Insider
Blend Insights: Supportive Leadership
Prerna Kanwar, Senior Product Owner at OpenBlend, explains why having a supportive leader has become a key part of her blend while working remotely.
Prerna Kanwar, Senior Product Owner at OpenBlend, explains why having a supportive leader has become a key part of her blend while working remotely.
Top Ten Blend Elements March 2021
Behind every employee is their optimum work/life Blend: a group of personal and professional drivers that enable them to achieve and reach their potential at work.
Understanding the impact work-life Blend drivers have on employee performance is a vital part of people centric performance management. When businesses get the full picture of what motivates and drives their employees, they can enable them to maximise their personal and professional potential by tailoring management strategies to the individual, not the team. Understanding individual Blend drivers also has a significant impact on employee retention as we move into more hybrid ways of working, a subject we explore a little later on in this blog. And by taking relevant steps to improve employee performance, productivity and wellbeing it has a significant impact on the bottom line.
With pubs and shops throwing open their doors in the UK once more, a much-welcome hustle and bustle has returned to the UK’s workforce. At OpenBlend, we’re excited to see how the latest milestone in the lockdown emergence will affect employee’ work/life Blend drivers and how businesses continue to adapt to hybrid working models. But first of all, let’s look back at our most interesting findings for the month of March.
The Top Ten Blend Drivers for March 2021
Health and exercise remains undefeated as the top Blend driver
"Health and exercise is yet again the undisputed king of the Blend this month – it’s been at the top spot all year, with 63% of OpenBlend users picking it as a key driver for their performance in March. Not only that, but it has consistently outranked all of the other 27 drivers in the Blend for OpenBlend users by over 10% since the beginning of last year.
Over the course of the pandemic, employees have placed a big emphasis on the impact that exercise on their wellbeing and work performance, and so they should. The UK Chief Medical Officers' physical activity guidelines state that for good physical and mental health, adults should aim to be physically active every day. Any activity is better than none, and more is better still. But are businesses showing employees that they care about their physical and mental health just as much as they do?
Perhaps you can launch a new yoga class on Friday mornings, help employees buy exercise equipment, launch cycle-to-work schemes (with offices set to reopen from June) or encourage regular ‘office hour’ breaks that involve getting the endorphins running on the clock. These are just a few of the actions businesses can take to help their employees close the Blend gap and reach their targets.
When you get your employees blood pumping, businesses will be sure to see much healthier results too.
Making a difference at work is ever increasing as a key Blend driver
Making a difference has seen an increase in popularity amongst OpenBlend users, with 45% choosing it as a key driver in March. But what does ‘making a difference at work’ mean exactly? For some employees it might mean developing innovative solutions , while for others it might lie in knowing that their actions are having a positive impact on the company objectives, making a valuable contribution to their team’s project or directly supporting their customers.
OpenBlend allows users to define what making a difference means to them. In doing so, it provides managers and businesses insight into where employees might feel undervalued in their current role. It also empowers employees to take action, and double down on their objectives, which will leave them, and your business, much better off.
Flexible working culture makes another return this year as a key Blend driver amongst 32% of our user base
Now here’s an interesting development; 32% of OpenBlend users selected flexible working culture as a key Blend driver in March, making it reappear yet again in 2021 as one of the Top Ten Blend Elements recorded by our users. What’s more, users have selected an average target score of 90% for this element of their Blend, highlighting the extent to which the ongoing pandemic is driving the importance of a flexible working culture and the shift towards the hybrid working model.
Recent research by LiveCareer found that 81% of employees today enjoy working remotely, 65% state remote work has positively affected their work-life balance and 60% of working professionals have grown more productive while working from home - while almost 30% of remote workers said that they’d quit if they weren’t allowed to continue remote work. So what does this tell us?
Businesses need to work harder, right now, to understand individual performance drivers
With many trends pointing to the fact that employees may look to change roles or even quit as a result of ‘inflexible working culture’ after the pandemic - the ability to work remotely elsewhere is set to open up the labour market.
According to the CIPD labour market outlook, the net employment score - which measures the difference between the proportion of employers expecting to increase staff levels and those who expect to decrease staff levels – has risen to +11 from –1 last quarter. This is the first time since the pandemic that the figure has entered positive territory.
Understanding individual Blend drivers is about more than employee wellbeing. It directly correlates to output and in a competitive job market, it’s the difference between your most talented employees keeping their valuable skills in your business or taking them elsewhere.
The Solution
OpenBlend is the only performance management tool that connects the business with the employee and enables managers and employees to engage in effective, meaningful and regular one-to-ones focussing on everything that impacts an individual’s productivity and personal fulfillment. With insight into what drives your employees to achieve and work at their best, people strategies can be created that are tailored to the individual. Ensuring that employee’s needs are met provides the assurance that they’ll stay in the business and not go elsewhere, at the same time as driving productivity, engagement and performance.
When managers can see where the gaps are in their employee’s Blend, they can devise solutions to close those gaps. One size does not fit all, which is why a people-centric approach to performance management remains so important in the ever-shifting world of work.
To find out how OpenBlend’s people centric management approach can revolutionise your workforce, book a demo with us today. You can also call us on 01628 613040 or email hello@openblend.com.
