Why 2020 Is the Year of New Work, And 5 Ways HR Can Prepare For It
The Christmas season offers a chance to review the past year and to plan for the year ahead. But what changes can be made to meet the challenges ahead? Could the ‘New Work’ model be the answer?
The New Work model focuses on employee well-being and in helping them to develop a more holistic quality of life. Of course, employee well-being is nothing new, but organisations still prioritize financial success, insist on fixed working hours and offer only incremental career growth. This means stress levels still soar in many professions and pressure on employees to perform remains high.
As a result, many organisations are continuing on an unhealthy path, from an employee well-being point of view. Technology is making it possible to embrace a new model where employees are able to pursue skills and interests they are invested in.
And with this new wave promising to boost performances, innovation and engagement, the bottom line so important to every business can be improved dramatically.
What Is The New Work Model?
The whole concept behind New Work is revolutionary, based on deconstructing the main pillars of employment. So out go the traditional 9-5 workday, strict managerial hierarchies and slow-moving step-by-step career advancement; income cross-skilling, creative expression and employee self-fulfillment.
In fact, there are 5 key aspects of the New Work model:
- The autonomy of decision-making
- Freedom to move across roles, skills, and industries
- Participation in a larger community of people
- The opportunity for creative expression
- A sense of self-fulfillment derived directly from work
Any kind of change to a work practice requires HR taking some careful steps, so to fully adopt the New Work culture in 2020, here are some tips you can follow.
- Expand Employee Autonomy
- Facilitate Cross-Skilling
- building employee loyalty by helping them develop their careers
- strengthening another section in-house with already familiar talent
- reducing employee turnover
- Promote Office Community Through Open Layout
- Prioritize Creativity
- Assign Your Workplace A Fulfillment Scores
You’re not giving employees the keys to the safe, just allowing employees to take control of their professional lives. One good way to do so is promote employee self-service (ESS) tools where micro-decisions can be taken without having to consult managers. It relates to a limited number of areas, like leave management, personal data and company information.
It’s not unusual for an employee to find they want a change, but that doesn’t have to mean leaving on a career break. In-house training and career development programs are also increasingly popular, and the advantages are pretty obvious:
Consider purchasing online courses, like The Open University, in your employees’ areas of interest to.
A key element behind the success of the New Work model is employees who enjoy going to work. A big part of achieving this is creating a working environment that promotes a ‘sense of community’, namely where they feel comfortable interacting, sharing ideas and building interpersonal relationships that exist outside the workplace. So, create open co-working spaces to encourage interaction, which improves employee happiness, widens social networks, and the chance to expand skillsets.
This might seem to threaten the traditional hard-skill positions, but the New Work model insists that creativity should be part of what employees do every day. In one survey carried out by Abode, Human Creativity in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, professionals said that key creativity motivators included interaction during downtime (28%), online social forums for (30%) and working in an immediate culture of innovation (35%).
Offer employees creative learning courses, introduce social learning programs and offer lessons on soft skills, design thinking, and other problem-solving.
Fulfillment at work depends on various professional and personal factors so assessments of any success made have to be continuous. Reach out for feedback through regular surveys (ie: via SurveyMonkey) to assess how fulfilled employees are, then you can follow up on discovered concerns through one-to-one conversations.
AnnualLeave.com is a leading employee leave management tool on the market, lifting the HR headache by cutting request processing times, monitoring leave trends, and maintaining company compliance all with one user-friendly, affordable self-service solution.
