During times of uncertainty, your people and your organisations as a whole will find the ambiguity of their future challenging. But if your people are the key to success through this crisis, we need to empower them to feel engaged, informed and connected to the organisation’s strategy.
If your people are unclear about the future of their organisation, and therefore their jobs, the ambiguity will affect their engagement, motivation and maybe even their performance.
So an important step you can take in removing the uncertainty is through your strategy sessions where it’s revealed how your strategic transformations may or may not change their working lives.
McKinsey (May 2020) has revealed that it will be ‘necessary to restore a sense of meaning and clear direction for all.’ An essential basis is the ‘purpose’ of the company and the way that this is enshrined in all activities and strategy.
Based on conversations with a wide range of clients across industries, employees are focussing on delivering operational demand – yet, at the same time, it is clear that people know that organisations will change in some form, and recognise that it may be transformational.
Our people want to know what is happening to the organisational strategy:
- Is it changing significantly?
- Are we using the same strategy with different ways of working?
- Are we reviewing our strategy, and making incremental changes?
- Are we focussing on operational targets
One of the most powerful ways to engage your people during or post lockdown is to utilise your purpose and vision to re-connect your people to your strategy using a human-centred design approach.
Facilitating strategy sessions (in any form) as an employee experience is a valuable experience that delivers a range of tangible benefits on an individual, team and organisational level.
For your people, strategy sessions will help them to reflect and re-energise and re-connect to the organisation’s purpose, vision and mission to build clarity and empowerment about their roles to reset for the future.
For teams and organisations strategy sessions will help to gain employee input to reset or reconnect your vision and purpose and build commitment to creating annual objectives to deliver the strategy. IBM (2020) research demonstrates that “A framework that outlines a path forward, lending clarity amid the uncertainty, can make the difference between organizations that thrive and those that don’t”.
Check out our online and blended strategy sessions that we’ve created to meet this emerging need: https://three6.com.au/services/strategy/
Or if you’d like to learn more about our unique approach to service design, just say hello@three6.com.au