Leadership
$3.5m 3 months
The three-year total benefits at Lattice.
The Lattice payback period. 40% Lattice
The percentage that attrition rates plummeted by using the Lattice platform.
“This is where we start to see friction between the lives people were leading and the ones they want to live going forward,” he says. “Some people realised they truly loved their job. (I was one of them.)” Others, conversely, “discovered that their job didn’t align with their core values. For many of them, there was no way to reconcile the want and the reality.” With reports estimating that between 41% and 95% of Americans are considering quitting their jobs, Altman also suggests that the trend might still be accelerating. Of course, this presents another “potentially existential” challenge for businesses and even whole industries. Having spent so long in suspended animation, most can’t afford to simply raise salaries, but next to none could continue without employees to pay. In Altman’s view, it’s time for them to rethink their relationship with their people.
Watch and listen This isn’t a new idea. Altman might be the only CEO to have written a bestseller called People Strategy: How to Invest in People and Make Culture Your Competitive Advantage. But it’s not like many of his peers are extolling the benefits of the suspicion, toxicity and lack of trust they’ve cultivated in their businesses. Rather, tech executives are having to actively defend their companies against charges they have a corrosive influence on culture and society at large. Of Lattice’s Silicon Valley neighbours, it’s now widely accepted that Facebook knowingly sows discord, Twitter is despised by its most avid users and Zoom is a hall of carnival mirrors that makes people more aware of their own face than anyone else’s. As such, tech companies need to tread carefully.
Lattice’s approach to helping its clients foster the best possible culture is to build its systems around employees – developing and investing in people to help them succeed, rather than treating them as resources from which value can be extracted. But the pandemic has catalysed a very different model of people management. While no one is boasting about their weak company culture, many seem willing to sacrifice it on the altar of productivity. Tools for everything from recording employees through their webcams to logging their keystrokes and tracking their browsing are increasingly common. With the right software suite, bosses can even tap workers’ calls or remotely take control of their devices. And, if any of these privileges should fail to increase company loyalty, many IT departments are now tasked with monitoring emails for words like ‘recruiter’ or ‘salary’, so management can track resignation risks.
The only thing that this wealth of corporate spyware fails to reveal is why anyone would want to work for a business that uses it. Rather than addressing the reasons that people might want to quit, to put it
32
another way, these tools constitute a strategy for squeezing as much as possible out of them before they do. With the balance of power shifting from employers to employees, it’s a dangerous game. “As the saying goes,” says Altman, “people don’t quit their job: they quit their bosses.” Surveillance tools can turn managers totalitarian, but companies rarely have the power oppressive states enjoy to prevent defections. Moreover, by prioritising simplified measures of attention and productivity over the interpersonal, communicative side of leadership, workplace surveillance technologies could even automate managers who use them out of existence – if they have any employees left to manage. Lattice, by contrast, creates space for the more qualitative aspects of management, and positions its software as a foundation for turning managers into “expert career coaches”. Equally, its engagement suite doesn’t simply track screen time, but asks employees how engaged they feel, connecting findings to performance measures and helping companies understand the most impactful actions they can take to improve their people strategy.
A place and a purpose
Managers should bear in mind that productivity can’t just be pressured out of people, but people can be pressured out of jobs. Altman points out that the average tenure for a tech employee is a mere 22 months. “Low tenures and high attrition hurt businesses because people don’t – in fact, they can’t – contribute from day one”, he says. “Most employees take a couple of weeks to simply onboard and a couple of months to learn the ropes.” A sales employee might take this long before they start hitting their quota, but that doesn’t stop them learning and improving. “It’s only by year three that they start properly crushing it.” Companies in Lattice’s space are falling more than a year short of that threshold, which Altman is quick to stress isn’t some “weird sales eccentricity”. Indeed, sports scientist Ben Darwin has shown that sportspeople’s performance often dips when they move teams. “They’re in a new environment with new processes and colleagues,” Altman explains. “Just like the sales rep, they onboard, learn, and ramp. And they hit peak performance at the same time – three years.” So what can companies do to retain their top talent? For decades, they’ve relied on golden handcuffs. Stock options that endow after a certain period or bonuses that have to be repaid if workers quit before a particular date are undoubtedly good for making people stay, but they don’t motivate them to do their best work. “In some cases, it even bred toxic work environments,” notes Altman. More recently, businesses have pivoted to creating ‘fun’ office environments, turning workplaces into homes away from home (or a bar away from the pub).
Chief Executive Officer /
www.the-chiefexecutive.com
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48
