How does a company like Prudential Financial, which has been around for a century and a half, adapt to the modern world? The company’s secret to innovation lies in re-evaluating how work gets done and developing empathetic leadership.

That’s according to Prudential VP Alan Morales, who has an unusually forward-looking title at the company: head of transformative change for the future of work. In a conversation with Time Staff Writer Raisa Bruner at From Day One’s December virtual conference on the future of work, Morales shared how a company as vast as Prudential, which manages more than $1 trillion in assets and has more than 40,000 employees, keeps up with digital transformation and evolving work environments.

“Change is often thought of as incremental, whereas transformation is radical,” Morales said. “How do we focus on the people side of change?” It requires the employees in all business units and corporate functions to think creatively and challenge inefficiencies in the way they work.

This means finding areas of work that are redundant, bypassing typical bureaucratic practices, and enabling flexible work options, he said. Employees should be encouraged to blur the boundaries of their typical job functions and value the perspective and suggestions of all team members. “This creates more equity in teams and lets you focus on the end goal–you can react to changes more quickly. If we focus on the results and less on the bureaucracy and paperwork, it allows us to perform better,” said Morales.

The Value of Empathetic Leadership

The most critical aspect of successfully transforming companies and employees is impactful leadership–by simply being human.. “Be relatable,” Morales said. “Be vulnerable. Remind yourself that you’re a human being. Don’t be the superhero.”

Among leadership, there is often a desire to protect employees by not sharing difficulties and challenges, or failing to acknowledge that they don’t have all the answers. This instinct is not productive, Morales said. “You’re not giving them the benefit of the doubt that they can understand and comprehend that. They're undergoing their own changes and can relate, and they can help you find the answers, and they can help take care of you,” he said.

While the blurring of work life and home life during the pandemic created many stresses, Morales said that an upside is often increased empathy and vulnerability among teams. This can free people to make comments and suggestions that they may not have felt comfortable making previously. “You’re becoming more authentic,” Alan said. “You’re taking down the politically correct answers, and you’re doing what makes sense. That resonates with people and it creates trust.”

Helping People Grow Through Change

Although companies were forced during the pandemic to transition to remote work with little lead time and abandon typical workflow practices, it didn’t prevent customer support needs from mounting. “In our business, a lot of retirement accounts, insurance accounts, withdrawals were being made as a result of job loss, medical needs. Our customer needs skyrocketed, and we were under a lot of duress,” Alan said.

The company’s services were in demand, but because of changes in the global workforce, the pool of skilled workers was smaller. To appropriately address the needs of customers and support staff, Prudential was forced to become less risk-averse and develop quick, creative solutions.

In addition to rethinking business practices and leadership, Prudential is reinventing its recruiting tactics, particularly to attract the more purpose-driven Generation Z, whose members are now entering the workforce. To Gen Z, “Titles don’t matter as much as purpose and outcomes, and experiences that are fulfilling. As a result of that, the type of leadership around hierarchy has got to go,” Morales said. “People will perform because they want to, not because they have to, or for a paycheck.”

The way forward? To find continued success, businesses must be prepared to constantly evolve and change their objectives, practices, and leadership. “It’s now at a point where we are saying we [employees] are equal to customers,” Alan said. “If you actually enhance the employee experience, it enhances the customer experience. There’s a direct relation between the two.”

Tania Rahman is a native New Yorker who works at the intersection of digital marketing and tech. She enjoys writing both news stories and fiction, hot chocolate on cold days, reading, live music, and learning new things.