Is Employee Improvement Real?

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If you’re here for round three of The Buzz, welcome! I’m having a blast getting to know you via your great comments and feedback. My question to you (and see below for more) is about the i-Word — improvement:

Stop Using These Words

In fact, improvement may belong on the nefarious list of words about work that we need to rethink — along with HR, power, and productivity:

HR —?How many of us advocate for putting the “human” back into HR, only to wish we could ditch the term altogether? Maybe it’s just outlived its usefulness and is a holdover of the era of rigid policies and procedures — administrative, non-strategic, and old-fashioned. Consider the titles many HR leaders hold now — Chief People Manager, People Operations, VP Employee Success, Chief of DEI. Not an HR to be seen. (And here’s a handful of titles I’d love to see: Chief Work/Life Coordinator, VP Candidate Experience, Director, Remote and Flexible.)

Power —?No question, power has some gendered, authoritative connotations, and there’s nothing like a pandemic to remind us that everyone is equally vulnerable. Power is more about control than collaboration, more about the figurehead than the team. Have we grown past it? I keep thinking of Deloitte’s prediction that self-organized teams — as opposed to leader-driven — are the new essential working unit.???

Productivity — Productivity has a dark side. The culture of Getting Things Done has done a number on mental health, says Tim Leberecht. How to boost it, inspire it, shape it, measure it, and even quantify it has become a subdiscipline that can drive workers crazy — particularly knowledge workers. Consider Microsoft’s Productivity Score of how employees use office 365 suite. I'd love to see organizations focus on mission, culture, and people instead.?

Honorable mention: Compliance — Compliance connotes inflexible HR teams mired in red tape that favor obedience to bureaucracy over strategic thinking — a better word might be “commitment,” which is a little less top-down, some suggest. But are we overreacting here? Compliance is all about safeguarding our people and our business — perhaps it’s in how we do it, and how we ensure regulations promote safety and fairness. Perhaps this one needs to stay. Thoughts on this?

Improvement-ationalism?

Now let’s talk about improvement. I kid you not: I was once in a discussion about measuring employee performance when someone turned “improvement” into a new verb: improvementing. That’s a sign we’re doing something wrong — taking growth and development and reducing it into something more meaningless, scientific-ish, and divorced from real experience. The phrase didn’t catch on.

Three Myths About Improvement

But these days I’m seeing a real appetite for reclaiming a sense of forward momentum as we head into Q4 and aim for next year. That means tons of conversations around — what else? Employee improvement. We’re still looking at what people do as a chance to run graphs. Should we?

If improvement is the act or process of making something (or someone) better, as well as a driving sentiment in business that keeps us competitive, why do we continue to miss out on truly recognizing it? Since Henry Ford, we tend to apply the concept to employees as if they’re an OS whose features can be optimized. I’ll be bold here: if we’re going to continue to use this word, we need to understand it better. We need to improve how we look at improvement and get beyond the myths:

Any effort to improve is a good thing.

Nope. The effort can’t be half-baked or it may backfire. Take DEI: Ever since McKinsey made the business case for diversity, diversity’s benefit for the org is inarguable (and please don’t argue with me on this).

Bersin’s recent look at 800+ organizations found that nearly all Fortune 500 companies offer some form of diversity training, but 80% are just going through the motions. Think they’re moving the needle? Unlikely.

DEI training that feels like lip service can increase resentment in the workforce and undermine the overall work culture: If the company really cared about DEI, it wouldn’t be boring us to tears. (Side note: Here are 12 strategies for actually improving DEI training.)

Everyone wants to improve.

Nice idea. But improvement takes bandwidth: you can’t just focus on the work, you have to focus on how you do it. And VUCA doesn’t leave much time for idealism or self-reflection (and that’s also a hint to those writing performance reviews, maybe we don’t score employees on things like “introspection” right now.)

Further, what we have improved overall is the alignment between employees and business objectives. In doing so, we may have created a bit of a monster: employees so savvy and pragmatic about their company’s big priorities that they know better. They know that obsessing over individual improvement is a side note.

You can make people improve.

Okay: No. But this is big: When the pandemic necessitated working remote and flexible working, something interesting happened — people began to self-report better performance. A multi-university study (Stanford, MIT, etc.) saw a rise in those reporting that they were more productive at home than at the office — from 5% in May 2020 to 9% in April 2022.

Yes, we can pat ourselves on the back for figuring out Zoom over that duration, but it’s way more than that. Remote working necessitates self-awareness, and that leads to self-driven growth. There’s that self-improvement metric HR works so hard to bring about — and we have autonomy to thank for it.

Be Brave, Stay the Course

Circumstances drove people to hone the soft skills traditionally associated with better performance — such as prioritizing, time management, goal-setting, using the right tools, communicating, and dealing with distractions — because they had to do their jobs. Some even developed the new skills now on the rise: courage — an essential trait for working through a pandemic; and self-regulation — a key aspect of emotional intelligence that entails knowing our particular impulses and moments of strength and weakness, yet be able to manage them to stay on track.

The world of work is full of ironies and surprises — proof we’re not machines. By taking work out of the workplace, employees got the chance to evolve their workplace skills. Notice I avoided the i-word. Evolution seems a whole lot more fitting to where we’re at, and where we’re going.

So, what counts for improvement in your workplace, and where do you see it most? I’d love to hear your take on the i-word: is it still relevant, is it still useful? Share your comments below. I look forward to discussing what’s on your mind!

One Last Thing

Need some inspiration to join the conversation? Consider this comment (in response to The Buzz # 1) on rethinking something else: recruitment.

“Companies should consider recruitment as a serious business function, not “just” an unfortunate need.” — David Wragg

I think it’s spot-on.

If you enjoyed this article, I invite you to check the TalentCulture #WorkTrends Podcast, where I talk with leading HR experts, innovators, and practitioners about key issues and opportunities we’re facing in the modern world of work.

Best,