.
Remarkably successful leadership requires knowledge, understanding and insight across a landscape that is both wide and deep. Management practices, technology and physical workspaces have all become increasingly interconnected, enabling leaders to build a high performing work environment unlike anything we’ve seen before. While the dynamics have become more complex, the potential to positively impact the performance of individuals, organizations and communities may offer even greater rewards than previously expected.
To help uncover the potential Sodexo invited thought leaders from a wide range of backgrounds to share their insights regarding the top issues facing executive leaders today. After identifying and developing and publishing nine trends in the 2016 Workplace Trends Report, researchers then went one step further and looked for the threads across the trends. From our synthesis, we can point to these themes that signal opportunities for leaders:
Leading beyond the ‘four walls’ of the organization. Throughout this year’s report, we see the importance of leaders defining programs that extend externally to drive results. The role of community partnerships as well as extending health and wellness programs to employees’ family and friends is illustrated in our Population Health Management trend. Urban Transformation highlights the significant role that Corporate Real Estate is playing to drive the transformation of communities, which in turn impacts organizations and our ways of working. In sum, we see how organizational leaders are delivering positive impact for their organizations that goes well beyond their workplaces.
Addressing employee needs holistically, with a blending of work and life, and avoiding a ‘one size fits all’ approach. From how leaders are recognizing and rewarding employees, to more effective health and wellness program design, we see the importance of a more personalized, multi-factor approach. A holistic approach to reward and recognition that effectively recognizes the varied individual employee motivators is what works in today’s multi-generation workplace. In Humanizing the Workplace we see the opportunity to leverage a range of design principles to help keep the humanness in our work. Throughout our report, we see a blending of work, life, and play as the new standard to help drive employee engagement.
Leveraging technology to enable AND connect all dimensions of work. As a result of the digital business era, technology has become the glue that brings many facets of the workplace together. Big Data in the Workplace illustrates how technology is the underpinning, supporting the ability to leverage Big Data to drive productivity. In exploring the Lab of the Future, we see scientists’ way of working changing to integrate the use of technological tools to deliver value. Effective energy management and energy awareness programs are delivered through technology. It is true that technology is now not only touching every facet of work in our organizations, it is also helping leaders to understand the interconnections and build upon them.
These three themes summarize how today’s leaders are driving efficiencies in this complex environment, and delivering positive impact on their health, the environment and the community. Abstracts of each of the nine trends are listed below.
Population Health Management: A New Business Model for a Healthier Workforce
Population Health Management, or PHM, is a broad effort whereby individual-, organizational- and cultural-level interventions are used to improve the disease burden of entire groups or populations. By keeping people well at the onset, PHM strategies can be used to decrease overall healthcare usage and avoid future overuse of the healthcare system. PHM takes a systematic approach by stratifying populations across health-risk profiles and applying different behavioral strategies to mitigate further risk.
While PHM is typically thought of in the context of hospitals, employers in the business and industry sectors are also able to play a critical role and are increasingly applying PHM principles in the workplace. The meaning of workplace PHM is still evolving, and traditional wellness programs and their components will remain an important element of population health. However, in order to bend the curve on health costs, programs that go beyond the typical employee wellness models toward a more integrated and comprehensive approach are required.
Humanizing the Workplace: Using Design Principles to Inspire Workplace Thinking
No one doubts that business, life and the world at-large have become ever more Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous. With this in mind, leadership, management and newly empowered workers are anticipating challenges, understanding the consequences of actions, appreciating the interdependence of multiple variables, preparing for alternative realities, and owning their own transformation and even disruption.
In these times of transition and change, it is increasingly difficult to make the right decisions in creating the right work environments. When the journey is about humanizing the workplace in meaningful and compelling ways, heading in the right direction has its own special VUCA characteristics. Design principles, acting as a set of guardrails, can help shape the promise and trajectory of approaching the design and maintenance of workspaces, by inspiring new thinking, fine-tuning directions and guiding decision-making processes. This piece highlights seven design principles that can guide managers and leaders who are charged with humanizing the workplace for humans that we call workers.
Reaching Every Employee in an Organization: Engagement through Recognition
The vast majority of today’s employees are disengaged, and study after study indicates that engagement is one of the key drivers of business success. Corporate managers understand this imperative. Despite laser-like efforts, however, employee engagement scores in the United States remain lackluster. The stakes are increasing as the economy strengthens, the war for talent heats up, and recruiting, engaging and retaining the best and brightest employees becomes even more crucial.
Many organizations are embracing a corporate-wide approach to employee engagement today. Armed with recognition training, resources and best practices, diverse and inclusive teams from across the enterprise are increasingly speaking authentically and realistically about the challenges employees face and the most effective programs to engage them. There are generally two key areas that these organizations focus on in order to boost engagement and business performance: improving quality of life for employees and reaching every employee in an organization.
Smart Energy Management: A Win for the Environment, People, and Business
There is growing recognition that human activities are major contributors to climate change. The new normal is likely to require consumers to become more active participants in the creation and use of energy. The trend of consumers playing a key role in energy consumption and potential reduction carries over to the workplace. The value placed on reducing energy in the workplace will grow if business consumers are educated that a unit of energy saved at the meter represents more than that one unit.
The benefits of smart energy management go beyond the environmental impact. Smart energy management can enhance the quality of life of employees by creating a more comfortable work environment. Consumers are willing to pay more for products and services provided by companies that are committed to positive environmental impact. By implementing an action plan and working toward increasing energy awareness among employees, businesses can reap a multitude of benefits.
Big Data in the Workplace: Can It Enhance Employee Productivity and Quality of Life?
Organizations today have an unprecedented ability to capture data about both their facilities and their workforce’s activities. However, while FM professionals hear a great deal about smart buildings and how Big Data supports facilities management, there seems to be far less attention being paid to smart behaviors and almost nothing to smart management. IFMA and Sodexo collaborated to host a Future of Work Roundtable conversation on the challenges and opportunities surrounding Big Data at IFMA’s Facility Fusion 2015 conference.
A number of questions were raised during the discussion. How can FM leverage the data already being captured about workplaces and the workforce in order to raise the bar on employee productivity, engagement and quality of life? What additional data can take FM to the next level of relevance and enhanced organizational performance? How can FM leaders ensure that the data they capture is used appropriately and responsibly? This piece is a summary of the roundtable conversation, and focuses on exploring some of these issues.
Stories of Urban Transformation: The Rise of 18-Hour Work/Live Communities
Cities all over the world are hotbeds of ideas, blending new and old concepts to create exciting urban experiences for residents, workers, enterprises and visitors. Experts in a wide variety of fields are collaborating to transform the urban environment in today’s digital business era. In the workplace, this has led to the closer merging of work/life/play in these growing cities, where previously these activities had been clearly separated.
This piece focuses on a few of the most interesting stories that demonstrate early signs of these urban transformations, which will spread into more and more cities around the globe in 2016 and beyond. Each story is about how the various city players are using innovation and technology to transform the work they are doing and shape the world’s future cities.
The three themes of these urban transformation stories are:
- New Work/Live Places
- Corporate Real Estate and the Community: A New Partnership
- Horizontal and Vertical Villages
The views presented in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent the views of any other organization.
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Understanding and Leveraging the Trends that will Change How Business is Conducted
People Diversity Success Celebration Happiness Community Crowd Concept
June 10, 2016
Remarkably successful leadership requires knowledge, understanding and insight across a landscape that is both wide and deep. Management practices, technology and physical workspaces have all become increasingly interconnected, enabling leaders to build a high performing work environment unlike anything we’ve seen before. While the dynamics have become more complex, the potential to positively impact the performance of individuals, organizations and communities may offer even greater rewards than previously expected.
To help uncover the potential Sodexo invited thought leaders from a wide range of backgrounds to share their insights regarding the top issues facing executive leaders today. After identifying and developing and publishing nine trends in the 2016 Workplace Trends Report, researchers then went one step further and looked for the threads across the trends. From our synthesis, we can point to these themes that signal opportunities for leaders:
Leading beyond the ‘four walls’ of the organization. Throughout this year’s report, we see the importance of leaders defining programs that extend externally to drive results. The role of community partnerships as well as extending health and wellness programs to employees’ family and friends is illustrated in our Population Health Management trend. Urban Transformation highlights the significant role that Corporate Real Estate is playing to drive the transformation of communities, which in turn impacts organizations and our ways of working. In sum, we see how organizational leaders are delivering positive impact for their organizations that goes well beyond their workplaces.
Addressing employee needs holistically, with a blending of work and life, and avoiding a ‘one size fits all’ approach. From how leaders are recognizing and rewarding employees, to more effective health and wellness program design, we see the importance of a more personalized, multi-factor approach. A holistic approach to reward and recognition that effectively recognizes the varied individual employee motivators is what works in today’s multi-generation workplace. In Humanizing the Workplace we see the opportunity to leverage a range of design principles to help keep the humanness in our work. Throughout our report, we see a blending of work, life, and play as the new standard to help drive employee engagement.
Leveraging technology to enable AND connect all dimensions of work. As a result of the digital business era, technology has become the glue that brings many facets of the workplace together. Big Data in the Workplace illustrates how technology is the underpinning, supporting the ability to leverage Big Data to drive productivity. In exploring the Lab of the Future, we see scientists’ way of working changing to integrate the use of technological tools to deliver value. Effective energy management and energy awareness programs are delivered through technology. It is true that technology is now not only touching every facet of work in our organizations, it is also helping leaders to understand the interconnections and build upon them.
These three themes summarize how today’s leaders are driving efficiencies in this complex environment, and delivering positive impact on their health, the environment and the community. Abstracts of each of the nine trends are listed below.
Population Health Management: A New Business Model for a Healthier Workforce
Population Health Management, or PHM, is a broad effort whereby individual-, organizational- and cultural-level interventions are used to improve the disease burden of entire groups or populations. By keeping people well at the onset, PHM strategies can be used to decrease overall healthcare usage and avoid future overuse of the healthcare system. PHM takes a systematic approach by stratifying populations across health-risk profiles and applying different behavioral strategies to mitigate further risk.
While PHM is typically thought of in the context of hospitals, employers in the business and industry sectors are also able to play a critical role and are increasingly applying PHM principles in the workplace. The meaning of workplace PHM is still evolving, and traditional wellness programs and their components will remain an important element of population health. However, in order to bend the curve on health costs, programs that go beyond the typical employee wellness models toward a more integrated and comprehensive approach are required.
Humanizing the Workplace: Using Design Principles to Inspire Workplace Thinking
No one doubts that business, life and the world at-large have become ever more Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous. With this in mind, leadership, management and newly empowered workers are anticipating challenges, understanding the consequences of actions, appreciating the interdependence of multiple variables, preparing for alternative realities, and owning their own transformation and even disruption.
In these times of transition and change, it is increasingly difficult to make the right decisions in creating the right work environments. When the journey is about humanizing the workplace in meaningful and compelling ways, heading in the right direction has its own special VUCA characteristics. Design principles, acting as a set of guardrails, can help shape the promise and trajectory of approaching the design and maintenance of workspaces, by inspiring new thinking, fine-tuning directions and guiding decision-making processes. This piece highlights seven design principles that can guide managers and leaders who are charged with humanizing the workplace for humans that we call workers.
Reaching Every Employee in an Organization: Engagement through Recognition
The vast majority of today’s employees are disengaged, and study after study indicates that engagement is one of the key drivers of business success. Corporate managers understand this imperative. Despite laser-like efforts, however, employee engagement scores in the United States remain lackluster. The stakes are increasing as the economy strengthens, the war for talent heats up, and recruiting, engaging and retaining the best and brightest employees becomes even more crucial.
Many organizations are embracing a corporate-wide approach to employee engagement today. Armed with recognition training, resources and best practices, diverse and inclusive teams from across the enterprise are increasingly speaking authentically and realistically about the challenges employees face and the most effective programs to engage them. There are generally two key areas that these organizations focus on in order to boost engagement and business performance: improving quality of life for employees and reaching every employee in an organization.
Smart Energy Management: A Win for the Environment, People, and Business
There is growing recognition that human activities are major contributors to climate change. The new normal is likely to require consumers to become more active participants in the creation and use of energy. The trend of consumers playing a key role in energy consumption and potential reduction carries over to the workplace. The value placed on reducing energy in the workplace will grow if business consumers are educated that a unit of energy saved at the meter represents more than that one unit.
The benefits of smart energy management go beyond the environmental impact. Smart energy management can enhance the quality of life of employees by creating a more comfortable work environment. Consumers are willing to pay more for products and services provided by companies that are committed to positive environmental impact. By implementing an action plan and working toward increasing energy awareness among employees, businesses can reap a multitude of benefits.
Big Data in the Workplace: Can It Enhance Employee Productivity and Quality of Life?
Organizations today have an unprecedented ability to capture data about both their facilities and their workforce’s activities. However, while FM professionals hear a great deal about smart buildings and how Big Data supports facilities management, there seems to be far less attention being paid to smart behaviors and almost nothing to smart management. IFMA and Sodexo collaborated to host a Future of Work Roundtable conversation on the challenges and opportunities surrounding Big Data at IFMA’s Facility Fusion 2015 conference.
A number of questions were raised during the discussion. How can FM leverage the data already being captured about workplaces and the workforce in order to raise the bar on employee productivity, engagement and quality of life? What additional data can take FM to the next level of relevance and enhanced organizational performance? How can FM leaders ensure that the data they capture is used appropriately and responsibly? This piece is a summary of the roundtable conversation, and focuses on exploring some of these issues.
Stories of Urban Transformation: The Rise of 18-Hour Work/Live Communities
Cities all over the world are hotbeds of ideas, blending new and old concepts to create exciting urban experiences for residents, workers, enterprises and visitors. Experts in a wide variety of fields are collaborating to transform the urban environment in today’s digital business era. In the workplace, this has led to the closer merging of work/life/play in these growing cities, where previously these activities had been clearly separated.
This piece focuses on a few of the most interesting stories that demonstrate early signs of these urban transformations, which will spread into more and more cities around the globe in 2016 and beyond. Each story is about how the various city players are using innovation and technology to transform the work they are doing and shape the world’s future cities.
The three themes of these urban transformation stories are:
- New Work/Live Places
- Corporate Real Estate and the Community: A New Partnership
- Horizontal and Vertical Villages
The views presented in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent the views of any other organization.
