Coding - some pretty in-depth technical guides on software development.

Home Office Hacks - Title says it all really!

Osmosis.dev - Curious about why humans do strange, weird, and dumb things? Osmosis.dev is a weekly newsletter on human behavior.