Custom Thank-You Notes for Holidays: Spreading Seasonal Cheer

that touch you can support thriving at work, if that is the intent behind implementation. What does it mean to thrive at work? Thriving at work is about how we are at work. While work shouldn’t bear the burden of fulfilling all our social and emotional needs or substitute for rewarding pursuits and relationships outside of work, work and the workplace should be 

congruent, rather than at odds, with each of us living at our best. Thriving means excelling—in a way that is healthful and sustainable. It is the foundation of performance, a combination of our own perception of how we feel in my day-to-day—am I clunking along, on the verge of breaking down, or humming along with an open road ahead, calibrated with an organizational 

assessment of our performance, delivering work that matters to the organization. Of course, as figure 3 illustrates, thriving at work is much broader than the technologies that touch us. Our ability to thrive at work depends upon our health, behaviors, and the degree to which we develop our enduring human capabilities. It is also influenced by individual motivation, itself a complex construct, and affected by the management, leadership, and work practices around 

Technology is one piece but an important 

piece, of the puzzle. To the extent that we can shape the future, we might expect that the technologies in our daily lives integrate with our (group and individual) practices to help us do our best work and be our best selves, rather than woto recover. In that respect, even the external technologies that remove rote work and stress around compliance can help us to thrive. But as we know, work and the conditions, expectations, and tools to succeed are 

changing. We are in the midst of a shift from a world of scalable efficiency—in which our organizations, systems, and practices were oriented around predictability—to a future state of scalable learning, in which conditions and requirements change more rapidly and our organizations, systems, and practices have to reorient around learning, adapting, and 

shaping. In this shift, doing the same things faster and cheaper won’t suffice. Companies will capture financial value through differentiation and deeper relationships, continuously learning how to better address a diverse and growing customer base. This has huge implications for workforce performance and development. In a recent survey, 81 percent of executives said they anticipate use of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation to increase significantly over 

The next three years dramatically affecting

employees’ daily work. Only a quarter of leaders, though, report being ready to put this new technology into use.9 At least some of the burden will fall on workers: Increased pressure on companies to continuously achieve higher levels of performance and deliver new and better customer value translates into increased pressure on individual employees to learn and adapt faster—and to draw on a wider range of capabilities and skills to create new value. As 

companies take risks and work fluidly across boundaries with a diverse ecosystem of organizations and individuals, they will need a workforce that is diverse, healthy, collaborative, adaptable, and motivated to constantly learn. High performers will be those who can shift states more readily, switching back and forth between a diffused mode in which ideas, creativity, imagination arise (and body and mind reset) and a focused mode that plans and 

executes actions against a goal.10 Individuals as leaders and workers will need to be resilient to adapt to massive change. We will all need to know how to be mentally and emotionally healthy, to trust and build trust. We will also need to be rapidly learning and improving, and to embrace new tools and insights and put them to use for ourselves and our institutions. As leaders, we will need to know how to bring out the highest levels of communication, creativity, 

Collaboration and performance across 

diverse and distributed environments. And we will need to help people connect—to their colleagues, to their customers, to their passion, to purpose—and bring that to their work. The key question: How can organizations bring technologies that touch to bear for individual thriving in ways that power organizational performance, business strategy, and competitiveness in the future? The possibilities are open, and it’s easy to imagine that some 

of the use cases and solutions defined by today’s technology offerings will prove less valid or useful over time, while new tools built aperformance, focus, and cognition to how we perceive and interact with others or take in new information. Sensors and stress wearables offer visibility into your physiological responses to activities and emotions throughout the day. 

Combined with tools that make mindfulness practices more accessible and facilitate deeper meditative states, individuals have the power for awareness and self-regulation. • What if you could learn without limits? In a fast-shifting landscape, we need the ability to continuously connect ideas, adapt skills, and deepen capabilities. To do that, you need to form and strengthen new connections in the brain. Neurostimulation and training tools enhance the 

Conclusion

brain’s plasticity by using small electric currents to activate neurons during training sessions to build pathways faster. Questions such as these, and the potential solutions, underpin some of the most pressing issues for business leaders today. Understanding these questions from the perspective of the individual and the solutions possible through technologies that anchor on the individual, opens up new ways to approach the bigger organizational challenges. 

Consider how different the question of how to retool today’s workforce for tomorrow looks through the lens of individuals overcoming fears, being open to new ideas, and being trained in a neurologically optimized environment. The question of how to attract and access the right capabilities and develop them to create broader value might be reframed through the lens of creating healthy work environments, fostering high performance, or developing managers to 

coach teams in a less predictable, more fluid ecosystembased futureround the same technologies will emerge to address more finely tuned problems. Consider just a few of the ways that technologies that touch might help us thrive What if you could learn to overcome your fears? When you overcome barriers, negative stress decreases and possibilities open up, with the organization benefiting from your fuller contribution as you