There is no WE without YOU: It’s high time companies get to know their employees!

According to a KfW study, one in five SMEs (20 percent) stopped training their employees during the crisis due to a lack of time, money, and certainty of planning.

In a Stepstone survey of 28,000 employees, 20 percent of participants said they wanted to change jobs because their employer did not prepare them for new challenges.

Notice anything?

With no perspective in sight, employees will leave. It is the management's responsibility to create this perspective. It doesn’t suffice to create a diffuse feeling of “We”, á la ‘We can do this!’, ‘We will get through this together!’ or ‘If we put our heads together, we will come up with a solution’. These well-intentioned statements carry no meaning if companies do not manage to consider each employee individually and ask the following questions: ‘What can YOU do?’ and ‘What do YOU need?’ and ‘What would YOU like to contribute?’, so that we don’t merely survive, but become future-proof? And yes, these conversations take time. Lots of time, if you are truly interested in the answers and willing to derive consequences for your actions. But the time is well spent. Listening is leadership task no. 1, now more than ever, and possibly more important than holding on to processes. Not until every employee is empowered to do their best, can something good emerge for all. A real sense of “We” that celebrates both individuality and diversity. Eliciting the “best” does not necessarily cost a lot of money, but primarily requires us to let go of dearly held thought patterns and perceived securities. 

Tapping into your own potential 

"The WE in a complex world thrives on the personal responsibility of the ME and our unique ability to consciously change,” Wolf Lotter wrote in the magazine brand eins back in 2016. In 2021, the image of the employee resistant to change, who thrives on established habits and initially rejects anything new, does not hold up anymore, especially in light of the numbers mentioned at the beginning of the article. Even colleagues who value their routines and the familiar are increasingly realizing that security is primarily based on the feeling that they are not subjected to change but can play an active role in shaping it. This requires an examination of one's own skills and competencies, but also of educational needs and wishes. It is the responsibility of the employers to make room for precisely this kind of self-reflection, but also for exchange amongst one another and for exploring what employees can learn with and from each other. Tapping into the, often unknown, potential within the organization is one of the strongest levers for transformation and change on the way into an uncertain future. However, the personal responsibility of individuals can only be effective if companies as a whole are aware of their responsibility and are prepared to blaze new trails.

No in-person seminar is also a solution

Do companies seriously still believe that the answer to an increasingly complex environment is an in-person seminar for 1,500 euros? Depending on the size of the company, multiplied by ten, 50, or 200? – The only way for organizations to tackle the complexity of their environment effectively is by increasing their own complexity. And that does not entail holding even more meetings, distributing even more information, or sending out even more mass emails. Above all, it means continuously recombining the many abilities and competencies – or: skills – in the company and thus opening up a whole new world of solutions for current and future challenges. However, this presupposes that these skills are known. In many companies, this is not the case.

Uncovering skills in companies 

Now is the time for companies to engage in conversations with their employees with openness, courage, and heart. Time to get rid of the dead weight consisting of obsolete hierarchies, rigid processes, and outdated “we-structures” in the form of silos and departmental thinking, that leads to more of the same results rather than promoting self-efficacy and equal opportunities. Now is the time for the many hidden potentials, the individual skills, the differences, and their infinite combination possibilities. And – loosely based on Wolf Lotter – for companies as an agglomeration of "free people who know that things will be good if they are good."

The numbers speak for themselves: many employees want to "be good”, meaning, they want to learn, network, and further their education; they want to be seen and to contribute. Companies should finally dare to look.