The pressure is on our workforce to maintain an ever-faster pace of work and performance â to do what they can to prove themselves, to meet those targets, and secure that promotion or risk falling behind or even out of the running altogether. Never mind not being able to buy a house, for most of our younger employees, not making the grade amounts to the same thing as not being able to make the rent. And in this scenario, well-being becomes problematic.
Ask yourself again: do you keep a regular check on how your employees are feeling? Besides the routine engagement metrics, do you have a serious purchase on their mental or emotional health? The same Deloitte data reveals that only half of Millennial and Gen Z workers feel their mental health is good. And around 40% say that they feel stressed all or most of the time.
Happiness is plummeting among a cohort of the workforce that will accede to the majority in the next 10 or so years. Meanwhile, declining fertility rates suggest that there may not be enough young people in the coming decades to fill the jobs that organizations need to do. This means that the internal and external pressure to do more with less is only set to intensify and engulf older generations â Gen X workers who will be less able to retire and more likely to have to continue supporting adult children emotionally and financially, let alone their elderly parents.
I see our current reality as quintessentially and profoundly unsustainable. I see a calamitous emotional and financial crisis engulfing our workforces and societies unless we enact a meaningful reset in what we expect from people and how we lead and manage them. But what do I mean by this?
For starters, I believe that we need to rethink what we mean by leadership. And that means looking at the people that we lead and manage as actual human beings. It means that instead of fixating on things like engagement or work-life balance â a meaningless metric in todayâs context where the demands of work and the financial exigencies of life are completely out of kilterâwe instead strive to prioritize the differentiated needs of individuals in the workplace.
I believe we need a leadership reset that puts the individual at the center of the workforce in a way that human beings feel valued, heard, trusted and that they matter and belong, and that they are not simply spokes in an engine geared to growth at all costs.
What does that reset look like in practical terms?