Episode 5: Alex Cunningham (Chevron)
Alex Cunningham, Senior Employee Experience Advisor at Chevron
As we all explore the new catch-all territory of a “hybrid” future, we’re forced to examine how exactly it’s all going to work. Who will be in office, and how often? How will the office look now, and what kind of work will we do there? What about different team needs? In this episode of CMLabs, we chat with Alex Cunningham, Senior Employee Experience Advisor at Chevron. These conversations are especially interesting when considering the challenges faced by multinational corporations that are widely dispersed with wide-ranging tasks. As Alex tells us, there are so many different kinds of jobs and regional variables that the governing path forward can’t be uniform; it will have to be determined by the teams themselves and guided by an underlying empathy.
We’ve seen the same themes come through in our own research: the new workplace experience will only succeed with an eye toward hypersegmentation. We’ll need to understand how different teams work and what they need to be most productive. Some roles require active collaboration. Others demand heads-down concentration and individual contribution. The way to accommodate these disparate functions can only be achieved through empathy for the employees, and trust from the management. As Alex points out, there is a heightened need for employees to feel trusted and valued as individuals. He highlights the reality that workplace populations have now come to see each other in a new light: at home, in a real setting, with never-before-seen factors of their lives on display. And yet, some work functions have never stopped showing up onsite, reporting for duty to perform jobs out in the world, often in remote locales, far away from their computer-bound coworkers.
Alongside these realities, Alex speaks about the twin social factors that have reshaped our workplaces overnight: the pandemic, and the widespread cry for racial and social justice. In this episode, we delve into diversity, and how the events of the past two years have forged a deeper organizational commitment to inclusivity and empathy in ways never before broached. In short, the workplace today is shaped by a new humanity. While the past was all about productivity, uniformity and consistency, the future will be about results-based outputs, customized experiences, and hyper flexibility.
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