“You can have all the resources in the world and create the most incredible human-centric HR system. But at the end of the day, if you fail to uphold your promise to the people being held at the center of that system, the system has failed.” says Valentina Iturbe-LaGrave, Senior Advisor of Organizational Effectiveness and Employee Experience at Save The Children. 

In this case, the people being held at the center of an HR system are the employees, the managers, and the individuals who work to uphold it. And the promise is to genuinely support those people, and aid their growth in an enriching work environment. 

To Valentina, this promise is a momentous one, one that is being made by many today without proper regard for its importance. To create a system that supports, adapts, and serves its people is a tenuous task, but one that is immensely valuable and rewarding for all.

In our most recent Thought Leadership conversation, Valentina showed us what it takes to redesign a performance management system, and have it fit an organization in a way that promotes a healthy, collaborative workplace.  

Building Engagement Through Trust

Employee engagement is absolutely crucial to effective business. As Valentina points out, “we know that when people are engaged, when they are immersed, when they're really committed to the work and sharing information, the business succeeds. We know that this leads to better products, faster cycles, and stronger impacts.” Gallup research shows that business units in the top quartile of employee engagement see 23% higher profitability and 18% higher productivity compared to those in the bottom quartile. 

As the cultural backbone of a business, HR systems play a massive role in facilitating employee engagement. Only if a worker trusts that a company is invested in supporting their growth and creating a safe and healthy environment will they buy into company culture or business goals. However, over the past few decades, organizations have overlooked the importance of developing trust amongst their workers, relying on much hollower tactics to garner engagement. Not only are these tactics misguided and performative, but they deteriorate trust and create unstable work environments.

Work Is What You Do, Not Who You Are

Chief among the performative tactics that companies have used for decades to manufacture culture is to create a sense of belonging in their employees. By marketing their organization as a “family”, or telling new employees that they should feel “at home”, organizations push participation by appealing to people’s sense of identity. However, this notion is not only empty, but harmful in a labor market where  

job uncertainty and volatility is on the rise. 

According to the Bureau of Labor, employees are navigating a far less stable career environment than a decade ago: median job tenure has fallen 15% since 2014, while layoffs and discharges rose more than 12% from 2022 to 2023. When the average job tenure is around four years, it is intentionally misleading to push a narrative of employee belonging.

As Dr. LaGrave says,

 “Employees are feeling like these systems are being done onto them, they're being sold a false reality. Companies claim that they’re going to talk about my development and it's going to feel like I belong. But while that is happening on one side, the social contract is being broken on the other, and every week companies are saying goodbye to hundreds and hundreds of colleagues. ”

Narratives like these aren’t pushed passively, they have been engineered to create engagement. If an employee feels that a role is central to their identity, they are more likely to participate authentically. But when that sense of belonging is taken away, the psychological ramifications can be devastating. 

When the social contract says ‘work for us and we will look out for you because you are now a part of our family’, employee turnover is no longer just about employment, it’s about identity. Because it blurs the lines between these two realms, this social contract can never foster genuine trust between a workforce and its leadership. Because there isn’t a sense of mutual accountability, it is completely performative. 

Updating the Social Contract

To Dr. LaGrave, the solution lies in radically redesigning the workplace social contract. Her mission as a People Leader is to facilitate this redesigning, and revolutionize the company-worker relationship to meet today’s demands. Throughout our conversation, she cited three crucial areas of growth:

1. Employee Involvement

“My work is very inspired by participatory action research: ‘Nothing about us, without us’ is core to my work philosophy. We need to bring interdisciplinary thinking into space and we can't define organizational cultures as monoliths”, says Dr. LaGrave.

She argues that HR leaders should be proactive in collecting and using employee feedback to make sure that their performance management systems are designed specifically for their workforce. By bringing employee voices into decision-making, you are weaving mutual trust into the fabric of workplace culture. Employee engagement no longer needs to be forced through performative actions, and HR can focus on bettering the employee experience and reaching business goals.

2. Prioritizing Offboarding Conversations

With the amount of turnover in today’s workforce, Dr. LaGrave advocates for a more honest type of employee-manager relationship, one that embraces worker development beyond the company:

“Yes, we will grow and develop our employees at our company, but at the same time, why are we not talking candidly about your future, even if it's beyond your role in this company? Why are we not having those conversations in our developmental check ins?

If we start to think outside the boundaries of how we're performing corporate culture, people wouldn’t be walking into organizations all over the world holding their breath with a protective mindset. This distrustfulness is impacting collaboration, communication, innovation, and organizational health.

What if we rewrote that script and said, no, we're going to talk about offboarding and what happens at this company when you are offboarded?"

By encouraging more candid conversations, Dr. LaGrave believes we can pave an avenue toward genuine trust and mutual respect. 

3. Using AI-assisted Technology To Enhance Rather Than Replace

Dr. LaGrave argues that “new technology allows us to see so much, automate follow up questions, go deeper into sentiment without sacrificing time. We must use this to actually create interventions that people need to handle uncertainty and fear.”

By using technological advances to better employee experience, organizations can communicate a commitment to improving the workplace. These tools can be used to combat employee mistrust, and allow them the psychological safety to perform well.

Finding the ‘Human’ in Human-Centeredness

In a world of increased work anxiety, Dr. LaGrave’s mission forces us to question what it means to be truly human-centered. If humans exist at the center of every organization’s performance management system, how can we create systems that serve those individuals? By valuing employee input, by encouraging honest, meaningful feedback conversations, and using technology to the employee’s advantage, we can break down performative work culture, and replace it with policies that facilitate mutual trust. 

Dr. LaGrave reminds us that “we all have something really meaningful to say. We're all bringing our intersecting social identities into work every single day. They are the filter through which we see and experience the entire world.” Human-centeredness is not only about embracing this within your systems, but it’s about creating a culture that celebrates it wholeheartedly.