Individualised vs Personalised Work
Me, Myself and I...
Are you a manager advertising a vacancy? Are you waxing lyrical about your organisation’s adaptability and putting its employees first with a fully individualised work style?
If you really mean that, you might be using the wrong terminology...
Workstyle-over-substance...
What is individualised work? And how does it differ from personalised work?
Individualised work is tailored to a person's logistics, rather than shaped to their well-being.
Personalised work is more about the person's lifestyle and personal preferences.
Whereas individualised practices may highlight the possibility of customisation of work in a workplace, an employee's autonomy is often still constrained by a preordained set of parameters. Those parameters, more often than not, prioritise the employer. Personalised practices, on the other hand, have a human focus. As the Harvard Business Review concluded, personalization goes beyond simply meeting a person’s needs: it aligns the work with their strengths and lifestyles.
Putting the ‘Personal’ into Personalisation
Even in the champagne-splattered, wealth-creation midst of the mid-1980s autonomy was recognised as a “fundamental human need” – that, without it, even personalised experiences can feel hollow (Deci & Ryan, Self-Determination Theory, 1985).
It’s a notion which hasn’t faded with time – as recently as 2021, PwC's Future of Work report found that autonomy is more highly-correlated with employee satisfaction than flexibility alone, stressing that “customisation without control is just a surface-level perk”.
Autonomy, then, must be the driver. It's the working practice at the heart of the Workstyle Revolution because it's the root of mutual trust between employee and employer: the thing that allows an organisation's culture to thrive. Because, for employees in a workplace of trust, with self-determination comes self-accountability – and that’s surely what all good employers are looking for.
Why does it matter?
Let me ask you this: imagine you're a working parent doing the school-run this week (perhaps you don't need to imagine)...
Which of these 2 instructions would make you feel more motivated, engaged, trusted and respected at work?
Boss: “I know you won't be working past 4pm this week, so please can you get the report to me by Wednesday morning?”
OR
2. Boss: “Would it be better for you to get the report to me at some point between now and Wednesday morning? I expect that would work well around your personal appointments this week.”
The first is individualised – it recognizes a person's availability, but it feels cold. It highlights personal circumstances against a backdrop of traditional 9-5 working patterns. It might make the employee feel like a nuisance for having children, rather than a valued employee with a life outside of work that can be easily accommodated.
The second is personalised. The end result is the same – the boss will be getting the report by Wednesday morning, but by framing the instruction in a personalised way they are putting the human needs of their employee first, rather than the logistics of the work's timescales.
The difference is small, but the impact is huge: recent studies suggest that a personalised approach to work tends to increase employee engagement six-fold! (Gallup, 2022).
A Human Touch?
Like for so many of the world's overcomplicated problems, the answer is a simple one. We're all humans and, where an organisation is nothing more than a collection of its people, humanity is the difference between a thriving culture and a potentially-toxic one.
So remember, if AUTONOMY is the doorway to the future of workstyle, one of the keys to unlocking it is PERSONALISATION. Want to know how? Get in touch at lizzie@workstyle.org.uk
This blog was written by one of our team of fantastic volunteers, Jordan Frazer, on behalf of the Workstyle Revolution.
