Responding to Organizational Impacts

Technology & GenZ

Apple released its first iPhone during Obama’s 2007 campaign, and he announced his vice presidential pick – Joe Biden – on a two-year-old platform called Twitter. Today, use of smartphones and social media has become the norm in U.S. society, not the exception. The confluence of the rapid evolution of technology with the arrival of Gen Z in the workplace exacerbated the crises of leadership and engagement that organizations continue to grapple with today. As a firm, we have seen this play out firsthand in our client engagements.

Anticipating this challenge, we introduced the concept of Workplace 2040 during this period. As we encountered the different expectations and behaviors among the generational mix in our clients, it became apparent that maintaining cultural cohesion and high employee engagement was going to be contingent upon finding common ground and establishing norms for behavior that were consistent with this time in society.

During this period, our client base was primarily professional services firms, which operate in a very different context than normal hierarchical corporations and organizations. Because T.H. Easter creates customized solutions for each of our clients, this was right in our wheelhouse. Our initial contacts with these clients frequently involved some type of behavioral clash, including microaggressions, perceived harassment, or discrimination based upon race/ethnicity/gender. It also involved internal and external social media posts and “chats” that would have been considered unprofessional in the traditional workplace. We generally were called in to conduct investigations, and we often found that many behaviors that older workers considered acceptable were not seen that way by younger employees. By contrast, younger employees felt empowered to be “honest” via social media and older workers were taken aback by this level of frankness.

Navigating Change

It was important to establish a baseline for workplace behaviors with agreed upon definitions to ensure everyone was operating from the same understanding. To manage this new approach, and to achieve buy in among all stakeholders, we offered a variety of training and development opportunities based upon our findings from the investigations. We used different developmental modalities depending upon the audience, and the most important place to start was with leadership.

Our guiding philosophy is that an organization is only as healthy as its leadership. We began by focusing on executive coaching and team coaching for leaders, because it was imperative to identify their individual skill and competency strengths and challenges for targeting to maximize their effectiveness for the good of the organization. This included leading executive team discussion with topics such as Recognizing, Valuing and Understanding Diversity and Inclusion and Privilege, Power and Oppression in the Workplace.

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Workplace 2040
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Change Management
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Training & Development

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