The 5 Pillars to People Success

An employee-centered approach in creating highly engaged people & successful organizations

 

Today’s organizations face a dynamic and challenging competitive landscape. Increased penetration of global markets, the pressure of an “always-on” audience, and a labor market that is difficult to meet demand mean that most businesses are on the lookout for the best thing that will place them at an advantage in winning. While there are many roads to take on the way to success, all of them are contingent on an organization’s people.

People bring an organization’s strategy to life; they plan, execute, innovate and communicate. Increasingly, organizations will win or lose on the strength of their employees.  The ability to attract employees and in the process, engage with them, develop, and retain them has become an important success factor for most organizations.

Whether you complete innovation, customer service, collaboration, or operational excellence, engaged and high-performing teams are likely the foundations for creating a competitive advantage.

How you Define People’s Success? People’s success is bringing your best self to work and doing your best work. With the race to succeed is at the forefront for most employees and organizations alike, performance is highly impacted by motivation. There are two types of motivations:

Extrinsic motivation – comes from external rewards such as money and recognition.

Intrinsic motivation – comes from within. It includes the personal rewards associated with a sense of achievement or purpose. For example, the joy one feels after accomplishing a challenging task or writing a book. Intrinsic motivation is the more powerful and sustainable of the two. But It’s much harder to quantify and control.

Traditional HR programs and systems have not typically factored in intrinsic motivation. Instead, they focus on performance-based, external rewards such as ratings, bonuses, and perks, ultimately at the cost of people’s happiness and optimal business results.

It’s time to simplify the approach and help people show up to do their best work every day. Practices like learning and development, employee engagement, and performance management are rarely integrated. Simultaneously, many HR programs have evolved to address better what we know about human motivations and behavior; these have been mainly distinct efforts to address individuals’ processes.

There’s a better way for organizations to align people strategy with business strategy and benefit the employee. Leaders have the opportunity to champion change and tear down the barriers that prevent people from being happier and more successful at work. It starts with people success, an approach that replaces traditional talent management programs with a holistic, agile, and people-centric approach that drives sustainable organizational success.

The Five Pillars of people Success

People success shifts the paradigm from separate programs mainly designed to serve the organization’s needs to an integrated approach. It provides organizations with a framework for building effective habits that leader to desired individual outcomes like motivation, productivity, performance, and engagement. Let’s take a more in-depth look at those five pillars:

1. Fit – your role matches your strengths and interests, and you feel a sense of belonging at work
2. Alignment – you know what success looks like, what to prioritize, and you get feedback that helps you change course if needed.
3. Enablement – you have the support, tools, and resources you need to work effectively
4. Motivation – you have the freedom to own your work, and you feel like you have a meaningful impact.
5. Growth – you are learning new skills, diversifying your experience, and progressing professionally.

According to some research and work closely done with global organizations following people success strategy when used as the foundation for regular manager-employee check-in conversations, the five pillars help ensure those discussions are focused on the engagement, performance, and growth of the employee.

• Help leaders assess whether their organization is on a path to success by succinctly evaluating the most important drivers of engagement and performance
• Guide people to find and create the right role for themselves, which helps leaders place people in the right roles.
• Ensure people are working on the right things and are consistently aligned with the team and organization.
• Revel most important, impactful, and simple opportunities to make it easier to do great work.
• Expand people’s view of career growth and give them the confidence to own their development, as a result, will deepen the connections people feel to their work and inspire them to bring their best selves to it.

While there is no single approach for people success that works for every organization, there are three key characteristics that help shape its effectiveness these are:

1. A holistic–integrated approach that includes the essential elements of employee engagement, performance, and growth. It also encourages broad data sharing with managers who can use the insights to inform conversations with their employees and teams. Integrated data also enables managers to lead more effective discussions with their employees about making changes by taking meaningful action.
2. Agile – in today’s competitive environment, the ability to adapt quickly to change, and developing habits that support organizational agility is central to people’s success. Regular feedback and touchpoints enable managers and organizations to make faster, better, and more informed decisions. It also creates a meaningful employee experience that addresses the individual’s needs and builds trust between participants by aligning expectations and avoiding surprises. Example: talking about goals regularly, and acknowledging that goals can change as fast as business conditions do. They are seeking feedback and taking action on it.
3. People-centric – employee-centered HR programs recognize that each person has unique needs and ambitions. Using the five pillars as a guide for assessing and discussing the employee experience, managers can create high-performing teams that feel supported because the manager understands the employee’s needs.

 

In Closing

In short, the people-centric design minimizes stressful situations or scenarios for employees. A growth mindset encourages productivity through learning; a people-centric approach happily welcomes a growth mindset, believing that talents aren’t fixed and can be developed through hard work, the right strategies, and input from others. A forward-looking orientation means employees no longer need to feel defined by past mistakes or miscalculations that can no longer be altered to change outcomes.

Instead, in the people success approach, employees and managers alike look at mistakes as learning opportunities, channeling their effort into adjusting behavior to be effective in the future. Organizations that embrace a growth mindset tend to have employees who feel far more empowered, committed, and productive.

Some of the information above has been adapted from Glint; a people success platform that leverages real-time people data to help global organizations.