Transforming Risks into Opportunities: Enabling Employees to Drive Change
Are external change drivers a threat or an opportunity for your company and its employees? Who is involved in making a positive difference?
This article describes how social learning programs can transform passive awareness into active contribution.
By enabling employees to discover their personal connection to the company’s goals, companies can foster higher engagement and a greater sense of belonging while cultivating additional sources of innovation and organizational resilience.
Connecting the dots: Manifesting meaning in 2024
It isn’t always clear how your different interests and jobs fit together, but as Steve Jobs said in his now-famous commencement speech, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.“
Here’s where my dots are taking me in 2024. Heading into the coming New Year, I hope your dots lead you somewhere wonderful, too.
“Activating the culture”: A path from values to everyday behaviors
Most cultural transformation programs don’t change very much.
What’s usually missing is a chance for employees to work out how the values applied to their particular job and context; to actually experience what it would feel like to be “One Company”; to provide at least some answers to “What’s in it for me?”.
Social learning programs can close these gaps, particularly when they have three specific elements.
The killer chickens that lay a lot of eggs
Breeding chickens for their individual egg-laying ability led to vicious attacks and mortality rates of 50% or more. If you want more eggs, you need chickens with other skills beside being good egg-layers. You need chickens who are able to get along with other chickens.
New Work New Culture
Frithjof Bergmann’s vision for “New Work” was bold and ambitious, a fundamental rethinking of jobs, pay, and markets. All of it, he proposes, needs to be reimagined and fashioned from scratch.
Today’s New Work initiatives may fall short of his vision, but they can fulfill his promise of enabling people to “be more alive” at work.