Will the rebels be the winners of the New Work?

In this period of uncertainty punctuated by restrictions and confinements due to COVID-19 in all its forms, you are being told about well-being at work. The key to keeping employees is to make them happy by encouraging autonomy, emancipation and responsibility, while respecting the work-life balance, they say.

If you’re like most leaders, you not only want your company to grow, but to do so while having fun. You may be subconsciously hoping that you have hired rebels.
The premise of some economists is that rebels – that is, people who are very conscious of not following the rules or have a lot of trouble doing so – are a benefit to the companies that employ them. Rebels convey the idea that there are limits to what they can do. So they act with a very specific strategy to achieve their goals. They „break, transform and create“.

But how do you deal with the rebels in the teleworking period and, more importantly, how do you create an environment that will retain them?

5 tips for companies and their managers

„It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.“ Steve Jobs
The company must foster a culture of constructive dissent and trusting exchange. Its managers must accept that they are not the sole owners of new ideas.

1. Embracing differences

Encourage your employees to express their authenticity, for example during their first week of work, or during evaluations. Let them develop a personal mission. Only tell rebels what needs to be done, but not how. This will make them feel more comfortable in carrying out a task.

2. Make the best use of talents

Let your rebellious employees make the most of their talents. Make them aware of their strengths by complimenting them. Give them a job that matches their potential. This is the Meta method ( not all is negative there!): the company hires candidates, identifies their strengths and only after this step does it give them a tailor-made job.

3. Don’t forget the basics of business

How can you get rebels and other employees to develop new ideas? Start by encouraging your teams to know their customers better. The company that continually improves its proposition to the market is the one that knows what the main problems are for consumers, what technologies they can use to solve them and how those who have succeeded have done so. Only then can you encourage them to come up with new ideas. Ask the right questions when they present their solutions: a listening manager is one who answers to understand, not to be right.

The best answers come from a detailed understanding of three basic issues:

• what factors (price, quality, ease of use…) do consumers take into account when choosing which product to buy? This can also be translated into: how will the investment made by the customer be financed over time?
• how do consumers perceive the performance of your competitors for each of these factors?
• what capabilities (product development, industrialisation, service…) does your company need to improve to outperform the competition?

To harness the problem-solving talent of your rebels, encourage them to rethink everything to answer these fundamental questions in a unique way.

4. Rethink your workspace

Working from home is not synonymous with isolation. By working together, your employees will come up with better solutions than if they worked alone. A leader should encourage this collaboration between teams and do everything possible to make it happen, even if it is virtual. However, some of the best teamwork is generated by people physically meeting and discussing solutions through random interactions in the workplace. (Long live the coffee machine!)

5. Structure the results to achieve the goal

The rebel breaks, innovates and creates. A love of detail and the hard work of implementation are rarely part of their qualities. This is where the leader resurfaces.
Once the proposed idea is accepted by the company, it is the leader’s responsibility to ensure that it is implemented correctly. Don’t forget to praise the rebel’s work at this point. Continuous improvement of the new process will not be long in coming, the rebels will see to that.

New work opens up new opportunities in the employer-employee relationship. By breaking out of the rigid confines of the office, teamwork allows managers to make even better use of each other’s characters and opens up an even wider range of interesting profiles for companies.

Copper Oak, with its innovative and powerful tools integrating work processes and employees, supports you in identifying the psychometric differences of your employees, in facilitating the acceptance of these differences and, above all, in establishing a communication that generates high work efficiency.