Organizations Need to Start Focusing on Employee Emotigraphics

"Business is the Most Trusted entity to Integrate Innovation into Society."

-2024 Edelman’s Trust Barometer

Organizations need to shift their focus towards understanding and catering to the emotional drivers of their employees, a concept I've termed "Emotigraphics." Young candidates are asking Human Resources how the company will support their emotional growth and personal mission, adopt their values system, and what impact the specific role they are interviewing for will have on the world. While Gen Z is the most animated about working for organizations that allow them to live with Purpose and earn Legacies, they’re teaching the mature generations to strive for the same.

Employees from all generations increasingly demand that their hiring organizations align with their values rather than being forced to conform to the company's values.  Focusing on personal causes, individual equality, and celebrating uniqueness is commonly considered within an organization’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion umbrella, but it is much more than DEI. The new Gen Z mentality doesn’t separate career and life; they emphasize that the two are inseparable for their holistic well-being. Gen Z is not wrong.

Previous generations of employees sought a balance between work and life, but now seek Life-Work balance and are asking employers to help them reach it in modern ways.  Modern in this context means creating an environment where the individual is not included in one-size-fits-all corporate DEI goals, but rather they can customize their own Life-Work balance that reflects their independent values, beliefs, and thinking.

Issues arise for organizations to comply partly because the $13.4 Billion self-help industry, as the name implies, targets the individual’s self-improvement, but not within the larger context of a company. Self-help guidance and current employee benefits offerings don’t address the interdependency of the multiple stakeholders of a company: employees, HR associates, business managers, executive leadership, and the company as a whole.

Current research in the self-help arena is based on cumulative findings about a group sample. In fact, the veracity of research from Psychology, Anthropology, Sociology, Philosophy, and other social and human science disciplines is based on how many people participate in the studies.  In other words, the less “individual” and more expansive the research sample is, the more it is believed to be true in science research.

Demographics, psychographics, and socio-economics offer valuable insights for understanding and influencing human behavior.  Together, they form an approach for examining group thoughts and behaviors, but not for uncovering individual emotions, thoughts, and behaviors.

Employees want the reverse to be true. They seek to individualize their career, family life, lifestyle choices, and personal growth. They intend to identify their Purpose in Life based on how they feel and perceive their lives. Subjective well-being (SWB) is the widely accepted way of measuring how individuals perceive and feel about their lives. It is a measurement that aggregates positive and negative emotions and how a person experiences life. 

Since having a Purpose is clearly an individual pursuit, group research or generic self-help is not informative enough to find Purpose in Life. People who become motivated and focused on themes integral to their daily SWB, discover their Purpose in Life.  In other words, by discovering and focusing on what brings a person joy, they discover how to share it with the rest of the world.

People who impact others with an intense and determined Purpose earn their Legacies.

I believe all people want to live a Purposeful life, and employees are increasingly asking their employers for help. Again, they don’t want to conform to an organization's stated values and mission; they want their organization to align with theirs.

So what should an organization do?

Employee Legacy Planning using Emotigraphics is the way to study, discover, customize, and design their personal Life-Work development strategies.

Emotigraphics: using technology to purposefully focus, discover, and PLAN a life that maximizes Subjective Well-Being.

Emotigraphics, using Generative AI, can collect, analyze, and deliver individual summaries for each employee. The summaries can then be used to develop evergreen plans informing employees, their managers, and their HR counterparts on an appropriate career path, career development plan, and ongoing engagement activities to boost and maintain employee SWB.

Employees with high subjective well-being are more productive, perform better at work, and are more likely to impact their communities, including their workplaces, positively. The need for employees to belong to a group and feel close relationships within that group is a powerful and fundamental motivation for achievement and well-being. These triggers lead to increased employee pride in their work and workplace and subsequently should improve employee retention. Happy employees stick around, evangelize, and recruit other new, happy employees.

Managers are gifted with unbiased data that helps them deliver succession and development plans for their teams. Inefficient hiring and placement processes drain managers and lead to significant direct and indirect costs, including lost productivity, decreased employee morale, increased turnover, and the costs associated with re-hiring and re-training. These challenges highlight the importance of employee-led self-discovery, emphasizing their SWB layered over descriptive role requirements. Companies can identify what job is exactly right for an employee by matching role requirements with employee Emotigraphic results.

Organizations that go beyond their corporate interests and commit to the growth and SWB of their individual contributors, managers, and recruits create happy employees. Improved employee recruitment, retention, and engagement reflects positively on the organization’s leadership and delivers Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental, Social, and Governance promises. When organizations commit to ethical practices, social responsibility, and their employee’s sustainable development they are recognized as respected and trusted employers.

There is one generation that has bonded together to an extent we haven’t seen in history to identify and focus on their personal well-being WHILE simultaneously focusing on the betterment of the world at large.

Thank you, Gen Z, for prioritizing yourselves and me at the same time.