Reading time: 7 min.
Below you will find a brief summary of our conversation with Lesley Arens. The full episode can be listened to via Spotify, SoundCloud & Apple Podcasts.
About Lesley Arens
In this seventh podcast, we have Lesley Arens as our guest. Lesley has built a large HR Community, organizes monthly events, and publishes the HR trade magazine and the podcast #ZigZagHR.
All these activities stem from her book “#ZigZagHR, Why the Best HR Is No Longer HR,” which she co-published with Lisbeth Claus in 2018.
The inspiration for her book #ZigZag HR came from Lesley’s own zigzag career. She has a marketing background but never actually ended up in marketing, instead moving through fundamentally different fields before finally landing in HR. While a zigzag career can be a great asset to someone’s career, it has often been seen as outside the norm by many HR departments until now. Lesley wants to champion more zigzagging in our careers, which is why she wrote her book and started the ZigZag HR Community.
Growth mindset
Careers used to follow a more straightforward path. You started within a company, grew there, and stayed until retirement. Today, we have more zigzag careers, and those careers don’t necessarily have to move upward. Sometimes a career takes a sharp turn due to a personal trigger (think of the birth of a child, a partner accepting a job abroad, etc.), but usually, that sharp turn happens because the context changes.
Companies also need to zigzag. They must make operational choices to respond to the ever-changing context.
Zigzagging helps and pushes us to grow, learn, discover new environments, and to growth mindset to accept and gain new insights from different perspectives.
But not everyone naturally has that growth mindset; often fear is involved, or employees have simply unlearned how to make their own choices and know what they want.
Young people are now entering careers where continuous learning will be the norm because the world is changing at record speed. They have been used to this from the start, having grown up digitally and even attended school digitally. For earlier generations where this was not the case, continuous learning and adapting can sometimes be less obvious, and they may need a little push.
Lifelong learning
We are born with a desire to grow and learn, but often employees have unlearned over the years to think about what they want.
It is important to realize that it is a shared responsibility is both employers' and employees' responsibility to indicate what they want to learn. Employees must relearn to taking control of their own career!
That is why the role of HR must evolve. Previously, the focus was mainly on the here and now, ensuring the right people are on board, that they come to work with enough drive, and at the end of the day feel they have contributed something useful. But HR must also dare to look further ahead and invest time and energy in tomorrow:
- What will the company need tomorrow?
- What are the major trends in the world, and what impact will they have on my sector?
- What talent will we need for this, and is there perhaps a gap with the talent we currently have in-house?
- What can we offer current talent to help them cope with these changes?
Companies must therefore focus on both today and tomorrow simultaneously, across departments. But it is the people who will have to make it happen and in this, HR, lifelong learning, and a growth mindset can play a major 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 time of day work is stopped and everyone experiences a break together with tea, coffee, snacks, …
During such a break moment between colleagues, informal knowledge sharing invariably takes place: an important part of the knowledge and information in companies is shared during such informal moments.
How important these spontaneous, informal moments for employees has become very clear because these have largely disappeared due to Covid-19. Within teams, there is still an effort to schedule moments via conference calls, but informal moments happen spontaneously by definition. This now risks disappearing, especially across teams.
Companies face a major challenge here to find a balance between working from home and working in the office. The accelerated digitalization due to Covid-19 has certainly taught us that we are still people who need social contact.
A hybrid model of working from home and sometimes together in the office can help to find that balance to find.
Work-life integration
Speaking of balance, even with work-life balance, it’s about continuously seeking balance. In these Covid-19 times, when people have increasingly started working from home, with their private lives intertwined (schools were closed, children had to be kept busy, …), life can no longer be organized so rigidly.
At work-life integration It’s about moving away from the strict division between work and private life and letting both blend a bit more, provided that neither your colleagues nor your performance suffer. Like when you go to the dentist during the day and then simply work a bit longer afterward to finish your tasks.
To give employees the time to find their balance in this and to learn and maintain their boundaries, it is important that they can go through a learning process.
At JustBite as well, we stand for balance and seek equilibrium in everything we do, not just in food or work/life. We don’t believe in extremes but in ‘lagom’, Swedish for 'just as good/much as it should be'.
Behavioral economics and the future of HR
A meaningful exercise for HR can be to use marketing to create a positive employee journey for (potential) employees throughout all the touchpoints they have with the company. In the past, the focus was too often 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 policies to help employees become and stay healthy, for example through behavioral economics and nudging.
Through the to manipulate choice architecture and for example only healthy snacks to offer or by making it harder for employees to eat unhealthily. It is important to give employees their not to take away freedom of choice, but through an adapted choice architecture, you can give them a nudge in the right direction.
With small changes to the choice set HR can help people make choices in favor of their well-being, without limiting their freedom.
Employers therefore play an important role in making their employees healthier and, by extension, the whole society with small steps in the right direction that lead to behavioral change.
Conclusion
The ultimate tip to take away from the podcast is to listening to people! Don’t just do storytelling but especially storylistening: listen to what your people are engaged with, what they need, what they want, ...
By effectively listening to what employees need, you can make your employer brand so concrete and efficient that you attract the right people who fully fit your story, want to stay with your company for a long time, are healthy, and will fully commit to their job.
Enjoy listening!