A workplace revolution is unfolding in real time, and it will forever upend how people interact, execute, excel. The days of top-down, secretive management teams ordering around compliant employees hunkered down in traditional offices are over.
This is the dawn of remote idealistic employees demanding transparency and meaning at work. Culture will be as important as strategy or execution.
• Communications will be the central front in this revolution. Those who do it crisply, authentically, forthrightly will win. Those clinging to the closed, cluttered ways of the past will perish.
We talk with CEOs and leaders at the smallest of start-ups to Fortune 500 companies. They all feel the same as you probably do—buried in piles of unread emails, unpacked and unseen Slack messages, meandering memos or company notices too long and boring to bother.
• This is paralyzing and confusing, making it much harder for lots of organizations to see what matters most at the very moment when people are scattered around working remotely.
Gallup, which has been polling since the 1930s, found that two things keep people feeling good about their job and staying put: close relationships with colleagues and engagement.
• Among those feeling disengaged in their job,
74 percent are actively looking or watching for jobs. They’re willing to bolt for any increase in pay—and sometimes even a pay cut in exchange for a change of scenery, if they get the chance.
It won’t get any easier. Jon Clifton, CEO at Gallup, said in the fall of 2021 that only 30 percent of all workers want to return full-time to the office. For those who don’t want to go back, most say they would rather move or make less money if forced to return.
This presents a massive opportunity for those who learn to communicate in engaging and illuminating ways. The global communications firm Edelman, based on its “Trust Barometer” polling, concluded in a 2021 report called The Belief-Driven Employee that personal empowerment and social impact are approaching promotions and raises as must-haves for employees.
Excerpted with permission from Smart Brevity, Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen and Roy Schwartz, Nicholas Brealey Publishing/Hachette India
