Mark Mortensen

With potential and current employees now able to choose among many options for working arrangements, growth and development opportunities, and company culture, attracting and retaining talent has become about much more than just compensation and where employees can work from. In this informative session, Mark Mortensen, INSEAD Associate Dean of the Middle East Campus in Abu Dhabi – an authority on remote work and solving the challenges of organizational design – helps leaders better recognize what their employees want from their company and understand employees’ perception of what the organization is providing.

Using the integrated employee value proposition (iEVP) model, which he co-developed with Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, Mark helps organizational leaders balance elements like compensation and flexible work, growth opportunities, community, and sense of purpose. He uses the proprietary iEVP measurement tool to map employee needs and assess how well those align with what an organization is delivering. Using this data-driven, evidence-based approach helps leaders identify critical gaps and manage key tradeoffs like those between short vs. long-term and individual vs. collective benefits.

Mark will demonstrate that aligning organizations’ offers with employees’ needs is a win-win. For organizations it reduces costly absenteeism and turnover while boosting engagement and ultimately productivity. For employees, it promotes healthier work-life balance, inclusion, and wellbeing. Audiences of employees and leaders alike will be empowered to actively engage and optimize both employee experience and organizational performance.

For decades, the relationship between organizations and their employees was one of mutual security: the latter worked exclusively for one company while the former guaranteed job security and lifelong benefits. Technology has fundamentally transformed that relationship due to the advent of the “gig economy” and the subsequent shift away from lifetime employment. But while popular discourse focuses on the insecurity experienced by workers, Mark Mortensen, INSEAD Associate Dean of the Middle East Campus in Abu Dhabi, reminds business leaders that they too face heightened risk. Employees can now work for multiple companies simultaneously or leave at a moment’s notice to pursue their own endeavors. It also means that personal relationships within organizations have become less common, which could potentially corrode employees’ ability to work together in groups or with members of different teams. Consequently, organizations in the 21st century must rethink how they manage human resources, collaboration and their relationship with employees. Though companies should embrace flexibility, they must also ensure teams can effectively build bonds that enable them to work together on important projects. Relationships will become more important than ever in the future, and managers must find ways to sustain the cohesiveness of organizations in a more fluid world.

What type of company do you lead or work for? Many leaders expend time and energy predicting what kind of organization will succeed in the future, and then working to make their companies fit that description – an admirable goal, but one that assumes we are better at predicting what the future brings than we actually are. Consider that more than half of the companies in the wildly popular book “Built to Last” haven’t. In this presentation, Mark Mortensen, INSEAD Associate Dean of the Middle East Campus in Abu Dhabi, offers a different perspective for thinking about your company’s “organizational fit,” and provides a framework to align what you are (an organization), what you do (your strategy) and where you are (your environment). Mortensen’s core message, derived from his research and consulting work, is that there really is no permanent organizational fit and the key to surviving in the future is building adaptability. Mortensen shows you how to constantly revisit and reimagine the “fit framework” – as well as your organizational design, power dynamics, networks, routines and culture – to build and maintain an adaptable organization. This presentation has cross-industry applicability and can be tailored to any audience.