Dr. Jackson is also a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education where she teaches the next generation of students about entrepreneurship in the education marketplace. She was the architect of the Future of Work Grand Challenge, an initiative to rapidly reskill 25,000 displaced workers into living-wage jobs in the 24 months.
"For the past decade, I have traveled the United States talking to workers. In red states and blue states, in boardrooms and on factory floors, I have asked those who I’ve met to tell me about their relationship with their work. No matter where I go or whom I talk to, what I hear is often the same: When the conditions are right, work provides workers with more than just a paycheck, but with a sense of community and dignity."
While the American worker has always had to adapt to technological and social change, the last few years have clearly been among the most turbulent periods we’ve seen.
Just consider these facts:
Coming out of the pandemic, a new way of doing business is needed – and some companies are answering the call. They’re doing things like collecting and responding to employee feedback, reimagining employee benefits, and creating advancement ladders so that top-performing employees can experience rewarding futures without having to quit to climb the ladder somewhere else. By doing so, our research shows, they’re actually improving their bottom lines.
This report demonstrates that attending to workers and earning profits is not an either-or trade-off. In fact, doing one actually helps to achieve the other. Taken together, these companies are pulling from a playbook we call the Win-Win Workplace Framework, a set of practices that differentiate workplaces that are attuned to employee growth and development. This report begins to demonstrate, for the first time, a correlation between a firm’s implementation of these worker-centered strategies and its financial growth. With this report, we hope to make the case for companies to release even more data and for more research to be conducted, especially since early findings are so compelling. Finally, we take you inside workplaces where workers are experiencing a new relationship with their employers to glean insights on how forward-thinking business leaders can implement the Framework in their own organizations.
Across industry and geography, the best workplaces are truly win-win, unlocking value for both workers and shareholders. Let’s explore what that looks like.
Download the full report here.
