As the pandemic took hold of our lives, many of us sought to stretch our minds in new ways. There was tidying and breadmaking, virtual yoga classes, book clubs, and courses in anything and everything. I was no exception. In looking for something that could expand my critical thinking in a completely new context, I enrolled in a 9-day immersive humanities course through the University of Chicago.
The course covered a lot of ground – but at first glance, was far removed from the day-to-day work of a CPO. In the words of my teacher, Professor Mark Miller, an associate professor of literature at the University of Chicago: “The aim of the course is to develop analytical skills shared across the Humanities, as well as those specific to the disciplines of philosophy, film and drama studies, and literary criticism. It is a wide-ranging course held together by a common focus on questions of ethics and personal identity.”
The course had no relation to my day job, yet it still better set me up for success as a People leader navigating the constant changes the past few years have thrown at us. My big takeaway?
In this time of uncertainty—in the economy, the job market, and even with our own health—employees and organizations need to focus on building a foundation of ‘self-engagement.’ For employees, this means finding ways to fuel their own performance through self-reflection, personal engagement, and self-directed learning. And for employers, it means broadening their definition of and approach to employee learning and development beyond just mastering the skills in a job description. Here’s how we can get there.
Expanding the definition of employee engagement
Fostering employee engagement has always been incredibly important, but as the working world shifts, the next iteration will be all about helping employees self-engage. For example, in the 2010s, your People team may have focused on providing individual budgets for supplemental learning via industry conferences. But those feel more mandatory—and less exciting and valuable—to today’s workforce.
The pandemic has increasingly changed the meaning (and importance) of work-life balance. Employees don’t want to grow their careers by adding hours to their workweek in order to attend a conference or take a course focused on the tasks they are working on day in and day out. They understand that growth outside of the office (virtual or not) can have a significant impact on their professional performance.
People teams need to focus on meeting the needs of this new era of employee engagement. This begins with businesses, managers, and People teams getting to know their employees so that they can ask the question: What are the development opportunities that are really interesting to you, and how can I support you in pursuing them? From there, how can we facilitate those opportunities through company-, manager- and employee-directed learning?
Feedback plays a critical role here. Facilitating comprehensive and frequent feedback loops can help employees identify new growth opportunities and encourage self-reflection.
What can leaders, organizations, and employees do differently?
It’s absolutely critical that leaders and organizations move beyond ‘learning’ and towards development when it comes to employee engagement. This means thinking more creatively than solely providing a framework and resources for employees to master the skills required for their specific role. Just like employees are taking a more holistic view to work-life balance as a result of the pandemic, employers must focus on their team members as whole humans with interests, desires, and motivations outside of work.
“It’s precisely by detaching from the ways that problems arise and get framed in specific professional contexts that humanistic inquiry can develop the analytical skills necessary for high-level performance and creative problem-solving,'' says Professor Miller. “By exploring questions about how meaning gets produced in various media, and in different historical and cultural contexts, the humanities help us cultivate a critical relation to our current forms of understanding, while also providing opportunities for reflection about what matters most to us, how we ought to live, the forces that shape our desires, and the different ways such questions are configured for people across time and cultures.”
This holistic approach to learning and problem-solving is truly the currency of the future, both inside the workplace and in the wider world. And employers who encourage this level of learning and self-engagement will attract the best talent and empower employees to thrive within and outside of their careers in the process.
Today’s workforce expects fair compensation and a reasonable amount of flexibility—these are table stakes. What will come to set employers apart are the opportunities they provide for career pathing, growth, and internal mobility – and how they embrace the potential of outside-the-box learning and development.
Here are two simple concepts People leaders can focus on to get there:
Feedback
We need to embrace that feedback is not a one-way street. It’s an ongoing conversation and one where both employees and employers need to actively look for growth opportunities. As leaders, we must invest in tools and processes that create strong cultures of feedback that will enable development and growth, and help employees to see their employers as partners in their growth journey.
Learning
Learning is not sitting in a classroom learning about your job. We need to move toward a future where work and life integrate in new ways—where a language class is seen as helping a sales professional feel more confident in front of clients, or an evening pottery class is a valid work-sponsored way to alleviate stress and burnout to help an employee stay focused and engaged during working hours.
The Future is Mutually Beneficial
People leaders have a unique opportunity to inspire the workforce to see the benefits of employees who never stop learning—in and out of the office. Why shouldn’t we all aim to build lives that mutually benefit our whole selves, the personal and the professional? A holistic approach to self-directed employee engagement allows people to explore their passions, in turn enabling us all to be the best employees we can be—and the happiest versions of ourselves.
“I wouldn’t be a University of Chicago professor if I didn’t manage to squeeze a quote from Aristotle in here somewhere,” Professor Miller says. “Aristotle thought that one of the main things that distinguishes humans from other animals is the desire to understand. This drive to understand is why we theorize, argue with ourselves and each other over politics, inquire into the grounds of justice, and why we write, perform, and seek out stories that take us beyond ourselves. Aristotle also thought that pursuing this desire to understand was essential to deep human fulfillment and happiness. The Humanities are all about taking time out from the immediate demands of our lives to pursue that desire to understand, and to flourish along with it. And there should be space for this flourishing in the modern workplace, as well.”
