The feminist movement in the 70s used a metaphor to define the battle for gender equality: breaking the “glass ceiling”. It’s a metaphor that has never been more relevant, especially when we read shocking statistics about women across all areas of life.
Statistics such as this: just 1.3 million out of 6 million companies in Italy are lead by women. Even though women have had the right to vote in the country for over 75 years, there’s never been a female Head of State or Government. What’s more, female representation in politics is still a lot lower than in other European states.
The social gender gap continues to be a weak spot in western democracy. The Gender Gap Report by the World Economic Forum shows that women are the only majority that are still treated as though they were a minority group. That’s why talking about female empowerment has become a sort of international mantra. A mantra that’s sometimes mistreated.
We’ve seen some little signs of movement recently, though. In 2021, Italy hosted the G20 summit. It was the first conference on gender equality in history, where President Mario Draghi highlighted that he’d adopted a “roadmap to reach and exceed the Brisbane target, closing the gender gap at work by 25% by 2025 in G20 countries”.
So the gender gap and female empowerment are two sides of the same coin. Both need to be worked on in parallel for women to have a real and concrete presence across all levels of society. There are so many ways to get there, from a different approach to leadership to a fairer approach to salaries and welfare packages. We could even go so far as to champion equality of rights and responsibilities, starting with nuclear families and flowing right through to workplaces. One thing is for certain: the world needs a new way of looking at things. It needs new solutions.
But while women have the same opportunities as men, until they are able to compete for the same potential and objectives, this social, cultural and economic change will never happen. They need to have their voices heard, without having to change their way of being.
It’s not about letting women run on the same race track as men. Instead, we need to change the track to make it more suitable in welcoming the potential that each gender has to offer.
One of the roads we could take is an approach based on management models that focus on harmony in diversity and inclusion. This begins with favoring the link between corporate “Learning Cultures” and promoting D&I.
According to a Harvard Business Review survey, companies that focus on a learning culture are not only oriented towards increased learning, flexibility and mental openness. They’re also more likely to innovate and adapt to new situations.
So, if the world of work started to look at things differently, companies would gain so much. An open corporate culture that welcomes multiple roles and different identity dimensions (through care, collaboration and trust) will be able to strengthen wellbeing, engagement and productivity at work.
A culture that focuses on learning is a way of amplifying different voices that bring new ways of facing challenges and resolving problems. According to research, increasing the level of diversity and inclusion within companies goes hand in hand with putting the emphasis on learning at work.
Learning can be developed on so many levels, from the individual to groups within the company. The managers’ roles remain central, becoming ‘changemakers’ in relation to the status quo. They also understand how to manage or build new systems that focus on learning, where women can offer a new and precious perspective. It’s a way of ensuring that their potential is considered equal to their male counterparts. Maybe once we’ve done that, we can really be proud of hosting the G20 2021 in Rome.
What makes life worth living? It’s a question we rarely ask ourselves, because we already know the answer… Or would we rather not know? Not know how much our life resembles the answer we would give, how much meaning we give to the things we own, rather than seeking things that are meaningful for us? Well, the good news is that pandemics encourage this kind of reflection. Pandemics, but also other major life events: losing someone, giving birth, falling sick, learning something. These events inevitably slow us down and reveal the hidden mechanisms that regulate our lives, making them visible, hence vulnerable, questionable, improvable.
That’s why the results of this year’s Pew Research Center research are even more interesting to look at. The ambitious survey interviewed 19,000 respondents in 17 countries, in order to find out “what makes our lives meaningful.” Notably, the questionnaire wasn’t made of close-ended questions. Instead, researchers extracted data from the respondents’ narratives. A bold decision enabled by technology: rather than establishing what to find in advance, technology allowed to extract it straight from the complexity of human narrative, hence opening up to many more discoveries.
So, here is the question asked in the very same way, across the 17 countries, including Italy:
“We’re interested in exploring what it means to live a satisfying life. Please take a moment to reflect on your life and what makes it feel worthwhile – then answer the question below as thoughtfully as you can. What about your life do you currently find meaningful, fulfilling or satisfying? What keeps you going and why?”
Who knows whether, in the days after the interviews, the Pew Research investigators have checked the mood of those who answered the question. In fact, there are at least two questions: the first is what keeps us going, what pushes us out of bed in the morning, in our cars, to the office, travelling, working, planning, pushing, pulling, back and forth, without interruption. The second is about the why: why do we do it? In the end, the research only mapped one type of question which combines these two aspects of our lives’ meaning. Let’s take a look at them, but keep in mind that they’re always made of two perspectives: the meaning of what we do as our “what”, and the meaning of what we do as our “why”.
In first place, family was quoted as a source of meaning by 38 percent of respondents in nearly all countries studied (with some notable exceptions like Spain, North Korea, Taiwan and Italy’s hybrid case). For some reason, the study makes a distinction between family and romantic love, which occupies the eleventh place with only 4 percent of preferences (7 percent in Italy), lower than nature, hobbies, family relations, society and learning. Therefore, family means “non-romantic love”: family ties, but most of all children, the household like a small self-sufficient community, which brings out love and responsibility, giving a meaning to everything.
And what about Italy’s hybrid case? In first place, we find family together with work (43 percent), which in other countries is generally in second place with 25 percent of preferences on average. Work is strong in all responding countries in the 30-64 age range, where it occupies second place; it goes down to third place in the 18-29 age group while it completely disappears after 65, leaving room for material well-being and health. Work is therefore seen as a right, as a form of citizenship, self-expression and an opportunity for personal growth, as well as a source of sustenance. Spaniards share the Italians’ view, putting work before family (40 percent of respondents), but after health and material well-being.
Finally, in most countries, the third place is occupied by material well-being, friends and physical and mental health. Again the results offer us a wide range of information if seen by age range. Friendship, for instance, is a pillar of life for younger respondents, while losing ground when getting older. Health makes an appearance in third place, while in adulthood material well-being prevails. You can nearly see them before your eyes, the dreams and ambitions that take shape as years go by, and continue to inflate and deflate in the face of reality. Work goes from third to second place when turning 30, winning over friendship, only to lose ground against material well-being at 65. Meanwhile, our health worries reach the top three positions.
With all this back and forth, it is remarkable to find the concept of family in top position: a word that can have multiple meanings, as it changes with culture, age, economic conditions and geographic location. Yet, family still prevails, like our roots giving sense to our being, but also fruits that confirm we’re able to exist beyond our limits, in a future that does not foresee our existence.
So, do we know what keeps us going? And how does it make us feel to think about it?
This article was originally written by Riccarda Zezza and published on the Il Sole 24 Ore blog, Alley Oop. To read the original article (in Italian), please click here.
The Deep Human Learning® models, developed by Lifeed in partnership with RES Group, will allow companies to analyse thousands of small data generated by Lifeed training participants, leveraging the talents and skills developed across all their life roles.
How can companies help their people to discover hidden talents? How to make the most of the skills acquired by employees across their various life roles and experiences, especially in the personal dimension? To answer these questions, Lifeed launches its new Deep Human Learning® models, developed in collaboration with RES Group, a key player in the IT and digital marketing sector.
Starting from the reflections collected among participants in Lifeed training paths, the artificial intelligence models will measure and predict key indicators such as self-efficacy, engagement, energy, and work-life balance.
In a world characterized by uncertainty and deeply transformed by the pandemic, Lifeed’s Deep Human Learning® models will equip companies with a new tool to better listen and get to know their people, in order to enhance them in their wholeness and not just simply as professionals. By revealing the competences developed by employees in their personal lives, the models will help companies to transfer those skills to the professional sphere and count on a richer, extended set of competences.
“The artificial intelligence models developed with RES allow us to better read and interpret complex, destructured and meaningful data”, says Chiara Bacilieri, Head of Data at Lifeed. Thanks to Deep Human Learning®, she adds, “artificial intelligence acquires new relevance in the HR sector, helping management teams to know their people more in depth, to uncover the talentd they develop across their various life roles and to enhance them at work, too”.
“Today, companies are increasingly placing human potential at the heart of their processes. Thanks to Natural Language Processing (NLP), the branch of artificial intelligence that deals with the automatic understanding of human language, we can speed up and simplify the way companies get to know and enhance their employees’ talent through the automatic analysis and interpretation of the textual data they produce”, says Federico Bonelli, CEO of RES IT.
“To develop Lifeed’s automated models, we used deep learning algorithms inspired by neural networks, an evolution of traditional machine learning algorithms. In particular, for Deep Human Learning®, we used BERT, one of the latest Google products to run linguistic tasks. The model has been further refined to allow a deeper and more intimate knowledge of human language”.
In the future, historians will refer to the 2020s as the era of the Great Resignation. It’s a term coined by Anthony Klotz, Management Professor at Mays Business School in Texas. It’s a way of defining the increase in the number of people who have resigned in the United States as the pandemic started to draw to a close. There was a 2.4% increase in resignations in March 2021: a record number over the past 20 years of American history. Why? Here’s what the professor had to say:
We know that generally many employees only stay at their jobs because the costs of leaving are higher than the costs of staying, and this ratio has shifted for many workers over the past year. The costs associated with staying have risen, with many workers experiencing burnout — a key contributor to voluntary turnover. At the same time, some costs associated with quitting have decreased. The pandemic has provided many Americans with an opportunity to reduce expenses, pay off debt and save money. Combined, higher employee burnout and enhanced financial security is a recipe for increased resignations.
This explains why people are leaving and why they are ready for a change. But where are they heading? When companies know what people are aiming for, they can work on retaining those who now have more options available. We’ve gone way beyond a vision of human “resources”, where we can acquire and maintain talent to ensure maximum productivity. During the pandemic, a large portion of the workforce started questioning the meaning of their lives – as many crises do – and they wanted to regain control.
At the same time, other factors pushed them into making radical choices. A recent Microsoft report revealed that 40% of people are thinking of resigning by the end of the year. Not everyone will be able to follow through on that, but the bad news is that the most talented amongst them will probably manage to. They are the ones that will cost companies the most. The same Microsoft report highlighted the things that have prompted this shift. They’ve outlined 7 factors that touch everything from the growing need for flexibility to the depression that’s hitting Generation Z after entering the world of work remotely. Three of these factors highlight the amount of work given to employees, managerial responsibility and the ongoing identity revolution.
1) Increased productivity hides an exhausted workforce. The numbers don’t lie. The digital invasion in our workplaces has removed any buffers that were there previously. We now find ourselves managing schedules that don’t allow any down time. We’re spending more than double the amount of time in online meetings, a statistic that’s only continued to rise. Even the length of meetings has increased by 10 minutes, going from 35 to 45 minutes. What’s more, we’re sending around 45% more chat messages each week. We can almost see the physical impact this digital wave has had on us. A greater quantity of work doesn’t necessarily mean better quality: people start to feel trapped and stressed. Our computers have started to feel like conveyor belts, and people have started asking themselves questions. 37% of workers say that their companies are now asking too much of them.
2) Leaders have lost sight of their people and they need to wake up. Anthony Klotz refers to it as “managerial laziness” that stokes the illusion of being able to go back in time, returning to old ways of working. With the temporary ways of working through the pandemic extending over time, the complexity of life has crossed over into business. And it’s not going away any time soon.
This wonderful video shows a dad at his “first day in the office”, accompanied by his little girl that’s reassuring him. You’ll see your friends again, you’ll be okay, don’t cry. Because the dad doesn’t want to go back to the office, and he doesn’t want to let go of his little girl’s hand. The video highlights something that’s rooted in truth: life has collided with work, and we can’t just press the rewind button. Managers and leaders need to make an effort to see this increase in complexity as a destination that changes the rules of the game.
3) Authenticity will drive productivity and wellbeing. The Microsoft report says that 17% of people have cried in front of a colleague over the past year. We’ve let ourselves be seen at home, let others catch a glimpse of the artwork on our walls, of our washing machines, our children, our kitchens and our emotions. And we’ve learned through it: 39% more people feel that they are ready to “bring their whole selves to work” compared to the same time a year ago. On the other hand, 31% of people feel embarrassed about showing their private life while they’re at work.
When the chips are down, do we really want to hide away again? Why then have these transparent relationships with colleagues improved our wellbeing and productivity levels? Why should we want to go back to the way things were? Maybe it’s better to go someplace else instead.
This article was originally written by Riccarda Zezza and published on the Il Sole 24 Ore blog, Alley Oop. To read the original article (in Italian), please click here.
“Let’s no longer think that being a mother or a father may conflict with our working lives. All of these dimensions have a natural synergy that needs to be valued. Companies need them to be able to work well together and bring the type of energy that the world needs to be able to move forward”.
That’s how Riccarda Zezza launched the event “Beyond stereotpyes: the value of life transitions for both people and businesses” organized by TIM and 4Weeks4Inclusion, the biggest cross-corporate event dedicated to inclusion. For the first time, the event has taken place in Italy with over 200 companies taking part in a training marathon that focuses on this very topic.
The recent Lifeed event was held in collaboration with Barilla, featuring Riccarda Zezza, Lifeed CEO, Giulia Lamarca, Content Creator, Psychologist and Change Maker, Valeria Icardi, Customer Team Director & D&I ERG Balance Italy Leader at Barilla and Chiara Bacilieri, Head of Data at Lifeed.
“Changing the paradigm – continued Zezza- isn’t natural and it wouldn’t be possible if there weren’t companies such as Barilla. They’ve made courageous choices to make these changes a reality”.
Barilla is one of the 80 companies that Lifeed is working with to deliver training and self-awareness programs for their employees. These journeys value the dimensions from employees’ personal lives, such as being parents, caregivers or simply going through a transition.
“We’ve found the founding principles of Lifeed journeys incredibly coherent and in line with the approach, putting people at the centre – commented Valeria Icardi, Customer Team Director & D&I ERG Balance Italy Leader at Barilla. “Diversity is key to Barilla’s growth strategy: equality, inclusion and diversity have long been an integral part of our culture, values, ethical code and business model. We consider our people to be our most precious resource.”
The Winparenting program aims to support parents and their managers as they make the transition into parenthood, through initiatives that value people and give them concrete support.
“Lifeed has had a strong impact on cultural change within the company, accompanying people as they go through transformational life phases, such as parenthood. Today, everyone in the company – especially fathers – feel more confident in speaking about their parenting experiences and family needs, without feeling that they are being stigmatized for it”– concluded Icardi.
Following the analysis of over 3,000 reflections from Barilla employees through the Lifeed Winparenting program, we can see a clear picture of their parenting experiences begin to emerge. 56% of people talk about positive energy, joy and motivation. Over the past year, Barilla parents expressed the need to manage uncertainty and have a better work-life balance. They are more effective in caring for others, leading and are more emotionally intelligent too.
“By dynamically reading this data, Barilla can see people for all they really are. They’re taking into consideration a range of softer elements that many companies don’t look at. For example, emotions correlate against wellbeing, allowing them to find the right ways to interact and connect with their people. But that’s not all: the emotions that correlate to their needs change over time. The need to manage uncertainty and fears for the future were strong in 2020, following the start of the pandemic and switch to remote working. But this came down to 59% in 2021. In 2018, the need for work-life balance was one of the things that new parents at Barilla were thinking about most. Over the years, this has decreased, and now it’s no longer an issue 2021”– commented Chiara Bacilieri Head of Data at Lifeed, when presenting key results from the project.
Emotions, needs and life experiences, bring value to people and their companies. Seeing people for all they really are provides an opportunity for developing skills and innovation. One of the most important life transitions is parenthood, an everyday training ground for soft skills.
Caring for ourselves and others, means accepting imperfections and valuing each person’s complexity. It helps to bring the change in cultural paradigm that the world needs right now.
These are just a few of the themes that were explored further at the “Beyond stereotypes: the value of life transitions for people and companies” event, organized as part of 4Weeks4Inclusion. It’s the biggest cross-corporate event dedicated to inclusion and promoted by TIM. Over 200 companies came together for a 4 week marathon that focused on this very topic.
The event organized by Lifeed in collaboration with Barilla featured Riccarda Zezza, CEO at Lifeed, Giulia Lamarca, Content Creator, Psychologist and Change Maker, Valeria Icardi, Customer Team Director & D&I ERG Balance Italy Leader at Barilla and Chiara Bacilieri, Head of Data at Lifeed.
With the aim of creating a new parenting culture within their company, Barilla launched the Winparenting Program to support parents and their managers through this important transition.
By analysing over 3,000 reflections from Barilla employees collected by Lifeed’s Work-Life Observatory through the Winparenting program, we can see a clear picture of the emotions that their people are feeling as they journey through parenting experiences.
Barilla has dynamically analyzed this data to allow them to see people for all they really are, considering a range of soft elements (such as the evolution of needs over time) that’s not always something that companies consider.
The diffusion of hybrid working following the pandemic has increased the distances within organizations. That’s why it’s more important than ever to focus on the contact that people have amongst themselves, and to stimulate inclusion and a sense of belonging through caring behaviors. It can help organizations and teams to face changes more effectively at work. Our experiences over the past few months have only confirmed that: once companies saw the barriers between work and life come down, they learned to see people for all they really are, discovering new needs and vulnerabilities.
The same emerged from a report by the Politecnico di Milano’s School of Management (Lifeed research partner in their 2021/2022 HR Innovation Practice Observatory). Even though 8 out of 10 workers were clear on the objectives they needed to aim for and their role within the organization, people felt less engaged and involved in their working activities. 79% said that they had reached a good work-life balance and 76% felt that their working environment was inclusive. But the distance between people and their organizations continues to widen.
Internal communication and managing the corporate climate are critical processes to consider. Proficiency has been king over the past year, but proactivity has continued to slide. The latter measures the ability to take an active role in introducing positive change to the benefit of the company. When people feel less engaged and involved, they find it difficult to generate ideas that will improve their working activities.
The concept of engagement has been reduced to “vigor”, or rather the psychological condition linked to our energy and desire to work. The initiatives launched by companies to motivate their employees didn’t go far enough in making them feel like they were being noticed. It’s why we need to work on making these new ways of working more sustainable for all. It’s about coming up with new initiatives that stimulate involvement and motivation, creating new caring and attentive ways of leading teams.
As the Politecnico’s report highlights, it’s time for HR departments to find new ways to care for and guide their people. Motivating employees would mean re-aligning people to the business’ vision. It’s possible to invest in people’s wellbeing, without losing sight of business needs. Empathy and listening really help people and contribute to increasing productivity at work.
But how can we develop a caring leadership style? Being a “kind” leader doesn’t mean forgetting about your leadership duties within the company. The opposite is true. Kind leaders are able to recognize what their people need, allowing people to safely express their feelings. They’re able to do the same themselves. Vulnerability is now seen as a strength for leaders. It means that they are closer to their teams, but also is a way of leading by example when people feel afraid to share their own emotions. An empathetic leader that’s ready to listen and include others can truly value the team, transforming their strengths into resources for the business.
As Richard Davidson (founder of the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Winsconsin) says, compassion can be trained through practical exercises. When companies practice compassion, their workers are more trusting and willing to collaborate. Davidson says that “people can effectively build their compassion ‘muscles’ and respond to others’ suffering with care and the willingness to help”. When people are going through periods of intense stress, it’s important to care for their psychological and physiological wellbeing.
The first people that need to train this “muscle” are HR directors. They’re called to support their people in feeling more enthusiastic and motivated. We also need to help people feel ready to mix with others, re-establishing that sense of belonging that they may have lost through the emergency. Let’s try to learn through our past experiences. The challenge is to value the changes that remote working has brought to corporate culture and people behavior, moving from presenteeism to being focused on results. And, most importantly, if people have reached them.
When a major event happens in our lives, it rarely makes us happier. According to a piece of research I read a while ago (which I can’t find anymore!), most people would prefer a quiet life to an exciting one. This may sound a bit sad, but it’s the plain truth: changes are upsetting and always involve unexpected circumstances, which translate into exhaustion, adjustments, risks. Yet it is precisely those major events, whether planned or not, that give sense to our lives. Who could argue with that?
Falling in love, having a child, starting a job, falling sick, losing someone, changing jobs: these are the so-called milestones of our lives, those which will eventually shape it and make up our own essence. However, none of them, in their day-to-day normality, will guarantee our happiness. A study on 909 working mothers by psychologist Daniel Kahneman, author of seminal books such as Thinking, Fast and Slow and his latest work Noise, investigated the relation between the satisfaction given by a certain activity and its day-to-day emotional responses. Take, for example, the satisfaction of being a mother and the emotions generated by interacting with one’s children: what is their relation? Over the past few years, several studies have noted how parents often express fewer feelings of happiness than non-parents, which led Harvard professor Dan Gilbert to write:
The only symptom of empty nest syndrome is the inability to stop smiling.
In other words, everyday life puts even our best narratives to the test. Some life dimensions, at the heart of our identity, manifest all their complexity and richness as daily challenges involving tiredness, emotions, and patience. So much so that, if we could only theoretically decide what to do, we might eventually choose to not be than be.
Granted, the list of daily tasks performed by a working mother, described by Kahneman’s study, is impressive. It is easy to sympathise with the tiredness curve of women throughout their days (interesting to note how mothers who are younger than 30 wake up feeling more tired than older ones – a matter of sleepless nights or a habit?). It is also not surprising that social activities involving friendship and fun, such as prayer, TV and exercise, are those returning the most positive emotions… Even cooking or being on the phone come before spending time with children (which, in turn, precedes sitting at one’s desk, cleaning the house and working). What does it all have to do with the meaning of life, and with “major” choices such as becoming a parent?
As professor Paul Bloom says in The Atlantic, major events, with the identity dimensions they create in ourselves, shape the sense of our lives. And yet, this seems to have little if no impact on our happiness. Indeed, happiness expresses itself in the positive emotions generated by daily activities. Happiness is a moment of awareness and can be so unexpected to go unnoticed. However, those moments of happiness should be framed into a much wider context, which allows them to surface but also contains much, much more. This framework is the meaning we give to our own lives.
The sense with which we fill our actions depends on the blueprint we have imagined for our existence: on whether we see it at all, on how clearly we see it, on whether we are able to question it and adjust it to circumstances. This perimeter has no ideal shape: it can be more or less linear, large or irregular, and is constantly changing.
It is the kind of framework that becomes unfitting after a major event, like a pandemic, motherhood or sickness, makes it no longer suitable to the meaning of our life. We ourselves change shape and consequently need to adjust the way we show up and portray ourselves.
Whether having a child, finding love, getting a new job or fulfilling a dream will make us happier is, itself, a spurious issue. The real question to ask ourselves might be whether we are still able to give sense to the events of our lives, no matter it they happen by chance or are induced by us. Our days are made of schedules, activities, tasks, routines and emotions, and sometimes of discoveries, twists and surprises. Meanwhile, our lives surround them with their constantly evolving meaning – and it is upon us, the narrators, to give it to them.
This article was originally written by Riccarda Zezza and published on the Il Sole 24 Ore blog, Alley Oop. To read the original article (in Italian), please click here.
The UN has outlined 17 objectives for sustainable development in their 2030 Agenda. Each country is playing its part, through their national strategies. But for us to arrive at a level of global sustainability, everyone needs to play their part. Companies (particularly HR Directors) play a key role in this.
As John W. Boudreau and Peter M. Ramstad demonstrated in their 2005 study Talentship, talent segmentation, and sustainability: A new HR decision science paradigm for a new strategy definition, published in Human Resource Management, organizations face two main challenges. Attracting (and retaining) talent and ensuring that economic targets are in line with social and environmental changes.
To overcome these two challenges, the first step is to balance what companies promote and display externally with what they do for (and with) their employees. These two aspects must live alongside each other. Aligning internal and external objectives allows things to run properly, preparing for the company’s success.
That’s why the concept of Human sustainability is increasingly important within corporate agendas. It’s the collection of steps that a company takes to train its people, as well as how they enhance their wellbeing, inclusion and engagement. HR departments play a central role in implementing these steps, ensuring consistency between what the company is and what it shows about itself.
And it doesn’t stop there. Companies can develop their ability to see people for all they are, in all their complexity. This in turn generates value. It’s an opportunity to go beyond the concept of work-life balance, instead adopting a vision of work-life synergy. In fact, people’s personal and professional lives don’t go into conflict with each other. We are the same people at home and at work, while we speak with our children, friends, managers and colleagues. We don’t just bring a part of ourselves to our desks, a slice of what we our and a portion of our skills. We don’t stop being mothers, fathers, children, siblings and friends when we close the office door. Quite the opposite: our different life spheres strengthen each other.
That’s why companies can choose to prioritize their people through programs, projects and initiatives. It’s a way of putting into action their Human sustainability projects and establishing a HR blueprint, regarding the concrete impact that human resources has on the future of the company.
But how can companies plan HR processes that respect sustainability principles? It all starts with valuing equity, development and wellbeing within the organization. Sustainability values can be shared across the culture, translating into corporate practices. This reinforces people’s skills, motivation and productivity (which can all be measured through People Analytics activities) that are fundamental for companies to obtain good financial, social and environmental results.
This is a new way of looking at human capital. In fact, when companies leverage all that their people have to offer, rather than limiting their actions to a single role, individuals feel fulfilled at both a professional and a personal level. This has a positive impact on the business too.
Life transitions drive the constant growth and development of our people. That’s why we shouldn’t be afraid of changes over time. Companies can actually benefit from them, maximizing their people’s experiences and talents to enjoy greater motivation, wellbeing, engagement and efficiency levels. These are the elements that contribute to the company’s sustainable growth and the value that they create.
As we begin to return to normality after Covid, people feel the need to share and reflect on their experiences with others. The solitude linked to remote working and the pandemic in general is leaving space for community. The ability to share has been a missing piece of the puzzle over the past couple of years.
That’s why User Generated Content (UGC) is becoming increasingly important: content created on blogs, social posts, reviews, images and videos. This content is often generated freely and spontaneously, contrasting with advertising and sponsored posts.
According to recent research from the Nielsen Consumer Trust Index, 92% of consumers trust UGC compared to traditional advertising. Around 60% of consumers consider it to offer a more credible and authentic take on products and services, allowing them to make a more informed decision.
It’s just one of the reasons that Lifeed has launched the new ‘Social Sharing’ functionality. It allows users to share the things that are on their minds right now, as well as content that they discover throughout their learning journeys.
Within each program journey, users have the option to highlight the parts that interest them most. These sections can then be shared to Facebook or Twitter; or copied to the clipboard so that they can share them on another platform that’s relevant to them.
