Not sure what the Talent Revolution Blueprint is? Read the primer.
Getting through COVID-19
Organizations, institutions, policymakers, leadership teams, and employees were all impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. The challenges and contexts shift, but in every case the Talent Revolution Blueprint can be used to chart a way through the ongoing workforce uncertainty and disruption.
Let’s compare how a challenge might be addressed with and without using the Talent Revolution Blueprint, and how its use can lead to valuable shifts in thinking and planning.
What’s the challenge?
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Future of Work discussions might have focused on succession planning and the demographic shift currently underway in society and the world of work. Or they might have been triggered by a concern about next-generation leadership cultivation and development. In some cases, the focus might have been on identifying how automation and shifting business models will impact the skills requirements for future staff.
Pre-COVID challenges have not disappeared. But many longer term priorities were upended in favour of more immediate COVID-related concerns.
In Challenge Factory’s discussions with leadership teams during the pandemic, we noticed a shift in both the focus and the questions being asked. Long term planning gave way to getting through the next few months. Teams continue to struggle with how to address current workforce needs without losing sight of future-focused goals. Unsurprisingly, a common short term challenge that clients expressed an intense focus on was how to maintain healthy and safe workplaces.
How is the challenge commonly tackled?
Without a Talent Revolution Blueprint, leadership teams are likely to address the challenge of workforce health and safety by activating only one lens—such as revolutionary change, given how radically COVID-19 affected us. It is also common to deploy multiple teams to address the challenge, each with their own unique perspectives, tools, and goals.
Of course, ensuring the health and safety of employees in the workplace is nothing new for employers. The primary focus of policies and practices before COVID-19, however, was to keep employees safe from occupational hazards, such as handling hazardous materials or working at heights. But in the context of COVID-19, all of a sudden employees also had to face risks introduced by other people (fellow employees, customers, delivery people, etc.), drastically changing how health and safety needs are conceived.
A singular revolutionary change approach would assign project teams to rewrite and implement new guidelines, standards, responsibilities, and actions. The result would be rapid changes to how employees operate in workplace spaces (including new work-from-home models) that are meant to accommodate the urgent needs of employees while ensuring business can continue. Communication between project teams might be limited, longer term impact assessments might be forgotten, and a sense of haste and stress might lead to a lack of confidence in the new measures.
How can the Talent Revolution Blueprint help?
The issue of health and safety in a pandemic is weighty enough on its own. We understand the inclination to focus on “just getting through” such an unsettled period.
At the end of the summer of 2020, many of our clients and partners expressed how immensely proud they were of their organizations and teams for coming through this challenge more united, cohesive, and committed to working together. As we continued to check in and collaborate, we noted that by late fall, and then well into 2021, many of the teams that had rallied so strongly were showing signs and symptoms of burnout.
They were tired. The immense and relentless nature of the effort it takes to keep people safe amidst changing public health guidance and conditions, including the vaccine rollout, was proving unsustainable from a prolonged crisis response perspective. An entire cohort of leaders—those who the workforce looks to for cultural cues and signals—shifted into a period of ‘holding on’.
A two-lens approach would integrate lifelong career development into the revolutionary change discussion. Rather than only focusing on the physical occupational hazards, it would address the cultural impact of initiatives that serve to protect employees from each other. It would ask the following types of questions:
- Who is advantaged and disadvantaged by the changes being implemented, and how might we consider immediate needs as well as longer term career implications?
- How can changes be implemented to maximize workplace health and safety while also instilling a sense of agency and control among staff?
A three-lens approach would add the Future of Work perspective. It would establish forward-looking sensors to monitor when the time is right to move from reacting and responding to capitalizing and shaping how recovery happens. This approach might ask:
- What will/did we learn about how leadership and change occurs in times of intense pressure? What do we want to build on from this experience? What behaviours and approaches might we want to leave behind?
- How did we balance shifting between urgent (acute) actions that needed to be taken and long term (chronic) monitoring that maintains lasting stability?
- What skills and traits did we value differently during this intense period of time, and what does that tell us about longer term Future of Work characteristics that we should be cultivating?
Using all three lenses does not prevent urgent decisions and rapid changes from being made. They allow for better questions to be asked on an ongoing basis, in turn promoting a different model of thinking and planning that emphasizes which actions need to be prioritized and in which order. This ensures leaders can have confidence in their decisions and actions, even when pressure is intense and disruption is overwhelming.
Groupings of three are stabilizing. They build supportive structures that can bear weight from multiple sides of an issue, contributing to stronger strategies, policies, and leaders. The three lenses allow for better collaboration, drawing in and making connections between project teams and their respective mandates so that goals aren’t being pursued in silos.
The ultimate results of the Talent Revolution Blueprint are workforce architecture solutions—tailored to an organization’s unique conditions—that place humans, their needs and values, and their futures at the centre of the world of work.