The Future of Talent

ContentsForeword 2

The Battle for Talent 3What are the main challenges? 4

Double whammy: shrinking birthrate, older population 4The changing workforce 4The new skillsets … and the skillsets that may disappear 4

Are companies adapting to the new challenges? 5‘People are our greatest asset’. Really? 5People are not rational… 5‘We want the best talent…’ 5Why brand and culture are crucial 5

The role of recruiters 5What do recruiters need to do? 6Key questions for recruiters 6

What Kind of Talent Will Be Needed? 7The big changes in the world of work 8

Remote working 8Co-working 9The bots are coming … 9The crucial new skillsets 10

Why Diverse Talent Is Crucial 12Diversity and innovation 13The power of experience: why we need older workers 13

Ageism in the workplace 13Creating an age-neutral culture 14

The power of parity: why we need more women 141) We’re not producing enough new workers 142) Branding 153) The bottom line 15How can we achieve gender parity? 15

Managing the millennials 15Clash of generations? 15

Changing the culture 16‘We say to-mah-to, they say to-may-to’ 16The diversity challenge 17

Tackling unconscious bias 17

This paper has been written by Peter Cosgrove and Katie Ryan. Peter is a Director with Cpl and Founder of the Future of Work institute in Ireland, Katie is the head of research for the Future of Work Institute.

Email peter.cosgrove@fowi.ie | Twitter @petercosgrove | Phone +353 87 6200836

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Finding the Talent 18Sourcing the talent 19

Using job boards 19Using LinkedIn 19Using the business 20Using social media 20

Future ways of finding talent 21Co-opetition 21Building the skillsets 21

Outsourcing recruitment 21Using recruitment agencies effectively 21

Using freelancers 21Using technology 22

Big data is here … what do you do about it? 22Understanding our employees 23Automating time consuming tasks 24Complex profiling of candidates 24Nurturing passive candidates 25In brief … 25

A word about references 25

Why Good Companies Attract Talent 26What is your employer brand? 27

What has changed? 27How to be ‘a good company’ 27

Your culture is a collective effort 28Trust and empower your employees 28Inspire with purpose 28Tell your story 29Enhance the candidate experience 29

Something you can control … 30

Making the Best of the Talent You Get 31Presenteeism is not productive 32Overworking doesn’t work 32Better sleeping works better 32Wellness programmes work well 33Breaking down silos brings in new thinking 33Fostering creativity and enthusiasm 34Making failure safe 34Innovation? Just copy and improve 34Creating an inspiring environment 35

Conclusion 36

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ForewordIt’s nearly twenty years since it was recognised that the ‘war for talent’ had begun. Yet most companies have gone on doing ‘the same old thing’, not realising that the work revolution demands a revolution in attitudes, practices and methods.

Today’s labour markets are undergoing fundamental change and companies need to respond to some of the disruptive forces that will affect all organisations.

n Technology is changing the types of jobs we do as well as replacing workers in many current jobs.

n While the last century was characterised by the white male breadwinner, diversity is driving today’s workforce.

n We have an ageing population with over 60% of people living in countries with a stagnant or shrinking population.

n The emerging markets are no longer emerging, they are set to dominate. By 2025, China will be home to more large companies than either the United States or Europe.

n We no longer live in a nine to five society as work is 24-7 in a global world.

Competitive advantage can vanish in a flash. How can you succeed in these turbulent, rapidly changing times?

You need the right people with the right talent. But the problem is that there’s not only a shortage of talent, it’s harder and harder to find. What must you do to find it? How can you improve your processes? What new models can you apply? How can you enhance your employer brand as a ‘great place to work’, so that you attract the best talent?

If you both attract and retain the best talent, you are hugely raising the chances of creating an inspiring and innovative environment, you have a huge competitive advantage, and you’re more likely to survive and thrive in today’s intensely competitive market.

This guide tells you everything (or nearly everything!) you need to know about talent, gives examples of what successful companies are doing, and provides lots of practical guidance about what you need to do.

The sections are as follows:

1. The Battle for Talent: What are the big challenges you face and what do you need to do about them?

2. What Kind of Talent Will Be Needed? With the major changes in the world of work, what kind of talent will you need to succeed?

3. Why Diverse Talent Is Crucial. Why a diverse workforce and an active change in workplace culture is essential.

4: Finding the Talent. What are the best ways of sourcing, from job boards to social media and LinkedIn? What about recruitment companies? How can technology help you?

5: Why Good Companies Attract the Talent. What can you do to perfect your employer brand and be a target for talent?

6: Making the Best of the Talent You Get. How can you foster creativity and enthusiasm, create an inspiring workplace, and ensure that the talent you have won will give it their best?

Finally, we offer some key ‘takeaways’ that you can start implementing right away.

This is a uniquely comprehensive guide to talent. It not only provides lots of must-know facts and specific guidance on what to do; it will also immerse you fully so that you get a deep sense and understanding of what the challenges are and what action you need to take.

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The Battle for Talent

In 1998 McKinsey & Co published a report proclaiming that “better talent is worth fi ghting for”. Today the war for talent has become even more intense. Yet many companies treat hiring situations as if they were emergencies. They persist with often vague hiring practices, and rely strongly on unquestioned organisational traditions and subjective personal preferences. Companies need to appreciate that we are undergoing a work revolution.

If you are hiring well, you can hire exceptional, motivated and smart people in the top 10 or 20 percentile of their sector. If you get just this piece right, everything else becomes much easier, many other people issues fall away, and your company will be much more productive. For that reason alone, it is imperative that you make talent central to the agenda of your organisation.

However, a range of factors – including a falling birth rate, ageing population, the changing nature of the workforce, the changing nature of work itself, technological and social shifts – are making it increasingly diffi cult to fi nd and replace top talent. Companies that fail to change their approach to talent acquisition and management will suffer.

Let’s look at these talent issues more closely.

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What are the main challenges?

Double whammy: shrinking birthrate, older population

Birthrates are falling in the developed world; 60% of people now live in countries with stagnant or shrinking populations. Some countries, such as Japan and Singapore, have chronic demographic challenges. In Germany alone, the labour force could shrink by six million workers over the next 15 years. In China the working age population peaked in 2010, and by 2050 over one-quarter of its population will be over 65, versus 8% today.

We have, therefore, the double whammy of fewer people entering the workforce and more mature workers being closer to retirement – leading to a huge demand issue that is not going to change anytime soon.

The UN predicts that by 2030 the percentage of Germans in the workplace will drop by 7% to just 54% – despite a strong influx of young migrant labourers.

Globally, 800 million people are 60 years and over, representing 11% of the world’s population. By 2030 over 60s will total 1.4 billion, or 17%. It is estimated that in 2047, for the first time in human history, a higher proportion of people in the world will be aged 60 and over (21%) than under the age of 15 (20.8%).

We have, therefore, the double whammy of fewer people entering the workforce and more mature workers being closer to retirement – leading to a huge demand issue that is not going to change anytime soon.

The changing workforce

Some will argue that we don’t have a skills shortage, it’s just that people are in the wrong place. For many jobs now, you don’t need to be in the same country – graphic designers, customer services and developers for example. However, even when this is true, employers prefer what they have always had. Most companies are still keen on the same type of talent: people who live locally and work five days a week.

Many companies prefer younger rather than more mature workers, and are reluctant to hire people who do not work in the same country, who want to work from home, or who don’t want to commit to anything more than a freelance assignment or a contract role.

Traditionally, a temporary worker was seen as playing a lesser role. However, by 2025 it’s estimated that over 40% of people will be working on a contractor-type model, so they will not have a full-time, permanent contract.

While the concept of project-based work is not new, the way it is viewed, both by employers and employees, has changed immeasurably. As more and more skilled professionals choose this type of work, employers are increasingly seeing temporary workers not as a stop-gap but as ‘talent on demand’. Some have termed it as a kind of ‘Netflix for the labour force’.

We will start to see a decoupling of job and work in the future, more people might be jobless but not workless.

While this development opens doors to a new type of workforce, many organisations have not changed their thinking. They are reluctant to adopt a non-permanent model and, outside certain areas like IT and lower-level roles, still operate a predominantly permanent workforce.

The new skillsets … and the skillsets that may disappear

The top five skills on LinkedIn were invented in the last five years. It’s believed that the majority of the most sought after jobs did not exist ten years ago, such as blogger, app developer and data analyst.

Workforce augmentation through artificial intelligence, machine learning, 3D printing and smart sensors will also change how we work. Many jobs will disappear because of automation and robots – but not just low-level or manual jobs. We need, therefore, to be thinking about the skillsets of future talent.

Many jobs will disappear because of automation and robots – but not just low-level or manual jobs.

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Are companies adapting to the new challenges?We’ve listed previously the major, external reasons why it will be hard to find talent, but there are deeper problems that organisations need to address first.

‘People are our greatest asset.’ Really?

When CEOs are asked about their top challenges, their people always come close to or at the top of the list. The phrase ‘people are our greatest asset’ has been done to death. While senior executives may believe it, a better question to ask them is: Does your company behave every day as if it truly believes that your people are its greatest asset? This rarely gets such a categorical yes.

The word ‘asset’ denotes ownership. But employers don’t own their staff, in particular temporary workers or freelancers. For all other assets, return on investment (RoI) is the crucial thing, but RoI is much harder to measure for employees as they do not work in a vacuum. It is hard to measure the positive or negative impact they have on others or the opportunity cost of not having someone in a role for a period of time.

We say that ‘what gets measured gets done’, but few senior executives have compensation related to a people metric. While retention is not always a very good metric, nearly all companies run employee sentiment surveys where they can measure the happiness and well-being of their staff. If senior executives were compensated on this metric, they might start to take more notice of their people.

Again, if ‘people are our greatest asset’, why is this not reflected in compensation for those most in charge of the people agenda? Outside of the CEO, the HR Director is the best equipped to ensure staff engagement and happiness, but HR Directors receive, on average, 30% lower salaries than directors in areas like sales or finance.

In brief, our actual behaviour does not match the sentiments we express. We insist that talent is really important, yet our practices suggest the opposite. Is it surprising that the latest Gallup surveys have recorded the lowest employee engagement rates ever?

The business knows how critical the best people are, but does not necessarily promote the behaviours that reflect such a conviction.

‘People are not rational…’

Technology can help us, but only to a limited extent. Consider games like the Ultimatum Game, and you will understand why it could be a long time before we put recruitment into the hands of computers. The game highlights that people in many situations are just not rational. Emotions cannot be discounted. For example, no matter how good a hire you have sitting across from you, you will not hire someone that you do not like! So, we will always need people to help find the best person and we need to understand that even with technology telling us who the best candidate is, it does not necessarily mean we will choose that person.

‘We want the best talent…’

This is another claim often made by companies but rarely truly subscribed to. Many excellent employees are interested in working for another company, but do not want to apply formally. They just want to dip their toe in the water and have a chat with a senior manager in the company. Regularly, however, they are just pushed towards the recruitment process, which turns them off.

We may say we want the best talent, but in reality we are saying: We only hire the best people that are available when we have a budgeted headcount and they demonstrate they want to work for us by going through a long series of interviews and tests!

Why brand and culture are crucial

Talent is more than just about recruitment: it is your brand, what your people say and your culture. All these do not have one owner – they are everyone’s responsibility – but here is where the recruiter needs to redefine their role in the future of recruitment and become an influencer in the rest of the organisation.

The role of recruitersThe business may believe that talent is critical but their HR department does not have the ability to source it, unless they demonstrate their ability to understand where the business is going and the talent needed for this.

Type in “recruiters are” on Google and note the words that come up in the autocomplete function. Not good!

One of the challenges recruiters have is that everyone thinks they know recruitment. It’s not like IT, legal or finance, where there is much more reliance on the expert. It is up to recruiters to challenge people’s assumptions here.

What is the skillset of recruiters? What do they know that the business does not know? What qualifications have they got? How do they create a sense of accountability for everyone around hiring and attracting, and around building a great culture of future stars? How do they ensure that talent is a central business agenda?

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The business knows how critical the best people are, but does not necessarily promote the behaviours that refl ect such a conviction. For example, shifting to a procurement discussion around effi ciency and cost is not always conducive to fi nding the best candidates.

What do recruiters need to do?

Educate the business on the market

Hiring managers need to be educated on the new normal of the recruitment landscape. It’s a marketplace of scarcity, and therefore how we attract and interview will change. The number of candidates for each role may not be uniform so we may need to look at contracting options.

If you cannot demonstrate that the recruitment function is learning and adapting, then it becomes more of a processing function, which becomes easier to outsource.

Ensure expectations are aligned

A company wants just two things from its recruiter: speed and quality. It will then let the recruitment team get on with their job. But recruiters need to educate the business on what is a realistic timeline to hire the best talent, even if they do not want to hear it. If speed is the key measure, you may compromise on the quality of hire.

Adapt the approach to the particular candidate

Many of the best candidates are passive and have to be cajoled into being submitted for an interview. It’s important to adapt the type of interview to the particular candidate. If you know already that a candidate is good, then you don’t grill them at the interview so much as check that they are a good fi t and, if they are, sell them the role.

Key questions for recruiters

A company will always highlight the importance of talent, but not necessarily the recruiter’s ability to fi nd it.

How will the recruiters, HR and people operations teams demonstrate their value in the future of work? They will have to get their heads around technology and marketing so that they understand the following:

n How can they work better with the business on the internal culture to ensure it is a great place to work?

n What automation tools can the business use to make the recruitment process easier and more customer-friendly?

n How can data analytics and social proofi ng be leveraged? Which is better: a 2.1 degree or someone who has three fi ve-star ratings on a freelancer website?

n How can they infl uence their business, which may know that talent is critical but is not actually behaving as if this is so?

If you cannot demonstrate that the recruitment function is learning and adapting, then it becomes more of a processing function, which becomes easier to outsource. The value of the role is understanding the business and, therefore, the best models and solutions for fi nding the best talent.

Google, Airbnb and Facebook often get the headlines for pioneering initiatives. Airbnb has transformed HR. Mark Levy’s role has been changed from Chief Human Resource Offi cer to Chief Employee Experience Offi cer, combining the traditional HR functions of recruiting and talent development with marketing, real estate, facilities, social responsibility and communications. In this way, Airbnb has changed the focus from HR being seen as a support function within the business; now, to a large extent, employee experience is the business.

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What Kind of Talent Will Be Needed?

Competitive advantage is fl eeting in today’s world of work. Blink and it’s gone. As many companies aspire to be the next Airbnb or Google, technological advances make it more and more possible to succeed, for example, disintermediation, or ‘cutting out the middleman’. Coca Cola, one of the top 10 most successful global brands for decades, was pushed to 13th place this year.

The one common element to the future of work is the importance of having the right people to help navigate the choppy, windy, rapidly changing seas ahead of us.

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The big changes in the world of workMany companies are clinging to traditional workplace models. Those who fail to keep pace will be left with increasingly dissatisfied and disengaged employees. Research has shown that 70% of Irish employees work longer hours than they are contracted for. This tallies with the global trend of a longer working week. It is no surprise that employee satisfaction is sliding downward.

According to the Future Workforce Study 2016, the future workforce will be more mobile, more productive and more capable. Remote employees are becoming more widespread. While this decreases face-to-face interaction, work is increasingly collaborative. Productivity will increase as employees become more digitally connected.

Workers will learn to accept artificial intelligence (AI) and adapt it to their everyday needs, freeing up time for other tasks. Indeed, 62% of global employees surveyed believed that AI would make their jobs easier.

Developments in communications and workplace technologies coming head to head with lifestyle changes are creating a workforce that is more productive than ever before. Why? Because these developments bring increased flexibility and autonomy.

The traditional work week is now becoming obsolete: 24/7 connectivity means that the 9-5 can be 12-7 or include a few hours at the weekend.

The office itself is changing. Remote workers and freelancers are working from coffee shops and co-working offices.

Let’s look at some of these key changes in more detail.

Research has shown that 70% of Irish workers work longer hours than they are contracted for.

Remote working

It’s not only that more people want to work remotely. Remote working widens the talent pool. Companies can access more skillsets by becoming more flexible and open minded when it comes to work styles. Tools like Slack (a web-based platform for team communication) make working anywhere much easier. These tools recreate the watercooler feel of an office, providing a safe space for staff to hang out if they feel isolated or want to reintegrate with the company culture.

Remote working isn’t an all-or-nothing concept. This is the mistaken assumption often made by businesses who refuse to embrace it. For example, it can involve working at least one day at home, two days in the office and one day in a coffee shop around the corner. It’s not a fixed notion, which is probably why many companies find it an intimidating prospect. Working at home every Friday is inflexible. The key about flexible working is that it is truly flexible.

Some organisations, such as Buffer, have introduced 100% remote working. Buffer automates social media sharing. Having workers spread out across the world means they have people available to speak to customers at any time of the day. How, then, does Buffer instil brand loyalty and affiliation? It empowers its employees by allowing them to work remotely in a culture of mutual respect so that its employees feel happier and more fulfilled.

As the workforce becomes more accustomed to remote working, and demands it, companies will need to effectively hire and manage outside talent.

Remote working is not a quick fix for employee dissatisfaction however. There must be a culture which allows it to work. Workers should go to work for the love of the work. Wherever the work is being done, it must be rewarding.

Although the Future Workforce Study 2016 found that 57% of global employees prefer face-to-face working, more than half also said that remote working and better communications technology would make face-to-face unnecessary and obsolete.

People who have longer commutes are 40% more likely to divorce, and have less time and motivation to exercise.

Commuting time

Another factor is the time that we waste on the morning commute. Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert argued that we can never adapt to commuting because it’s entirely unpredictable: “Driving in traffic is a different kind of hell every day.” People who have longer commutes (defined in the study as 45 minutes by car) are 40% more likely to divorce, and have less time and motivation to exercise, which has its own negative repercussions.

Remote working is becoming an integral part of achieving work-life balance and increasing productivity. Companies will have to embrace it, at least as an option.

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HoloportationHoloportation may change how businesses communicate. It enables a more engaging interaction than video conferencing and phone calls, projecting a live hologram in real time, as if the person is actually there. It can also do prerecorded messages, as seen in Star Wars.

n It may revolutionise remote working and the freelance economy.

n It could help with communication, which is often difficult because of the number of people on a conference call.

n It will bring benefits in terms of productivity, business travel budget, conferencing, etc.

n It could be one answer to the global talent shortage.

Co-working

Co-working spaces are membership based working spaces where diverse groups of freelancers, remote workers and independent workers share a communal space. In 2014-2015, the number of co-working spaces worldwide grew by 36%. This growth has been driven by the need for face-to-face interactions and collaborations in the digital age. People like co-working spaces because they are well-designed and because of the well-curated work experience they enjoy when working there.

A survey found that 86% of those availing of co-working services felt less isolated, and 71% believed that their productivity had increased.

Autonomous workers often become less productive over time as they can lack a routine.

Because each individual in the co-working space works for a different company or cause, there is little internal politics or rivalry. Collaboration occurs naturally as people with varying skillsets help others. Interaction can spark great ideas.

Many companies are incorporating co-working into their business strategies. For example, teams can use co-working spaces as meeting rooms, and facilitate staff who want to work remotely. Companies are also taking design notes from these co-working studios, such as having a 1:1 ratio of desk seats to seats in shared settings for collaborative or quiet work.

Companies are also expanding their offices to include co-working spaces for startups and entrepreneurs who work alongside employees, which helps to inspire innovation and a sense of community.

There are a proliferation of co-working spaces sprouting up such as Dogpatch Labs in Dublin, Brooklyn Desks in New York or KoHub in Thailand.

50% of our jobs will be automated and five million jobs will be lost to automation by 2020.

The bots are coming …

The World Economic Forum 2016 report estimates that 50% of our jobs will be automated and that five million jobs will be lost to automation by 2020. This number is going to keep on growing. Jobs you once thought safe are being done with ease by machines or artificial intelligence. For the most part, they will be administrative or repetitive tasks, which means that some of the dullest parts of our day-to-day working lives will be automated or done for us – leaving us more time to think and add value.

However, nothing is safe – even creative roles such as web design. The Grid is a new service that offers “AI websites that design themselves”. It uses artificial intelligence that can rapidly build custom solutions for clients. It all feels natural as if you’re interacting with a designer.

Chatbots are even becoming social media managers. Kit is a chatbot that helps retailers run social media campaigns. It posts updates, and runs ads and email campaigns. Persado is a marketing tool that can help brands use the right words to inspire action. It ensures that ads, messages, etc are emotionally engaging.

A robotic office manager or carer will not be as outlandish to future generations, who will be more digitally ‘native’, and surveys have shown a preference for automated leadership and management.

Auto bots don’t need to be perfect; they just need to make fewer mistakes than humans. A US study found that human error kills 15,000 elderly patients a month. Doctor bots can learn from other bots, from all the medical research out there, from everything that has ever happened to patients worldwide. The knowledge available to them is endless whereas humans are limited in this regard.

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‘Better than human doctors’

The London startup Babylon helps patients access a doctor through mobile technology, like ordering a Hailo. It also helps to decode symptoms and prevent illnesses before they occur by monitoring your daily behaviour and teaming it with data from your medical records, diet and heartrate. IBM’s Watson (language-fluent computer) is being turned into a tool for medical diagnosis. Its ability to absorb and analyse vast quantities of data is, IBM claims, better than that of human doctors.

Bots to transform conversational commerceIn the short term, bots will change how many businesses interact with their customers. Longer term, they will have considerable implications on how humans interact with machines.

WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, etc. are part of what’s called ‘conversational commerce’ – the use of chat, messaging and voice-based interfaces to interact with people, brands or services. Why tap and slide when you can chat to a bot that can pre-empt your needs, personalise your experience and deliver support to time-poor people on the go?

Messaging apps have surpassed social networks in monthly usage. Using messaging bots is a valuable way to engage with smartphone users in a way that feels natural. Messaging is a chance to build relationships with consumers in a conversational manner. For example, users of Yamato Transport, a shipping company in Japan, can use a messenger app to track packages, change delivery dates, etc.

Chatbots will kill off the call centre. They offer a superior customer service to the traditional 1800 voice-based customer support interaction, which involves a lengthy process of inputting numbers to eventually get to someone who can answer your question.

With chatbots, identity verification happens easily through social media, and extensive information and feedback is provided through rich media (images, text, voice, hyperlinks).

American food store Whole Foods competitive advantage was always its instore experience. It has now combined instore with the digital space by using a bot that helps you to find recipes using food emojis.

The crucial new skillsets

We’re living and working longer. What we want from our career is changing. We will need to be extremely adaptable as our roles change along with technology and demand.

Robots can do many jobs better, faster and cheaper. This will mostly involve laborious, routine tasks that can be automated with ease and will open the workforce to new opportunities, and help us excel in new ways.

In many senses, we are already the human 2.0. How would you manage without your smartphone? How many phone numbers do you know, how does your internal GPS work, how could you quickly contact so-and-so to explain why you’ll be late, instantly find out the latest news or weather forecast, and so on?

The professional services that will be hiring and the jobs they will try to fill will all change drastically over the next few years.

On average, by 2020, according to the World Economic Forum, more than a third of the desired core skillsets of most occupations will include skills that are not yet considered crucial to the job today.

Workers will need to adapt to the new organisational structures to be socially intelligent.

Social skills

Overall, social skills— such as persuasion, emotional intelligence and ability to teach — will be in higher demand across industries than narrow technical skills such as programming or equipment operation and control. Technical skills will need to be supplemented with strong social and collaboration skills.

Workers will need to adapt to the new organisational structures to be socially intelligent. Especially with collaboration across countries and regions, virtual collaboration will be an in-demand skill. We will have to be able to work not only in uncertainty and ambiguity, but also in diversity.

Managers will have to manage diverse age groups and backgrounds. Companies who can leverage diversity and recruit from the widest pool of talent will keep them engaged and, ultimately, have the advantage.

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Information and data skills

The informational deluge is set to increase. Companies will be looking for employees who can manage and select information for importance, and understand how to be productive in information-heavy environments.

Data analytics will be less of a niche field. As analytics become more and more relevant to every facet of business, the ability to translate vast amounts of data into business insights and understand data-based reasoning will become invaluable.

Communication skills

Machines still have their limits when it comes to communication. Great communication skills will always be in high demand. Human language is extremely varied and the context of particular communications is vast. Despite the advances of technology, face-to-face interaction will not be totally replaced. A total of 39% of Gen Z and millennials1 surveyed said they preferred human interaction to digital, so a mix of in-office and remote working is most likely to prevail.

Media literacy

There will be more of a focus on media literacy. Being fluent in the latest communication tools and visual media, being able to leverage new media to persuade and communicate, will become vital.

1 Generation Z (aka Post-millennials, iGeneration) – consensus on birth years is lacking, but generally these range from mid-1990s to early 2000s; connotes widespread use of Internet from a young age. Millennials (aka Generation Y, Generation Me) – birth years typically from early 1980s to mid-1990s and even 2000.

Cross-cultural skills

Many CEOs see cross-cultural competency as one of the most critical leadership skills. However, managers rank working with people from different cultures as their weakest skill.

Employees who can work in ambiguity, are able to take different perspectives, and show a high degree of resilience and humility will thrive.

Companies will have to help their employees by investing in social learning. They will reap the rewards as culturally fluent companies will be able to flourish on a global stage.

A desire to continuously learn and add new skills will also be integral to success.

On average, by 2020, according to the World Economic Forum, more than a third of the desired core skillsets of most occupations will include skills that are not yet considered crucial to the job today.

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Why Diverse Talent Is Crucial

Diversity is quickly rising to the top of many organisations’ agendas. It’s regarded as the right thing to do for its own sake, but on a pragmatic level, diverse companies are shown to be better places to work and much more profi table. Diversity also off ers a solution to many talent challenges.

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Diversity and innovationIt has been shown that companies with a diverse workforce innovate and outperform others. According to a Centre for Talent Innovation study, diverse companies are 45% more likely to grow their market share year on year and 70% more likely to capture a new market.

Malcolm Gladwell, author of Outliers: The Story of Success, argued that the major reason behind Enron’s failure was not that they hired the wrong people, but that they had hired the same people, over and over. They had a template for what they thought was the ideal employee - MBA graduates, often from Ivy League universities and candidates who fit their criteria for highly intelligent individuals. They believed in the myth of ‘the perfect employee’ and filled their organisation with homogeneous talent. Groupthink was rife in the company.

Diverse companies are 45% more likely to grow their market share year on year and 70% more likely to capture a new market.

The ‘Lehman Sisters’ theory

Research indicates that Lehman Brothers might not have failed if it had been a more diverse organisation. This has given rise to the ‘Lehman Sisters’ theory. There is too much testosterone active on trading floors, according to Dr. John Coates, a neuroscientist at Cambridge University. He found that, when traders have an above average gain, their testosterone and cortisol levels rise – which clouds their judgment and fuels their appetite for risk. Women have only 10% of the testosterone level of men while older men have less than younger men. The trading world consists of 95% young males.

Homogeneity contributes to groupthink and a lack of innovation. McKinsey & Co found that organisations in the top quartile for racial and ethnic diversity are 35% more likely to have financial returns above the industry average. Research has proven time and time again that diverse teams outperform more homogenous teams.

Tip: Have a look at the range of your talent. Is it diverse enough to contribute to your ability to innovate?

The power of experience: why we need older workersThe West is experiencing declining birthrates and greater life expectancy. The average life expectancy in OECD countries is now 80. By 2041 there will be 1.4m over 65s in Ireland, making up 22% of the total population, compared to 11.6% in 2011.

People and companies need to start preparing for the 100-year life. People are no longer retiring at 60 - they can’t afford to, nor are they likely to want to.

By 2030 the percentage of older workers in the global workforce is expected to rise to 22%.

Companies need to look at all of this as an opportunity, not a challenge. The war for talent means we will rely more on older generations to fill the gap. Experienced workers bring a wealth of knowledge, potentially drawing from a variety of industries which inspires innovation and collaboration.

Ageism in the workplace

“Under 30? You’re 4.25 times more likely to get an interview” – People Management (Aug 2015)

It’s frustrating being an older jobseeker. You’re regularly met with unconscious bias. The interviewer is younger than you and quick to write you off. Over-50s face unfair barriers in the recruitment process.

In the Cpl Employment Monitor survey, it was found that 67% of employers are uncomfortable dealing with older staff. This indicates a greater need for education of managers in the workforce.

It’s not just younger managers but also those aged 50 and over who discriminate against their peers. It’s believed that older workers lack stamina, are overqualified, will bolt if the job isn’t good enough, can’t keep pace with technological change, will even block change and that they have a problem with younger generations. As a result, older staff face barriers to promotion and training, often not receiving the same investment that younger people receive.

Ageism is particularly evident in tech and innovation. Mark Zuckerberg reportedly said in 2007 that “younger people are just smarter”. It is assumed that young people are the ones more likely to have fresh ideas, with fewer responsibilities and stress to burden them. But older workers can capitalise on their experience, wide network of contacts and financial resources.

Harland Sanders started KFC at 65, Ray Kroc started McDonalds at 52, Robert Noyce started Intel at 41. Who’s to say the next Uber couldn’t be launched by someone in their 60s?

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Barbara bucks the trendBarbara Beskind is a designer at IDEO, the company that developed the first mouse for Apple. Aged over 90, she commutes to the office once a week from a community for the elderly. She retired at 44 but after hearing the founder of IDEO talk about the importance of diversity on a design team, she decided she wanted to work for the company.

Designers think differently when she’s in the room and she has been adding different perspectives to projects since she started.

Creating an age-neutral culture

We need to think less about what older workers can’t do and more about what they can do. Often, in an attempt to appeal to Generation Z and millennials, companies encourage collaboration through café style settings and open plan offices. However, ‘cool’ offices with beanbags and revolving chairs can alienate older generations.

It’s important to ensure that there are common agreements across generations regarding the office. For example, everyone appreciates more natural light and quiet environments free from distraction. We need to create an environment that suits everyone, not just one generation, because tailoring to diversity is better in the long run.

Another way to enable older workers to enter the workforce after a break is to have flexible working and part-time contracts. Such policies have the added benefit of helping new parents, women re-entering the workforce, and employees trying to juggle responsibilities, as well as increasing employee engagement.

Ultimately, though, all generations want to feel valued and respected. Fostering a culture that is inclusive and nurturing is the best investment and will benefit employee engagement across the board. Older and younger workers alike will look more favourably on such companies.

We need to create an environment that suits everyone, not just one generation, because tailoring to diversity is better in the long run.

Companies should begin the process of creating an ageless culture now – a culture that treats and rewards each age group equally.

Older workers will need to keep on top of emerging technologies and in-demand skills, as will younger workers. Age is no limit in this regard. Companies can help by offering regular training and workshops.

BMW reinvented the factory for older workers by laying new floors, outfitting workers with special shoes, installing easier to read computer screens, letting employees sit instead of stand and piping in more daylight. The changes improved productivity by 7%.

The power of parity: why we need more womenThere is clear evidence that having a strong female presence in the workplace is good for business. Furthermore, because of demographic and cultural changes, it will also become crucial for business success.

As with diversity in general, it is right in itself to ensure gender parity. Here are some further, pragmatic reasons.

In Ireland, women account for 58% of all purchases and influence 85% of purchasing decisions.

1) We’re not producing enough new workers

In a world of shrinking talent, we cannot afford to leave anyone on the sidelines.

Germany has realised that it could increase its workforce by up to two million people by 2025 by increasing the female participation rate.

Nowhere is the shortage of talent more pronounced than in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) sector. Even during the US recession (2009 to 2012), there were nearly two STEM job postings for every unemployed STEM professional. This is also an area with low female participation. Women fill less than 7% of tech positions in Europe and only a quarter of those working in STEM in Ireland are women.

In these circumstances, it makes no sense not to avail of the full range of the talent pool. Women outnumber men in global university attendance and graduation rates. In developed nations, as many as two-thirds of graduates are women. In the US in 2012, women made up more than 70% of high-school valedictorians.

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2) Branding

The future brand will be shaped online. Women are most likely to engage with brands online and often make great brand ambassadors. In Ireland, women account for 58% of all purchases and influence 85% of purchasing decisions. Globally, they control more than $20 trillion in annual consumer spending. This purchasing power continues to grow year on year. Goldman Sachs declared that women are “the economic engine of the future”.

3) The bottom line

According to the 2016 Peterson Institute study, businesses that have 30% of females in leadership positions have 6% higher profits. The study looked at 22,000 companies around the world and found that CEO or director level females make little impact on the bottom line. However, the more diversity at C-level, the more profit was gained.

While having female directors and CEOs is important, the real impact is felt at the C-suite. The correlation between C-level participation and better profits and performance is demonstrated repeatedly.

How can we achieve gender parity?

One suggestion made by the Peterson report was to encourage paternity leave. The report found a positive correlation between increased female participation in corporate leadership and mandated paternity leave, rather than maternity leave as might be expected.

To achieve increased female participation, it’s important that companies assist women who are in the middle of their careers and those who make a career goal of reaching the C-suite. Career development helps to keep female ambition and confidence alive as they progress through their career.

In a report by Bain and Co, Everyday Moments of Truth, it was found that 43% of women surveyed aspired to a top management position in the first two years at a company, compared to 34% of men at that stage. However, over time the proportion of women with leadership aspirations dropped to 16%, while men’s ambition remained the same.

The report found that the erosion of women’s ambition was due to lack of supervisors’ support for female career advancement in the early years.

President Obama’s female staffers adopted a strategy called ‘amplification’ to ensure that female opinions were heard in the male-dominated environment. When a woman makes a key point, other women repeat it and give credit to the woman who voiced it. This repetition stopped any males in the room taking credit for ideas that weren’t their own.

Ensuring your talent is engaged and has career progression in their sights will not only result in a more diverse workforce but will benefit your bottom line.

For millennials, alignment with the company mission and brand allegiance often trump salary.

Managing the MillennialsMillennials (born approx. between 1980 and 2000) will begin to dominate the workplace in the next ten years, but their impact is already being felt and is driving many of the workplace changes we have seen over the last few years. In 2025, 75% of the workforce will be millennials.

Millennials are often characterised by their independent mindset. They grew up with slogans like “Have it Your Way” (Burger King), “Empowering People” (Acer), “The Power to Be Your Best” (Apple), “Be What’s Next” (Microsoft) and “Expanding Possibilities” (Hewlett Packard). They are a confident generation, empowered to carve out careers based on their passions and values.

For millennials, alignment with the company mission and brand allegiance often trump salary when it comes to accepting an offer or staying with a company. Money is not as important as it was to previous generations. Personal growth, varied projects, flexibility and autonomy, and intellectual stimulation all have an important place.

In a PwC survey of over 4,000 graduates, what they valued most was career development, with work-life balance a close second.

To manage millennials successfully, companies will need to ensure that there is a purpose running through the company’s DNA. Company cultures that provide staff with meaning have higher rates of engagement. According to a survey by Deloitte, 73% of employees who worked at a ‘purpose-driven’ company were engaged, compared to 23% who didn’t work at such a company.

Clash of generations?

A major focus for organisations now is how to manage a multigenerational workforce. Millennials with a reputation for job hopping are often being managed by Baby Boomers who have stayed with a company for decades. Clashing priorities and work styles can become an issue for some teams and ultimately hinder collaboration and innovation.

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There is always going to be another generation that thinks differently. For example, Generation Z is already talked about as a generation that will clash with millennials. Laszlo Bock, who managed Google’s People Operations, says pigeonholing workers into categories is not helpful. He believes that there really isn’t a major difference between the generations. Instead, he suggests focusing on better understanding individual employee needs and working to fulfil them.

As companies face more pressure to take greater care of their employees, they will need to:

n Focus more on employee wellness and motivation.

n Encourage career breaks and paternity leave so as to foster a healthy work-life balance.

n Be more open to staff wanting, if possible, to work in different departments in-house or take different paths in different countries.

Changing the cultureThe world is getting smaller. We are one step closer to a two-hour flight from London to Sydney. Hypersonic travel (travelling faster than the speed of sound) will have seismic consequences for the future of business. This means that we have to pay closer attention to cultural differences, but we don’t need to wait until 2018 to do this. We’re already living in a workplace where international conference calls require regular interaction with people of different cultures. Language barriers are not the only concern.

Different cultures and ethnicities have different ways of behaving and acting in a corporate setting. It is important that both companies and individual employees understand this.

What’s a good meeting?Culture guru Erin Meyer has highlighted many examples of cultural challenges in her book The Culture Map. One survey she carried out looked at how different cultures interpreted ‘a good meeting’.

For most Americans surveyed, ‘a good meeting’ produced a firm decision. For the French, a meeting was productive if they were able to “debate and share various viewpoints”.

Most Thais believed ‘a good meeting’ occurred if they “put a formal stamp on a decision that had been made before the meeting, in informal pre-meetings”.

Clearly, multiculturalism poses challenges if even a simple meeting means different things to different people.

Misinterpretation can cause confusion, hinder decision-making, and leave people feeling unsure of their value or responsibilities.

According to a Centre for Talent Innovation study, a team with a member who shares a client’s ethnicity is 152% more likely than another team to understand the client.

‘We say to-mah-to, they say to-may-to’

In a study of cultural difference, Americans and Japanese were asked to take a photograph of a person.

n The Americans most frequently took a close-up, showing the facial features.

n The Japanese showed the person but also highlighted their environment, so that the individual was often small in the context of their surroundings.

In Chinese and Japanese philosophy, there is generally a focus on interdependencies and interconnectedness. Their approach is more holistic. In Western philosophy, there’s a tendency to believe that you can remove an item from its environment and analyse it as a separate object.

How we see the world guides how we approach solving a problem.

How managers give feedback is drastically different from culture to culture:

n Americans tend to be overwhelmingly positive when giving feedback, which leads to much ambiguity.

n A Thai manager is conditioned never to criticise a colleague in front of others.

n The French tend to criticise passionately and give feedback only sparingly.

Imagine a French manager interacting with US employees where none of them understand the cultural differences.

Even simple behavioural differences can lead to misunderstanding and worse. Pausing is an acceptable conversational device in Japan, where there is often a ten-second pause between two people speaking, whereas in most Western cultures you will never get to speak if you are waiting for a pause of this length!

Most Nordics are comfortable with silent pauses in conversation and may feel that quick-fire Americans, who don’t like pauses, are not paying attention or are being dismissive or even rude.

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The diversity challenge

According to a Centre for Talent Innovation study, a team with a member who shares a client’s ethnicity is 152% more likely than another team to understand the client. Diverse teams are harder to work with because of the different viewpoints; having teams who look and think like yourself are easier – but they are less beneficial.

As the world of work evolves and the world itself becomes smaller, we’re going to be doing business with clients and employees of various ethnicities. To be a thriving multicultural organisation, a company must educate itself and its staff about the cultural differences that might arise, and tackle them head on.

The sooner companies adapt to diversity, the sooner they will come out on top.

Tackling unconscious biasUnconscious bias affects us all and in ways we may never realise. Unintentional assumptions are made about other people all the time – whether it relates to their age, gender or culture.

When we see someone, whether we realise it or not, we make judgments about how competent they are. Our brain fills in any blanks from past experiences and shortcuts. For example, they don’t look like me, they don’t have the same background, etc.

Yale University asked science researchers to assess two identical CVs for a Lab Manager role. Both had the same qualifications, but one was male, the other female. The researchers all came back with the same response: they judged the male candidate to be more competent and would pay him more.

We like to think that we are observing objectively, but research shows how wrong we can be.

To be a thriving multicultural organisation, a company must educate itself and its staff about the cultural differences that might arise, and tackle them head on.

In English speaking countries, some people are changing the names on their CV, believing that ‘Anglo-Saxon’ names are more successful. A study by the Australian National University found that Chinese applicants had to submit 68% more applications to get an interview than those with ‘Anglo-Saxon’ names. Those with Middle Eastern names had to submit 64% more.

Bias can hit more than names and religious affiliation. For example, Andy Cross, Managing Director of Australian recruitment firm Ambition, has heard employers state that they don’t want Irish people because they “talk too much”.

It can be tricky to ensure that a candidate is completely anonymous. Recruiters can use other indicators to identify race. For example, a knowledge of Arabic or the name of a school can indicate a candidate’s faith.

Unconscious bias may arise at interview stage and also influence who we promote and who we value at work.

Westpac’s Head of Inclusion and Diversity, Ainslie van Onselen, says they remove details such as interests (yoga or dancing may suggest a female candidate) and school details (to cancel out geographic bias). The application will only contain details about skills, qualifications and why the applicant believes they are suitable for the position.

However, unconscious bias may arise at interview stage and also influence who we promote and who we value at work. It’s essential, therefore, to be aware of our tendencies so that we can start to work on them and make sure we’re treating everyone fairly.

To really achieve a diverse organisation, we need to re-educate and ensure that we are aware of the impact of unconscious bias and make efforts to tackle it.

If companies fail to embrace diversity, they are not preparing for the future talent they will need.

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Finding the Talent

Not only is there a shortage of talent but it is also becoming harder to find. So what strategies can you use to find this talent? How can you improve your existing processes and what new models can you apply?

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Sourcing the talentSmart companies know that they’re only as good as their best workers, so they prioritise seeking out the best talent they can get. But do we just need to do the same things better, or do we have to find radically new ways and means to find the talent?

First, we need to keep in mind that the talent on the market includes both active talent (actively seeking employment) and passive talent (not looking for a job but may be interested in the right opportunity). In other words, we need to look to not only those actively job searching but to the entire marketplace.

Using job boards

‘The job boards are dying.’ Are they really? Where do you look when you want to buy or rent a house? You generally go straight to a house listing. Job boards are the biggest listings for jobs. They will not be going away anytime soon. The first place that people look when searching for a job is still the job boards.

Advertising your jobs

That said, the competition for jobseekers’ attention is increasing, so you need to improve how you advertise your jobs to target the best talent:

n How exciting are your jobs? Do they capture the imagination?

n How easy is it to apply on a mobile phone?

n How easy are they to find on job boards?

n Has the business (which understands best what it’s looking for) contributed to writing the job specification?

n How responsive are you to all the applications you receive?

n How easy is it for a jobseeker to find your jobs? In online terms, how well optimised is your job for SEO?2

In brief, while you will get candidates on job boards, you are fighting for their attention, so you need a good hook to get them to apply. You also need to be able to respond quickly, as you never know how relevant or suitable the person is that you did not respond to.

2 Simple techniques, such as creating a tagline that includes your company (name, job title and most important, credentials), can increase the chances that qualified candidates will find the listing in a search. Careful use of key phrases in the ad means that the search engines will assign relevancy to them and move them up in search rankings.

Bury my Bentley‘Facts tell but stories sell …’

When selling their company or their jobs, companies need to look at how powerful the story is. Brazilian businessman Thane Chiquinho Scarpa created waves when he announced plans to bury his million dollar Bentley so he could drive around his afterlife in style. You can imagine all the negative attention he got as a result.

However, on the day he was to bury the Bentley, he announced that he was not going to do it and instead revealed his real motive: to create awareness about organ donation. Every day, he said, we were burying much more precious items – our human organs. We should be donating these to save the lives of others.

A powerful way to get a message across with maximum effect!

When you search for candidates, you may identify great profiles on LinkedIn but not necessarily great people.

Using LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the largest candidate database and fast becoming the number one tool for recruiting organisations. While it will continue to be one of the best methods to find employees, both active and passive, there are ways of improving your recruitment strategy.

First, your whole business should be on LinkedIn. It is a branding platform for your company. Candidates are at least three times more likely to look at profiles where there is a photo. At a minimum, think of LinkedIn as another shop window for your brand and do an audit on what your brand looks like to a potential employee.

Secondly, your line managers should reach out to potential candidates. People feel flattered if a CEO or senior manager approaches them. Just think how you would react to a CEO versus a recruiter asking to meet you.

Remember though, that many people have embellished their experience and been trained in how to do this. When you search for candidates, you may identify great profiles on LinkedIn but not necessarily great people.

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Using the business

Communities

The future of recruitment is about connecting with excellent talent who may need to be seduced and wooed. This clearly works best if you are speaking the same language and share the passion of the potential candidate.

Many companies use online forums to find candidates. In the tech community, two such forums are Github and Stack Overflow, which are essentially IT communities where people share information and ask for advice. Clearly, the best person in your business to be on such forums is one who is interested in the discussion and thus has a much better chance of engaging with others.

If a recruiter goes on the forum with the sole purpose of finding talent, it’s like being asked to connect with someone on LinkedIn and then getting a sales pitch straight afterwards. These approaches need to be seen to be genuine. If they are, you will get a much higher hit rate.

Talented people know talented people, so identify the top performers in your company and ask them for two referrals.

Referrals

Companies also need to rethink their employee referrals. These are often highlighted as the top source of great hires but the main reason they fail is that they die off because they are not embedded in the business; you need to develop a well planned employee referral programme and ensure it is continuously implemented.

The other major problem is that those who refer candidates are not informed about how the candidate is progressing, so they may refer a candidate once but never do so again. Money may get people interested in the referral programme but, unless they trust the process, they will not be comfortable putting their friend through it.

Talented people know talented people, so identify the top performers in your company and ask them for two referrals. Soon you’ll have a talent pool of promising candidates. It is also important to stay on top of technology platforms that can help you embed the referral process, such as Jobvite Refer, Zao and RolePoint.

Face to face

The business is meeting people every day at conferences and events and will regularly find great people. There may not be a role for someone at a particular time, but companies need to have a simple way to keep track of such people.

We all have a feel for someone we think would work well in our organisation. To build a future pipeline of potential talent, make sure that you are ‘capturing’ great people and have a process to ensure you can find them if a position becomes available.

Using social media

More and more employers understand that, in a marketplace short of talent, they need to attract the people who are not actively looking – to entice them to an interview at least and then sell them the dream job.

Social media recruiting is becoming a better tool as more data is appearing on sites. It can be an excellent tool if used correctly.

n Start by setting objectives so you can measure these later.

n Define who your audience is and where they hang out. They are not all on LinkedIn.

n Take the time to engage and communicate with employees.

n Have content that is interesting and shareable.

n Listen to experts like Greg Savage, Matt Alder or Andy Headworth, who offer great advice about using social media on their blogs/podcasts.

New tools regularly come on stream, but you should still be focusing on the largest platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn (if that is where your audience is).

Trendy new platforms such as Snapchat may not be right for recruiting (at least right now), so start with what works now and be excellent at using them.

Note also that recruiting and marketing are highly intertwined; you may be excellent at finding candidates, but they must like what they see when they look at your company profile, your stories, your social streams, and so on.

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Future ways of finding talent

Co-opetition

Ford and GM both realised that they could work faster if they pooled resources on developing 9 and 10-speed automatic transmissions. This resulted in bringing products to market twice as fast because of access to more talent and resources.

If the talent is not available, why not work with a competitor? Some companies are doing this and sharing talent so as to get access to talent they need. Cooperate with your competition – if only for a short period!

Building the skillsets

What if we invest and train our staff … and then they leave?

What if we don’t invest in them … and then they stay?

Jim Collins in his book Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap ... And Others Don’t highlights the case of Nucor, a US steel company that built its entire system around an idea that you can teach farmers how to make steel but you cannot teach a farmer’s work ethic to those who do not have it in the first place.

“They didn’t want unionised steelworkers,” said Collins. “Nucor located in farm country because it figured it could teach steelmaking to farmers but couldn’t teach a farmer’s work ethic to steelworkers.” This resulted in some great hires for Nucor following this approach.

In the 1990s, when ‘middle offices’ became popular in investment banking after the Nick Leeson/Barings scandal, companies realised they did not have enough people with the relevant experience, so they began to hire process operations people with no banking experience. They needed to ensure that people were strong operationally, given the risks – and they could teach them banking.

You may not have someone with the requisite experience for a particular job role, but if you hire an individual based on attitude and help to build their skills you will have a better long-term employee.

Outsourcing recruitmentCompanies generally outsource for what they believe is not a primary service offering and when an expert supplier can be contracted to do the service better. Some companies specialise in recruitment process outsourcing (RPO), but organisations are often circumspect about taking this option.

The first concern is that a recruiter who opts for an RPO model is essentially a turkey voting for Christmas, as in general you do not need a recruitment function (or you need only a very small function) if you outsource. RPO will generally help your costs, your speed and responsiveness, but there are multiple factors as to why a company would outsource part or all of the recruitment function. As a minimum it is important to investigate this as an option.

Using recruitment agencies effectively

Are recruitment agencies a dying industry?

Well, the global market, according to the Staffing Industry Analysts, is a $470bn marketplace (the highest ever). As with all open economies, if we did not need the service, it would not exist. The reality is that recruitment agencies find, persuade and influence talent – and it’s a free service until you hire the candidate.

Companies may claim they do not need a recruitment agency, but there is no downside to checking whether a third party is able to furnish you with candidates superior to your own – why would you not use this service? The problem is that, if a company believes it doesn’t need this service and that it can do better, then it is not possible to prove or disprove this: they do not know what talent they did not get!

Why would you not use a service that can deliver you excellent and relevant CVs and you only pay if you hire?

If you hire an individual based on attitude and help to build their skills you will have a better long-term employee.

Using freelancersOver 50 million Americans are now engaged in freelance work. According to Upwork, the largest freelancer platform, over 60% of them choose to work as a freelancer.

In the gig economy, as it has been termed, temporary jobs are changing. Using an app, you can hire a receptionist for a day. We can check the rating the person has with the platform or app - such social proofing is exactly what we use on sites like PayPal, eBay and TripAdvisor to help us make a decision.

We are comfortable buying from strangers, accepting lifts from strangers, swapping houses with strangers as long as they have a strong rating. A good rating can be seen as better evidence than a CV or traditional reference, since it’s a public judgment - it’s based on those who have used a person or service.

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The gig economy isn’t just creating a new digital channel for freelance work. It is spawning a host of new economic activity; for example, people making and selling items such as jewellery, clothing and accessories through online marketplace Etsy.

The top reasons cited for choosing freelance work are generally, freedom, a flexible schedule, ability to work from anywhere, and being able to do what one is passionate about. If companies don’t trust their workers and give them flexibility (be that working from home or flexibility regarding working hours), they may look elsewhere.

A good rating can be seen as better evidence than a CV or traditional reference, since it’s a public judgment - it’s based on those who have used a person or service.

Reduced cost

Companies often face difficulties when it comes to contractors and temporary workers. There are inherent risks with flexible staff if they are perceived as doing a job similar to full-time employees as they may end up being considered full-time employees, with all the employee rights that entails.

However, it is not mandatory to afford freelancers paid benefits such as healthcare and pension. This may change in the future, but there is no doubt that the cost of the worker is much less.

On the one hand, companies need to understand what the future employee wants (the core feeling for most employees is trust); on the other, they need to recognise the benefits and opportunities of hiring freelancers.

Using technology

Big data is here … what do you do about it?

When it comes to your talent agenda, can big data help you to gain a competitive advantage?

Big data is widely seen as the future of recruiting and development. If so, companies must understand and know how to apply it. You have access to big data through LinkedIn, for example. However, you need the right tools to analyse the data, and people who can interpret it.

There are a number of workforce analytics and applicant tracking systems, designed for recruiting purposes that gather information. But data by itself is not enough. You have to be able to understand it; having used technology to bring up the right candidates, you must be able to weigh the data points so that you find those who best fit your requirements.

Remember too that behind all the publicly available data, factors relating to personal interaction and communication are important, such as whether a candidate showed up for an interview. Add to that the need to include referrals and references in the algorithm.

First, to understand the complexities, let’s look at some of the pros and cons of experts versus machines.

The limitations of experts

According to psychologist Paul Meehl, experts often try to be too clever in coming up with the solution. Experts can be inconsistent. In one study, when radiologists were shown the same X-ray twice, they would contradict their original prognosis 20% of the time.

Humans are also susceptible to outside factors and stimuli. A study showed that the chance of a convict getting parole approved varied depending on how long the judge had until his next food break! Not even the experts are infallible.

The value of ‘gut feeling’

On the other hand, research shows that gut feeling is more reliable in complex situations like choosing a partner or changing professions. The unconscious part of our brain is older, larger and more powerful than the conscious part. Our brains respond subconsciously to events five times faster than the conscious brain processes information. For example, we will have sweaty palms and a ‘bad feeling’ about something long before our brain consciously processes what’s happening.

Given the information overload we face each day, we often rely on our intuition or gut feelings – the rapid cognition, condensed reasoning or unconscious associative processes that use the built-in shortcuts in our brain. Our brain looks at the situation, quickly searches its ‘files’, and then finds the best analogue among the archives of stored memories and knowledge.

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Tennis coach Vic Braden is often able to predict when a player will double-fault before the tennis racket even makes contact with the ball. The Germans have a word for gut feeling – intuitive, unconscious decisions made on the basis of apparently little information: Fingerspitzengefuhl, which translates as ‘fingertips feeling’. It was considered a key reason for the early successes of German tank commanders in WW2.

Could gut feeling be just as, or even more valuable than data-driven decisions?

It depends. The more experience you have in a particular field, the more reliable your gut feeling. They are based on a rich foundation of stored patterns of experience. However, we are fallible; you might focus on the wrong detail and trigger the wrong associations in your brain. Your unconscious bias (as discussed earlier) may be twisting your assessment in the wrong direction.

Big data works well with online shopping habits and rituals, but is still limited when it comes to talent.

The limitations of big data

It’s important to look at the limitations of algorithms. It’s generally assumed that they are objective; they power insurance quotes, terms of loans, even medical diagnoses. However, these algorithms are based on choices made by biased human beings. They may be made with good intentions but it’s hard to avoid human prejudice, misunderstanding and unconscious bias.

The conclusions these algorithms produce often go undisputed. Applicants are struggling to get their CVs to the top of the pile – especially those in minorities and women. In the US, 72% of CVs are never seen by human eyes.

Big data works well with online shopping habits and rituals, but is still limited when it comes to talent. For example, through data alone, it’s difficult to understand people’s motivations for choosing one role over another.

A recent product called Crystal Knows can fairly accurately predict not only your personality type and style through the data they can find about you online, but also how best to interact with you, how to email you and what your key triggers are.

However, the amount of data online about older people is relatively small compared to the next generation, who may have started on social networks at the age of seven, so the data on them is much richer and more detailed.

Despite this, as human beings, we are far too complex even for the best computers, and may always remain so.

Our big data algorithm machines are designed by humans, so are limited by the knowledge and values of their developers, the commercial needs of their creator and the limits of human understanding (take the Apollo 13 disaster for example).

Data is only as useful as it is credible. How can we ensure the information gathered is of a high quality and accurate? And, to get the right answer, we have to ask the right question, to identify the key indicators that will guide us to the solution.

The value of big data

Despite those limitations, we now have vast amounts of information that we can benefit from – if we have the insight and ability to do so. Our access to all this data offers an unprecedented opportunity to transform our sourcing and recruiting – the data is useless unless we can retrieve precisely what we want, when we want it and then to leverage that data in order to gain the insights we need.

Next, let’s look at some of the ways in which big data can help us.

Understanding our employees

Companies such as Bullhorn and PredictiveHire have products that let you know when people are close to resigning. There are many signs that we can see ourselves: such as change in appearance, change in attitude and taking more time off. Predictive analytics tools can help alert us too. Algorithms use data points such as geography, performance reviews, personality tests and communication patterns to give an idea of whether a worker will leave a job in the near future.

VoloMetrix Inc uses HR data as well as anonymised employee email and calendar data. It found that it could predict that a worker would leave based on the fact that they were spending less time interacting with certain colleagues or attending events beyond required meetings.

Box Inc found that how connected a worker feels to their team matters more than pay or relationships with managers. Box has thus encouraged managers to throw more social events, recognise team work and hold more mentoring meetings between senior leaders and newer employees.

Predictive analytics can thus help companies to understand their employees better.

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Automating time consuming tasks

Recruiters are already being replaced as technology is increasingly used to screen candidates. Alexander Mann uses technology to automate manual processes such as scheduling interviews and authorising job offers. It also uses Joberate which determines, through psychological profiling built using social data and CVs, how likely an individual candidate is to be interested in or suited to a role. The aim is to free their employees from administrative work and give them more time to be productive and innovative.

Profiling people to predict behaviour or to identify their capabilities (such as being better suited to IT than marketing) has huge value for the hiring industry.

WorkFusion is a New York software company that provides AI cognitive services that can be programmed to do your work for you. Essentially, over time the machines learn the work that people do through understanding key data points. Such work is generally mundane; automating it frees up employees to do more purposeful work.

Profiling people to predict behaviour or to identify their capabilities (such as being better suited to IT than marketing) has huge value for the hiring industry.

Your AI recruiting assistant …

Mya is an AI recruiting assistant, created at FirstJob Inc in 2016. It’s a chatbot that makes sure every applicant gets a response.

One of the biggest bugbears of candidates is not getting any response from an employer. Mya can help recruiters by going through a flood of unqualified applications and finding the relevant ones. Time spent reviewing applications can be used on other tasks such as creative sourcing.

Users log into the platform, select from open positions and then Mya follows up with questions such as ‘How much experience do you have with MySQL database?’ It can pinpoint the shortfalls of an applicant and ask them to make a case as to why they should be considered for a particular position.

It’s claimed that Mya has improved recruiter efficiency by 38% and increased candidate engagement by 150%.

Candidates are more likely to hear back from a recruiter if they have engaged with Mya. Those who might have been overlooked before are given an opportunity to sell themselves instead of getting lost in the applicant pile.

One challenge you may hear is the fact that people want human interaction. This may be the case but, for example, more hotels are moving to self-service check-ins so maybe we aren’t as focused on some of the niceties as we think.

Complex profiling of candidates

Gild, a San Francisco based startup, sorts through millions of job sites, analysing each person’s social data. The company creates profiles of job candidates for its customers (mostly in the technology sector). It keeps track of over 20 million job change events and various behavioural patterns that indicate readiness for a new job. This can include adding new skills to a social profile or data on location, job-hopping behaviour and tenure.

Gild sends updates as the people they track add new skills, for example. It claims that it can predict when a top performer is at the point of being likely to change jobs. That can spur clients to make the right offer at the right time.

For companies that subscribe to Gild, it’s important for them to know a potential candidate’s social capital – how active are they on GitHub, how often they share code or insights with their community. These can be good indicators for genuine passion or for being a good collaborator.

The world of big data is ever-expanding as we continue to share updates on our personal life. Hiring models are now using this data to help predict and assess.

It’s all about matchmaking …Deutsche Bank’s US corporate finance division is using behavioural profiling (similar to that used for matchmaking) to hire graduates. They screen candidates for the behaviours they’ve identified in their best junior staff in an effort to hire the best performers from diverse backgrounds.

Investment banks know that diversity improves decision making (research consistently proves this). ‘Herd mentality’ was blamed for the financial crisis, so investment banks in particular are considering more carefully the talent they hire.

The profiling software picks up on skills such as how well a team member collaborates, whether they take initiative, or are tenacious and resilient in a fast-paced environment.

Deutsche Bank believes that this levels the playing field for talent hoping to work for them and thus opens up the organisation to diversity.

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Nurturing passive candidates

Some companies have to engage with passive candidates because there aren’t enough qualified active candidates to choose from. But passive candidates typically make better employees than active ones. According to The Undercover Recruiter, passive candidates are 120% more likely to want to make an impact and 33% more likely to want challenging work.

To reach out to passive candidates, it’s important to really understand them. If you pinpoint the star employees in your organisation and what makes them great, you can use this information to filter candidates and identify your target market. The best companies then work on building relationships organically.

To reach out to passive candidates, it’s important to really understand them.

The Zappos insider

Like any company, Zappos is struggling to find tech talent. It experimented with banning job postings on its site and replaced them with its relationship based Insider programme. People signed up if interested in working at Zappos now or some day in the future.

You can become a Zappos Insider in three steps:

n Step 1: When you visit the Zappos careers site, you aren’t greeted with job postings but are introduced to the various teams at Zappos and asked to choose which is most suited to your skills and interests.

n Step 2: You upload your CV or join with LinkedIn, Facebook or an email address.

n Step 3: You’re asked to fill out a few questions (5-10 minutes) relating to logistics, preferences, culture, etc.

Every Insider is assigned an ambassador, one of Zappos’ six recruiters.

Zappos put job postings back on its site, but still relies heavily on the Insider programme.

In brief …

Algorithms can only take us so far, but we can now use machines to assist in the screening process, picking up on behavioural clues as opposed to screening digital profiles or CVs. Data and AI are gradually doing work for us that frees us up for creative and collaborative tasks that rely more on human interaction and the personal touch.

Big data, when used properly, is good for everyone involved. Recruiters can save time, companies get positions filled by the right candidates more quickly, and candidates are matched with the jobs of their dreams.

We are only at the beginning when it comes to using data for talent selection, but it will become increasingly important. However, many companies do not sufficiently value their sourcing capability. Those that invest in the tools and technology that enable their sourcers to be as effective and successful as possible will gain a huge advantage.

Companies can start with two basic questions, asking:

n What job gets the most views on our own website?

n Which page is most viewed by our own employees on our intranet?

This information should enable informed decisions on which job ads are effective and on what internal employees are most engaged with. That’s a good start.

A word about referencesFinally, a brief word about references, which are still something of a disaster area. After you have gone through a long interview process and got your hire, the last thing you want is a bad reference, which could scupper the entire hiring process. In some cases gathering references can be the responsibility of a junior person and it is not really in their interest to hear a bad reference. Their targets are hires so a bad reference means starting again. The only person who should take a reference is the person who will be their relevant line manager. You need to ensure you don’t hire someone disruptive or risk anything else that may harm your business.

Ask two questions today of your business regarding the reference process:

1) Show me all the people we rejected at reference stage.

2) Where you’ve hired someone who turned out to be wrong for the business, look at the reference that was taken, if one was taken at all, and ask why this person was not flagged before.

The only person who should take a reference is the person who will be their relevant line manager.

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Why Good Companies Attract the Talent

If you have a poor employer brand, you will struggle to attract the best talent. But, if you have a reputation as a ‘great place to work’, you have a huge competitive advantage in both attracting and retaining the best.

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What is your employer brand?Your employer brand is all about promoting your company as an employer of choice to a desired target group. It’s about presenting a consistent, compelling and accurate message about your organisation’s culture, your reputation as an employer and your value proposition to your employees (as distinct from your more general brand reputation and value proposition to your customers).

There’s no point having an incredible strategy to attract and source the best of the best if, when they start checking you out, they get the impression that your company is not an attractive place to work.

If you do not focus on your employer brand and the candidate experience, you will struggle to find the best talent.

What has changed?

Your brand used to be what you said about yourself; your voice was that of the CEO, your website and your outbound messages, advertising or PR strategist. All that has changed now that information is so easy to share.

Just as there are sites for the travel industry such as TripAdvisor, where people can freely and anonymously write reviews about their hotel experience, Glassdoor has brought that to the employers market. Current or former employees can now easily and publicly discuss their company in detail, and companies are rated out of five.

If you find your company on Glassdoor with a rating of two out of five, then your employer brand probably needs work.

However, it’s not just Glassdoor; anything can be said about you on Facebook, Twitter and, sometimes most damagingly, YouTube.

A bad break for UnitedCanadian musician Dave Carroll and his band, Sons of Maxwell, wrote a trio of protest songs titled ‘United Breaks Guitars’ that recount how his guitar was broken during a trip on United Airlines in 2008, and the airline’s response.

The YouTube video of the songs was posted on 6 July 2009. By August 2015, it had attracted 15m hits. United Airlines suffered a major PR embarrassment.

Since the incident, Carroll has been in much demand as a speaker on customer service!

You cannot control comments about your company on sites such as Glassdoor or on social media in general, but you can do something to make it more likely that you will attract favourable comments.

At the very least, you can track what is being said about you, using listening services such as RiskEye, NewsWhip or Olytico, and respond in the best way open to you.

However, the truth will come out – so if you want to get good comments, you don’t have much choice: you have to be ‘a good company’.

If you find your company on Glassdoor with a rating of two out of five, then your employer brand probably needs work.

How to be ‘a good company’First, you need to look at your culture. Culture is the inside out and brand is the outside in. Try not to separate these. Describe the brand, the experience of the company from the consumer point of view. Now consider the culture; i.e. how you would describe the experience of the organisation from an internal point of view?

One of the best definitions of company culture is: what people talk about when their boss leaves the room.

The attributes of brand and culture should be similar and in alignment.

If your brand used to be what you told everyone, now it is what everyone else says about you – so your brand advocates are now the key owners of what people think about you and say about you – and that will be reflected in how they feel about you.

Studies have shown that 50% of millennials would take a pay cut to find work that matches their values. This indicates that it’s important to have a mission and values that people can identify with.

While companies see culture as a priority, there is often a clear gap between intention and action. Deloitte’s report Human Capital Trends 2016 highlighted that 82% of executives think culture is a potential competitive advantage. Compare this with a recent Gallup study indicating that engagement in the workplace is at an all-time low.

Studies have shown that 50% of millennials would take a pay cut to find work that matches their values.

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Your culture is a collective effort

You can no longer fake this. If you don’t deliver an authentically good experience, you will struggle to retain the best people. It’s true now more than ever how you treat your employees is how they will treat your customers. All this should not be seen as an HR/recruitment issue, but as an organisational issue. Cross-functional teams are needed to address this.

The CEO who was removed by his own staffNo one person owns a culture, but problems can arise if the CEO’s values do not reflect those of their employees.

Former Mozilla Chief Executive Brendan Eich backed an anti-gay marriage ballot initiative in California in 2008, and suffered a severe backlash.

He eventually resigned due to pressure from his own employees. When have you last heard about a CEO resigning because his staff didn’t want him?

Trust and empower your employees

You need to trust your employees when it comes to sharing content about your organisation. The content they share is trusted by candidates much more than a company’s marketing department. We will all trust a person we know far more than a faceless brand.

However, less than a third of employers encourage employees to use social media to share news and information about their work or employer.

Random acts of generosityHyatt Hotel have data showing who their best customers are. In a 2009 initiative, employees were encouraged to perform “random acts of generosity”, such as covering bar bills, offering free massages, and providing free services that they could normally charge for.

In Hyatt’s Random Acts of Generosity project, a total of $1m was dispersed, and employees had free rein in their decisions. Diamond member activity increased 40.9% in 2009 over 2008, while room nights reserved increased 51.5%. Key brand measures also increased: awareness up 34% and preference up 117%.

If the acts of generosity had been an obviously corporate initiative, they would have felt fake; the fact that they were offered ‘spontaneously’ by employees helped to make the campaign successful.

Inspire with purpose

For many employees, what does work mean? Drudgery, daily grind, stress?

If you dramatically cut the salaries of your employees, would any of them come back to work tomorrow? Perhaps they might. Money is important but is not the only driver.

In the Okinawa region of Japan, they are said to lack a word for retirement – but they have a word ikigai, which means ‘a reason for living’ or ‘the reason you get up in the morning’. Author Dan Buettner has suggested that ikigai is one of the reasons that people in the Okinawa area live such long lives. Older people have a purpose, whether it’s teaching martial arts at 90 or learning to catch fish at 100.

It’s not just about work-life balance. Think of people working in a dingy office 16 hours a day who are happy and motivated because they’re working for a start-up that they believe in.

Two men are moving rocks from one place to another. One is sad, the other happy. When asked what they’re doing, the sad one says “I’m moving rocks”; the happy one says “I’m building a cathedral”.

It’s important to be honest and authentic when it comes to driving an organisational purpose. If people are going to have to work hard, tell them so. If you go on about having a diverse organisation but your executive team are ‘pale, male and stale’, your employees won’t buy into you. Values must be lived, not just written down.

Think about having some purpose-driven job ads; focus less on us and we and more on you and your. Look at any career videos you have, and see if they play up the purpose of why someone works with you, rather than just focusing on the job they do.

If you go on about having a diverse organisation but your executive team are ‘pale, male and stale’, your employees won’t buy into you.

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Motivating your employeesIn the UK, working hours are at an all-time high but productivity is collapsing. Output is at its lowest level since 1991 according to the Office for National Statistics in the U.K.

There are many reasons for this, but a crucial one is lack of motivation.

Irene Wennemo, state secretary to Sweden’s Minister for Employment, says: “Most of labour market policy has focused on the whip – the idea that if you are whipping people, for example increasing workload and putting people under pressure, then they will do more at work. But the whip rarely works anymore.”

If you pay employees fairly, trust them, give them reasonable autonomy and ensure that they are motivated to help improve your business – in the long term, you will increase productivity and boost your profits.

Tell your story

Corporate storytelling is a great way to interest prospective hires in your brand. When a new employee joins Lego, they are told the Lego story: how it started, the challenges that were overcome, and how Lego got to where it is today.

The new employees are often taken to the original house and factory built by Lego founder Ole Kirk Christiansen. In 1929 the factory was burned to the ground, but Christiansen was undaunted. To date more than 600 billion Lego pieces have been produced.

Such organisational stories tell candidates, employees and customers who you are, what your company is all about. They create a sense of company community, and they create engagement.

Enhance the candidate experience

Next, you need to look at the candidate experience. This is a vital part of the recruitment process. If prospective employees don’t have a positive experience they are likely to look elsewhere – damaging your prospects of hiring the best and tarnishing your employer brand if they pass on their negative feedback.

A study by Harris Interactive found that when job seekers have had a bad candidate experience:

n 22% say they would actively tell other candidates not to work at the relevant company.

n 9% will tell others not to buy products or services from that company.

Other studies found that:

n 60% will have a negative view of the company’s brand.

n 78% will share their bad candidate experience with friends and family, while 34% will share their experience on social media.

The impact, clearly, is much greater than just the lost opportunity of the hire.

A poor candidate experience starts with a lack of planning. There should be no surprise that a job might attract hundreds of applications.

A vague job description, perhaps copied and pasted from a similar one from years back, again gives little for the potential candidate to go on.

Lack of any human contact, with the main communication being through automated messages, is also a huge bugbear for candidates. Companies would learn a lot by undertaking the equivalent of a ‘mystery shopper’ campaign – with a ‘mystery jobseeker’ – to get unvarnished feedback on their processes.

Virgin Media are seeking out how a poor customer experience might damage its reputation and lead to lost revenue. They are looking at applicants who were already subscribers and looked and how many stopped using their services after a poor candidate experience.

Lack of any human contact, with the main communication being through automated messages, is also a huge bugbear for candidates.

Be mobile-friendly

Look around you and notice how people are incessantly on their mobile phone. Incredibly, many employers do not have a mobile-optimised webpage for their jobs.

The screen on a mobile is much smaller than on the desktop; the pages must be easy to navigate, and the information must be concise and easily readable.

One problem is that nobody in a company owns mobile optimisation; it falls between communications, IT, marketing, recruitment and the senior team’s strategy – which again highlights the need to break down silos to look at your brand from a company wide point of view.

Ask your employees to look and apply for a job online; what is their experience like on a mobile? It is generally very poor.

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Over 50% of potential employees will search your jobs on a mobile device. Whether it’s on mobile or desktop, applying for jobs can still be an unpleasant experience, so try it yourself so that you ‘walk a mile’ in the candidate’s shoes.

Use technology only if it enhances the experience

Technology is not always the answer. Video interviewing works well with Skype and hangouts, but the passive process whereby interviewees log in and just have to answer questions to camera is not a pleasant experience and turns people off. It may feel like a time and money saver, but it can damage your employer brand. If you tried the process yourself, you would see why.

Recruitment jobs should not be hard to apply for. If a company is getting too many applications, the default ‘solution’ is often to make the process even harder. That does not make sense from the candidate-experience point of view.

You hear candidates asking: Why can I not apply with a CV? Why do I have to play a stupid game? Rather than penalising the candidates, make the process better and use better technology tools.

Technology can help us in many ways. It can:

n Parse information from candidates’ LinkedIn profile so you can begin to match them with appropriate roles.

n Automate interview scheduling – there’s no need for back and forward emails; people are now generally very comfortable self-scheduling, so just have a calendar where they can see dates available and pick an interview slot.

n Track digital mouse flow – you can see where candidates are abandoning your career website or how long people stayed on the site. You can thus learn what works and improve user experience.

Where candidates have to enter lots of information, it makes a big difference if there’s an indication of the percent completed, or some other means to show how far along the candidate is in the process. They are much more likely to complete it.

The interview: you, too, should give a good impression!

While the interview is a flawed tool, all companies still use it. So make sure that you put your best foot forward from a brand perspective. Here it is important to know a little about behavioural economics.

In a recent library experiment, one librarian was told not to interact with staff, just to do the job, while a second librarian was told to note a person’s name, smile and touch their hand in a light, non-invasive way. When subjects were asked to rate the library, their responses ranged from ‘dark’ and ‘disorganised’ to ‘bright’ and ‘great’, depending on which librarian they engaged with.

We are not advocating touching everyone’s hand! But it is important to note how little personal touches (in another sense) can help, and how much someone takes away about your brand without even knowing it.

It’s also important to note that who you hire will play a part in cementing your company culture. Remember that every single employee plays a part in shaping your employer brand.

Your employer brand is something that is totally within your control – if you make it a priority.

After the interview, ask candidates for their assessment

How you deal with candidates after interview is also critical. Only one can get the job, but the others still want to know what happened, and, if they are not informed, may judge your brand negatively forever after.

The candidate experience is not just about the person who gets the job but about every person who applied and did not succeed. Many people can tell you of a terrible candidate experience, however long ago, and recall the company in detail. Make sure that it’s not your company.

Improve your interview process by surveying candidates who got to the final stage but were not successful. This is your perfect opportunity to get honest feedback from them. They are likely to have some thoughts on the process and will be willing to offer feedback in the hopes of being considered in the future. You may not like everything that is said but it is a crucial step in improving a vital part of your employer brand.

Something you can control …Perfecting your employer brand can set you apart in a world of shrinking competitive advantage. Disruption, technological change and demographic trends are forces that we need to work within and adapt to, but your employer brand is something that is totally within your control – if you make it a priority. Get it right and you will not only be a great place to work, but will have great people working for you too.

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Making the Best of the Talent You GetCompanies all want that innovative idea that will help their business survive and thrive. But how do you create an innovative environment? Start by looking at your employees’ workload and pressures. Are they valued? Are they trusted? Are they inspired? Everything – from your employer brand to how you support your employees day to day – helps inspire innovation.

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Presenteeism is not productiveFor the most innovative companies, the 9-5 is dead. They know that hours clocked is not the most successful measure of productivity. Presenteeism is a prevailing workplace culture where employees are pressured to be present in the office - when they could be more productive elsewhere.

According to the Aviva Workplace Health Index, about one-third of employers in Ireland cited presenteeism as a key health concern for their business. When times are tough, people are even more afraid to ring in sick. Many go to work with back pain, migraines, depression, etc, and thus cannot function well.

Research indicates that presenteeism can reduce individual productivity by one-third or more.

An MIT study showed that, after six months of giving people the option to work from home, employee productivity significantly increased, while stress decreased. However, this only happened if staff were given autonomy over their time; for example, they were not required to log in at a certain time or to inform their boss about what they were doing. That indicates that autonomy and trust are vital for employee engagement.

Sweden recently implemented a six-hour working day for nurses in an experiment to test its efficacy. The result? The nurses took half as many sick days as those in the control group and were 2.8 times less likely to take any time off in a two week period. They were 20% happier and had more energy at work and in their spare time.

Research indicates that presenteeism can reduce individual productivity by one-third or more

Overworking doesn’t workA 2014 study by John Pencavel of Stanford University found that factory output at 70 hours differed little to output at 56 hours. The extra 14 hours was a waste of time. Too much work can damage productivity. In a study by Boston University, it was found that managers couldn’t tell the difference between employees who worked 80 hours a week and those who pretended to.

Overworking is also having a detrimental effect on our lives outside of work. It impairs sleep, and can lead to depression, heavy drinking and heart disease. In turn, all this has a direct impact on a company’s bottom line, as quite apart from being less productive at work, more staff have to take days off for health reasons.

Control or trust?Just because you can see that your employees are present is no guarantee that they are working.

Cyberloafing is a term used to describe the actions of employees who use Internet access at work to pretend they’re doing actual work. It costs US businesses an estimated $85bn a year.

Researchers came up with a system to stop this activity. They divided the Internet into sites that employees can always, sometimes or never visit, and then provided onscreen warnings to remind them that certain sites are not work-related.

Employees were allowed to browse leisure sites for 10 minutes at a time. After 90 minutes’ total of doing this on any day, they were blocked from those sites.

The counter-argument is that this kind of control indicates a low level of trust in your employees, and thus lessens engagement.

Better sleeping works betterIf you don’t sleep adequately, your brain slows down when you’re awake. People find it harder to concentrate, process information and make critical decisions. If you get less than six hours’ sleep on a regular basis, you are more prone to stress and burnout, and will tend to take unnecessary risks.

After many late night EU meetings, Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker said: “I don’t like this way of working which leaves me sleepless. We can’t make the right decisions when we are tired.”

Contrary to common belief, our bodies do not adapt to a sleep-deprived schedule. All it does is add to our increasing sleep debt. Sleep is a restorative process. On a very basic level, it helps us regain energy and repair and grow muscle tissue.

In the TEDx talk ‘Sleep, Memory and Dreams’, Dr Robert Stickgold talks about the importance of dreams and memories, and unpacks the science behind ‘sleeping on it’. Studies have revealed that neurons in the brain are firing nearly as frequently as during the day. The brain is busy creating memories, processing the activities of the day, filing away information.

There’s a lot of talk about mindfulness these days, which is developed through meditation. But, according to the Dalai Lama, “Sleep is the best meditation”. So what’s the point of trying to meditate or develop mindfulness if you don’t sleep well in the first place?

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Ariana Huffington, an ardent advocate of good sleep, says that any board director or CEO who brags about only getting four hours’ sleep might as well boast that he or she is making decisions while drunk.

Sleeping ‘on the job’In Japan you often see someone sleeping on the underground or sleeping standing up. The nation is tolerant of ‘catching sleep’ in public - known as inemuri (‘being asleep while present’).

This even includes sleeping during meetings, classes and lectures.

According to Brigitte Steger (University of Cambridge), inemuri is “an informal feature of Japanese social life intended to ensure the performance of regular duties by offering a way of being temporarily ‘away’ within these duties”.

Getting paid to sleep …

The insurance company Aetna is literally investing in sleep. Employees can get a ‘shuteye bonus’ of up to $300 a year if they get at least seven hours of sleep every night. Aetna believes that having a well-rested and more present workforce benefits its bottom line.

People are a company’s most valuable asset. If their total wellbeing is being looked after, there is increased engagement, productivity and innovation.

Wellness programmes work wellWorker wellness programmes now focus on both physical and mental health. Anecdotally, employees who avail of wellness programmes experience fewer sick days, bounce back quicker after an illness, and are less likely to look for a new job.

It’s important that companies encourage their staff to be happy as well as healthy. While encouraging staff to eat well and exercise is a great start, many wellness programmes do not promote mental and social wellness.

People are a company’s most valuable asset. If their total wellbeing is being looked after, there is increased engagement, productivity and innovation. It’s worth the investment.

Do you have a busy, 24-7, sleep-deprived workforce? If so, look into how you can look after them better, and you too will reap the rewards – not least by enabling them to exercise their creative muscles and come up with good and even innovative ideas.

Breaking down silos brings in new thinkingAs companies become more successful and grow, they break down into silos. Each silo focuses on problems in its own area and begins to work in the business as opposed to on the business. If people don’t look up, they don’t get to see potentially useful information from other parts of their business or from other sectors.

In a silo culture, employees are rarely exposed to new thinking or new areas.

Inspiration often comes from unlikely sources. At Speedo, Fiona Fairhurst and her design team wanted to help swimmers improve their times, so they looked at ways to reduce drag. Their final design drew from a variety of areas, from the drag-reducing structure of shark skin to using stretch material to decrease muscle vibration. It was James Dyson’s interest in the industrial cyclones used in sawmills that led him to invent the bagless vacuum cleaner, the basis of a multimillion-dollar company.

With this in mind, many companies have ‘fireside talks’ where they invite guest speakers, from writers to musical performers, to the company to share their insights. The guests may not have a background directly related to the company, but their perspective can inspire new ways of looking at things.

Creativity needs to be part of a company’s DNA. IBM places a lot of value on brainstorming. It regularly holds ‘Jam’ events where employees are encouraged to put forward their creative ideas. It once held an online brainstorming session with over 150,000 people from over 100 countries.

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Fostering creativity and enthusiasmAsking questions is vital. Open-ended questions push people into problem-solving as opposed to problem-focusing mode. Questions provoke people to find answers.

The office can be a ‘tool’ for fostering creativity. Often there’s little space for introverts – quiet areas where they can focus. Allowing remote working can help inspire them.

Many entrepreneurial and driven people will have a side-hustle, their side project away from work. Many companies capture this enthusiasm (‘Companies are Making Employee Side Projects Work for Them’) by letting them devote 20% of their working week to their passion projects:

n LinkedIn does this with InCubator, giving engineers time away from work.

n Apple has Blue Sky, which allows staff to spend a few weeks on their projects.

n Adobe runs a program called Kickbox – Adobe gives out red boxes to some employees filled with sweets, a Starbucks gift card and a debit card loaded with $1,000. Adobe says that this is all you need to kickstart an innovative idea. Adobe doesn’t ask for receipts, doesn’t check up on them. It’s the ultimate form of trust. Any employee can take part and they can do so on company time. Such facilitation will become more common as millennials begin to dominate the workforce; 78% of millennials believe it’s important to have a side project.

Harnessing this side-entrepreneurship is a positive way of capturing creativity but also keeping staff engaged.

Instead of fearing failure, there should be a celebration of exploration and experimental learning. Much can be learned from small risk experiments.

Making failure safeA common mistake made by corporations is encouraging risk-taking but then punishing failure. Instead of fearing failure, there should be a celebration of exploration and experimental learning. Much can be learned from small risk experiments.

Widen hosted a fireside chat called ‘Celebration of Failures’ where people talked about every failure in the company’s history. They outlined what they did, what went wrong, why it went wrong and how to stop it from happening again. Combing over the failures helps people fail better. This event makes failure safe.

Economists talk about sunk cost – the time, energy and money that has already gone into a project. However, just because there is a high sunk cost doesn’t mean that time and energy have been wasted. Projects should be judged on whether they are likely to succeed, not on the costs invested so far.

Needing to ‘get your money’s worth’ can hinder rational business decisions. Richard Branson said, ‘don’t be embarrassed by your failures, but learn from them and start again.’ One of the best places in the world for creativity is Silicon Valley where on average only one in ten ideas work out – a lot of failure leads to success!

Innovation? Just copy and improvePokémonGo grew faster than Tinder and Twitter. In its first two months, people were spending more time on it than Facebook and spent twice the gaming industry average on in-app purchases. John Hanke, the creator, didn’t create anything new – he merely built on old technologies: geolocation and virtual reality.

Instagram was threatened by Snapchat, where text and images disappear right after they are read and posts expire after 24 hours. So it incorporated disappearing content into its own app. They did what any great company does when facing a threat: they incorporated it.

Between 2013 and 2015 the average number of posts per user on Instagram declined. Snapchat was eating into this with 10 billion daily views. Instagram made filters popular, Snapchat reimagined them.

Just do things better…

Innovation is often about doing things better or finding a way to market a product or service in a way that connects with people.

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Apple excelled at marketing in a way that connected with people. Dollar Shave Club got 12,000 customers in two days after its YouTube video went viral. Its success rested on its humorous, engaging and authentic message, which helped secure the company a community of brand loyalists. It now controls 5% of America’s razor market. This would not have been possible ten years ago. In 2016 Unilever bought the company for $1 billion.

Deloitte found that one-third of Americans would pay 10% more for a ‘craft’ version of a food or beverage. It appears that consumers trust smaller brands more than established ones. In response to this, large firms are buying or backing smaller rivals. This is something pharmaceutical companies have been doing for years – outsourcing their R&D to the market. They rarely invent, they acquire. This is because colossal brands fear they cannot keep up with consumer demand.

Parker flips the scriptParker Pens realised that relatively few people bought their pens to use for writing. If you want a pen to write with, you’ll probably buy a cheap biro. Parker pens are usually bought as gifts.

This realisation changed how Parker packaged their pens: how they marketed them, where they sold them, and how they priced them – in other words, it transformed the company’s whole approach.

If you’re too busy among the bushes and trees, and don’t occasionally rise up to see the overall forest, you will not gain the kind of perspective that leads to possibly game-changing perceptions.

It appears that consumers trust smaller brands more than established ones.

Creating an inspiring environmentIn 2010 the BBC took six celebrities, all aged over 75, and transported them to a country house decorated and furnished as if it were 1975 (TV series The Young Ones). The idea was to transport them back to their halcyon days, and thus encourage them to ‘think themselves young’.

After a week the stars were completely rejuvenated. One celebrity arrived at the house in a wheelchair but left with a cane. Another was unable to put on socks without assistance, but towards the end was hosting the final night’s dinner party with ease.

The experiment shows that, to some extent, age is just a mind-set, but it also reveals the importance of your environment. The environment is not only the physical look and feel; it can consist also of the mind-set and behaviours in an organisation that, often unconsciously, smother new ideas or progress.

Think of the total physical, cultural, mental and behavioural environment that your employees work in. Is it discouraging, limiting and repressive? Or is it nurturing, encouraging and inspiring? Can your people operate at their best? If so, they may well come up with that new idea that could not just keep you competitive, but revolutionise your whole business.

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ConclusionThe paper highlights what the future will hold and how you will need to adapt to ensure talent is to the forefront of the agenda. Below are some practical steps to help you start this journey to ensure you thrive in the most rapidly changing business environment we have ever known.

n Look at your leadership team, they may say that talent is their most important asset, but see if they are being measured and compensated on this, as what gets measured gets done.

n Ensure your recruitment/HR team work closely with marketing as the attraction of talent is becoming as much a marketing skill as it is a recruiting skill.

n Where possible, embrace workplace changes by letting your workers work from anywhere – focus on productivity not presenteeism.

n Look at how you tell a better story around the jobs that you are posting, with more candidates looking at job specs on mobile devices, they need to capture the reader quickly.

n Research some of the more innovative ways to attract and harness talent which may not be the norm – co-opetition, freelancers and the gig economy.

n Forensically examine how you take references – the only person who should take a reference is the person who the potential candidate is reporting in to.

n Evaluate the strength of your employer brand. There is no point having an expert ability to source the best talent if the moment they hear the name of your company they lose interest because of what your employer brand represents.

n Roll out unconscious bias training to ensure you identify how to hire a more diverse and therefore a more creative and profitable workforce.

n Examine the candidate experience and see how you are treating those candidates who do not get the job, each one is a potential future advocate or detractor of your brand.

n Look at the data points you are collecting and try to focus on one key measurable recruiting data point which you use monthly as part of your talent agenda.

n Pay attention to your workers’ health and well-being – sleep can be a huge differentiator, not just in the performance of your team but in their ability to come up with new ideas and be creative.

“Each one is a potential

future advocate”.