Company leaders are dealing with a lot of challenges, such as economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, demands of digital transformation, and the changing paradigm of leadership in shaping the future of work. I have already provided various suggestions showing how leaders can address these challenges. Some of the suggestions were:

• Create a human-focused environment based on trust, respect, recognition, gratitude, and autonomy
• Explain to the employees how their jobs fit with the organization's broader purpose
• Offer a career path with a clear advancement to higher pay and an opportunity to achieve short- and long-term personal goals
• Engage with direct reports and have a good sense of what is important to them

Fortunately, several startups have also developed tools to help organizations to tackle some of these challenges.

Financial Education

In this article, I expressed my frustration with the lack of money management education I received as a recent college graduate and new employee. I suggested that employers should fill the knowledge gap and provide their employees with financial education to empower them to manage their lives better and benefit society as a whole.

LearnLux agrees that personal finance is not a priority in our education system. As a result, employees have limited knowledge of how to invest money, establish good credit history, and feel safe in making big financial decisions. LearnLux developed educational tools to democratize access to expert financial guidance, helping organizations educate their employees on how to understand and manage their money.

Employee engagement and retention

When I described why I decided to pursue research on meaningful work, I mentioned that 83% of employees are disengaged. The founder of Landit, a technology platform that enables companies to attract, develop, and retain diverse high-potential talent, said that the number of workers who are actively disengaged is actually over 87%. Regardless of whether the number is 83% or 87%, it represents an overwhelming majority of the workforce. Both employers and employees get hurt by poor employee experience when individuals are unable to fulfill their potential and contribute fully to the growth of an organization.

Landit was developed to increase the success of women and diverse groups in the workplace. As mentioned in previous posts, diversity drives innovation and market growth. It is a natural system of checks and balances. Diverse perspectives provide organizations with a range of insights and opinions, enabling them to be more innovative in how organizations approach problems.

Coaching

Coaches shape a better future. They motivate, engage, and inspire others. Executives with effective coaching skills help others achieve personal and professional goals. Organizations that employ leaders who are great coaches experience improved performance, increased retention, team cohesion, increased motivation, and improved conflict resolution. Unfortunately, coaching can be a hard skill to master for some people. It is not something they have been trained to do throughout their career.

Bravely has set out to democratize coaching and connect people with coaches to help employees discuss the challenges they are facing at work. With the right coaching, employees gain a more positive outlook of the future at their company.

Leadership Skills

The key to motivated and engaged staff is not in trying to motivate them, but in understanding their preexisting motivation triggers and aligning the triggers with the overall mission. Lattice is a performance management software that helps "people get the feedback they need to grow, know where they stand, and have a clear idea of how their work moves their organization forward."

Skills Development

We are experiencing a paradigm shift where we are moving away from matching a person to a position to instead matching skills to work. Patheer is a talent development and analytics platform that uses technology to "analyze and map skills, interests, personality traits, education, work experience to people, companies, cities, careers…"