The Great Resignation & The Future Of Work: Meredith Wells Lepley On How Employers and Employees Are Reworking Work Together
An Interview with Karen Mangia
Developing cultures of psychological safety to boost organizational success.
When it comes to designing the future of work, one size fits none. Discovering success isn’t about a hybrid model or offering remote work options. Individuals and organizations are looking for more freedom. The freedom to choose the work model that makes the most sense. The freedom to choose their own values. And the freedom to pursue what matters most. We reached out to successful leaders and thought leaders across all industries to glean their insights and predictions about how to create a future that works.
As a part of our interview series called “How Employers and Employees are Reworking Work Together,” we had the pleasure to interview Dr. Meredith Wells Lepley.
Dr. Meredith Wells Lepley, PhD, is a workplace psychologist and founder of Workplace Surveys & Solutions, where she combines over 25 years of research and analytics expertise with her passion for helping organizations achieve optimal results. Known for pioneering research on pets in the workplace, her published work also explores flexibility, the multi-generational workforce, workspace personalization, and worksite health promotion programs, earning recognition from major media outlets like The Washington Post, Fast Company, and Psychology Today. An associate professor at USC’s Master of Science in Applied Psychology Program, Dr. Meredith teaches organizational research and data analytics while continuing to shape workplace innovations through her research and consulting.
Thank you for making time to visit with us about the topic of our time. Our readers would like to get to know you a bit better. Can you please tell us about one or two life experiences that most shaped who you are today.
When I was in high school, my parents put our house on the market so they could build a new house. But our house sold very quickly, well before our new house was built, so we had to find a place for us to live for a year or more. They rented a house sight-unseen, and it was horrible — dark like a cave, very little natural light, dark brown everywhere, and dark, dated, dingy shaggy carpet. It was not a pleasant place, and when I would come home from college, I would find myself sleeping excessively. My mother pointed out that perhaps the dark, unattractive house was making me tired, and I was sleeping to escape it. Ah ha! That was the first time I considered the effect that the environment has on our behavior. A few months later, I took an environmental psychology course in college. I was so enamored with it from the very first day that after the first class I called my mom to tell her that I’d discovered what I wanted to do with my life! And I did… shortly thereafter I applied to an environmental psychology PhD program at UC-Irvine where I studied the impact that the work environment has on employees. And I’ve been researching and teaching about employees and their environmental experiences ever since (32 years)!
The second life experience that shaped who I am today occurred many years later. I had worked in academia for many years, and as an academic researcher I conducted research on organizational topics that interested me (e.g., how employees personalize their workspaces, the organizational and psychological benefits of pets in the workplace). My completed research would take many months to see the light of day, because it had to be peer-reviewed by other scholars, revised accordingly, and eventually be published in a journal that likely only a limited group of people — faculty or students — would see. However, about 14 years ago I took a position with the University of Kentucky’s Institute for Workplace Innovation (iwin), a workplace research organization that brought business research to life for our clients (no longer in existence). My research shifted from purely academic to applied — meaning it was conducted specifically to help one of our clients solve one of their business challenges (e.g., determining how engaged their employees were and how best to increase their engagement, determining which shift schedule employees liked best, determining why turnover was so high among a particular group of employees, helping a manager assess her leadership skills). And suddenly my research became useful immediately! I would present the findings to the company executives within days of project completion and see the ah-ha moments on their faces and hear their reactions. I knew that they’d get the ball rolling and begin to implement changes within their organizations the very next day — based on my research! It was thrilling to know my work was having a positive impact on companies and their employees immediately.
Let’s zoom out. What do you predict will be the same about work, the workforce and the workplace 10–15 years from now? What do you predict will be different?
Regarding what will be the same about work…I predict that one of the most important factors to employee satisfaction and engagement will continue to be having meaningful, fulfilling work in which an employee feels they are doing something that interests them and contributing something of value to their organization. Global studies of engagement have found this to be true for years, and I have seen this in my own research with companies. When examining statistically the key predictors of employee engagement, having meaningful work comes in #1 statistically in every study I’ve conducted, no matter the company or industry. And it makes sense, it’s so fundamental to us as humans to want to spend our time doing something we enjoy and that is of value, something that we are able to contribute due to our unique skillset, and something that brings value to a company and its customers. It makes us feel special.
As for what will be different…In the future, lots will be different, and so adaptability and a desire to learn will be key. In the future, more and more knowledge-based work, which many of us do, will be done with AI, so the most in-demand employees will be those with strong AI skills. And as AI continues to develop and get smarter, having critical in-demand skills will be essential.
This impacts the way companies will hire. In the past, many companies hired for attitude or, sadly, “fit.” But with AI’s growth and ability to do many of the tasks that employees have spent hours and hours doing, there is more of a focus on hiring for specific employee skills that will help a business innovate and grow. Skills-based hiring will become much more widespread.
This also affects employees’ expectations of their companies. Now more than ever, employees are demanding learning and development opportunities. Korn Ferry’s recent workforce survey reported that 67% of employees would stay with a company, even if they hated their job, if offered training, upskilling, and opportunities for advancement. This mirrors some findings from surveys I’ve conducted with my clients — a key reason for considering leaving is few opportunities for advancement. Companies who are paying attention to these trends will change up their learning and development programming — both in terms of content and methods. Content will be more AI focused, and methods will be more innovative and include gamification, microlearning, and even virtual reality (VR).
What advice would you offer to employers who want to future-proof their organizations?
Two words: flexible and humble. We know from the pandemic that world events can shift drastically very quickly. Those who survive and thrive will be nimble — not only in their processes and logistics but also in their thinking. Organizations will need to stay flexible and open-minded to the latest research and practices and never get caught in “well, this is just how we do it here” thinking. We’ve seen how well that works, haven’t we, Blockbuster?
Organizations also need to stay humble and understand that sometimes national and international economic conditions work in their favor, and sometimes they work in favor of employees. To futureproof their organizations, they must remain humble — whether they have an ample supply of high-quality job seekers or not — and always maintain a culture that highly values its employees and recognizes that have choices when it comes to where to work and share their talent. Organizations must always focus on providing their employees with the best work environment, tools, resources and supports to do their jobs well and maintain their wellbeing, lest they lose their talent to a more employee-friendly company when market conditions change.
What do you predict will be the biggest gaps between what employers are willing to offer and what employees expect as we move forward? And what strategies would you offer about how to reconcile those gaps?
The biggest gap between what employees expect and what employers are willing to provide going forward will be flexibility, in terms of allowing employees autonomy over when and where they work. Despite proof during and since the pandemic that flexibility works and has numerous benefits, such as more engaged and satisfied employees with higher levels of wellbeing as well as lower absenteeism, a greater ability to attract and retain employees, and a more positive culture, the pendulum seems to have shifted lately and many well-known companies are calling their employees back to the office full-time and reducing the amount of flexibility they offer.
I believe this is sending employees the message that the company doesn’t care about their wellbeing or their needs very much anymore. Based on the evidence that 74% of employees are seeking jobs with flexibility, and that it’s the top-performers who are most likely to leave if they don’t get it, it’s in a company’s best interest to loosen the reigns and compromise. I firmly believe that a full return-to-office mandate could have unwanted ramifications for both employers and employees.
I recommend that company leaders have some strategic planning sessions to seriously consider what their objectives are and how best to meet those objectives in terms of employees. They should consider what are the absolute necessities that are critical to the company’s objectives and where can they lighten up. So instead of requiring 100% of employee time in the office, companies should consider a hybrid approach (some days working in the office, some days working remotely) that obtains the face-time and in-person collaboration that companies believe is so critical for collaboration and culture and yet provides some autonomy and flexibility to employees and allows them to shift their schedules around other life events, responsibilities, and their own best ways of working.
We simultaneously joined a global experiment together last year called “Working From Home.” How will this experience influence the future of work?
The required working from home for many knowledge workers during 2020 and beyond will influence the future of work in at least two ways. First, it proved to many who were slow to adopt the ideas of workplace flexibility that remote work works. Company leaders who beforehand didn’t trust their workers to work remotely — thinking they wouldn’t be working — suddenly realized that remote work does work once they themselves were working remotely and interacting with their employees doing the same. Many companies were just as productive, effective, and revenue-generating during mandated remote work as they were before. In sum, the pandemic demonstrated for everyone that work can happen anywhere — it’s not anchored in one particular place. As Gensler says, work is a process, not a place.
Secondly, required working from home shifted the country to a focus on comfort and feeling. Employees enjoyed work more when they were able to work in more comfortable clothes and more comfortable, softer surroundings. Thus, design firms began shifting their focus from building efficiency (getting the maximum number of employees in a space) to how employees feel in the workspace, their emotional response to the space. And business leaders began paying more attention to their employees’ feelings and emotions.
In fact, I was asked to head up a study for a company who was bringing its employees back to the office on a hybrid-basis (a certain number of days per week) a couple years after the pandemic to study employee emotions and assess how employees were feeling about returning, what challenges they faced, and how they would be using the spaces in the office after working remotely for so long. This company was extremely innovative to be truly interested in their employees’ feelings and experiences returning and to make workplace policy going forward based on what they learned.
So now we understand that work is a process, not a place, and that process must be supported. For knowledge workers, our work usually consists of 4 components: focusing, collaborating, learning, and socializing. Clearly the proportions vary from role to role, but whatever employees are required to do, their environment must support it. Employees can’t be expected produce high-quality outputs if the office in which they are required to work inhibits one or more of these. Employees need a variety of spaces including space for focused, head-down work, space for collaborating with their team — either in-person, online, or a hybrid; private spaces for confidential conversations, space to socialize, bond and build trust with their teams, and space to relax and recharge their batteries.
However, company leaders and workplace designers are beginning to understand that supporting the work alone is not enough. In addition to supporting the work itself, the work environment must also evoke positive feelings, inspiring and motivating employees. Especially now that we realize work is more of a process than a place, and yet more and more organizations are requiring employees to return to the office on a daily basis, business leaders need to understand that if they mandate employees to commute to work in a set place, their employees’ expect that place to be a beautiful, welcoming, high-quality work environment that fully supports them in doing their very best work, in getting into a flow, and enabling them to be engaged, energized, comfortable, and to feel great.
We’ve all read the headlines about how the pandemic reshaped the workforce. What societal changes do you foresee as necessary to support a future of work that works for everyone?
In order for work in the future to work for all, society will need to continue to appreciate diversity (no matter what you call it — that people are all different), and companies will need to step away from “one size fits all” thinking. Companies must realize that their employees work in different roles, perform different tasks with different needs. For example, making everyone return to the office because one segment of employees (e.g., manufacturing teams) cannot work remotely is a “one size fits all” approach that is ineffective and unwise. Businesses must be nimble and strategic rather than using blanket approaches.
What is your greatest source of optimism about the future of work?
My greatest source of optimism about the future of work is that employee experience is still a priority for companies around the globe. Large research organizations (like Gallup) continue to assess employee experience and engagement in the U.S. and around the world annually because research shows — and innovative companies realize — that employees are the heart of an organization. Many companies now have “listening strategies,” clearly designed method of gathering data from their employees to learn about their experience in an effort to ensure it is positive. There is no question that companies with more satisfied and engaged employees are stronger. They are more productive and more profitable and have more loyal customers, lower absenteeism and turnover, and fewer injuries and safety incidents. The best companies continue to realize that for their businesses to thrive, their employees must thrive. That makes me optimistic.
Our collective mental health and wellbeing are now considered collateral as we consider the future of work. What innovative strategies do you see employers offering to help improve and optimize their employee’s mental health and wellbeing?
Control/Autonomy/Flexibility
When I was finishing my dissertation to earn a PhD many years ago, I was at a wedding and was introduced to someone. My husband volunteered that I was about to finish my degree program in environmental psychology, and that person shook my hand and said, “Wow, that’s great. What did you learn?” For a moment I was speechless. How would I summarize five years of graduate work into one brief explanation of a couple of sentences at a party??? After a moment or two, it came to me. “Control,” I replied. So much of what I learned boils down to control. People want control over their environments. They want to be able to alter their environment to support their unique, individual needs for whatever it is they are trying to do. And not only is everyone different from others, but they themselves are also different over time. So, it’s impossible for a stable, unchanging environment to meet everyone’s needs. People must have some control over their environments to be able to alter them to support their needs. That applies to all sorts of environments but especially to work environments. Employees must be able to adjust their lighting to fit their task (fine motor tasks require more light than, say, a work-related conversation), to mask noise so they can concentrate, to adjust their computer screen to reduce glare at certain times of day, to adjust their chair to fit their bodies to reduce workplace injuries, etc.
Control is incredibly important to people. Studies in the 1980s revealed that people exposed to high decibel noise were far less bothered by it if they thought they had control over it and could turn it down if they wanted to — even if they chose not to. Just knowing they had some control and could adjust it if they wanted to — whether they did or not — provided a greater sense of peace and lessened the frustration.
Giving employees the flexibility to control their work lives — when they start their day, when they end their day, where they work — is critical to employee wellbeing. The innovative strategies that companies could implement to improve employee wellbeing center around giving employees control over their work lives.
This is so critical, because stress is a major roadblock to wellbeing, and a big source of stress for many employees is role conflict — conflict between their work responsibilities and their non-work responsibilities (getting their child home from school or to the doctor, taking care of their health by getting exercise, attending a child’s sporting event, etc.). If employees are able to flex their schedule to reduce this role conflict, their wellbeing is much higher! Allowing employees some flexibility in terms of where and when they work is a smart business decision.
Reduce accessibility
Volkswagen made headlines in 2011 when, in an attempt to promote work-life balance and prevent burnout, it began turning off employee email after hours. This was viewed as pretty drastic, but it has inspired more moderate approaches to wellbeing including tech-free zones in certain parts of the workplace and at certain times of the day as well as digital detox retreats for employees.
Relatedly, some companies are trying to give their employees a breather from constantly being accessible and in meetings by scheduling meeting-free days, initiating break times or blocking lunch breaks, and shortening meetings to 30 or 45 minutes so employees can get a break between meetings.
Different types of wellness programs
Some innovative companies are expanding and differentiating their approach to wellness programs. Some are offering mindfulness classes onsite or online, providing online coaches/therapists at no or little cost, offering financial wellness programs to educate employees on financial matters to hopefully prevent some financial challenges that can be so stressful.
And finally, with the rise of AI, companies are now using AI to develop customized wellness plans for their employees based on their age, gender, activity level, type of work, medical history, and more. AI can predict potential health challenges and design programs to help prevent them.
Related to customization, as a survey researcher, I am always an advocate of using surveys to ask employees what specific stressors they are facing and what sort of stress management resources or strategies they would appreciate most.
Culture
But it starts at the top. The company must have a culture that appreciates and fosters employee health and wellbeing, and that begins with the leaders.
There must be a commitment to employee wellness. And if they leaders say health and wellbeing are important but aren’t seen taking advantage of wellness resources, employees won’t do it either. Innovative companies are training their leaders to include their own wellbeing and the wellbeing of employees as part of their role responsibilities. Managers are encouraged to build in mental-health check-ins with their team members and work to destigmatize mental health issues.
It seems like there’s a new headline every day. ‘The Great Resignation’. ‘The Great Reconfiguration’. And now the ‘Great Reevaluation’. What are the most important messages leaders need to hear from these headlines? How do company cultures need to evolve?
The key messages from these headlines were that people (i.e., employees) were rethinking their life choices at a very basic level, not small, minor choices but major life decisions: What do I really want to do? Where do I really want to live? How do I want to spend my time? What bring me pleasure? They were able to step out of their daily, mechanical routine to push “pause” and ask, “Hold up… Is this what I really want?” And in a big, beautiful way, we saw people act on that pause. Some realized, “Hey, this isn’t what I envisioned for myself” and they made changes. As a university professor myself, we saw grad school enrollments jump as people of all ages went back to school to learn new skills and reset their careers on a path that they were more excited about. Employees quit jobs they weren’t passionate about and launched new careers and even started their own businesses more aligned with their interests and passions.
The key lessons that business leaders need to take from these headlines is that their employees have agency, and they take action. If the company hopes to attract and retain and engaged, active, productive workforce, they cannot remain complacent and expect that their employees will stay without feeling a sense of purpose in their work and without feeling valued. They must see their employees as multi-faceted people who are more than the role they perform on the job. They must learn about them and have conversations with them to ensure their many interests and passions are aligned with the company mission and vision. Employees are more engaged with a company and will stay longer when they feel that the work they are doing is meaningful and that their unique skillset is valued and appreciated.
Leaders would be wise to foster a culture in which employees are seen as whole people with a variety of interests, valuable skillsets, dreams and goals. Only then will managers and supervisors have a better understanding of whether their employees are feeling a sense of purpose and connection, beyond merely performing a role, and be able to find opportunities of connection. From an organizational standpoint, it’s far more efficient to invest time and money into retaining and engaging current employees than to lose them and have to recruit, hire, onboard, and train new ones.
What are your “Top 5 Trends To Track In the Future of Work?”
- Focus on employee well-being. Companies will realize that maintaining employee wellbeing is not just good for employees, it’s good for the company’s bottom line. Employees who are well are engaged and productive.
- …and the role that managers play in employee wellbeing. For years we’ve heard that people don’t quit jobs, they quit their bosses. But in Gallup’s Global Workplace 2024 Report, as we see that employees are lonelier than they’ve been in the past and the need to focus on employee wellbeing, there’s now evidence globally that managers play a key role in employee wellbeing, not to mention retention. In fact, I just finished a consulting project with a client company having to rebuild their organization because a key manager left their organization a shell of its former self. This manager was so toxic, so demeaning to employees, that morale was at an all-time low, and over the course of a couple of years, half the staff quit, leaving the remaining staff grossly overworked. And the organization’s reputation in the community was damaged so recruiting was difficult. Organizational leaders in the future will pay more attention to managers and the impact they have on their employees and provide extensive training to manages on best practices in interacting with and supporting their employees’ wellbeing.
- More care and support given to managers. Manager’s jobs aren’t easy. There are benefits that come with being a manager, sure, but managers are more likely to experience negative emotions such as stress, sadness and loneliness than non-managers. And just as moms often are so busy caring for their children that they put themselves last, many managers tend to do the same thing. They often provide support and resources to their employees, but they may not use them themselves. It’s really important that managers take good care of themselves and are supported by the organization with training and resources, because employees are more likely to be engaged in their work if their manager is engaged. Managers must remember to put the oxygen masks on themselves first!
- More skills specialization and thus contract “gig” work. With more skills-based hiring comes the acknowledgement that some skill-specific tasks are not required consistently throughout the year. Some are project-specific, and thus we’ll be seeing more contract work in the coming years. For example, a company may need an employee experience survey conducted once a year, so instead of hiring a full-time survey researcher to their HR or organizational development team, they will likely contract out their survey work. A survey specialist may work for several companies at once.
- Developing cultures of psychological safety to boost organizational success. If a company’s culture is such that employees are terrified of making a mistake or hesitant to point out a problem or suggest an idea for fear of possibly “looking stupid,” that company’s leaders need to turn it around fast! For example, Boeing’s devastating manufacturing problems and the resulting crashes of two Boeing 737 Max airliners have been blamed on a change in company ownership and management style from one in which employees were valued team members who could stop production at any time for concerns…to a very hierarchical style focused on production and productivity with exceedingly little psychological safety for employees. Employees were punished for sharing their thoughts, speaking out and voicing concerns, and sadly we see how that turned out. Innovative companies know the value of psychological safety and encourage open communication, reject the idea that managers and leaders know everything, and recognize that failure is part of growth and innovation. If you’re not failing, you’re not growing. I love the story that Sarah Blakeley, founder of Spanx has shared. Every night at the dinner table, her father would ask her and her brother how they’d failed that day. His attitude was that if his children hadn’t failed, that meant they hadn’t tried anything new, and that was unacceptable. That attitude was instilled in Sarah and guided her persistence to get funding for Spanx, for which millions of women are grateful!
I keep quotes on my desk and on scraps of paper to stay inspired. What’s your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? And how has this quote shaped your perspective?
“The French work to live; Americans live to work.” In their book, “Can We Agree to Disagree: Exploring the Differences at Work Between Americans and the French,” Sabine Landolt and Agathe Laurent highlight the cultural differences in our ways of working based on 50 interviews with Americans and French employees. This quote reminds me to be more French! It is a subtle reminder of my truest priorities in life and helps me resist the societal pressure as well as my natural tendency to overwork.
We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US, with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He, she, or they might just see this if we tag them.
I would love to have a few minutes to talk to Billie Jean King. As a feminist and lifelong tennis fan and player, I would so enjoy thanking her for the impact she’s had not only on women’s tennis — enabling the world to see that women are as talented on the court as men are (with her 39 Grand Slams titles!) and deserving of equal treatment and equal prize money — but also on the sports world beyond tennis including her founding of the Women’s Sports Foundation. She’s such an icon. And, of course, I’d also ask her where she gets her fabulous glasses!
Our readers often like to continue the conversation with our featured interviewees. How can they best connect with you and stay current on what you’re discovering?
They can surely follow me on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/meredithwellslepley/ and check out my website: https://www.surveysandsolutions.com
Thank you for sharing your insights and predictions. We appreciate the gift of your time and wish you continued success and good health.
About The Interviewer: Karen Mangia is one of the most sought-after keynote speakers in the world, sharing her thought leadership with over 10,000 organizations during the course of her career. As Vice President of Customer and Market Insights at Salesforce, she helps individuals and organizations define, design and deliver the future. Discover her proven strategies to access your own success in her fourth book Success from Anywhere and by connecting with her on LinkedIn and Twitter.
