I am a frequent traveller for professional reasons, which means that I spend lots of time in airport lounges, mainly in North European cities. There, I have the chance to observe people and their behaviours. After investing extensive hours, I can classify travellers in three groups: 80% business men, 15% business women, 5% couples or families travelling for leisure. This proportion remains the same everywhere I go, regardless of the airline or the country. And I am wondering again and again: why the percentage of female business travellers is so low? How many of these male business travellers would be happier at home with their kids?
The gender-role association is an anachronistic feature which, luckily, doesn’t exist anymore in the horizon of those born after 1985. So, allow me to be optimistic regarding this issue in the years to come. However, for those born before, work-life balance is still a double-edged sword. Social pressure and self-programming are both a big burden forcing women to quit their careers and making men accept just a supporting role in the family environment. This is a global phenomenon, regardless of how long local parental leave is or the general labour law of the country.
Solving the work-life balance dilemma is just the tip of the iceberg which is the society-organization debate. Looking back, the social shifting brought by the Industrial Revolution (which was the origin of the first hr departments) showed that society leveraged the positive transformation of the companies. Every single change of cycle (with its intrinsic revolution) leads to an impasse on which social behaviour and corporate standards do not match. However, history always shows that both sides will find their common fit sooner or later, until a new cycle arises. And this is what is happening nowadays.
Corporations are far behind society. In an hyperconnected world, where everybody is available 24 hours and global boundaries have been blurred, there is no point in being sitting on a chair for 40 hours (or more) a week. This is so 80s.
We attend conferences and wow at success stories of companies having flexible work, collaborative workplaces, blended work policies, result-based rewards, … Speechless and fascinated, we whisper to ourselves “I wish my company was like this”. So, what are we waiting for? Those organizations are made of people, the same as ours. They just simply changed their social mindset (which goes far beyond the fact of having a cool interior design). Many companies which have spent decades echoing their customer centric approach have lost nowadays their top ranking position. The new organizations heading the podium are the ones who decided to put their internal costumer first. Welcome to the human centric organization!
There is no doubt: the new talent, which nowadays is so coveted by all companies, will choose a human centric organization (even if a “conventional” corporation is ready to pay more, believe me!). The internal customer satisfaction brings such a positive impact into the organization that it becomes a lovemark that attracts more talent and more customers (both internal and external).
A company is not an isolated entity: it is one of the partners which must contribute to build a better society for everyone. The human centric organization is the answer to help a person (man or woman, with a partner o single, with children or childless) to have a harmonious work-life integration. If we see that the KPIs of those organizations are so healthy and their employees so happy, what’s the reason not to adopt that new style? A XXth century mindset? Social and generational evolution is inexorable: we are back to our human core. And what’s more human than adaptation? Procrastination is not an option. The motto renew or die works for organizations, too.
