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We are experiencing significant workforce disruption. This is evident as we are witnessing unprecedented changes in all issues surrounding our ability to attract, recruit, develop and retain top talent. From the pandemic-related recognition of frontline workers to the continued conversation of work-from-home, to upward pressure on wages to high levels of team member turnover and worker shortages, the fact is, the conversation relative to our workforces has changed fundamentally. This is particularly evident in our manufacturing and supply chain industrial sectors. Is this some new phenomenon? Absolutely not, as the trends have been in motion well before the pandemic. Can we do anything about it? Can we understand what is heading our way relative to workforce challenges? Can we develop strategies to get ahead of structural and leadership changes required to the organization? Can we build an employment environment that people recognize as meaningful and one that properly values frontline workers? Yes, we can, and this will be the next organizational expedition we embark upon.

Think of it as the next mountain an organization will need to ascend.

But before we can embrace solutions, before we head off on this challenging climb, we need to understand what exactly has changed and what the implications are of these industrial and societal shifts.

Changing Demographic and Societal Shifts

Organizations are competing for talent today, and this trend will continue into the short and long-term future. This is a result of many forces that have now converged to create the perfect storm. Elements of this perfect storm are an aging population, decreased birthrates, increased levels of college education (and resulting career expectations), politization of legal immigration, reduced labor force participation rates, increased gap in skill requirements (in particular with skilled trades), shifts in attitudes towards work environments and shifts in attitudes towards work itself. These elements have now converged and have resulted in a shrinking workforce and a fundamental shift in attitudes within the workforce that remains.

What does this mean for organizations going forward? We will all be competing in our ability to attract, recruit, develop and retain top talent. The employer – employee power balance has inverted upon itself as the worker now has choices and can be selective in their decisions relative to their employment. People will no longer accept declining or simply surviving in their employment environment, but rather they want to be growing and thriving. In other words, employees have choices relative to where they want to work and who they want to work for, and it is a certainty that people are leveraging these options.

Which begs the question; what can you do to ensure you are an employer of choice, to ensure you are capable of convincing people they should work for your particular organization? The answer to this question is this: We need to build Meaningful Employment Environments (MEE) ™ for all team members. That is, we need to build employment environments where people thrive because organizational decisions, leadership behaviors and team member participation are deeply rooted and guided by dignity and meaningful work.

While this may seem like a daunting expedition, the climb can be planned and managed, as there are tollgates along the trail. These include Trust & Dignity, Fundamental Human Needs, the Work Environment, and the Work itself.

Let’s get started on the expedition up the MEE Mountain.

Basecamp: Trust & Dignity

People want to work in a Meaningful Employment Environment (MEE). As an organization, we need to build this environment, which means, we need a starting point. This starting point, the basecamp of our expedition, is Trust and Dignity.

Trust is the starting point because the absence of trust will result in the absence of participation and the absence of participation will result in a failed expedition. The good news is the path to trust starts with one human behavior. As leaders, and as team members alike, we need to treat each other with dignity.

Treating people with dignity begins when we believe that people are valuable and deserve respect for no other reason than they are human beings. Dignity is not given, and it cannot be taken away; it simply is. Regardless of our position on the organizational chart, our time is valuable. We have real lives; we want to add value and we want to grow and thrive. As leaders, we must examine our own attitudes and ensure that our behaviors reflect a sincere belief that people are trustworthy, that people naturally want to work, that people seek responsibility and accountability, that people seek meaning in their work and that all people want to learn and progress in their lives. As a leader, to treat a person with dignity is to know the person, to understand the person, to help improve the person.

Treating people with dignity will also require an acute focus on the work environment that an organization has built through a historical evolution of good and bad organizational decisions. We have learned that employment environment factors, in particular for frontline team members, form a hierarchy (like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs), in that lower order needs must be met before we can expect people to fully participate and thrive within the employment environment. These environmental factors can be categorized as Fundamental Human Needs, Work Environment Needs and Work Needs. 

The Trek: Team Member Fundamental Human Needs

After Trust and Dignity are established, we need to trek to the next level, which is a person’s fundamental human needs. The fundamental needs of people in the workplace include physical safety, financial needs, and an absence of fear (emotional safety). People want to be in an environment that is safe from physical harm and where they know their safety is the first and foremost priority of the organization. People require compensation that is fair (defendable as compared to others in the workplace), competitive (as compared to competitors) and sufficient in meeting their basic personal needs. Lastly, people expect a culture where they do not fear failure or voicing their opinion, where mistakes are part of the learning process and where their opinions and ideas can be voiced and respected. People need to know they are part of an organization that is loyal and committed to them as human beings. Once these fundamental human needs are being met, we can then focus on the next section of the MEE climb, the work environment.

The Climb: The Work Environment

There are three core factors that are critical specifically to the work environment. These are autonomy & control, fairness & equity and a loyal social community.

Autonomy & control are a result of work environments that are flexible, secure and predictable. People require flexibility in their work environment to feel in control of their lives. In addition, we yearn for a high level of predictability in our work and some assurance that our future is secure. The fact is, most people want to be in control of their lives, and the absence of this control will result in fear and anxiety, and fear and anxiety result in a lack of trust.

Team members today, particularly those on the frontline, crave mutual respect and to be treated with fairness & equity regardless of their position in the organization. It is important that our opinion matters, that our personal experiences are valued and that we are treated as the unique individual we are, where our individual life circumstances are known, understood, and improved upon.

The last important piece to our work environment is to recognize that people want to be part of a positive social community. We grow through loyal friendships with shared values, and we strive to be part of a successful community where we share similar experiences and like-mindedness in how we approach our work. Even though it is the workplace, as leaders, we must recognize that people take pride in true friendships that support them to become their best selves. In the end, team members want to be part of a successful community and a winning team.

With trust and fundamental human needs in place and improvement in the employment environment underway, we can then focus on the fourth and final section of our expedition. This is the work itself.

The Peak: The Work

Attitudes towards work itself have shifted fundamentally. People want to perform work that is purposeful and meaningful, where as an organization we are proficient in our work and where we can experience success in improving our work at the end of each day. This means, as leaders and team members, we need to be fundamentally focused on knowing the work, understanding the work and improving the work.

As an organization, we need to know and understand that people want to know why their work is important, how their role connects to the customer’s purpose, and how to perform the work proficiently in order to truly understand why the work is worth doing well. This means that as leaders, we need to ensure our teams understand why their particular role is important and how it impacts overall team success. To accomplish this, all team members need to be properly trained and have the proper tools and technology to successfully execute their individual role.

In this new environment, our work needs to be well designed, understood, properly supported at all levels and free of obstacles. Performance needs to be visible, and we must ask for input from the people doing the work into how the work can be better designed and executed, including an understanding of how adjacent processes impact the work. People want the freedom to communicate obstacles in their work and provide positively received input into improvement ideas.

Lastly, it is critical that as leaders, we sincerely believe that our team wants to be successful and learn and grow as a result of improving their work. No reasonable person wants to waste their life simply working for a wage. People want to experience victories and know their work is adding value to the customer, to the team and to the organization. People want to learn and progress in their education and development through improving their work and share those learnings with others. Our people desire to be part of a winning team, something that is greater than themselves.

MEE: The Work so Far

Over the last year, we have had the honor and humbling opportunity to work with several organizations in their pursuit of creating Meaningful Employment Environments. The work and results to date have provided significant learnings that can be leveraged across any organization and any industry.

The first lesson is taking the time to understand the “prize” in creating a Meaningful Employment Environment. Not only do dignity and meaningful work show respect for people, but there is also a very pragmatic purpose to MEE, in the reduction of employee turnover and the corresponding cost of this turnover. Estimates suggest that employee turnover costs range from five-thousand to fifteen-thousand-dollars per attrition event. This means there is a significant financial reason to create business environments where people want to stay, grow and thrive.

PART II

The second lesson learned is that getting started on building a Meaningful Employment Environment will require three plans. The Plan for Every Organization (PFEO), the Plan for Every Leader (PFEL) and the Plan for Every Team Member (PFETM).

The Plan for Every Organization is to build and grow the Meaningful Employment Environment by focusing on organizational decisions and their impact to people. The Plan for Every Leader is to develop skills and learn to lead with dignity and meaningful work as the two most fundamental leadership principles. The Plan for Every Team Member is to develop trust and to sincerely participate, engage, grow, learn and thrive in the work environment.

We can call these three plans the first destination (tollgate) on the path towards a Meaningful Employment Environment. These plans represent the ideal future state.

With these destinations set, we recognize we only have one more unknown. Where are we today and what is our current state as it compares to the three destinations (plans)?

This is exactly what we need to answer, and organizations are accomplishing this by engaging in conversation and completing organizational MEE assessments.

Through dialogue, assessments, and engagement, we can determine:

• PFETM: Where are our team members relative to the Meaningful Employment Environment hierarchy and the Decline to Thrive spectrum? How many are declining? How many are thriving? Are fundamentals in place for people to feel a sense of trust and dignity? Do people see themselves in a position to grow and thrive inside the organization? What will our team members need to do to participate, learn and grow within the environment?

• PFEL: What do our leaders need to learn? What personal competencies will need to be developed? What do our leaders need to do to lead with dignity, understand the work and help make the work more purposeful and meaningful?

• PFEO: What does our organization need to do in order to prepare and build this environment so leaders and team members can be successful? What structures and processes do we need to put in place? How will we grow people and ensure dignity is the guiding principle?

With our three MEE plans firmly in place, the remaining two steps are: to educate and teach the entire organization relative to the factors that create a Meaningful Employment Environment and then to build and support the systems and platforms that will sustain the MEE on an hourly and daily basis.

And this is the work that is happening now and will continue into the future.

The MEE Expedition: The Time is Now!

People expect to be treated with dignity and have a further expectation to perform purposeful and meaningful work, all within a meaningful work environment. This means that, as an organization, we must build Meaningful Employment Environments, and as leaders, we must focus on dignity and meaningful work. With this in place, all employees then have a shared role and responsibility, which is to fully participate and engage within this meaningful employment environment. It is a triad system of organizational decision-making based on people first, modernized leadership behaviors focused on dignity and an expectation of full-contact team member participation to make the work meaningful.

This is all to recognize that, first and foremost, people want to progress from declining to thriving in the workplace. However, in the absence of dignity as a core guiding principle, now and into the future, it is very likely that an organization will have zero success in their ability to attract, recruit, develop and retain top talent.