You Say You Want to Be People First - This Is What That Means
You will hear a lot of leaders say that they are “People First.” But do they actually know what that means?
Well, I’ve worked with more than 100 organizations globally and worked with thousands of leaders across nearly all industries, and what I can tell you is that less than 5% of them actually walk the walk in terms of truly being People First organizations. The rest just talk about it with little to no action.
So if you are one of the leaders who truly wants to create a great workplace - because, let’s face it, you can’t have a great workplace without putting the People in your organization first - then here’s a quick guide to getting on the right track.
- Embrace the beauty of the people in your organization.
Too many leaders write up a list of core values and act like those principles should just now live within each employee as it does within them. They expect employees to feel passionate about them, but they don’t tend to ask employees what values are important to them.
Instead of taking a top down approach which really is just a way of controlling the organization, take a look at core values as an amalgamation of the beauty of the organization. Ask employees what they find important, and what they want to align against. Ask them what drives them and motivates them. Ask them what THEY believe the organization stands for, and then vote on it as an entire organization.
Make sure to also include elements of a myriad of backgrounds and lived experiences into your organization as well as your core values. Are they inclusive? Are you being inclusive in your actions and policies?
One of the biggest misses is when leaders of organizations tend to make decisions in a vacuum with only their lived experiences in mind or in the room. Bringing in multiple perspectives to decisions will only help to strengthen those decisions and make sure to be inclusive of more people.
Ask yourselves this, “Are there only white people in the room? Are there only straight people in the room? Are there only leaders in the room? Are there only people from second-generation-corporate families in the room? Are there only able-bodied people in the room?” And so on. Decide whose perspectives you’d like to have or whose you are missing, and make sure to add those people in BEFORE decisions are made.
- Create a culture of flexibility.
Most organizations think that if they draw rigid guidelines, people will abide by those rules. Wrong! The more strict a place is, the more people want to buck those rules.
Where excellence flourishes is with the right amount of structure and flexibility. Having conversations where expectations are set are important, but without flexibility, employees feel stifled. As human beings, feeling backed into corners is never a good feeling, so if you can provide more flexibility for employees in your organization, they will thank you.
Do you have flexibility for working parents, caretakers, single people, early career people, late career people, those with disabilities, those with nonprofit volunteer goals, etc.? If not, you should revisit a lot of your policies and handbooks to give flexibility where you can. People don’t often leave organizations because there is too much flexibility. They tend to leave because there were too many parameters in place.
- Try your best to plan for headcount appropriately.
Organizations with great leaders understand how to headcount plan appropriately, which means not having a huge influx of people just to lay people off within months. But proper headcount planning also involves making sure each department and team has enough people so that those team members can take breaks, vacations, sick days, etc., and they don’t feel inundated or overwhelmed. Over the last few years, leaders have looked to become lean, and ultimately, that’s a mistake. “Lean” has come to truly mean that “you’ll work twice as much for the same salary”. You don’t want to be that. Resource your teams appropriately.
- Involve your proactive HR team early and often, and listen to them.
Notice I said proactive HR team. If you have an HR team that is all about compliance and paperwork, that’s not the team you need to succeed moving forward. Your HR team should be able to strategize on headcount, future projects, financial forecasts, company initiatives, etc. as well as making sure all of the t’s are crossed and i’s are dotted in terms of paperwork and compliance. They are the only team that serves every single department and function in the organization AND the entire business at the same time. They are also the only people internally that are experts in the biggest line item of most businesses - their employees.
People leaders are people experts, and the best organizations are ones that understand that listening to their People experts helps the bottom line at the end of the day. And that not listening to them tends to end in tragedy, whether that’s today or next week or next year. - Embrace learning and failure.
No one wants to walk on eggshells. No one wants to continue to guess as to where they are on a day-to-day with their teams or their boss. So embracing learning, trainings, and trying new things possibly to fail has shown to create way better workplaces.
If you are fearful of failure, it showcases that the organization isn’t a safe space. And it showcases also that maybe your manager or your leadership team doesn’t have the capacity or emotional intelligence to understand and deal with failure.
But failure is how a lot of humans learn. And until we try something new, we don’t know how to do it or a better way to do it.
Embracing learning, trainings, and failure doesn’t allow people to remain stagnant, and you tend to have an evolving employee base which leads to an organization that is able to pivot quickly and easily.
Fear - which is where organizations sit if they don’t encourage learning and failure - only drives production for so long, and then it builds resentment. And resentment tends to cost a lot more than freedom.
If you start with the above, and tend to think first about the people within your organization - you know, the thing that costs you the most on your P&L? - then you’ll be a better leader, and your organization will be better for it.
💻 For more tips like these, be join myself, Rocki Howard and Tracie Sponenberg for our webinar: Implementing a People-First Culture on Tuesday, January 21st 10:00am PST / 1:00pm PST
- Anessa Fike