Why your employees are Allies in the future of work

The rules of work have changed. Gone are the days where you spend your whole career at one company that gives you a great pension, a gold watch, and a retirement party. And yet, we still act like that’s the case when we hire people, and in how we approach managing them.

We live in the world of “at will” employment. Layoffs and “it’s just not working out” discussions are always just around the corner. Meanwhile, many employees job hop from company to company always searching for greener grass. We lament their lack of "loyalty" when we aren't showing any loyalty ourselves.

Why are we lying to ourselves?

Rather than be in denial, we should accept the new rules and take full advantage of them. That’s what Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha and Chris Yeh advocate for in their book, The Alliance I recently read.

The current system is bad for all sides.

It creates major problems for both the company replacing team members regularly and the former employees who see their tenures cut short.

The worst parts about replacing team members are:

• They leave when you don’t expect it.
• You have no plan for what to do without them.
• Work is left incomplete even if they give some notice.
• Their knowledge and experience is lost from the company.

And for the employee, the worst parts are:

• Unfinished work and incomplete milestones that now can’t be put on their resume.
• Less development in their career as companies fear to invest in them.
• Damaged relationships due to resentment over the first 2 items.
• Distrust in every employer they have going forward.

Hoffman, Casnocha, and Yeh advocate for a new system that considers employment as an Alliance: a mutually beneficial relationship, without the empty promises of long term employment.

Why You Should Think of Your Employees as Allies in the Future of Work

In an alliance, both sides work together for mutual benefit. This means shifting your thinking on employees. It’s a lot more than, “do this work and I pay you.” Instead, the relationship is, “I help you grow, learn, and tackle these challenges, and the company benefits from that work.”

The authors call this a Tour of Duty. You select a length of time (a year or two up through 5+ years) and a set of goals for them to achieve with core responsibilities. The agreement is that you will help them have a Tour that is of interest and value to them, and they will do good work for your company.

By agreeing on the time frame and what the Tour entails, you eliminate many of the biggest problems for both sides:

• Employees now have a clear set of goals and milestones and a plan to get there.
• Employers have more certainty how long they can count on having an employee.
• Employees have a clear point where they can cleanly transition out if they want.
• Employers can plan ahead as a tour is about to complete, avoiding any surprises.
• Both sides have more certainty and a clear commitment to one another for a reasonable amount of time.

Now the end of a Tour is not the end of someone’s employment. What Reid Hoffman found with Linkedin, was that people were often hungry for new Tours. It provided opportunities to quickly progress people onto tracks for major leadership roles (they call them Foundational Tours), or give them a new, interesting, challenging job different than what they just completed.

Either way, you can keep renewing the Tours as long as there’s a good fit between company needs and employee interests. And if there’s not a clear fit at the end of a tour, you can have a very smooth transition for both sides, allowing the employee to find work elsewhere without hurting the company or vice versa.

Your people want tours. You just don’t know it.

As I’ve been working on my app for managers, I’ve spoken to a lot of employees in addition to managers. What I keep hearing over and over again is how frustrated people get over a lack of progress in their work and especially their career goals.

Employees want to grow and learn new things. They want to be challenged. They want to be recognized for their good work, and feel like they’re working towards something greater than just a list of tasks for the day. When they don’t feel that progress, they feel stifled and quickly lose motivation. Not long after, they’re looking for the door.

Tours address all of these issues. A Tour:

• Creates a clear set of goals to achieve in a role.
• Creates a set end point where new opportunities can be explored.
• Ensures a discussion about an employee’s goals and how they fit into the company.
• Necessitates regular check ins to be sure progress is made on a Tour and will be completed on schedule.

Planning Tours take effort and have big payoffs.

Planning Tours for your team members doesn’t happen by accident. It’s why they wrote the book to explain it and are building a site around the concept at theAllianceFramework.com.

You have to have healthy discussions with each team member and plan out a path for them. What can they achieve in a few years? How does that align with their long term goals? What are the measures of success for a Tour for them? Do those goals interest them? Do they leverage and build up their strengths? If those are questions that are foreign to you, you need to start discussing them and both reflect on them.

The best time to have these discussions is during your 1 on 1s.

With so much work to do, so many short term priorities to address, who has time for this? But if you want to keep your best people motivated and engaged and level up your team as a whole, you need to make time for these discussions. That leaves 1 on 1s as your best chance to have the time (and if you're new to them here's how to start 1 on 1s.)

If you’re already having candid conversations in 1 on 1s, shift part of each 1 on 1 to work on aligning their long term goals with their current roles and responsibilities. It won’t happen all in one meeting, but you can slowly put together a plan over a series of meetings. 

You’ll see the benefits quickly.

Once you start this process, pay attention. Watch closely. The more you align someone’s work with their goals, the more motivated they will be. Show them how the work you’re asking them to do gets them closer to what they want and they’ll work harder to help you with what you need.

It’s no mistake. It’s the Alliance at work. As Hoffman, Casnocha, and Yeh, write,

“Every employee relationship should be bidirectional in nature; it should be clear how the employee benefits and how the employer benefits.”

That’s because it creates the best situation for productive, happy work. And the Tour takes that to its greatest outcome by sustaining that over a multi-year period.

Are you creating aligned work for your team? Are you engaging your team towards mutual benefit? If not, learn more in The Alliance and start doing Tours at your company.

Looking for a system to track your team’s long term goals and break them down into the near term goals you need?

Want to have more effective 1 on 1s that build towards alignment like what’s described in the Alliance?

Then sign up for Lighthouse, the app for managers.