Creating a people-centric culture means valuing each person as an individual, not just their job title. It's about adapting management styles to fit each person's needs, rather than treating everyone the same. And it's about finding ways to motivate your team to do their best work. Here's how to get started.
No doubt you’ve heard this term being bandied around in the press, on LinkedIn, in your office, or in management meetings. But what does it mean?
A lot of businesses will consider themselves ‘people-centric’ or 'people-first'.
They’ll have a company people policy. They’ll have constructed an environment designed to offer a relaxed, comfortable experience. They’ll pride themselves on their communication and collaboration. They’ll have a social aspect to the workplace that brings people together
And they’ll probably have a pool table, too.
But are they really people-centric? Or is there more to creating a people-first approach than meets the eye?
For many of those businesses, and the managers who work for them, remote and hybrid work environments have highlighted that a lot of what they thought was ‘people-centric’ about their business, was actually ‘employee experience’. And it can't be replicated through remote practices alone (no matter how many team quizzes and cocktail hours are hosted over Slack, Teams or Zoom).
At OpenBlend, we believe people-centric businesses should have one thing in common.
When talking about employee performance, being people-centric as we've previously identified, places the individual at the heart of everything.
From an employee's career development to their motivations and career goals - operating with a cookie-cutter set of expectations and frameworks is unlikely to yield the same results as aligning individual career aspirations and motivations with overarching business objectives.
Not everyone is motivated by money, and not everyone wants to follow the same career path, some individuals are more driven by purpose, and others are more driven by impact.
Here's what being people-centric means:
We all need to ditch the idea of a work/life balance and start thinking about our work-life blend.
We’re not two different people, one at work and another at home. When we acknowledge ourselves, our colleagues, and our employees as whole individuals, each with our own mix of personal and professional challenges, motivations, and aspirations, we can build an environment where everyone can thrive at work. It's about ensuring that everyone has equal chances to grow and advance based on their skills and personal and professional goals.
Similar to being customer-centric, to be a people-centric workplace you need managers who can tailor their approach to individuals, rather than operating a cookie-cutter set of expectations and management methods. This can be tricky for managers to navigate, but with the right mindset, toolset and skillset, it is possible and will get results: increased productivity, engagement and wellbeing.
When we talk about honest, open, 1:1 conversations, we’re not talking about water-cooler chats in the office or regularly meeting with your team to discuss project updates.
Being supportive, understanding and conversational is not the same as being people-centric. 1:1 conversations between managers and employees need to be honest, open, structured and accountable.
The right questions need to be asked to prompt responses that go beneath the surface. This isn’t always easy: some people are more forthcoming than others, but a people-centric approach enables 1:1 conversations to be effective for everyone.
There’s a difference between recognising individual needs and acting on them.
Management conversations need to go beyond ‘I hear you’ to ‘now what can we do to change this?’ If an employee is struggling with an unmanageable workload (like James here) it’s not enough to give advice and understanding. They need a series of actions to address the problem and drive forward their development, whether that’s helping them have the confidence to say ‘no’, reallocating work elsewhere or setting a series of SMART goals to help them overcome
Say you have a very talented team member, but work hours and/or location is making their role difficult. A traditional business could say, ‘well, that’s the job’. The result is either a) the employee’s performance declines or b) they take their talent elsewhere. A people-centric workplace would look at how the employee’s needs could be met and what benefit it would bring to the business. Meaning that talent is then kept in the business, and not lost to a competitor.
Managers cannot become people-centric without the right mindset or support from their business. They need coaching to have the right conversations and training to recognise effective next steps. They need the authority to make people-centric decisions and enable their teams to explore their work-life blend. And they need a structure that underpins this style of performance management and keeps conversations, accountability and actions on track, like the OpenBlend platform.
So now you know what people-centric really means. How will you make it part of your performance structure?
If you want more information about how to enable employee performance using a people-centric approach, download our guide to people-centric performance management.
Our new Talking Points feature provides a structured way to have regular employee performance conversations. Find out about the OpenBlend approach.
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