Work journey as soft skill needs more practice

Alike great products and services, we shall be able to design our journey through our carrier. How to design a carrier in advance? No matter what is the role, what is the educational background, we are living a life that surrounds us with such conditions that hard to discover in its complexity. Easy way could be to find a software, a new business application where we input some profile information and have good predictions. These kind of applications can be found in the area of human capital management, there are vendors who offer add-on solutions to basic people management process. There are many approaches to help, motivate and retain human workforce that all employee are support to take benefit on. Some tools concentrate on building better social work-life, some of them stimulates new business ideas. What the employee is looking for is something more, they want to understand the clear expectations and able to express their contribution to the common business purpose. As these matters are soft attributes it is really difficult to define and measure to provide stable, clear picture about the state of a carrier journey. Common players on this field are human recruitment and advisory companies with multiple decades of experience and covering continents with they own proven methodology. But, we see that digitization is a brave, unstoppable concept, a new philosophy that says: no such complicated process exist in business that can not be digitized. Besides manufacturing, logistics the softwares can occupy more and more territories like legal, professional consulting, healthcare, culinary and organization development services, too.

Just another business application? 

Managing employee expectation and measuring it shall be based by a great mass of sciences and  reliable benchmarks. But who can decide, wether the service is satisfactory or not? Finally, the user decides. In the group of business applications the situation is more confused while the common scenario shows that users are not decision makers. Applications are procured on a separate channel, usually being not closely coupled with the real interest of workers. In case of side buying opportunity it possible to exclude the heavy IT justification battle out from the buying. But a new practice shall also be introduced, companies shall enable their employees to choose they software tool themselves or in a group having common business purpose. That way new software will not only be another new tool that is used for a short time, but will really penetrate a new culture of digitization that serves core corporate values.

Lean analytics as power

When we start working in a new place the wish of being accepted is very strong. We want to show up with quick results, our special strength and be admitted by the team where we belong to. Contrary verse we want to know more about others, understand the expectation, the real structure of hierarchy and non formal layers and motivators of the business community around. Therefore the human capital management application shall reflect real, personalized information that helps our integration to the business team. These indicators are not just a corporate standard that is set by the human department, rather personal, simple and might change by time. One aspect to assemble a set of indicators can be the shared values in the team, but might serve us perfectly following some personal milestone of networking goal. No longer is acceptable to define KPIs, fix them for a year and force them onto a staff without having real interest and agreement. Instead of picking a scoring method and suffering with that, it tends to be better to offer an option the clarity and hand over the right of choice to the person, directly to each human involved into the business. Whatever happens, that we can see, understand and consult on - of course with the help of such modern application that can support this way of thinking.

Work-balance

Instead of talking about work-life balance, first set the balance at work. Balance means to keep every influencing matters in order, all the time. The closer environment is the group with whom we are recently working together. We shall also consider besides the close environment the wider organizational scope and beyond. As there are partners and competitors in our business, we shall identify and follow-up their interest and probably make them happy for our mutual fun. These balanced, mutual benefits are the everyday goal and all the tools that help us to keep it, are the right pieces, that shall be searched and used. Besides the organizational, cultural attributes there are physical quantities that we shall mix into our target list. These are the classic ones: time, cost, other quantitative goals. What keep then the balance at work in our life? Soft and countable facts that are clear and important enough to deal with. This fact are seen relative to us and we are in the network of business co-members who practice realtime influence on our performance. When we join these working balance together with our social life we finally come to the work-life state of art.

Soft attributes again and again

The picture around us is influence by soft attributes, in close relation to behaviour science. Wether it falls under the category of psychology, philosophy, organizational development or similar field it remains a question. Sure is that we shall resolve the problem and measurement difficulties here. If we ask good questions and handle the responses properly, all science will become a justification of simple and usable result. That is a right business application that we use with fun for understanding our work environment and keep it in real-time balance.

Changing paradigm

The last decades were spent with digesting more and more tools for automation. Most of them are replaced by software. That hegemony we name digitization. Very soon it is realized that overloading our business with plethora of applications makes even more chaos. New paradigm is arising, it is necessary to find the right aspect how we live with softwares, what are the real functions and services that we need. A how much it worth to learn and use them, in what combination. The human management field is not exception. Careful design of our work-balance is possible. While we ride our journey, we can borrow a lot from modern service design that made already possible to take care of interaction points between human and services to gain good quality of emotional experience on the employee journey.