While last year’s hit TV show Severance conjured a world where there was total separation between characters’ home and work lives, the recent real-world trend veers in the opposite direction. The line has blurred dramatically between work life and, well, life life—especially over the course of a pandemic in which, for many people, home became the new office. 

It’s created a fascinating dynamic for HR professionals who are attempting to respect and facilitate their teams’ rich personal lives, while also nurturing a cohesive and high-performing company culture. 

Among the challenges—and opportunities—is that many employees are now looking for a high degree of personal fulfillment from their jobs, rather than just a paycheck. 

“What's been bubbling to the top [of employee priorities] is meaning and purpose and a sense of belonging in the company,” said Rose Sheldon, Chief Learning Officer at KeyBank, speaking as part of a March panel discussion at a From Day One conference in Chicago.

In response, KeyBank has tweaked its onboarding process. Before teaching new employees “our purpose, we need to understand their purpose. When you can help lead someone to how their personal purpose aligns with the company's purpose, then it gives you more of a reason to not just be a high performer, but actually care about the work you're doing.”

Creating that sort of alignment is hardly the only step HR teams are taking to encourage employee wellbeing without sacrificing performance. There’s also an increased focus, for example, on ensuring that employees don’t burn out—a particular danger among the hard-charging, high-performing employees upon whom companies often depend most. 

It falls to managers to keep their star performers from reaching that point, sometimes in spite of the workers’ objections. These aren’t people who like easing back on the throttle, so one tactic to help them maintain a healthy level of focus is to ask them to participate in mentorship and coaching programs, which provide variety and a focus on investing in others—along with an intentional absence of deliverables.

“A lot of people get engaged around how they can help someone else and how can they pay it forward, so that's not as draining to them,” said Kim Nero, Executive VP & Chief HR Officer at railcar lessor GATX, another of the From Day One conference panelists. “There’s not a deadline or result that you expect from them.”

Of course, that approach only works when those employees aren’t worried that they’ll fall behind if they take their foot off the gas pedal. Thus it’s crucial for senior leadership to model healthy work habits—including a willingness to unplug. 

People in the C-Suite “have to step away, and they have to be really vocal about it,” said KeyBank’s Sheldon. When executives post social media photos of a family beach day, it sends the message that spending time on family and leisure is both worthwhile and brag-worthy.   

In the remote-work era, many professionals have discovered that they’re able to do great work at odd times, and in strange places. Alex Maragos, an anchor and reporter at NBC5 News Chicago who moderated the discussion, asked about the “future of flexibility“—and how companies should think about balancing productivity and remote or hybrid work arrangements in the post-pandemic era. 

The panel’s consensus? Flexible work arrangements are here to stay and can correlate with great productivity. The onus is on companies and managers to learn to accommodate asynchronous work—and workers.
“It’s understanding that my working hours may not be your working hours, and that just because I am not doing something at eight o'clock in the morning doesn't make me less valuable,” said panelist Kat Frosolone, director of strategic partnerships at Care.com for Business. 

At their best, flexible work arrangements enable employees to better manage their schedules and fulfill a broader range of personal and professional priorities. 

“People's families come first, and understanding that will allow them to be more productive and happy employees,” said Frosolone.

But there’s also a danger to such arrangements: some people who work from home struggle to unplug, which can lead not only to burnout but also to other unhealthy outcome. Accordingly, managers must be prepared to help with that, too. 

“Everything's melding a bit now, which is helpful and important for flexibility, but also potentially harmful from a standpoint of creating separation and finding opportunities to disengage from stress,” said Jordana Kammerud, Chief HR Officer at fashion retailer Claire’s. In those cases, she recommends employers provide some guardrails—structure that’s not for the company or manager’s benefit, but where it’s “needed to support the health and well being of the full employee.”

One such strategy is building in time for relationship-building. In the past, work friendships formed naturally in the cafeteria, by the water cooler, or around the conference table. But a remote or hybrid work environment necessitates “more time spent learning individual needs, and doubling down on those structures to fill that  [relational] void with belonging and recognition and trust,” said panelist Matthew Willis, Senior VP and general manager for North America at employee-engagement platform Advantage Club.

Amidst a series of seismic shifts in employee expectations as well as ways of working, companies and HR leaders are working to find a playbook that will serve their organizations’ needs as well as the needs of their workers. In times of upheaval, there can be a tendency both for people and organizations to revert to what they know best, but in this case, Claire’s Kammerud says the right move is to invent a new corporate template.

“The future of work is about balancing these opposing forces,” she said. 

And like any balancing act, success will require trust and confidence. 

“We have to trust that people are adults, and that we're in it to win it together,” said GATX’s Nero. “Hopefully there's a vision and a mission that compels us to work at this place, and we’ll trust each other to do our best every day.”

Steve Hendershot is an award-winning multimedia journalist and bestselling author. He hosts the Project Management Institute’s top-rated Projectified podcast and operates Cedar Cathedral Narrative Studio in Chicago.