Surviving a World of Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity, and Ice

The term VUCA stands for “volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.” It was created to describe the sociopolitical situation in Russia and other eastern European nations during the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s.¹ It is often used to describe the chaotic nature of the modern world as though this sort of environment is new, but there are many examples throughout history of people facing VUCA situations. For example, many people's ancestors migrated across oceans in the 19th century to start new lives on different continents. They crossed mountain ranges in wagons without roads and built homes in the wilderness with no electricity or other modern forms of technology. Imagine the VUCA they faced.

History demonstrates that people are good at adapting to the challenges of a VUCA environment provided certain conditions exist. These conditions are largely about how they mentally experience the situation they are in. An exceptional illustration is the story of Ernest Shackleton's expedition to cross Antarctica in 1914. After their ship became trapped and crushed by ice, they drifted for 15 months until the ice flow broke up. Part of the crew crossed 800 miles of stormy open ocean in a small open boat to seek aid. The members of Shackleton's expedition spent 20 months in a freezing, extremely hostile environment, yet all 27 members survived. Shackleton knew that “in this environment his greatest enemies were high levels of anxiety and disengagement, as well as a slow-burning pessimism.”² He used language and actions such as giving his own mittens to a colleague to demonstrate commitment to everyone's safety and health. He stressed the most important purpose of the mission was to get everyone home alive. He worked to make sure the men believed survival was possible, so they would not lose hope. He organized activities and celebrated holidays to build camaraderie and lift people's spirits. He also emphasized the importance of small kindnesses like saying “please” and “thank you” to ensure people felt appreciated by their colleagues. Shackleton and his men relied on exceptional sailing and navigation skills to overcome their challenges, but how they psychologically experienced this extreme VUCA situation was fundamental to their survival.

People are the one constant in any organization. Companies can exist without actual products, services, or profits. This is the initial state of many startup companies. But a company without people is just a legal document. An organization is, at its core, an organization of people. People are also the most effective resource that companies have for dealing with change, provided they are the right people, in terms of skills and capabilities, and they work together in the right way. Working together the right way comes from creating the right employee experiences. Shackleton's crew consisted of the right people in terms of skills, but their survival was a result of experiencing adversarial changes in a way that transformed them into a confident, resilient, and supportive team.

This chapter discusses the role that employee experience plays in building adaptable workforces that can survive and thrive in a world being reshaped by the talent tectonic forces of digitalization and demographics. It begins with a discussion of the unique role that people play as the one constant in a world of change. It explains the three kinds of experience that affect how people experience work, and why these are critical for building an adaptable workforce. It then looks at factors that affect how companies understand, shape, and manage employee experience. The chapter concludes with a discussion of employee experience from the perspective of four key stakeholder groups within an organization: employees, managers, leaders, and support functions.

People: A Constant Resource in a Changing World

People often talk about companies needing to pivot in response to change. Figure skaters and dancers know that pivoting requires having a stable point to pivot from. In a similar fashion, creating an adaptive company requires understanding the stable components of the organization that are not changing. These stable resources are the ones companies need to master to navigate change, and the most constant and valuable of these resources are the people in the organization.

Figure 2.1 illustrates the three things that determine the performance of an organization:

• People: the individuals in the workforce who carry out activities to support the organization's mission and strategy. This includes full- and part-time employees as well as contractors.
• Resources: tools, materials, technology, finances, and other assets that can be accessed by the workforce to achieve company objectives.
• Environment: the business market or social setting where the organization is situated. This includes external stakeholders that influence the organization's success such as customers, business partners, and government agencies.

An organization is successful when the people in its workforce use the resources available to them to capitalize on opportunities and overcome challenges in its environment. Resources can swiftly change due to technological innovations, supply chain shortages, or access to financial capital. The environment can be altered due to changes in consumer preferences, government regulations, and other economic, social, or environmental events. The one factor in organizations that does not change much is the psychology of the people in its workforce. An organization can change the size and composition of its workforce through staffing and change the attitudes and skills of its workforce through management and development. But the fundamental psychological attributes and processes that influence people's motivation, performance, development, and well-being at work stay relatively constant over time.³ We cannot be certain what the future of work will look like, but we can be certain organizations will always involve groups of people working together using shared resources to accomplish shared or complementary goals. Even if the structures of organizations radically change, organizations will still consist of people cooperating to achieve mutually beneficial outcomes. This makes the psychology of people one of the few things that does not change within companies. It also makes understanding employee psychology critical to building resilient and adaptable organizations.

People's behavior is a function of what they can do, what they want to do, and what they believe they are able to do. This is determined by various abilities, traits, needs, and aptitudes that are remarkably stable from one generation to the next. The abilities, motivations, and personality traits that guided people's actions in our great-grandparents' generations are very similar to those found in the generations of people currently working. This is one of the reasons why stories told in Shakespearian plays written more than 400 years ago still feel relevant today. What people can do and want to do does not change that much. This might seem counter to statements frequently made in the popular press that suggest employees belonging to different generations are radically different from one another. These statements tend to be both ageist and wrong. Longitudinal research on generational differences and employee attitudes suggests that what people fundamentally want from a job has not changed much over the years.⁴ These studies analyzed job interest data collected from millions of students and recent graduates during different decades dating back to the 1920s. They found that, at a basic level, what people want from work has not changed much from one generation to the next. Regardless of when they were born, most employees want jobs that provide some sense of meaning, challenge and career growth, fair compensation, pleasant and safe working conditions, a reasonable level of work-life balance, and some degree of stability. What does change a lot due to socioeconomic and technological shifts are people's beliefs about their ability to get these things and how they go about getting them.

People often confuse differences in labor market realities with changes in generational attitudes. For example, skilled college graduates entering the labor market in the 2020s have access to far more job opportunities than college graduates did in the 1980s. This means job candidates graduating now can demand more from employers. Graduates in the 1980s wanted many of the same things that graduates want now, but they could not get them given the labor market at that time. One of the most influential business books in 1950s, The Organization Man, spoke of people being stuck in meaningless, unfulfilling jobs because they did not have the opportunity to pursue their true career passions.⁵ If our grandparents and great-grandparents had job search technology like Google and LinkedIn, how different their careers might have been! It is also common to attribute changes caused by life situations with generational differences. People do change as they age, but these changes have little to do with what generation they belong to. For example, what employees want from work changes as they gain career experience.⁶ Early career employees are usually more interested in development and advancement than more tenured employees. This is true regardless of age. The career interests of a 40-year-old finishing college after raising children are likely to be more similar to their 20-year-old classmates than their 40-year-old spouse with 18 years of job tenure. The main reason generations have different career interests is because younger employees are more likely to be in earlier career stages. Another major factor is changes in nonwork obligations, such as raising children and paying for home mortgages. Employees' willingness to take financial risks and switch jobs tends to change as they age because family responsibilities and financial situations often change as they grow older.⁷

There are two areas that do change significantly from one generation to the next: expectations about use of technology and attitudes toward social values.⁸ How we grow up shapes what we expect when we start working. For example, people born after 2000 are the first employees who have had access to mobile smartphone technology since they were very young. This affects their expectations for how people can and should communicate. They are more likely to expect their employer to use mobile communication technology because it is how they conduct their lives outside of work.⁹ People born after 2000 also grew up in a time when women are as educated and active in the workforce as men. As a result, they may hold different social beliefs about the role of women in the workplace compared to previous generations that grew up in a time when fewer women went to college and worked. One reason younger employees may be more vocal about workplace change is because they want to work in a world that mirrors the technology and social values they experienced growing up. Older employees might take solace by saying things at work are better than they used to be, but if you are young then there is no “used to be”; there is only the way it should be now.

Although there are differences between generations in terms of social values and technology expectations, the basic things people want from work are remarkably constant regardless of age or era.¹⁰ Similarly, the things that make people successful in their jobs do not vary much with age. This includes the widespread myth that young people are better at learning technology.¹¹ Older people may be less interested in using a new form of technology, but that does not mean they are less capable of learning how to use it. In sum, people are the most constant and valuable resource organizations have for managing change, but only if the company is able to hire the people with the right skills and capabilities and manage them in the right way. This requires understanding the basic psychology of people as it relates to how they view work and how they respond to change, and then using this knowledge to create employee experiences that support the creation of engaged and adaptable workforces.

The Employee Experience and Workforce Adaptability

The success of an organization hinges on building a workforce capable of executing the company's strategy, including adapting to changes when necessary. Regardless of a company's industry or geography, changes are bound to occur that will require it to rethink its strategic direction or operational approach. These could be a result of economics, technology, regulations, labor markets, consumer preferences, or other factors. Companies may be unable to forecast when these changes will happen, but once they start, companies must quickly adapt. A critical part of adaptation is getting employees to do things in the future that are different from what they did in the past, even if it means abandoning practices and activities that had once made the company successful. I am often asked, “How can we train employees to be adaptable?” My response is that this is the wrong question. People are born adaptable. The competitive advantage of humans as a species is our ability to adapt to changing environments. It is called learning. The question is not how to teach people to adapt but how to create employee experiences that unlock people's innate adaptive ability.

Historically, companies focused on staffing jobs and managing people to maximize their productivity. People are most productive when they are doing things they already know how to do. Management methods built on productivity emphasize efficiency and performance. They focus on providing people with clear job direction, educating them with targeted learning activities, and motivating them through tangible rewards. These methods work when the goal is to maximize productivity in doing repetitive tasks in familiar work environments.¹² But they often fail when the goal is to maximize people's ability to adapt to new environments and master constantly changing activities. Managing for adaptability requires understanding the psychological factors that influence how people respond to change. This starts with dispelling the myth that people fear change. People do not fear change. What they fear is poorly managed change. They also fear change that leads to losing valuable resources or being forced to do things they do not want to do. But change in the right conditions for the right reasons is exhilarating. It is the feeling of developing new capabilities, overcoming challenges, and achieving meaningful goals. If you hear a leader blame a failed strategy on employees' supposed fear of change, what you are really hearing is a leader who does not know how to inspire employees to adapt.

Companies may not be able to control the change employees experience, but they can influence how employees experience change. When faced with significant change people adopt either a survival or growth mindset. When employees adopt a survival mindset, they become skeptical, cautious, and protective. They experience change in terms of potential loss and work to resist it or minimize its impact. When employees adopt a growth mindset, they approach change with a sense of commitment, engagement, and confidence.¹³ They may recognize risks associated with the change, but view the change primarily based on the opportunities it provides to achieve new things and develop new capabilities. Whether employees adopt a survival versus growth mindset is influenced by whether their experience of work meets two basic, innate psychological needs: a sense of achievement and a sense of confidence.

A sense of achievement is about tying work to something that is meaningful to employees. People are born with an innate desire to accomplish meaningful goals. We like doing things that give us a feeling of accomplishment. This is reflected in things as basic as an infant's desire to crawl across the floor.¹⁴ Why do babies work so hard to learn to walk and speak? Because it instinctively feels good to achieve something that provides a sense of personal agency and accomplishment. The feeling that work is meaningful gives employees a sense of achievement and purpose to their efforts. This creates energy and desire to persist in the face of challenges. When work taps into this innate desire to accomplish meaningful goals, employees are more committed to finding ways to be successful in the face of change. For work to be meaningful, employees must have ownership over activities that they perceive as making a difference in something they care about. At one level, this may be tied to having a sense of job security and the ability to make enough money to provide for their families. But for most people, it is also about doing work that has social meaning¹⁵ (e.g., helping others) or doing work that enables them to achieve goals that align with their own sense of self-identity and self-actualization¹⁶ (e.g., fulfilling career goals). A key part of managing for adaptability is ensuring employees see a connection between their work and something that matters to them beyond simply punching a clock and getting a paycheck.

A sense of confidence comes from employees believing they have the capability to be successful. When employees lose confidence in the face of change, they give up, withdraw, or fall into despair. Confidence comes in part from employees feeling they have the knowledge, skills and resources needed to be successful. Another often more important factor that influences confidence is the people employees work with. Employees are far more confident and committed when they feel a sense of belongingness and support from those around them. An important part of managing for adaptability is creating connections and supportive relationships among employees who are facing similar challenges or have shared goals.

As the pace of change accelerates, companies must create employee experiences that lead to adapting growth mindsets in the face of challenges. This requires connecting jobs to activities and goals employees find meaningful and ensuring their work provides a sense of agency and achievement. It is also about making sure employees feel confident that they have the resources and knowledge to overcome obstacles and achieve their goals and belong to a community of people who value them and want them to succeed.

Creating Effective Employee Experiences

To be successful in a fast-moving world, companies need to create workforces that are productive and agile. Employees must execute on strategic goals while simultaneously finding ways to adapt to unforeseen challenges and changes. This requires creating employee experiences that attract the right talent, engage high levels of performance, support employee development and adaptability, and foster a growth mindset. This comes from actively managing three different kinds of employee experiences (see Figure 2.2):

• Fulfillment experience: does my job provide the things I want from work? This is tied to concepts in psychology called intrinsic and extrinsic motivation¹⁷ that influence whether work provides a sense of achievement. Employee fulfillment can come in the form of extrinsic, external factors resulting from work, such as making money or having resources to provide for their families. It can also be tied to intrinsic, internal factors, such as the opportunity to do work they enjoy, helping them fulfill professional career goals, or enabling them to contribute toward achieving some higher-level purpose related to improving society or the planet. Employees' experience of fulfillment depends on all these factors to some degree, but the importance of each factor varies across individuals.
• Task experience: is it easy to get things done? This is about providing employees with tools, knowledge, and resources to accomplish their goals at work. At the most basic level, task experience influences our confidence that we can be successful. This is tied to a concept in psychology called self-efficacy, the belief that we can achieve our goals through effort.¹⁸ Positive task experiences make employees feel efficient and productive. Poor task experiences create frustration and a sense that the company does not appreciate the value of employees' time or skills.¹⁹ If you have ever cursed in frustration at your smartphone or computer, you know how a bad task experience feels. Extremely bad task experiences can lead an employee to quit or stay on the job but give up trying.

  

• Social experience: do I like the people I work with and how we work together? This is about creating supportive and inclusive cultures and teams. It is tied to concepts in psychology called belongingness and need for affiliation, which reflect the importance of feeling part of a group that values and cares for us.²⁰ Good social experiences make employees feel welcomed, appreciated, and supported. Bad social experiences make employees feel isolated, alienated, overlooked, and annoyed. Humans are social animals and do not do well if they feel isolated, excluded, or alone. This is particularly true when people are under pressure or in situations in which there is a risk of failure.²¹

Any experience at work can be viewed from three perspectives: does it help employees accomplish what they want to do, is it making efficient use of their time, and do they feel supported by others when they are doing it. Ideally the answer is yes to all three, but in reality employees make trade offs between them. It is easier to do a relatively unfulfilling job if we work with people we enjoy. We are willing to overcome bad task experiences if we believe in the purpose of our work. However, if any one of these experiences falls below a certain level for an extended amount of time, then jobs become unpleasant, stressful, and intolerable.ⁱ In addition, the more stress we are under the more critical these experiences become. These three types of employee experience also affect a company's ability to attract and retain talent. People are more likely to apply and remain in positions that allow them to do work they find meaningful that fulfills both the internal and external things they want from a job. A major factor affecting retention is the people we work with and the sense of belongingness we feel toward the company. Last, although people are unlikely to join a company simply because it is easy to get things done, they will quit a company if it does not provide the tools and resources they need to succeed.

Employee Experience Management and Business Performance

Employee experience management is about shaping the experiences employees have at work to create more productive and adaptable organizations. More specifically, it is about managing “the beliefs, feelings, attitudes, and behaviors resulting from one's job experiences.”²² The experiences employees have at work play a critical role in their ability to cope with stress, manage change, and deliver and maintain high levels of creativity, service, and performance.²³ Growing skills shortages also make providing employees with a rewarding and compelling employee experiences critical to attracting, engaging, developing, and retaining talent.

Managing employee experience involves understanding the links among company actions, employee experiences, and business results (see Figure 2.3). Company actions do not directly affect business outcomes. Company actions change the workplace, these changes affect how employees experience work, which in turn leads employees to change their behavior, which affects business outcomes. For example, if a company changes its pay structure, the immediate impact is a change in the employee experience working for the company. Employees may feel the new pay structure makes their work more or less fulfilling and meaningful. In some cases, they may not notice the change at all. Then, depending on how employees feel about this new experience, they might decide to work harder, less hard, or quit entirely. This will affect their accomplishments, which in turn affect business operations.

Employee experience management involves balancing employee interests and company goals. It is rooted in simple truth: employees do not do things because the company wants them to do them; employees do things because they want to do them. This truth was often overlooked in the past when workforce management processes were mainly built on company needs. Employee experience was treated as an afterthought and discussed only when the company tried to create “what's in it for me” (WIIFM) arguments to persuade employees to adopt the process. When these WIIFM arguments failed, methods were used to force compliance such as withholding compensation until employees completed a required form or action. Effective employee experience management requires looking at company and employee needs simultaneously. This is not about putting employee needs above company needs. It is about putting them on the same level. The best employee experiences happen when the company is successful. Working for a company in financial trouble is rarely fun. Companies that do not put adequate emphasis on goals such as profitability and growth will eventually go under, which is not good for the company or its employees. The best employee experiences happen when there is an optimal balance between what employees want and what the company needs to achieve.

Understanding and Improving Employee Experiences

The key to creating successful, agile organizations lies in recognizing that the company cannot achieve what it needs to if it does not consider what employees want. This requires understanding the experiences employees are having and how they compare to their expectations. This is achieved by asking and listening to employees about their work experiences. One way to do this is to simply talk with employees on a regular basis. Every company should do this, but there is a limit to what can be learned about employee experience solely through conversations. This is why companies use different technologies to collect employee experience data such as surveying candidates' attitudes filling out job applications, getting online feedback from employees on the value of a training course, using natural language parsing technology to measure the sentiment expressed by employees in online job communities, using wearable technologies to track how the physical layout of an office influences employee interactions and collaboration, and leveraging pulse surveys combined with advanced qualitative and quantitative analytical tools to measure employee attitudes.

Employee experience data enable companies to get inside the heads of employees to understand what is and is not working well. Traditional workforce data such as headcount, turnover, course completion, and qualifications metrics provide insight into who is in the organization, what they know, and what they are doing. But it does not tell us why employees are doing different things or how they feel about the things they are doing. By contrast, experience management data provide insight into how employees feel about things they are doing and experiencing at work, and why they feel this way. The value of experience management data might be compared to having the sound turned on when watching a movie. You can see what the actors are doing in a movie with the sound turned off, but it is hard to determine what is driving the actors' actions when you cannot hear them express their thoughts and feelings. In this sense, experience management data turn the sound on for business leaders seeking to understand their workforce. It provides companies with insight into the underlying attitudes of employees, the factors that influence these attitudes, and how these attitudes affect employee behavior and business outcomes.

Employee experience management involves using experience management data to shape positive employee experiences to create more effective organizations. It is about understanding and managing three things: (1) the expectations employees have prior to the experience: what employees think should happen at work; (2) the work environments that shape experience: what actually happens at work; and (3) the interpretations employees draw from the experience: how employees feel about what happened at work and how they choose to respond as a result. To illustrate these concepts, consider the following examples of managing employee experience.

• Establishing expectations. Based on analyzing experience survey data, a financial services company learned that many employees felt the work demands in the organization were excessive. Employees who were dissatisfied with work-life balance were also more likely to quit. When shown these results, the CEO agreed that the company expected more from employees than most organizations but noted that it also shared more of its financial rewards with employees than most companies. Rather than change a culture that had made the company successful, the company changed the hiring process to give employees a realistic preview of what it was like to work there. It hired employees who expected and wanted the experience of working in a company that was highly demanding but that also provided very high levels of financial rewards.
• Changing environments. A technology company was struggling to retain salespeople, so it conducted a study to understand what they disliked about their job experiences. Salespeople enjoyed the process of selling the technology but disliked having to perform post-sales activities that focused on customer support issues. They believed these support activities were important, but they went into sales because they like selling new solutions, which is very different from maintaining solutions after they have been sold. To create a better experience for the sales force, the company created and staffed a new function focused specifically on post-sales customer support.
• Influencing interpretations. A consumer goods company found itself the target of union-organizing activities. The company was surprised because it offered compensation and benefits that matched or exceeded what employees would receive as union members. What they learned was many employees did not understand the value of these benefits. Employees were paid fairly, but they did not feel like they were. The company put communication methods in place to explain the competitive nature of their pay and benefits packages. The company also encouraged employees to voice concerns about compensation and other issues to company leaders. When employees better understood how they were paid and felt they were being listened to about their needs, the union-organizing activities stopped.

All the companies in these examples improved employee experience, but only one changed the work experience itself. The other two focused on shaping expectations and perceptions of work experiences.

Addressing the Subjective Nature of the Employee Experience

A challenge to managing employee experience is the subjective nature of experience itself. Two employees can have the exact same work experience and perceive it differently based on their expectations or interpretations. Experiences that matter a lot to some people may be of little consequence to others, and experiences some people view positively can be viewed negatively by others. For example, next time you are on an airplane, strike up a conversation with the person sitting next to you about whether passengers should bring pets onto planes. Some people think having a dog next to their feet greatly improves the travel experience, some think it makes it worse, and others do not care much one way or the other. The subjective nature of experience raises several important questions. What experiences matter the most to people? Where should the company focus efforts to improve the employee experience? What is the best way to balance the competing needs of a diverse workforce consisting of people who may not all want the same thing? There is no simple way to answer these questions, but the following four strategies can help:

• Do not waste people's time. If there is one universally disliked experience, it is spending time on tasks that we feel are unimportant, overly difficult, or inefficient. Collect experience data to find activities that are despised by employees as taking too much of their time. Then look for ways to simplify, automate, or eliminate the activity.
• Use technology to identify employee experience issues. It is impossible for company leaders to fully understand what employee experience is like in the organization without using surveys or some other technology solution to measure employee attitudes and perceptions. The experiences leaders have at work are not the same as their employees, and many employees will not candidly share their experiences with leaders particularly if the things bothering them have no simple solution. In large companies there is also no way a leader can efficiently gather experience data from across the entire organization. Whatever data they gather from one group of employees may not reflect the experiences of others elsewhere in the company. Having technology-enabled processes for measuring and interpreting experience data is critical to identify what employee experiences are having the biggest impact on the company, whether for good or bad.
• Avoid managing based on “average” experiences. Different employees can have very different experiences of work, even if they are in the same job in the same location working for the same manager. This was strongly demonstrated when companies shifted to remote work in 2020. Average employee engagement scores went up during this period with most people welcoming the ability to work remotely. But engagement went way down for employees who did not have good home office environments or who struggled with being physically isolated away from their colleagues. It is important to remember there is no such thing as an average employee.²⁴ Every employee responds to work experiences in a different way depending on their past history, personality, job objectives, and life situation. In addition, the most memorable work experiences for some employees could be things that other employees never experience at all. For example, a study found that employee experiences related to health care coverage are very important for employees in the United States, where health care is tied to employment but are relatively unimportant to employees in other parts of the world.²⁵ The top five most memorable “moments that matter” in the study were experiencing discrimination, taking maternity or paternity leave, relocating for work, being passed over for a promotion, and establishing a flexible work arrangement. Many employees will never experience any of these things, and it is unlikely they'd show up in the top 10 experience concerns of a company. But they are experiences companies should be aware of when they happen.
• Recognize that some employees' opinions may matter more than others. The goal of employee experience management is not to make everyone's job easy and fun. It is to create a work environment in which employees are engaged, committed, productive, and impactful. Some employees are more productive than others, and the things valued by these productive employees may be different from their less productive colleagues. For example, highly committed employees tend to value access to training or technology that makes them more effective in their jobs. Less committed employees may emphasize things like office perks that make their job environment more pleasant. Showing preference to some employees' interests over others can make certain employees feel less valued and must be done with caution. But no company has unlimited resources to devote to improving the employee experience. It is important to invest resources where they will have the greatest ROI on company performance.

A final note about measuring and managing employee experience. Do not ask people's opinion about their employee experiences if you are unable or unwilling to act on what they say. Employees can accept that not all their work experiences will be ideal, but they strongly dislike being asked for their input if what they say does not seem to matter.

The Employee Experience and Organizational Stakeholders

An old saying goes, “work is not supposed to be fun, that's why it is called work.” This saying was accepted as a reality by many people in the past. People did not work to have great employee experiences, they worked to get money and other things they valued. Historically, many activities associated with work were not particularly enjoyable and some were physically dangerous. As long as employees got paid, they expected to endure unpleasant employee experiences to some degree. The talent tectonic forces of digitalization and demographics are reshaping this view of work. Part of this has to do with attracting and retaining talent. Skills shortages make it possible for people to demand good employee experiences or go to another employer. The other even more critical reason is because the activities associated with work are changing. If companies want people to be creative, collaborative, adaptable, resilient, caring, and empathetic then they need to create work environments that make people feel confident, efficient, supported, included, and appreciated. As we will discuss in subsequent chapters, this requires changing how companies address the seven perennial workforce challenges outlined in Chapter 1 associated with designing organizations, staffing roles, developing capabilities, engaging employees, increasing efficiency, ensuring compliance, and building culture. But it also requires changing the capabilities and mindsets of the four major stakeholder groups within an organization: leaders, managers, employees, and support functions.