From 7-9 May 2024, our team from Great Place To Work® ASEAN and ANZ attended the 19th annual Great Place To Work For All™ Summit held in New Orleans. The theme of the Summit was “Change Happens Here” – an apt and evocative phrase to remind attendees that each one of us can make a difference.
The Summit offered multiple platforms and opportunities for attendees to learn. These included mainstage keynote presentations and panel discussions featuring well-known speakers and thought leaders. Breakout sessions covered diverse topics on workplace culture and employee experience, featuring company examples and practical tips from Great Place To Work clients. To facilitate opportunities for networking, peer learning and dialogue, the Great Place To Work team and conference attendees hosted multiple braindate sessions for interested parties to sign up.
Our team’s reflections can be condensed into these three key takeaways:
1. Embrace AI for a more equitable future
Many people view the impending growth of artificial intelligence (AI) in our daily lives and work with some ambivalence. This is the same for business leaders – while there are clear benefits, there are also questions about AI’s impact on how jobs will be done, how decisions will be made, and what the future holds. Some look forward to leveraging AI while others are hesitant about it encroaching deeper into our lives.
In his keynote, Michael C. Bush, Global CEO, Great Place To Work, spoke about shaping a future of equitable AI. In our fast-paced world today, people tend to think zero-sum game. For one person to gain, someone else must lose; for me to get a bigger slice of the pie, it means you have to get a smaller slice. This creates a scarcity mindset and limits our ability to tackle complex challenges.
Bush asked the audience to imagine planning for the next 500 years. This type of long-term perspective encourages us to think about collective well-being, fostering an environment where everyone benefits from everyone else’s success. It’s about creating a community where respect, fairness, and honesty aren’t just ideals but practical realities. He says, “When you think about 500 years, you realize that everyone does better when everyone does better. It’s as simple as that.”
In this regard, he believes that “machines equal hope… machines can optimize outcomes for all. Machines will think zero-sum thinking makes no sense, so they will not do it.” Unlike humans, machines do not have self-interest and operate without biases that can lead to short-sighted decisions. This makes them ideal helpers in striving for outcomes that benefit everyone over time, even centuries into the future.
As we integrate AI into our lives and workplaces today, it’s vital to embrace and understand this technology by encouraging one another (and the younger generation) to learn how AI can prepare us for a future where technology supports our collective success. Together, we can bake more pie.
2. Don’t quit on a bad day
Chances are you would have heard of Angela Duckworth and her bestselling book “Grit”. Speaking on Grit and what it means in building great workplaces, she emphasizes the critical role of supportive relationships and a positive workplace culture. “It’s forged through relationships,” Duckworth says. “I don’t think you can express or develop grit if you don’t have a great place to work.”
She defines Grit as a mix of passion and perseverance, and attributes it as the real driver of success. Rather than the hours spent practicing a skill, she asserts that it’s the quality of that practice that makes the difference.
And the good news is, Grit can be nurtured and developed through deliberate practice:
- Deciding on a small sub-skill to practice
(It’s perfectly fine to take baby steps to reach the finish line)
- Practicing with 100% focus
(The emails and messages can wait)
- Getting feedback and reflecting
(We all need feedback. Without it, human beings don’t learn)
The essence of Grit and advocating for unwavering determination was summed up in Duckworth’s advice that if you want to quit, do it on a good day. Rather than rage quitting (or “quiet quitting”/“rage applying” happening in recent years) she says that we shouldn’t quit on a bad day (don’t let that bad day triumph!). Instead, she cautions us to make that decision on a good day, so we’re not clouded by our emotions. In the meantime, practice Grit.
3. Don’t be afraid to stop and hit Reset
Another panel speaker that struck a chord with many of us was Arianna Huffington, CEO of Thrive Global. Set against today’s climate where businesses and individuals face macro pressures and micro stresses, she taught us the human need to Reset. Unlike mechanical operating systems where we aim to minimize downtime, for the human operating system, “downtime is a feature, not a bug” and that “health is what happens between doctors visits”.
Stress is inevitable, but cumulative stress is avoidable. While most companies have some form of employee wellness programs or employee assistance programs which are greatly beneficial, Huffington says it’s crucial to have interventions that are part of daily workflows. To illustrate how this can be done, she shared about Thrive Global’s partnership with Synchrony, a Best Workplace™ in many countries, to co-design well-being initiatives across the organization.
As part of this initiative, well-being is integrated directly into the daily lives and workflow of frontline customer service associates, who represent a majority of the company’s workforce. The process of taking back-to-back customer calls and resolving disputes can be intense. To help them break the cycle of cumulative stress between calls, Thrive Resets (a 60-second science-backed break) are pushed to associates directly in their flow of work. These comprise short mindfulness and breathing exercises to re-center themselves after a tough customer call. Impressively, almost 80% of agents at Synchrony said they would rather get a 60-second reset than have 5-minutes to themselves between calls.
As part of her sharing, Huffington shared her own 60-second Reset video comprising a compendium of her favorite moments (her hometown, pictures of her children) and inspiring quotes. As she walked off stage that morning, she left many of us feeling inspired to create our own videos to embed a 60-second Reset into our daily lives.
This blog merely touches the tip of the iceberg. By the end of the Summit, our team left feeling enriched by the insights shared and inspired by the solutions and strategies that some of the most innovative organizations are employing, to meet the changing needs of their people and business in the most challenging times. We recognized that each of us, in our respective roles and markets, could make a difference in our work to benefit our clients, our colleagues and our culture.
We were also reminded of the quote from Maya Angelou that goes “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.” Change did indeed happen there, for us.
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