The New Shape of Work interview series 
addresses  the challenges and uncertainty in the current business environment with a focus on how to transition to a more agile workforce for the future.

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Employee engagement is critical, but with headlines talking about the great resignation, the great reassessment, the great resentment, we may be getting some of it wrong. It speaks to this incredible period of introspection that we just had and people rethinking their relationship with work.

We are joined two Mercer leaders with a strong focus on employee experience -  Robyn Bachochin, Partner in our Career business, and Lewis Garrad, Singapore business leader – to discuss how we can effectively engage talent in the current economic climate.

Interesting moments:

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    We are seeing many people forming a different relationship with their work and therefore with their employer. And that shift is causing organisations and HR functions and leaders to find that perhaps strategies and tactics that they'd used in the past are less effective than they would like.

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    More and more the conversations that we're having, particularly in the industries of health care, hospitality, retail is around burnout and the nature of work. And to be frank, a lot of employees are telling us that their jobs are awful. That they're just feeling really challenged, really high levels of stress and burnout and frustration on a daily basis. And so we’re starting to see some employers in those spaces really look at work design and how work is getting done.

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    Employers are still trying to think through what does flexibility look like and how do we extend that to our hourly workforce? I know of one organisation that was really looking at changing the dynamics of their shifts, and rather than having three eight-hour shifts, looking at something like four six-hour shifts. And also looking for other ways to make those hourly jobs more attractive, or to be more accommodating to hourly workers.

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    Forcing people to go back to the office is very difficult. So you need to figure out other ways in which to create these shared experiences, these rituals so that people will then start to feel really in sync. And it could be to be physically present with each other. You don't probably need to do it as often as you thought you did, but it needs to be there. It needs to be consistent, and you need to understand the underlying psychological purpose in order to be able to do it effectively.

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Refocusing on employee experience in a challenging climate

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