Approximate reading time: 1.7 minutes

What’s the deal? How do employees view their contract with an employer? It’s been changing in recent years as globalisation, talent management, downsizing and other trends such as demographic shifts take their toll.

A major study by the newly rescued Work Foundation, now part of Lancaster University, in its Future of HR Programme has some interesting answers.

These reflect what employees actually say about their roles and how they currently view the contract with the employer.

In a complicated multi box table, senior researcher Wilson Wong who led the lengthy study has broken the current deal down into three basic perspectives: Achieving a balanced deal, sustaining the deal and rebalancing the deal.

Using these three filters the researchers analyse people’s responses to the deal, in four additional ways, how it: 

·         Supports and re-enforces the individual’s personal identity

·         Meets their relationship expectations through their manager

·         Meets their relational expectations through co-workers

·         Involves an exchange between the organisation and the individual

All good labelling stuff, but what use is it?

Once you get your head around the resulting multiple views it provides a potentially useful way, for example, to look more critically at how an organisation manages its talent.

The way leaders define and treat talent is becoming a critical factor in an organisation’s success.

So the various views from this research can potentially prove helpfully in prompting a more insightful consideration of what it will take to win people’s engagement and perhaps avoid unnecessarily high attrition rates.

Other implications include ways that employers might help people find meaning through work, professionalism, and managing, measuring and rewarding performance.

What makes this particular research different is how it looks at the work contract: strictly from the perspective of an employee.

This may hardly sound revolutionary, but in fact too many managers fail to do just that, being far more comfortable directing most of their attention upwards towards their own boss.

There remains a niggling question mark over how far this particular perspective really does offer managers a useful tool.

For example, in The Talent Perspective, a not dissimilar approach recently by the CIPD researchers, explored “What does it Feel Like to be Talent Managed?              

Again, the result was multiple boxes of data beloved of researchers, but which practicing mangers might well struggle to turn to good effect in day-today work.

This is not to denigrate such research which can throw a useful light on how people think and feel at work. The trick is to turn such evidence into more than just an abstract, strategic perspective.

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