Reading time: 7 min.
Below you'll find a brief summary of our conversation with Lesley Arens. You can listen to the full episode via Spotify, SoundCloud & Apple Podcasts.
About Lesley Arens
In this seventh podcast, we welcome Lesley Arens as our guest. Lesley has built a large HR Community, organises monthly events, and publishes the HR trade magazine and podcast #ZigZagHR.
All these activities grew out of her book " #ZigZagHR, Waarom de beste HR, geen HR meer is", which she published together with Lisbeth Claus in 2018.
The inspiration for her book #ZigZag HR came from Lesley's own zigzag career. She's a marketer by background and never actually ended up in marketing, but instead moved through fundamentally different fields before eventually landing in HR. While a zigzag career can be a huge asset to someone's path, it's too often been seen as outside the norm by many HR departments. Lesley wants to make the case for more zigzag in our careers, so she wrote her book and launched the ZigZag HR Community.
Growth mindset
In the past, a career usually followed a straighter path. You started at a company, grew there, and stayed until retirement. Today, we see more zigzag careers, and that career doesn't necessarily have to move upwards. Sometimes a career takes a sharp turn because of a personal trigger (think of the birth of a child, a partner accepting a job abroad, ...), but more often that sharp turn happens because the context changes.
Companies need to zigzag too. They need to make operational choices to respond to a constantly changing context.
Zigzagging helps and pushes us to grow, to learn, to discover new environments, and to adopt a growth mindset and gain new insights from different perspectives.
But not everyone simply has that growth mindset. Fear often plays a role, or employees have simply unlearned how to make their own choices and know what they want.Â
Young people are now starting careers where continuous learning will be the norm, because the world is changing at record speed. They're already used to this from the start — they've grown up digitally and even went to school digitally. For earlier generations, for whom this wasn't the case, this constant learning and adapting is sometimes less obvious, and they could use a helping hand.
Lifelong learning
We're born with a drive to grow and learn, but over the years, employees often unlearn how to think about what they want.
It's important to realise that it shared responsibility lies with both employers and employees to indicate what they want to learn. Employees need to learn again how to get back in the driver's seat of their own career!Â
That's also why the role of HR needs to evolve. In the past, the focus was mainly on the here and now: making sure the right people are on board, that they come to work with enough drive, and that they feel at the end of the day they've been able to contribute something useful. But HR also needs to dare to look further ahead and invest time and energy in tomorrow:Â
- What will the company need tomorrow?
- What are the big trends in the world, and what impact will they have on my sector?Â
- What talent will we need for that, and is there perhaps a gap with the talent we already have in-house?Â
- What can we offer our current talent to help them learn to deal with those changes?
Companies need to focus on today and tomorrow at the same time, across departments. But it's the people who will actually have to make it happen, and that's where HR, lifelong learning and a growth mindset can play a big role.
FIKA and informal knowledge-sharing
In her book, Lesley also talks about the 'Fika moment'. Fika is a Scandinavian principle where, at a certain point in the day, work stops and everyone shares a break together with tea, coffee, snacks...
During such a break, informal knowledge-sharing invariably takes place between colleagues: an important part of the knowledge and information within companies is shared during these kinds of informal moments.
How important these spontaneous, informal moments are for employees has become very clear now that they've largely disappeared due to Covid-19. Within teams, people still try to schedule little moments via conference calls, but an informal moment is by definition spontaneous. This now risks disappearing, especially across teams.
Here, businesses face a big challenge in finding a balance between working from home and working in the office. The accelerated digitalisation brought on by Covid-19 has certainly taught us that we're still people who need social contact.
A hybrid model of working from home while still sometimes coming together in the office can help find that balance to find.
Work-life integration
Speaking of balance, work-life balance is also about constantly seeking equilibrium. In these Covid-19 times, where people have increasingly started working from home with their personal life woven right through it (schools were closed, children needed to be kept occupied...), life no longer lets itself be organised so rigidly.Â
At work-life integration it's about stepping away from that strict division between work and personal life and letting the two overlap a bit more, on the condition that neither your colleagues nor your performance suffer as a result. Like when you pop out to the dentist during the day and then simply carry on working a bit longer afterwards to finish your work.
To give employees the time to find their balance in this and to learn to know and protect their boundaries, it's important that they can go through a learning process.
At JustBite too, we stand for balance and we look for equilibrium in everything we do, not just in food or work/life. We don't believe in extremes but in 'lagom', Swedish for 'exactly as good/much as it should be'.
Behavioural economics and the future of HR
A worthwhile exercise for HR can be to use marketing to create a positive employee journey for (potential) employees across all touchpoints they have with the company. In the past, too much focus was placed on convenience for HR and far too little on convenience for employees, resulting in great frustration for the latter.
Today, HR increasingly focuses on a positive journey and a policy to help employees become and stay healthier, for example through behavioural economics and nudging. Â
By manipulate the choice architecture and for example only healthier snacks to offer, or by making it harder for employees to eat unhealthily. It's important to give employees their not taking away freedom of choice, but through an adjusted choice architecture you can give them a nudge in the right direction.
With small changes to the choice set HR can help ensure that people make choices in favour of their well-being, without limiting their freedom.
Employers therefore play an important role in making their employees healthier and, by extension, society as a whole, with small steps in the right direction that lead to behavioural change.
Conclusion
The ultimate tip to take away from the podcast is to listening to people! Don't just focus on storytelling but especially on storylistening: listen to what's going on with your people, what they need, what they want, ...Â
By effectively listening to what employees need, you can make your employer brand so concrete and efficient that you attract the right people — people who fit your story perfectly, want to stay with your company for a long time, are healthier, and will fully commit to their job.
Enjoy listening!