Prioritising your people in the new world of work

You don’t need to be online from 9am to 5pm to sup­port your cus­tomers. Work has shift­ed from a place you go, to what you do. Today every com­pa­ny must cre­ate its own dig­i­tal HQ which con­nects its employ­ees, cus­tomers, and part­ners, allow­ing them to thrive in a work-from-any­where world.

The beau­ty of this for us at Sales­force has been empow­er­ing our teams to adapt their work around their lives. That could be par­ents want­i­ng to log on after doing the school run, encour­ag­ing col­leagues to take a longer after­noon break to re-ener­gise, or gen­er­al­ly let­ting both ear­ly birds and night owls work when they feel most pro­duc­tive.

Yet while we want to make it as easy as pos­si­ble for peo­ple to work in an envi­ron­ment that’s best for them, the last thing we want to do is inad­ver­tent­ly exclude peo­ple by tak­ing a remote-only approach to work. We don’t want to make bar­ri­ers out of the dig­i­tal tools that are meant to be lib­er­at­ing.

For exam­ple, across the gen­er­a­tions we have in our work­force, we’re see­ing a dif­fer­ent approach to this new way of work­ing. Some of our more tenured, expe­ri­enced team mem­bers are com­fort­able spend­ing less time in the office, because they already know their way around the organ­i­sa­tion. 

Our ear­ly career tal­ent, on the oth­er hand, are grav­i­tat­ing more towards the office, drawn to the social and col­lab­o­ra­tive aspect of work. They’re here for the com­mu­ni­ty and the cama­raderie, and for those whose home envi­ron­ment may not be con­ducive to focused work, a place where they can get in the zone. So with these two extremes of the hybrid work spec­trum, we want to find the right bal­ance.

We val­ue that inter­ac­tion between ear­ly career and expe­ri­enced tal­ent. We want our ear­ly career tal­ent to learn from those who are more expe­ri­enced. It’s impor­tant then, that we cre­ate a new way of work­ing that pri­ori­tis­es com­ing togeth­er for col­lab­o­ra­tion, learn­ing, engage­ment and cul­ture build­ing, on both a pro­fes­sion­al and social lev­el. 

We’ve asked our teams to think about when we should come togeth­er, and for what pur­pose? As we think about the type of events we want to engage our com­mu­ni­ty in, the mile­stones we want to cel­e­brate, and how we can unleash our best cre­ative and strate­gic think­ing, we will be look­ing to engage both phys­i­cal­ly and dig­i­tal­ly in a much more pur­pose­ful, dynam­ic way. This way, both our junior and senior teams can get the most out of the times they work togeth­er.

How we sup­port our man­agers in help­ing deliv­er this will be cru­cial. We acknowl­edge that this is going to require them to devel­op very dif­fer­ent skill sets. Their job tra­di­tion­al­ly has been about dri­ving pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and employ­ee engage­ment, but it’s been sim­pler when peo­ple have been all togeth­er in the same place. 

Our mid-lev­el man­agers in par­tic­u­lar are the core peo­ple who are influ­enc­ing our work­force across the world, and help­ing us act in a much more empa­thy-dri­ven way to pri­ori­tise peo­ple rather than process. We will be think­ing care­ful­ly about how we dri­ve that fur­ther in an envi­ron­ment where it takes a more con­sid­ered effort to cre­ate trans­paren­cy in your rela­tion­ships and inter­ac­tions. Equal­ly, we will need to address how we build trust in geo­graph­i­cal­ly dis­persed teams, and how we strength­en the employee/manager rela­tion­ship in that con­text – espe­cial­ly for those where remote work­ing could cause them to with­draw social­ly from their peers. 

Build­ing psy­cho­log­i­cal safe­ty is much hard­er through a screen, but it’s our goal to do that by giv­ing every­body the dig­i­tal skills that will actu­al­ly help them engage bet­ter and more pro­duc­tive­ly, even if it does look dif­fer­ent now. We want to cap­i­talise on the oppor­tu­ni­ty to upskill all our demo­graph­ics, to make sure nobody gets left behind. For exam­ple, we want to approach job descrip­tions and career path­ways in terms of what roles need as a whole from an attrib­ut­es per­spec­tive, ver­sus a more black and white list of skills and qual­i­fi­ca­tions. The more qual­i­fi­ca­tions you add to a role, the small­er the tal­ent pool you have access to.

We are focus­ing on how we give peo­ple skills that they can actu­al­ly use to advance them­selves in the work­force, like crit­i­cal think­ing and ana­lyt­i­cal skills. It’s why we launched Trail­head, our free online learn­ing plat­form to empow­er any­one from any walk of life, includ­ing our employ­ees to skill up for the jobs of the future. With Trail­head, you can learn in-demand skills, earn resume-wor­thy cre­den­tials, and con­nect with a com­mu­ni­ty of Trail­blaz­ers for men­tor­ship and employ­ment oppor­tu­ni­ties.  If peo­ple can feel con­fi­dent in their abil­i­ty to learn, they won’t be afraid to try some­thing new.

At Sales­force, it real­ly is about try­ing to raise aware­ness of oppor­tu­ni­ties that exist in the com­pa­ny, for a whole vari­ety of peo­ple. That’s what we feel will bridge any bar­ri­ers across our flex­i­ble teams. Upskilling peo­ple from with­in, rather than expect­ing them to come to us with a raft of cer­ti­fi­ca­tions under their belt already, is also how we plan to con­tin­u­al­ly diver­si­fy the tal­ent com­ing into our busi­ness and grow­ing with­in it at all lev­els.

Demys­ti­fy­ing dig­i­tal and tech­nol­o­gy will be key to how we keep our peo­ple con­nect­ed, and make our new way of work­ing inclu­sive and acces­si­ble for every­body, regard­less of their work pref­er­ence or skillset. That’s top of the agen­da for me as we move into 2022.

To find out how Sales­force is pow­er­ing the work­force of tomor­row, vis­it trailhead.salesforce.com.