As today’s teenagers begin to join the workforce, employers are going to have to change their approach to people management.
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Back in the pandemic, Yeti, the Texas-based maker of coolers and related outdoor equipment, was struggling to persuade its mostly young employees to return to the office once restrictions had been lifted. Hollie Castro, then the company’s chief people officer, explained that since the headquarters was “a beautiful workplace,” she and other executives could not understand why this was. But then she started doing Zoom calls with groups of employees and realised that a lot of them had acquired dogs while working from home and could not figure out how to care for them if they returned to the office. So the company put dog care in place. “As soon as we did that we had people back in the office,” she said in a recent interview. “Employers can’t do everything, but they have to be sensitive.”
Thousands of miles away, in the English county of Essex, the founder of a facilities management company discovered that one of his employees was feeling anxious because she had had to ask her manager on a few occasions if she could leave early in order to pick her children up from school because their father — who normally fulfilled this role — had been unable to make it. Jeff Dewing’s response was to call in his managers and tell them that henceforth no employee would be required to attend meetings before a certain time in the morning and after a certain time in the afternoon. When he asked the employee a while later if the policy had helped, she responded that she was no longer arguing with her husband. For Dewing this was a vindication of his belief that trusting employees makes them much more effective. “When you give people autonomy you get rid of a lot of their stress,” he explained in a telephone conversation.
The two situations look rather different. For instance, unlike Yeti, Dewing’s company, Cloudfm, has closed all its offices bar one in favor of remote working for most of its approximately 200 employees. But in paying attention to what different workers require in order to be able to do their best work, the two organizations may be more similar that they realise. As Dewing says of the much-discussed challenge of enabling work/life balance, “Life is always on. Why is it any different at work?”
Castro, an experienced business executive who now acts as a corporate adviser, is convinced that the arrival of Generation Alpha — those born between 2010 and 2025 — is going to force many more employers to change how they manage and view work. Even more so than their predecessors in Generation Z, they will be digitally-savvy and unwilling to accept the norms associated with older workers, who may well feel that their younger colleagues are not wrong. “People of all sorts are seeing they can work differently,” she said.
In encouraging boards to focus on the changing needs and priorities of a workforce that can now include up to six generations, she points to the “disconnect” between how long younger employees typically stay with a company — two to three years for Millennials and one to two years for Generation Z — and the systems that companies generally have that assume much longer tenures. In these circumstances, “culture becomes a strategic advantage.”
Dewing also acknowledges the importance of culture, saying “If you are working in a hybrid or remote environment you’ve got to create an environment where people can have the best experience when they do meet.”
Relishing his persona as a maverick — he has co-written a book called Doing the Opposite — he sees himself as more of a coach than a manager. He says that meeting the former England rugby union coach, Sir Clive Woodward, and hearing his ideas about accountability has played a key part in developing his approach. “My job is to ask great questions, not have good answers,” he said. As such, his roles are now to act as “chief energy officer” and “chief inspiring officer.”
These fit with his conviction that the vast majority of workers are much better than they are given credit for and so do not need to be managed in the traditional way. In addition to autonomy and accountability, the core principles are mastery — the idea that everybody wants to improve at what they do — and purpose — the concept that there is “something bigger than you.” If you can nurture these, “there’s nothing that people can’t do.”
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