Читать книгу Shapers - Jonas Altman - Страница 17

When traditional labour‐oriented jobs gave way to knowledge‐based ones, most corporations failed to upgrade their recruitment incentives. Some started to individualise rewards, giving each employee an opportunity to tailor a benefits package. But few reoriented towards the seismic shift in the market. Today, shapers have learned that giving employees control and empowering them so that meaning might ensue is the name of the game. Third‐wave workers ‘Seek meaning along with financial reward’, declared Alvin Toffler over 40 years ago. Many HR departments are just slow to read the memo–still trying to lure employees with pay and perks (and that veil of security).

Trailblazing organisations like Squarespace and Patagonia have high retention rates because they inspire and challenge their people. While less pedantic about contractual distinctions, these companies appreciate that the competition for talent has merely evolved into an endless game of Tetris. They've abandoned mass synchronisation in favour of agility that caters better to the uniqueness of individuals. The winning talent strategy is to quickly assemble and reassemble the right building blocks so as to meet a business's emergent needs. Continual renewal and reinvention is the capability du jour which we explore further in Part II.

As we saw in the origins of work, our industrial‐age beliefs were formed on a false understanding of human motivation. ‘Adam Smith's ideas about human nature were much more invention than discovery. His argument for what people were like was false. But they gave rise to a process of industrialisation that made them true,’ writes psychologist Barry Schwartz. This regretfully has shaped the nature of today's workplace and has impoverished us instead of lifting us up.

In modelling our workplace on the thesis that people are inherently lazy and spurred solely by dangling carrots, we turned a myth into a reality. We removed the soul from the organisation and replaced it with ego.

Shapers seek to perform those activities that give them the chance to learn and grow. Purposeful work is a responsibility because it betters themselves and society.

This applies across the spectrum no matter what collar you wear. Happy workers perform better. When people are more satisfied with their jobs, they are happier with their lives. There's greater commitment, increased productivity, and more profitability.

A comprehensive study of retail companies has demonstrated that the low pay, poor benefits, wacky schedules, and dignity robbing that is typical of jobs in this sector can, and more to the point should, be avoided. A good jobs strategy is one that makes a long‐term investment in people through better pay, ongoing training, and the intrinsic motivation that comes with autonomy. This yields better financial performance for investors, morale for employees, and positive experiences for customers.

The irony is how many human resource departments fail to grasp this. It's all too common to hear of ill‐fated or repeatedly delayed performance reviews, inclusion programmes parading as PR stunts, shoddy benefit packages, and the wrong people (or certainly not all the right people) leading the hiring process. The broken function of the conventional HR trade is one of the main obstacles to securing talent for well‐suited positions.