At Steer, we are happy to announce a new section in our blog. This is an intimate space where leaders and experts share their tips, experiences and their own vision on how to be a great leader. To inspire you, to guide you and, above all, to help you have conversations that matter.

Jacob Morgan

Jacob, tell us a bit about yourself and how you got started.

My name is Jacob Morgan, I’m an author, speaker, and futurist. My latest book is called The Employee Experience Advantage and basically looks at what employees care about most at work and how to design for those things. I’m also an entrepreneur which is something I don’t really talk about, but that’s what someone is called who is able to make a living by “doing their own thing.” Originally I thought I’d stay in the corporate world forever. I double majored in business management economics and psychology. I graduated with honors and was excited to join the corporate world! I took a job working for an organization that turned out to be know what I was promised. One day an executive asked me to go get him a cup of coffee and that was one of the last full time jobs I ever had! The rest as they say, is history.

Why do you think Employee Experience is so important for a company? What effects does it have in a team or company?

Employee experience is the next big area of investment for organizations around the world who want to be able to attract and retain the best talent. It’s safe to say that employee engagement efforts have largely failed us because they have been quite focused on perks instead of on actual organizational design. There’s nothing more important to an organization than its people and you get great people by focusing on employee experience. The effects are also quite significant. In fact, my research showed that organizations who do an amazing job of investing in employee experience are more profitable, have lower turnover, are more productive, and see far superior stock price performance!

As a Manager, how can I create a place where people is engaged, happy and fulfilled? Can you share some specific examples?

The first thing a manager needs to do is look inward. They need to decide if they are the type of person that genuinely cares about the people they work with. If the answer is no then there really isn’t much that can be done. Any initiatives related to people always fail, if the person “in charge” doesn’t care about others. So step one is do a bit of self reflection to see if you care about others, and if not, can you change. If you do care about others then the next step is simply to have conversations with your people and get to know them individuals. Find out what they care about and what they value and see what you can do at work to cater to those things. As a manager try to have the mindset of “what can I do to help make my people more successful than me?” Organizations like Pandora or Linkedin do a great job of this, both through their emotional intelligence training programs and their encouragement of transparency at work.

Why company culture is so important?

Culture refers to the side effects of working for your organization and these can either be good or bad. Pretty much any prescription drug has side effects like nausea, skin discoloration, weight gain, hair loss, and the like. Well, many of us work for organizations that have the exact same side effects, but it doesn’t have to be this way. Side effects can also be positive such as growth, feeling valued, or the ability to contribute something meaningful to the organization. Bad culture means nobody will want to work there!

How’s the future of work looks like? Is remote work the future?

This is a very common question that people ask and the reality is that nobody can predict what the future will look like. As a futurist part of my job is to look at many potential futures and to help us move towards one that we would like to see come to fruition. Remote work is one potential for the future, another one is that we will all have to return to the workplace, a third potential future is that things will remain as is with minimal progress in remote work. The important thing here is that if an organization wants its’ future to have remote work, then it can do that, it just needs to make the right investment. The future of work isn’t something that happens to us, it’s something that we create!