Three trends — and how to prepare for them.

Survey results show employees are feeling anxious about post-pandemic working arrangements and the future of remote work, even if you don’t yet know what to tell them.

The prospect of change can make many employees shut down and look for reasons not to do something. Here’s how to shift that dynamic.

During this time of uncertainty and change, employees have a lot on their minds. A little empathy and thoughtful communication can go a long way to help employees know you care.

A holistic approach to offboarding

There's probably nothing I like more than someone who is being willfully contradictory, to zig when it seems the world says to zag. To wit, Emily Firth's article on why employee-generated content will NOT save your employer brand. She makes solid points (its over-used because it seems like an "easy" way to create content, but since there's rarely a solid plan with what to do with said content, or even how to nurture it, it rarely yields anything useful), but I see this as someone waving us away from the extreme end of an idea. Employee-generated content (when done right, where there's a "care and feeding plan" in place to nurture it, etc), can be useful. It just isn't a silver bullet.

Related to that, HBR asks if you give your employees a reason to feel proud of what they do? I'd add in, do you ask employees to share that pride when talking with their own networks?

It took me a minute to realize that this article on how to help your employees to own your corporate strategy is actually an employer brand article in reverse. That is, rather than explaining what employer brand is, it focuses on the fact that a strategy that isn't embraced and implemented by engaged staff is really just a good idea and little more. The article suggests making strategy communication a two-way street and asking for staff to commit to the strategy. Sounds great but if you have two identical companies differentiated by the first having a strong employer brand, you can connect your corporate strategy more easily to understanding what your staff expects to get out of working there far more than the company without a strongly held brand. In a company with different micro-cultures, how do you connect a single strategy to all of them? You'll have to go team to team, culture to culture, doing the hard retail sales work to make a connection. In a company with a strong brand, all those micro-cultures have already found a way to localize your core brand. It's like all those disparate audience are already hard-wired to understand the strategy because they are all aligned to a common set of concepts.