In this installment of our Workplace Strategies Watercooler 2025 podcast series, Luther Wright offers listeners an engaging discussion on how employers can create a cohesive and resilient workforce in the face of change, conflict, and uncertainty. Luther, who is the office managing shareholder of Ogletree's Nashville office and the firm's Assistant Director of Client Training, shares strategies for strengthening team connections, enhancing communication, and maintaining a positive work culture during uncertain times. He also provides actionable insights on leading through change while promoting unity and collaboration throughout the organization.
Announcer: Welcome to the Ogletree Deakins Podcast, where we provide listeners with brief discussions about important workplace legal issues. Our podcasts are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as legal advice. You can subscribe through your favorite podcast service. Please consider rating this podcast so we can get your feedback and improve our programs. Please enjoy the podcast.
Luther Wright, Jr.: Good morning, good afternoon, or good
evening, depending on what time you're listening to this
particular podcast. My name is Luther Wright, Jr. I'm the
managing shareholder of Ogletree's Nashville office and also
the Assistant Director of Client Training for our Ogletree Deakins
Learning Solutions Team. I want to talk to you today about some
highlights from a presentation that I just did just a few minutes
ago on bringing people together during changing times.
Times are always changing. The one thing, and I think you all have
probably heard this before, the one constant that you can count on
is that there's going to be change. Let me establish a couple
of biases that I have when I talk about this topic of bringing
people together during changing times. First, I believe that the
absolute best way to learn how to be successful with anything is to
learn from other organizations or people who have been
successful.
You can learn from your mistakes, you can learn from the mistakes
of others, but I think it is much more powerful when we learn from
a successful example. So, that's a bias that I have when I talk
about this subject matter. The other bias that I have is I am the
son of a mother who worked for the same organization for exactly 50
years. And when I say exactly 50 years, 50 years to the day, June
18, 1972, to June 18, 2022.
So, I've come up in this home life where I believe you're
supposed to work for your employers for a long period of time. And
I think we can all agree that a lot of things changed in the world
between 1972 and 2022. So, change is constant. It's always
going to happen, and I submit to you that it's happened before.
The last five years, we've had COVID shut down. You guys
remember the George Floyd issues.
We've had a couple of contentious elections. One of the things
we don't think about as being a significant change is that Gen
Z is entering the workforce, and the emergence of AI. That's
something that we all should be looking into in terms of a change.
It doesn't really matter what the change is. What really
matters is how we respond to those changes. And so, I submit to you
all that the biggest issue right now isn't the particular
change.
Our biggest issue, or our biggest challenge, is actually having the
capacity to see beyond ourselves. See, right now, the data tells
us, and this is another bias because I don't believe that
numbers lie, fully engaged employees perform 20% better and are 87%
less likely to quit. Two million professionals leave their jobs
each year because of perceived unfairness in the workplace.
These departures cost employers an estimated, and y'all listen
to this, $64 billion annually just in hiring costs. When I look at
those numbers, and I think about those percentages and the massive
amount of money that's being spent to replace those two million
professionals who leave organizations each year, my thought is,
hey, we've got to do better. Not only can we improve our
organizations through whatever changes are coming, but we can save
a massive amount of money.
So, I want to share with you five observations related to bringing
people together in changing times. But more importantly, I want to
also offer you five solutions. My first observation is this. One of
the biggest issues that we have in bringing people together during
changing times is the fact that we forget who we are
organizationally. And what I mean by that is changes can sometimes
distract us from our core values, our mission, and our
purpose.
And that distraction, if you will, can lead to an identity that
lacks cohesion, and that lack of cohesion leads to three very bad D
words: division, dissatisfaction, and departures. The solution that
I propose to observation number one, we forget who we are, is that
we remember what I call the Wakanda principle. Those of you who may
be fans of the movie Black Panther will remember an iconic moment
in that movie where King T'Challa says, "Let's show
them who we are," as they're about to go to war.
And I want you to think about that when you're managing change
and bringing people together. Let's show the folks in our
organization who we really are. Let's make sure that we make
the main thing the main thing. And what I mean by that is let's
make sure that we put our organization in a position where we are
solely focused on the thing that we were created to do, regardless
of what type of organization you may be.
Let's make sure that we celebrate, educate, and appreciate
employees. And if someone or something is eroding the culture,
please, oh, please make it stop. Show your employees who you really
are as an organization, and I guarantee you that will be a constant
reminder of what your organization truly is. My second observation
is this: Employees are more complicated than we typically
recognize.
We tend to think about employees' identities in one dimension
only, right? We think about folks in terms of maybe race or
ethnicity or sexual orientation or age, physical abilities, and we
don't think about all of the other identities that individuals
have in addition to those identities. So, think about this, for
example. You can take any person in your organization.
And once you get past some of the obvious identities, there are a
ton of other identities that can be associated or maybe not
associated with that individual. I would direct your attention, if
you have access this moment, to just put in the words identity
wheel. And you'll see, in addition to those things that we
traditionally think about as identities, you'll see things like
marital status, military experience, job classifications, religious
beliefs, socioeconomic status, thinking styles, parental status,
level of education, work background.
We have to stop thinking about employees as being one-dimensional.
They are multidimensional. And see, when we fail to realize that,
we prevent employees from finding common ground with each other,
and that further stereotypes and the creation of solutions that are
largely ineffective in solving employee issues. So, how do you
change that? I know this is going to sound outrageous, and
you'll listen to this, and you'll be saying, "Oh my
gosh, I can't believe he just said we actually need to
communicate, and we actually need to have more and better lines of
communication."
I'm a big fan of surveys and town halls, giving people an
opportunity to speak out on issues. I also love routine
communications with frontline supervisors and with human resources.
I'm an even bigger fan of climate assessments and free response
opportunities because that gives your employees an opportunity to
really talk and tell you about how these differing identities
interact and impacts their views.
My third observation is this: We frequently misconstrue employee
workplace concerns. I contend that there are four universal
workplace questions that impact every single employee, regardless
of who they are: Am I safe here? Can I trust you? Will you treat me
fairly? Do you care about me as a person? Regardless of a
person's identity or background, those four questions have to
be answered in the affirmative every single time.
So, how do you do that? Here's my solution to that third
observation: Control what you can, and admit what you cannot
control. See, the things that you can control as an employer are
fairness, consistency, opportunity, transparency, and workplace
resources. Those are exclusively in the control of employers. You
can also control safety parameters, physical safety, right? The
security that you have at your locations.
Psychological safety, making sure that folks are not being
terrorized by their coworkers or their leaders in the organization,
and they're free from psychological tyranny. But also
intellectual safety, the idea that I have the freedom and the
ability as an employee in this organization to come up with ideas,
new thoughts, new techniques, new technologies without fear that
someone is going to try to take that away from me because my
creativity or my ability somehow threatens them in their
positions.
The things that you cannot control are the outside world, politics,
and you all know that's true. And you can't control various
"isms" that exist in the world: racism, sexism, any other
thing that has "ism" in it. Y'all feel me when I say
that. You can't control those things as much as you want to, as
much as it would be awesome if we could say,
"Organizationally, we're going to make sure that
there's no more misogyny in the world."
You can't control those things, but what you can do is control
the things that happen within the confines of your organization.
Let me give you a really simple thing to remember, and this is what
I say to all of my clients. As an employer, as an organization, you
cannot heal the world, but you can keep the band together, and
that's all you're really concerned about in the
workplace.
I can't control what's going on outside of these walls, but
to quote the famous now deceased rapper DMX, I can control what
goes on up in here, up in here. And if we get focused on what's
going on up in here and not what's going on in every other
place, I guarantee you, you're going to have a much more
cohesive workplace, and you can manage through change.
My fourth observation is this: We fear asking hard questions. I
think everybody accepts that Albert Einstein was one of the
smartest individuals who has ever lived. He had a quotation that I
want to introduce you to, if you've never heard it, and it goes
like this: "If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life
depended on the solution, I would spend 55 minutes to determine the
proper question."
In other words, if I need to solve a problem, I've got to ask
questions to figure out the dynamics of the problem. And we fail to
do that many times as employers. We're off trying to find
solutions. We hadn't even asked the right questions. And we
definitely have avoided asking what I call those hard questions.
And so, my solution is organizationally, make sure that you are
asking hard questions frequently.
For example, does the organization communicate its commitment to a
healthy workplace enough? Is that communication resonating? Has the
business justification for employee engagement been made so that it
is viewed as a key business goal? Are there sufficient resources
committed to this effort? Are we having the right conversations
about, and you all hear me when I say this, life-work
balance?
Not work-life balance, but life-work balance. See, I contend that
we have to ask the question in that way to put the emphasis on the
importance of your life and understanding that your work supports
your life goals and not the other way around. Are there hardened
attitudes against change or an insistence on preserving the status
quo in your organization?
Is the organization resistant to external recommendations and
criticisms? Are there organizational barriers that prevent open and
effective communication? And finally, is the organization listening
to its employees? We have to be in the habit of asking these hard
questions consistently, frequently, so that we can figure out how
to solve the issues that we have in terms of bringing people
together.
My fifth and final observation is this: Changing times require new
solutions. Think about these following points in terms of changing
times. Millennials are now 70% of the workforce, and Generation Z
will be 30% of the workforce by 2030. A lot of baby boomers are
retiring, and a lot of folks, in terms of Generation X, which is
the generation that I'm in, we're outnumbered in the
workplace.
We had a very small generation. And now, when you start to see the
dynamics of the workplace, this is a significant change. Workplaces
are becoming more diverse: racially, sexually, neurodiversity,
national origin, religious, any other type of diversity. We're
becoming increasingly diverse as a world and as a nation. And then
also think about the prominence of remote work.
This is now more frequent in organizations, when five or six years
ago, remote work wasn't such a big thing, but it is now. And
those are changing times, and it requires new solutions. Let me
give you a solution to this fifth observation. The solution to the
fifth observation includes, first, making sure that we're using
better collaboration tools. If you're only collaborating online
and your employees are not having meaningful touchpoints,
they're not going to be able to establish relationships.
So, we cannot just use online platforms to collaborate. I'm a
big fan of starting a culture committee, and hear me carefully when
I say this, it's not a DEI committee. It is a culture
committee. It is a cross-section of your organization that is
designed to focus exclusively on making sure that we are building
and maintaining and fostering a winning culture. Reimagine
workplace outings.
What I talked about in my live presentation was not always having
outings that seem to be focused around alcohol or going out for
drinks. I have some of my clients that will have an ice cream
outing. Everybody loves ice cream, unless you're lactose
intolerant. And even then, you probably like it, but you can't
have it. But there are other things that we can rally around and
create new synergies and new energies.
One of our offices here at Ogletree for years has done an opening
day baseball outing for people in the firm and some of the clients.
It's fabulous. It's family-friendly. And if you want
alcohol, they have that. But guess what? They also have ice cream.
Y'all feel what I'm talking about. We have to start
thinking about not necessarily doing things the way that we've
always done them, and we need to reimagine those outings, and we
need to explore different workplace schedules.
That's something that we don't talk about enough. A lot of
times we're wedded to, okay, you're going to be remote a
couple of days, and then come into the work location a couple of
days. What if you have a schedule that says you're going to
work remotely for half of the day and come in for half of the day?
What if you had a schedule that says you're going to be remote
in the middle of the day and work remotely at the beginning and the
end of the day?
Because a lot of employees say they prefer remote work because
they've got some responsibilities at home. What if we designed
a schedule that allowed them to have the best of both worlds? So,
when I say explore different workplace schedules, consider those
things. New solutions to a changing work environment. So, I've
shared with you those five observations and those five solutions.
I'm not here to tell you that I have all the answers.
I'm not here to tell you that there's a foolproof method in
terms of bringing people together, but here's what I can tell
you conclusively. Our journey to bringing people together
successfully during changing times begins with what I call that
Einstein principle of making sure that you are dedicated to the
principle of having the audacity to ask the right questions and
carve out solutions that are based on a holistic view, and not just
a one-dimensional view, of the wonderful employees that you have in
your organization.
I can guarantee you that if you do that, you'll be on the path
to having a rockstar organization where you manage change easily.
Thank you for your time and attention. I hope that these five
observations and five solutions are helpful to you. Thank you.
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