Motivate your people, and treat them like elite athletes

Organizations must take a systemic view of teams. But treating people as things you can easily buy, move around, and sell has always been a bad idea. Organizations must create environments where employees can be better every day—aligned to clients and outcomes—and move away from environments where employees either win or lose based on arbitrary targets and a misguided attempt to motivate through the wrong kind of internal competition.

Seven out of 10 employees are either open to switching employers or actively seeking a change, but they still maintain the potential they see in the impact of their roles. Against this backdrop, Phil Fersht, CEO and Chief Analyst at HFS Research, sat down with Jesus Mantas, Global Managing Partner of Business Transformation Services at IBM Consulting, at our recent HFS Super Summit in New York.

Phil: After COVID, is there a new reality, a new work, or are we just heading back to where we started?

Jesus: Ask yourselves, where are we in the history of the future of work? All the talk four years ago was about jobs going, but also automation creating jobs—with a consensus that both were true—and that total jobs would go up but with a significant turbulence below the surface regarding the changing of roles in a new economy. That used to be the future, but now we’re three years further in that history of the future of work, and it’s a totally different narrative. We just need more people!

No amount of automation will make up for the people we need. We can’t ignore the importance of people, we learned during COVID. Lots of studies on the future of work used to be about the supply chain of skills—treating people not as people but rather as skills on a spreadsheet or “things.” COVID showed us just how bad a model this is. We need a different mindset now. People have a choice… incredible, right?! [Note the sarcasm in case of any doubt].

But we still haven’t gotten to grips with the idea of a career made up of 25 jobs—there’s still a paradigm of maybe two or three, where you go, you learn, and you advance. People living longer is an extra add-on, with careers being longer and [people having] more of them. The relationship between people and employees is changing.

Phil: So how can we do right by our employees and try to overcome this great resignation? Is this where your elite athlete mantra comes in?

Jesus: We need to realize, accept, and embrace that our employees will often find better growth opportunities going outside of our company than staying inside. It’s an inconvenient truth: We were always supposed to give them room to grow and view people as investments that pay back to our company, and their own investment in our companies paid back to their careers, but now we have the “great resignation,” and many can find better jobs.

We need to think about people like athletes and not as skills. Think of high schools and universities: For the most part, they can’t just buy talent; they must create a system that develops talent. Texas is an example in the number of players who make it into the NFL, a systemic win for sure. They’re creating athletes, and through a much better financial equation.

Constantly seeing employees quitting and having to pay their direct replacements (or replacements who must still be brought up to the leaver’s level) 30% more, repeatedly, is a bad model—so we need a better one.

Exhibit 1: Seven out of 10 employees will leave their current employer if or when the right opportunity presents itself…worldwide

Sample: 1,800 employees across leading IT and business service providers; September 2022
Source: HFS Research, 2022

Phil: Our latest data at HFS shows seven out of ten employees are on edge and looking to jump ship—how is IBM looking at this and its broad employee experience?

Jesus: Experience is the interface between customers and the way we work—as is co-creation and the involvement of ecosystems. Innovation and invention cannot be thought of in the same way; 95% of innovation is having a deeper understanding of challenges and the opportunities to do better. We created the IBM Garage model for co-creation relationships that help everyone create common ground. People need to find opportunities to grow; we need to provide those opportunities.

Many are still doing the same processes, outsourcing, and automation as before COVID. Habits are hard to change. IBM Consulting wants to be the most people-centric model out there. To do that, we need new habits.

We can’t change culture. Culture is the consequence of what our people do all day. So, share new habits, and ask people what they want to do. We guide behaviors like collaborating to succeed and embracing diverse perspectives, not only tolerating perspectives but really wanting to ask someone who is opposed [to an idea] and understand their views. Reach out and ask why they are opposed. It might be a stupid idea, and you can avoid it, or they tell you their reasons, and you disagree. Either way, you’re making a more informed decision.

Wider involvement of perspectives also creates a better “empathy map” of use cases; otherwise, you don’t understand who uses the process you’re designing, especially if you’re scaling to hundreds of thousands of people. You need to create a culture where people feel identified and understood.

Exhibit 2. Employees feel under-challenged and are ready to jump ship, but they see POTENTIAL…

Sample: 1,800 employees across leading IT and business service providers; September 2022
Source: HFS Research, 2022

Phil: So, the bottom line is that people still want to be challenged and still see the potential they have to change business for the better—is there a new view of management we need to take?

Jesus: Middle management kept the wheels on during COVID and drove different ways of working, tying between the organizational strategy and all employees. A few years ago, middle management was being blamed as the problem for everything, but in COVID, middle management connected people, checked in, and supported people (of course, there were less-than-great examples too). We need to triple-down on management advocacy—with managers not just managing badges and certifications but being guides and coaches. It’s a big change for many.

There are parallels with the agile and design thinking shock. Middle management jobs used to be about moving information up and down. But you need to be a coach helping the people under you succeed and get lifted. This all needs different value systems and different compensation structures. Help people become instinctive about self-motivating and succeeding and finding their best selves.