We know that droves of workers across the world are leaving their jobs or thinking about doing so in the near future. As many as 19 million people in the United States alone have changed roles since April 2021. What’s less clear is exactly what’s causing this change in behavior.
Broadly speaking, we know the pandemic caused a lot of people to reevaluate what they want from their jobs. We know that people are tired, and they’re missing some of the easy social and human connections that came with an office-based work culture. We also know anecdotally that people are increasingly craving a greater sense of purpose and shared identity from their work. But these reasons are somewhat amorphous and hard for companies to attack in a structured way.
Indeed, the market’s reaction to this increased risk of people attrition has been a rush to increase salaries for top performers or the introduction of other short-term financial incentives. While these changes are undoubtedly appreciated by employees, they don’t appear to get to the root cause of the problems outlined above.
A recent survey from Cascade and Momentive highlighted that 62% of dissatisfied employees look at strategy at most twice a year. This demonstrates how thousands of the world’s top employers have not yet grasped the power of strategy for creating that sense of purpose and shared alignment employees are asking for.
Part of the problem is that when many organizations think of “strategy,” they imagine elaborate PowerPoints® or convoluted “strategy workshops.” These things absorb a lot of time and energy but usually involve just a handful of people and show up dead on arrival, as they don’t cater to the views of the majority of the workforce and their day-to-day realities. The truth of the matter is that the creation of a typical “strategy” in an organization with thousands of people isn’t going to drive meaningful changes in levels of employee engagement. That’s because no matter how ambitious or motivational the strategy is, any employee more than a level or two from the CEO is going to struggle to internalize the strategy and reconcile it with the day-to-day reality of his or her work.
A Different Approach to ‘Strategy’
A different approach is to think about strategy not as an object but rather as a way of working. Most people broadly agree that, socially speaking, humans are capable of maintaining meaningful social relationships with no more than around 150 people at a time. The same is true for business relationships. It’s extremely difficult to align a group of more than 150 people on a single strategic plan. The relationships become tenuous extremely quickly because an individual’s ability to remain connected to others and aligned on a single set of goals simply breaks down at scales beyond that.
This is not to say that having a centralized set of strategic themes or focuses is wrong—it’s in fact critical to that sense of shared purpose. However, to bring true meaning and internalization to those themes, we need to empower individual organizational units (in groups of ideally fewer than 150 people each) to envision, create, and then execute on their own strategic plans. The centralized focuses should absolutely be woven therein but, thematically, not through rigid concepts of direct alignment, such as those touted by frameworks like objectives and key results (OKRs) or traditional performance management tools.
This may feel like a risk for organizations that are used to being prescriptive about what employees should work on or articulating precisely how every employee goal should directly align with the goals of their immediate manager. But it’s exactly this type of mentality that has created the underlying cause of the Great Resignation in the first place. With so many employees looking for new roles, it’s the organizations that can flip this on its head and make it one of their signature points of attraction.
From an organizational structure perspective, the idea of “T Shaped Teams” is rapidly emerging as a way to help give employees a greater sense of connection and purpose. The concept refers to creating teams that are highly specialized in one key area (the “I” shape of the “T”) but also having them input into a broader set of responsibilities with corresponding diverse skills (the top part of the “T” shape). The idea is that teams that are more cross-functional will be more engaged in the wider picture of their work, less likely to burn out, and quicker to adapt to the changing needs of the work environment.
This makes perfect sense, and if properly executed, it should go a long way toward reducing people’s sense of monotony and tedium in their roles. But it also comes with challenges around alignment. It’s great to have people managing a variety of things, but organizations will need to ensure they have systems and processes in place to provide visibility of this work at scale to avoid duplication. They will also need to give employees an easy way to prioritize their work and ensure that breadth of focus doesn’t turn into a lack of focus.
The Bottom Line
The good news is that the concepts of centralized thematic alignment + localized strategic ownership and T-shaped teams are perfectly suited to one another. There are a number of technology platforms that aim to address this type of transformation. While it may be too late to try to stop the Great Resignation, it’s certainly not too late to turn it into a Great Awakening, not just for individual employees but also for organizations that are motivated enough to look beyond the surface causation factors and implement organizational change that genuinely differentiates them from their competitors.
Tom Wright is the CEO & Founder of Cascade.