Leveraging Untold Stories
My last blog post suggested that the role of "Purpose" is more important than ever for Research Agencies in a post-COVID world - going beyond project excellence.
This one focusses on an important but often overlooked aspect of purpose - staff loyalty, keeping staff members motivated.
And senior staff in particular - those with more than a few years experience. They can be taken for granted, which can be an expensive mistake if motivation levels drop.
Going about this is typically a HR topic - but I'd suggest that new approaches are needed given the new often hybrid working environments many of us find ourselves in.
My pitch:
i) that targeted and timely interventions are needed counter the ongoing wave of the Great Resignation. It's not enough just to remind folk of the company vision.
ii) that researchers need to apply their own storytelling skill sets in an employee context, tapping into informal networks, reading minds sensitively to anticipate potential dissatisfactions.
The Great Resignation & re-booting to Listening Mode
The COVID experience has changed the workplace radically.
On the one hand, it seems business as usual - performance goals to be met, projects to be won, clients and partners to be kept happy.
But the context has changed for many. Hybrid working is the new normal, for example - for both existing and advertised positions.
Meeting up in person can be sporadic, rare events - Zoom often the norm.
This changes behavioural patterns and loosens all sort of bonds and ties - workplace loyalty is under threat.
Everyone has also become more thoughtful about how we spend our lives. Priorities are changing - including attitudes to work. Should I stay or Should I Go? could be the song of the moment - and we've all read about the Great Resignation.
Picking up on changing employee mindsets and plans is challenging: aspirations are hugely varied. Not easy - let alone reacting to it - if you're trying to run a business, with all that entails.
But it's important - and worth focussing on.
Untold Stories - a New Approach
Maybe a new approach involving storytelling could help "align individual with company objectives" - above and beyond what HR normally does.
Many stories that employees could tell - probably do tell their loved ones - are hidden to employers. Not everybody wants to share their feelings, reveal embryonic plans, let alone share officially.
But these ruminations are often the first stage of behavioural change, making career moves.
So leadership and HR need to think about how to access this early on, to help identify ways a company might be able to make a contribution before it's too late. Which is where storytelling can help.
Surfacing submerged emotions and motivations often works well by using storytelling techniques, as most qual researchers know. Your favourite pencil, the first time you....simple prompts very often lead to revealing responses.
We need to apply the same principles to ourselves - in a less formal, less direct manner.
This begins with adopting a different approach to listening and observing, especilly to organisational chit-chat.
"Stories" are all sorts of things, often fragments, hints, suggestions. People drop hints, likely unintentionally. Facial expressions can be telling, especially when people aren't conscious of being observed. Choice of words. Body posture.
We all leave these sorts of psychological "exhaust trails" - online, offline.
Qualitative researchers in particular are experts on picking up on these kinds of signals in their client work - recognising patterns, surfacing the meaning, noting emotional strength of reaction and more.
Using these skills for internal purposes could make a lot of sense if applied to a strata of the organisation for a few weeks. Maybe researchers could even apply the techniques to themselves, keep simple diaries.
A second approach is via tapping into informal networks.
All companies are full of small tribes - people that get together outside of work and exchange stuf that is private.
Finding a positive way of accessing these groups is worth exploring - not spying, but passing on work-related messages to people who can make a positive impact. Time-lines are difficult to predict - but getting an early heads-up on potential issues is better than reading a public online commentary from someone who has moved on.
Borderline ethical? Perhaps HR needs to be tasked with finding permission-based ways of tapping untold employee stories - using an offsite workshop to co-create ways of going about it with the very people concerned might be one starting point.
Timely Interventions
The above may all sound very woolly. But this sort of employee intelligence, if picked up and acted on in a timely manner, can be gold-dust in retaining researchers whose value can, in the the heat of daily project work, be taken for granted.
Best to pick up on the smaller signs before they grow silently into something more significant.
Curious, as ever, as to others' views.