From youth mentoring and job training to women's leadership initiatives, organisations are more committed than ever to unlock the potential of their people, clients, and communities.

In every organisation, the feeling of being valued at work is the key to sustaining a great work culture. There will always be waves of changes; from traditional full-time employees to the rapidly growing gig-workers or service-on-demand providers, we have witnessed the evolving needs and demands of employees.

Due to the growing nature of the talent market and the dynamics of the market, employers have been taking an aggressive approach to offer unmatched expertise in leading their market space. Broadly speaking, employees are seeking the best for themselves and employers are going all out to provide their best. Take a dive into what the best of the breed has been doing:

Socially Responsible

Employers realise that being the best means making contributions count responsibly and effectively. Individuals in this era see great value in the value that companies are adding to the communities that they work in. Over the years, many large and small organisations have embedded this feature in their mission: to power organisations with insightful solutions that drive business success.

Top management realises that providing the best support to their clients’ growth enables them to invest well and positively influence their communities. From youth mentoring and job training to women’s leadership initiatives, organisations are more committed than ever to unlock the potential of their people, clients, and communities; it has become foundational to everything they do.

Courageously Agile

Businesses have adopted agile practices because they allowed them to be nimble and responsive in real-time, in today’s dynamic market. Using agile frameworks, organisations continue to deliver customer engagement and satisfaction through small teams, working in short cycles.

Earlier, aspects like research, innovation and nimbleness were the focus of only a few teams or functions. In this setup, HR teams seldom saw the need to get creative with their practices for several years as it enabled them to sustain focus on the core of their job – managing their people.

But agile people practices are evidence-based. Hence, leaders needed the courage to directly address those affected: their people. Organisations would identify something that could work, test it, and quickly seek feedback to check if it works. If it works, they would move to the next stage confidently. If it doesn’t, they can switch to something else. It’s about making decisions on the go and using data and technology to help the decision making.

Such culture continues to help build an organisation where people can make fast decisions to design solutions that meet customer needs; theirs in this case.

Teams in Need

Organisations are adopting a scientific approach to employee engagement and performance. Leaders have been witnessing the importance of leveraging data and research to drive team management practices for the progress of the organisation and the employees.

Leaders have shifted their focus on enhancing engagement and increasing performance in teams by building a culture of delivering great work using an individual’s strengths rather than gauging their performance against annual goals.

The world has moved on from plug-n-play performance management tools. The culture of reimagining process of capturing an individual’s data and using it to get the best out of them and enhance team management is in vogue.

When there is a system that tells leaders what each employee is good at – his/her strengths, 1/3rd of the task for leaders is done. Add to that, the culture of encouraging weekly check-ins to track priorities and using them to positively influence calibration meetings, talent discussions, and assignments, and we have leaders efficiently aligning priorities to strengths of each individual and boost their sprint into the next assignment consistently.

In the history of business, we have witnessed several top companies vanishing because they couldn’t keep up with changing trends and culture. Change is the essence of being in the business. Equally important is the need to gently tell employees that change will happen gradually and, for sure, will give them the time to adapt.

For any change, organisations need to find those who are eager for improvement, involve them wherever possible and reward those who positively contribute to the changes. When leaders can do this, every organisation will have the potential to make big waves in their field of expertise.