Webinar Insights: Diving Into HR’s Top Opportunities for 2023

During the second half of 2022, it felt like we couldn’t escape the term ‘quiet quitting’. The idea of employees ‘quitting going above and beyond’ for their employers spawned a whole host of new terms: quiet firing, rage applying, career cushioning – buzzwords galore! 

But as Ross explains, the advent of quiet quitting has more to do with the term than the concept. In some form, quiet quitting has been around for decades, but it has more to do with employee engagement and satisfaction. 

“The underlying trend [of quiet quitting] is quite an important one. When employees become disillusioned with their employer but decide to stay, that can be pretty damaging for the company. Both if they are top performers or individuals who haven’t had the impact they’ve needed to have in recent times”, explains Ross. 

A high occurrence of quiet quitting, or depressed engagement, can be a tell-tale sign of a culture in trouble. From Ross’s perspective, that ties directly back to overall organisational health and productivity. 

Driven by macroeconomic changes, as well as the legacy of Covid-19, employees are going to continue to reflect on their loyalty for their company and how much they want to give. An opportunity here for organisations is to guide them on that journey. 

The result could be to take a zoomed-out picture and take a look at the health of your organisation overall, and ask if things like your organisational design, role profiles and responsibilities and department structures are aligned with employee interests. 

Rely on things like your attrition rate, dig into why employees have already left in order to inform how you handle employees moving forward. Leveraged by data, start by focusing on if your roles are set up for success – and then graduate to focusing on individuals. 

One of the big challenges of organisational effectiveness is just how daunting it can feel for many teams. The idea of how to drive productivity across your entire organisation can often feel like a mountain you could simply never climb. 

An opportunity from Ross? Chop up the problem into pieces. As he explains: “For us, when it comes to organisational effectiveness, we have set up a framework”. Looking at it through the prism of the framework begins to see one big concept in more actionable ways.

The first: raising the bar. This is where you can focus on the natural growth and progression of in-role expectations. That means keying in on how to moderate great performance discussions, setting clear goals and making sure continuous feedback happens (alongside reward). 

The second is cross-team collaboration. When you put a premium on collaboration, you can start to see its effect on productivity and effectiveness. Try to think about how you can align your big-picture goals to intentionally loop in cross-departmental stakeholders. 

Finally, we need to understand that effectiveness starts on an individual level. That means removing blockers to productivity, like redundant meetings or cumbersome processes, and tracking whether that removal results in boosts of productivity. 

“It is a team effort. It is obviously guided by individuals in each area, and we [as an HR function] are at the centre to help guide it”, states Ross.  

There’s no way around it, the current environment is contributing to a perceived lack of career growth opportunities for many employees. The challenge is pushing back on that. For Ross, there has to be a mindset shift embedded in your organisation. That means enabling employees to both feel growth within their role, but also plan for the next role of that next step up – it’s a tricky balance. 

“Recognise that you will have individuals who are ready for a bigger role, and [in those cases] we have to go through a good calibration process in departments for promoting the right people into those roles”, explains Ross. 

The balance is choosing on which side your organisation may fall: You can focusing on growth in role and then calibrating a higher standard for promotions. Or you can choose to promote people en masse that may not scale as effectively (especially in certain situations). 

Finally, none of this is successful without a really strong foundation of culture and values. When you have a standardised set of values or behaviours you can grade against, it turns learning and career growth into far more scalable processes. 

For Ross, the case is clear: “Reward the behaviours you want to see, and reward the impact you want to see. For me, it has always been both together”. 

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If you’re interested in hearing more from Ross, watch back our latest webinar where we discussed the top opportunities for HR teams in 2023. You can watch it above or find it by clicking this link. 

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