Meet Hannah Duncan!

 

Transcript

Hello, my name is Hannah Duncan. I’m a member of Cohort X of the Lockheed Martin Leadership institute at Miami University, and my cohort and I are working on this project Reimagining Collaboration where we discuss the future of the workplace.

So I read and analyzed the book Making Work Human by Eric Mosley and Derek Irvine who put together a novel discussing how it is becoming more apparent than ever the importance of maintaining and incorporating positive workplace relationships. They discuss these interactions and how they promote quality work, relationships, and company loyalty. Not only does this promote customer satisfaction, but the authors discuss the positive impact of an employee that has a sense of belonging and allows them to grow alongside their company instead of growing out of their company.

In terms of our project, understanding the benefits of a human-centered workplace is critical in having a deeper appreciation for the importance of collaboration. And also, particularly in a hybrid workplace, the way that we have had those interactions in the past will change and will continue to change, probably very quickly, in the next few decades, and it's important to understand how having a human-center workplace could be an advantage for companies and something that I hope I will be able to bring into my everyday interactions and career.

So, Eric Mosley and Derek Irvine discuss the emphasis of the employee experience in addition to the customer experience, whereas first it’s always been kind of prioritizing the customer. The authors discuss how if you have an employee that feels appreciated and heard, it can really strongly benefit the company in terms of the happiness of their customers, as if your employees are satisfied then therefore your customers will be to. They discuss that, with a new economy comes a new way of treating employees, they place emphasis on social media platforms and how prevalent they are in today’s society, that it is easier than ever to write a review on a company as a customer or an employee and how these can have really strong impacts on your interactions with other employees and customers. For example, if an employee writes a bad review on your company, a customer that would go see that review may not even want to work as a customer, with your company. We also have seen that there is an emergence for a desire for autonomy in employees and emphasis on competitiveness, efficiency, traditionalism prior, has now resorted to a desire for more flexibility, a very hands-off approach that allows employees to work when and where they feel like it, with more lax dress codes and other company policies that before may have been very strict. It is more appealing to employees to have that flexibility, and one of the biggest points of emphasis that Mosley and Irvine address is the need to then replace those interactions and have those interactions, and one of the methods they discuss is the need for social recognition, and there are actually electronic platforms that they believe acn make this much more feasible and tangible in the workplace, and they believe that when you have employees that feel appreciated and that sense of belonging to the company can make them more resilient and adaptive to the fast-paced environment that our workplace has become. They also address the changes of culture that happen in the workplace when employees feel appreciated, including greater effort and better relationships.

In terms of how I could incorporate this into my life, I have the great advantage of getting to be an employee and a worker in 2023, 2024 and really seeing how that takes place from that side of things, so that give or take 5 or 10 years when I begin to emerge into leadership roles, I will be better equipped for that collaboration with, keeping things that I have learned about human-centered workplace and human-centered design in mind. They also present social recognition tools as a method for how to help employers know how to not only reward their employees but also for employees to be able to communicate to their employers how they would like to be recognized and rewarded, if you will. New innovations in technology can be used to help employees appreciate each other and appreciate their superiors and vice versa, but also to communicate clearly and collaborate with their coworkers. Employers are advised to couple this with tangible rewards that are separate from their paid compensation, their paychecks, beyond that transactional relationship as this will demonstrate effort and appreciation from the employers and will also add to that sense of belonging that Mosley and Irvine discussed prior. This information is critical in understanding how current events shape our workplace, and how this will impact collaboration in the long-run. As a student who is entering the workforce, it is more important than ever for me to understand how I not only can advocate for myself but also for, down the road, when I am a leader, how I can advocate for my employees, how I can advocate for the people that I am working alongside. The workplace is increasingly fast-paced, quick to change, quick to move, and the importance of it is to recognize human emotions and how you can move with it in order to better adapt for change.

Bio

I am from Columbia, Maryland, a small suburb between Baltimore and D.C. I graduated from Atholton High School in 2019 in the top 10% of my class and was lucky enough to be a member of the Atholton’s volleyball program, bringing home 2 state championship trophies during my time there. My passion for computer programming started around this time, and I found myself enthralled by the satisfaction of developing working software, fixing bugs, and problem solving.

In addition to my major in Computer Science, I also have a minor in Management through the Farmer School of Business. I am super passionate about software development and the project work that goes into it, but I really felt that a business-related minor would allow me to better learn how to communicate and work effectively with people, another one of my passions. Developing these soft skills has been pivotal in my studies at Miami, and I truly feel that Lockheed is able to fully take the insights I have learned and apply them to real-world issues. I applied for the Leadership Institute because I wanted to not only round myself out, but also felt compelled by the mission of this program, as well as the idea of getting to work alongside other engineering majors to make this happen.

Besides being a member of Cohort X, I am also an active member of Chi Omega, a sorority on campus. Within this organization, I serve as the Senior Committee chair, focusing on organization involvement.