Engaging Workforce With Stories – Jeremy Scrivens [Interview]

About Jeremy Scrivens

Jeremy Scrivens, the appreciative futurist, as he’s rightly known. Helping drive innovation and collaboration for the workforce, he is indeed a catalyst for increasing the strength of organizations and teams. He has been recognized by a lot of international organizations like UK guardian, engaged, and silicon republic as one of their top HR influencers. Known for his interesting takes on the future of work, Jeremy is a well-known keynote speaker and leadership coach.

Aishwarya Jain

We have the pleasure today of welcoming Jeremy Scrivens, today to our interview series – LeadersHum. I’m Aishwarya Jain from the peopleHum team. Before we begin, just a quick intro of peopleHum – peopleHum is an end-to-end, one-view, integrated human capital management automation platform, the winner of the 2019 global Codie Award for HCM that is specifically built for crafted employee experiences and the future of work with automation and AI technologies. We run the peopleHum blog and video channel which receives upwards of 200,000 visitors a year and publish around 2 interviews with well-known names globally, every month.

Aishwarya

Welcome Jeremy, We’re thrilled to have you!

Jeremy

Thank you very much. I hope I live up to some of that.

Aishwarya

Of course, Of course.

So I just wanted to begin with the first question, Jeremy which is, an interesting thing about your profiles, that you work to positively disrupt enterprise’s cultures to collaborate and innovate, so tell us a little about the emotion of the economy at work!

Jeremy

In my view, innovation and future works are both destruction and continuity, and “The continuity is that the idea of innovation is the reconfiguration of strengths.”

“The continuity is that the idea of innovation is the reconfiguration of strengths.”

So I was 20 odd years in HR and 10 years in Telstra Big Telco here in Australia on the executive HR team in the ’90s but moved away in about 2000 to start my own practice. And I thought, What do I call it? And at that time they were starting to emerge as a whole conversation around employee engagement.

And there was a Geller group in particular who did some interesting work, and they discovered that only about 13% of the world’s workforce is engaged to work. And, to be honest, that that figure has not changed a whole lot in the last few years. Those who were engaged, those top 13%, were kinda first engaged from the heart, not from the head.

And yet most of us talk for 300 years as managers to engage the head and maybe rarely if ever the heart because that’s a bit crazy, isn’t it? But so I thought heart, of course, emotional on them with engagement was intrinsic still emotional. So that’s the term emotional engagement.

So I became interested in flipping, changing that, disrupting the conversation from the head to the heart in work. And at the same time, people like Gary Hamel, who was a leading thinker on business, was talking about how low engagement has just been discretionary for managers.

We’re moving into an age of innovation beyond continuous improvement so that innovation is about collaboration. And in order to collaborate, you got to engage people so, in a nutshell, my work is forming around the strength-based approach to innovation, collaboration, and engagement at scale, in a digital world.

Aishwarya

That is beautiful. The way you put it, you know, it’s about the heart and not about anything else, and that is a beautiful, emotional concept that you’ve built out. So you know,

What is it that really drives employee engagement? Why is there less engagement? What do you think are the factors?

Jeremy

Well, there’s a lot of research being done. But in a nutshell, I think it goes, the fact that organizations have been built on what I call the factory model of work for 300 years, the first industrial revolution. What they did, before the industrial revolution, work was done as a community. People engaged in doing what I now call life work together.

What was that? Now with the current crisis, while it’s a crisis, yes, we need to be smart. We need to be caring for each other and make sure we’re safe. “It was also a massive opportunity to disrupt the way we think about work because what’s happening is that people are getting back to their homes, they’re still working. This is life work.”

“It was also a massive opportunity to disrupt the way we think about work because what’s happening is that people are getting back to their homes, they’re still working. This is life work.”

This was work as it was before the industrial revolution of this big monolithic factory, which wasn’t about you or me. They were about the machine, the process, the factory.

So all the automation or the decisions were – How do we keep feeding the machine to make it more efficient, producing more? And so you and I became dispensable or disposable in that conversation, too. So if you engage people from the head, you can dispose off people, make sense?

But if you engage the heart and we know that people want to be engaged in the heart, it does mean something very different. So challenge managers because managers have been taught to reduce variation in all the process stuff- leave thinking, six sigma, business process management, quality thinking, talk about reducing variation.

Managers have been talking about the uniform views of the world but innovation, creativity, human issues, the new 4ir tech, which is seeing patterns of things, is requiring every scrap of talent to come into the room to engage and question around why and who we are, that is a heart-based conversation first. “So innovation, at it’s best, is engaging the heart rather than the head.”

“So innovation, at it’s best, is engaging the heart rather than the head.”

In other words, to engage the story, your life Story, my life Story #Me #We corrected that together, then say what tech could help us to take that journey? That’s the right order of things. Factories don’t do that very well. But communities of belonging and propose to do that very, very well. And what we’re seeing now is the emergence of belonging and purpose from every individual’s personal life.

Aishwarya

Absolutely. And I think, you know, with the recent scenario of Coronavirus, it’s really the heart that is at work. And we’re all in it together as a community, right? And you know, the concept of #I #We, I really really think, that is so important, you know, especially in these times, right?

So talking about Coronavirus, right? How do you think, what’s your take on the future of the workplace going to change? Or will it get reinforced?

Jeremy

So it depends on how we see the world and what value, what mind construction we go through. So in a nutshell, I write about the future work could be one of two streams, think of a pathway, the road less traveled, two converging streams. So the new tech, I’m not a technical guy but I keep going on this tech list, right? And what I understand is that tech is converging, it is converging everything into like this (shows the phone)

So your data around your life or work is not broken apart. When I still used to go to work as a baby boomer, I was not allowed to bring my outside of work into my work. So the data of work was the stuff related to my job. Nothing else was important. I was owned by the companies and not by the individual, but the new data has allowed individuals access to that data.

But what it also is doing is challenging the way in which we see things. So if you are a first stream leader of those who used the tech to continue to see the factory at work, then they want to protect the factory. So what you’re doing now is the ones that lay off their people, the other ones that hold the money and keep it in the bank, seeing work, jobs as being to serve the stakeholders of shareholders “So people are dispensable.”

“So people are dispensable.”

The factory of the building has been the center of work, right? That’s why this term remote working is so wrong. If you talk about remote working, what we’re saying is we’re working remotely for the factory, right, for the office. That’s the old 300 models of management.

Remote working at its best now will need you and I and others to create new conversations, new collaborations and we’ll see work that’s starting to form beyond the single enterprise into a collaboration of strengths as a living ecosystem.

And we’ll be around the life and work around causes and around commercials all mixed up together, as it used to be before the factory took that away. But what the new tech will do is to restore the community, and extend it because of the power, we’ve got the new tech. And it’ll be the convergence that will spring up, and they will surprise us with who they are, not just the hierarchical guys, there will be people like your age who will come together, startup movements and they’ll be unstoppable.

Aishwarya

Well, we’re coming back full circle, isn’t it? But just with, technology in the mix.

Jeremy

“It takes a crisis to change something radically.”

“It takes a crisis to change something radically.” The word crisis comes from the Chinese word krises, K.R.I.S.E.S, which means an opportunity taken to change the way we are. It’s not just about survival, it’s about growth. And how could we form new connections? I’m involved in conversations in Australia now with a group of manufacturers who have been asked by the government to come together to find ways quickly to manufacture more pieces of kits like respirators and stuff.

So I’m supporting the virus. But that means they will form new collaborations, that will bring the unusual suspects in the room. They will need to put their IPs on one side. They’ll need to actually share and to be generous and to collaborate and to give. And it’s a different mindset. And the young kids coming through the workforce, the young talent, they know how to do that so very well.

Aishwarya

Right, Right. It’s very insightful, the way you put it. I think a lot of people will benefit from what you’re trying to stay. You know, in these times, how are we supposed to cope with it? Because I’m sure a lot of people are struggling with remote working, and it’s very insightful. The way you put it, you know that we’ve actually done it in history, and we’re doing the same thing now. But we have to leverage technology and be adaptive of it

Jeremy

One example of “Crisis is where technology and people come together”

“Crisis is where technology and people come together “

…for something bigger than ourselves. So, for example, without plugging anything, I mean, I’m part of a group of people that are deploying the world’s first digital talent dashboard. It is a dashboard that goes into the hands of the people themselves on their laptops. It’s an individual and team dashboards.

It’s a kaleidoscope of strengths, and they can see how their different strengths play with each other. They can form virtual teams so they can look after each other so it is a conversation around well being and doing well. So the last blog I wrote just a couple of days ago was how last week I did a piece of work with these two people officers team that said, ‘Jeremy, how can we design a conversation or our teams not just to survive but to flourish now?’

Wow, So I wrote that. And I think there are three questions: how we’re gonna be well together through the kaleidoscope of our strengths, how do we be well together, even though we’re not working physically together, how could we take this opportunity to re-imagine the way we work? And that’s the kind of conversation now, without that mindset behind that leader, it’s not possible “Without the digital tech dashboard, it’s not possible.”

“Without the digital tech dashboard, it’s not possible.”

And we are de-expertizing things now. So I was taught to be the expert, so I was taught how to do things like this and other sorts of things, accreditation, really, and all that sort of stuff.

I got two weeks ago, two truck drivers to debrief their CEO on his talent profile, using the dashboard on what you pick yourself up off the floor cause I got them to substitute for me, they have incredible conversation together, two truck drivers with the CEO using a new piece of 4ir kit, which they can understand that he can use, and they can collaborate as equal players in this space, that’s what is possible now.

Aishwarya

Wow! That is very, very beautiful. I mean, how do you really leverage all these things that you have and to do something that’s bigger than you are on? Just not surviving but actually trying to be productive in this crisis, Right?

Jeremy

So I would say, we’re moving into the new age of leadership, leaders used to be heroes, they come up with all the answers through their internal or external consultants. So I’m gonna grab this expertise. I’m gonna encourage my HR colleagues to shift the lens from the leader as a hero to the leader as host.

So right now, my question to HR is, are you trying to lead the conversation around remote work, and wellbeing and well-doing, as the hero, or expert, or are you going to enable, are you gonna host that conversation and do you have the right questions and the tools to do that.

Aishwarya

Right! it’s important to ask the right questions, than having the answers

Jeremy

Meg Wheatley, the great writer, she did amazing work with the community globally, years ago, and she read about the new science, the new leadership and she said there are a set of principles,10 principles on how you engage people in change. “The first principle is people own what they create!”

“The first principle is people own what they create!”

Are we allowing people to create a solution or a new pathway?

Secondly, people take responsibility when they care about the topic. Do we engage them with the topic or not? For example, old staff, employee engagement surveys, old school. Right! Good for work, Fantastic! But the questions and the topics are pre-set by external third parties.

We don’t get people to say, what questions would you like to ask? Because the process, becomes more important than the conversation and the future is the conversation between two people. What do you want to talk about? What do you care about? That’s the first question to ask someone in the remote work Conversations? Who are you? What do you care about? are the topics now we want to talk about

Aishwarya

Yeah, that’s very interesting! Because engagement surveys are so traditional, it is just a monologue, But can we extinguish that and make it a dialogue!

Jeremy

It’s also extrinsic, not intrinsic, because privacy laws prevent us from having a conversation.”Conversation is the way human beings have always learned together.”

“Conversation is the way human beings have always learned together.”

And Storytelling is the heart of that! Stories come first, not the data, the data informs the story. It helps people to share and create their own unique #Me #We

Aishwarya

Absolutely Right!

Jeremy

What we’re seeing now with stories that right now, as we did the stories, we need more stories around, where remote working is working well, what are the ideas? What are the opportunities? What are the stories of thriving that we’ve seen? What are the stories around breakthroughs we’ve seen? Because of the crisis, the coronavirus crisis, some of us took advantage of the knowledge to use to grow, not just survive.

Aishwarya

Absolutely! And talking about stories, you know, the workplace is like a journey in a filled with story, experiences, emotions, conversations and interactions. So how much of an impact does Social Media play for engaging and bringing together the employees of an organization? And…

What’s your take on using a human capital management platform, to create a digital workspace journey?

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