By Christine McLeod

I turned 40 last year and a wise friend in her 60s shared this with me on the big day.

“When I was in my twenties, I spent a lot of time thinking about what others thought about me. In my 40s I realized I didn’t really care what they thought about me. In my 60s I realized they weren’t even thinking about me in the first place”.

If those observations are accurate, then I should now be entering a phase of my life where I am confidently able to act on the belief at the very core of my being—there is a good way and a wasteful way to manage the people side of business. It’s time to reinvent the wasteful.

I no longer feel the need to convince others of this belief because what I have found over the past 20 years is leaders either get it, or they don’t. What inspires me most these days are the leaders having business conversations about how to reinvent every aspect of consumer and employee journeys to thrive and WIN.

Connecting with the Future Now
I have three beliefs about the future of work and how we can reinvent the workplace:

1. Those who understand the connected employee will thrive.
2. Those who understand the connected consumer will thrive.
3. Those who have a clear business strategy integrating the two will win.

Reinventing the workplace is about holding ourselves to a standard of business excellence higher than our customers and employees alike would ever expect.

I have experienced firsthand the thrill of repeatable high performance results when employee and consumer experience were inextricably linked to business strategy.  I have also experienced firsthand the collateral damage of leaders entirely wasting the valuable people potential side of their business.

What is different now and forever more is that we no longer have a choice not to be great. On the web, exceptional travels fast, terrible travels even faster and average, well, that doesn’t travel at all.

Our reputation is what our employees and customers say it is and if we don’t integrate that truth into every aspect of people and business strategy we are doomed to irrelevance.

Addressing the Disconnect
Reinventing the workplace can prove lucrative for the bottom line, the ability to attract and retain all-stars and brand reputation alike. However, we are still thinking too small if we believe those are the main fruits born of this change effort.

The biggest opportunity is both local and global:  to create deeper connection in all aspects of our lives to that we don’t just survive, we thrive: economically, politically, spiritually and environmentally.

As connected as we all are digitally, we are becoming more and more disconnected in relationships that matter, including our relationship with our workplaces. We may have iPads, Intranets, Social feeds, webcams at our disposal, yet we still are not moving the dial on reversing the dismal rate of workplace engagement. We still are not  doing our best work at work.

Very few of us feel fulfilled, grounded, excited about the contributions we are making and the impact we are having during the workweek.  The levels of disengagement amongst Canadian workers is just shy of 70 percent. This tells me I am not alone in my belief that we are not even coming close to the potential of true high performance in our current Canadian workplaces.

Welcome to Generation Connect
Consider the following statistics that reflect the difference 2005 and 2012 on the  usage of social networking sites: ages 18-29 went from nine per cent to 83 per cent; 30 to 49 year olds from seven per cent to 77 per cent for 30 to 49 year olds and 50-64 year olds from six per cent to 32 per cent.

The connected employee is not necessarily Gen X or Y or any letter of the alphabet; these labels are divisive.  For the first time in history united as one generation—Generation “Connect”. We have at our fingertips the knowledge and networks that make this world go around.  The proliferation of digital and social platforms have ignited a global conversation and shift in consciousness.

Generation “Connect” is yearning for purpose-driven, human, connected experiences. This shift permeates all relationships including the ones we have with our workplaces.

Engagement and connection can deepen from there introducing social, digital and mobile to facilitate new ways of communicating, collaborating and innovating.

Meaning, Not More, is the Answer
However, on the flip side, we are also experiencing unprecedented noise. People are fried, stressed and exhausted with the constant bombardment of  information being thrown their way.

Employees don’t get excited about accessing MORE relationships and MORE information; they are yearning to feel part of something bigger than the work itself. The noise lessens when tribes, teams and workplace communities align and become crystal clear on who they are, what their purpose is and who they serve.

Following Your Passion: More Than Trending
To illustrate how our workplace aspirations have changed, I dove into Google’s Ngram viewer which measures the iterations of a word or group of words in a database of over 500 million books scanned in from libraries all over the world. I typed the words follow your passion and here is the visual.

Look at what the graph does from 1990 onwards. The words follow your passion have shifted our collective consciousness and forced us as students, professionals, business executives to re-think what we want “work” to mean to us.

Put Passion to Profit
As business leaders we should be asking our potential and future employees powerful questions related to this:

• What do you care deeply about?
• What are you passionate about changing?
• How can I  better serve you?
• How do you want to better serve your customer?
• What is the work that needs to be done?
• How can we put some of your passions to work?
• How can this team support you? Even if it’s outside of work?
• How can we help you make meaningful contribution?
• How can technology enable new possibilities of connection, collaboration and communication?

The Zero Moment of Truth
Using the social media tools at our disposal is one thing—factoring how others are using them can and does impact our business is the key.  Google coined a new term that captures the changed reality for businesses worldwide; the Zero Moment of Truth (ZMOT) refers to the social exploration phase that now occurs even before a prospective employee or client does business with a product or brand.

The truth of the ZMOT is that as much as 60 per cent of the connected consumers’ decision process is established before they even set foot in your business—or do not.  Moreover, a majority are tweeting about their experiences with your business, often while they are still on site, and this delight in sharing, both the good and bad, adds further information to the mix for those embarking on their own ZMOTs.

Smart Leaders See the Connected Within
At the start of the piece, I mentioned leaders who “get it”. That’s you. The HR, IT, OD, operations, communications and executive leaders who recognize the connected consumer as not only your potential advocate or critic, but as the employees inside your organization.

The smart leader is relentless in the desire of making that connection a valuable and positive one. You are the ones lying awake at night thinking about your employees as brand ambassadors, bounding out of bed in the morning with an idea to engage differently with your employees. You are clear about why you do what you do.

How do we organize ourselves BEHIND the firewall to be that company?  It starts with integrating connected consumer and employee into a business strategy—and living up to a few bold statements:

• We are trusted advisors to our savvy customers;
• We are open and transparent internally and externally;
• We are responsive to each other and our customers;
• We are attentive to changing market conditions and agile in changing course when required;
• Our greatest ambassadors are both our customers AND employees;
• We embrace feedback and course correct;
• We make it easy to do business with us and work with us; and
• Our employees and customers are on this journey with us.

These are the conversations that we should be having in our boardrooms, our lunchrooms, in association meetings and roundtables.  This is not just about the future of work, it’s about the future of business—and it’s all connected.

(PeopleTalk Spring 2014)