Intentional Work Experience & Making Moves in 2022

? ? ? ? ?? ?? I?don't know about you, but I'm feeling '22....?? ? ? ? ?? ??

Though decidedly?not?original, I definitely have the Taylor Swift song stuck in my head as we head into 2022. I'd like to think I'm not alone. Already, the space is abuzz with good news and good moves towards creating an?improved lifestyle?for the year ahead. People are taking new jobs, expanding their teams, and setting healthy boundaries as it relates to work. And I? Am here for it.?

At GBS, we're doing the same things. Some of it started last year, when I brought Dwane Lay on board full-time to run Client Experience and Operational Success. While yes, we're married, let me be clear: nepotism is?definitely?not at play. Dwane's a?recognized authority ?in Lean HR and Six Sigma practice, with over a decade of leading Client Success and Experience. Bringing him onboard was a good move for both our clients and our business. We've built out much-needed structure in our payroll by partnering with?Paycom , added internal structure with?Freshteams , and enhanced our partnership with?Airtable ?to best serve client project management. We're also?adding to our team : in the first half of the year we are hiring for multiple roles in our?digital marketing , strategy fulfillment, and?client sales success teams . When we're done, this will represent a 50% growth in our company by July of 2022.... and for us, that's exciting!?

When I mentioned that we were hiring, I was met with equal responses of shared excitement and incredulous feedback of "in the Great Resignation? In this market? It'll be so much more expensive!"? To that I say:?what's the alternative??

Yes, we are hiring in this market. In fact, we are in the fortunate position to have good people?asking?to join our team. And I firmly believe that - regardless of scale - you can too.... if you're willing to be intentional about defining and executing against a blueprint for quality work experience. What are we doing to avoid the "Great Resignation?" All the things we recommend to our clients... we're taking our own advice.?

Defining Work Experience

Before we ever created the first job description and wrote the first job ad (1), we mapped out what we kind of employment experience we could commit to. Just as important as finding alignment between your Employer Value Proposition and a new hire is ensuring you can provide a positive work experience for your employees?before?you hire them. We broke that down to three things at GBS:?living wage, quality of life, and meaningful contribution.?

Living Wage :?At its most basic, ensuring job quality starts with the responsibility of ensuring your employees make enough to?live.?MIT developed and published a?Living Wage Calculator ?last year to help employers understand what living wage looks like for their employees. It's a pretty wide swath and dependent on household status statistics, so there's also?World Population Review's Living Wage by State ?(2). We've committed to paying a living wage, regardless of title or status. This includes barring base against commission pay structure for sales roles.?

Quality of Life ?= Quality of Job: While undoubtedly there are factors unrelated to work which affect quality of life, Gallup's?Great Jobs Study found those who identified as having "better job quality" also reported higher life quality. So what makes job quality? In the same study, workers identified job security, opportunity for advancement, benefits, stability, and dignity as the primary factors. While how we addressed this would take up the character count of several blog posts, here is how we addressed benefits, stability and dignity:?

Benefits:?The major disadvantage of small businesses and startups is the insurance. Even using a PEO doesn't help a lot when it comes to insurance costs and coverage. After extensive investigation, rather than stick everyone in a one-size-definitely-doesn't-fit-all insurance plan, as a group we made the decision to offer a?QSEHRA? plan, a gym reimbursement stipend, unlimited vacation, and an EAP program. It's not sexy, but it does help offset healthcare costs in an affordable way.?

This is really a common issue for start-ups and small businesses. It would be easy to throw up our hands and move on, but our people deserve more than that. So as a team, we tackled how we could balance the scales. What we lack in attractive insurance plans, we decided to make up with the benefit of?life balance.?

Stability:?There has been a lot of research into the benefits of a 4-day work week. As both a leader and practitioner, crafting our work weeks to allow for a more equitable balance of time on and off work just makes sense.?We've committed to the 4-day workweek model, and are alternating Mondays and Fridays to allow for two 4-day weekends each month. While long work days can lead to stress, one of our core values is "trusting."?We?trust?our team members to manage their workloads, get things done and ask for help when needed. And when they do, we're there for them. That's our job as a leadership team.?

It's also our job to make sure everyone knows what their job is...?and isn't.?While always somewhat common in startups, "wearing multiple hats" has become more common-place across companies of all sizes. Unfortunately, this behavior leads to an erosion of security and stability within employees. While it may seem like asking employees to "pitch in wherever it's needed" would prove how valuable they are to the team, it often leaves workers feeling insecure about their own roles. So we don't do that at GBS.?While we collaborate cross-functionally, each team member has defined responsibilities and roles which we've defined in our HR software and cover in onboarding and reinforce through weekly micro-feedback. This is also particularly important with a compressed workweek, so each team member has time to do a?good?job with what they have to do.?

Dignity: This one is super important and can be covered in a bullet-point list:?

• ?Pay our employees a living wage: this was covered above.?Individual dignity is difficult if you aren't paid enough to live. It also precludes them from giving their full focus to their job, which impacts job performance and further erodes self-satisfaction and dignity.
• ?Give employees a voice and?actively listen?to their feedback:?we make decisions that affect the team as a team. We're also transparent with each other about wins and losses, as well as company happenings.?
• ?Recognizing each other for things both big?and?small. While inherent dignity is a basic expectation, messages of validated contribution and recognized competence is critical to individual?earned?dignity. Through regular group recognition of good work and life events,?remediated dignity?is achieved. We need all three to?accomplish workplace dignity .?

Meaningful Contribution :?Finally, meaningful work is the other major component to ensuring quality employment. I've said for years that every job from the janitor to the CEO has meaning to an organization and I truly believe that. Interviewing thousands of workers across all levels has shown me they believe it, too.?But meaning isn't always easy to see and requires leadership to ensure that tasks are clearly connected to the larger goal. In our job descriptions, we have identified how each responsibility connects to our mission and profitability. It's covered in the hiring process, onboarding and in micro-feedback to make sure that each team member knows their work they do has meaning and contributes to our success as a company each day.?

To really get a handle on all of this has taken time and a lot of conversation with our existing team. I know we will likely find ways within these areas to improve even in the first quarter of this year. We haven't always gotten it right and lost a team member I really would have liked to have kept because we couldn't get her career development mapped out fast enough. But I'm?feeling?the direction we're going in 2022.??

(1) those are?different things. Your job description should?never?be on your company career page, that's a blueprint for you and your employee to know what's expected of the role and how to measure success.?

(2) this is what we used.?

Note: All images were sourced from Shutterstock. As an aside, if you run a search for "workplace dignity" images, you'll see a disturbing amount of sexual harassment images.