Sirona Says

If Talent isn't the word used to describe the workforce, then what is?

 

I was reading the latest copy of Human Resources magazine today, and some research they highlight has raised a simple, yet interesting question: What do you call the people that work for you?

Harris Interactive conducted a poll with 1,187 employees in the UK.

Only 9% of workers thought that their employers used the word Talent to describe it's people.

Nearly 70% said that the word Talent was not an expression used in their business.

So what do companies call the people that work for them?

As a starting point......staff; workers; employees.....

What does your company call you and your fellow colleagues?

The 10 ways to manage your workforce in a recession, courtesy of a CIPD & ACAS JV

Thanks to a CIPD and ACAS joint venture on the subject of helping companies during the recession, they have produced their official guidelines to managing your workforce during a recession. It is an excellent checklist for helping your business through the recession and out the outher side in the best possible way for the stability of your company.

1. Think long term

• Think creatively about how to reduce employment costs, such as new ways of working and work reorganisation.
•  See CIPD Research Insight Smart Working: The impact of work organisation and job design
• Remember that making people redundant and recruiting again later when the market picks up is expensive. 
• Protect and make the most of the training budget – focus resources on key areas such as improving line management capability and customer service. 
• Bear in mind your long-term reputation and responsibility to act as a fair employer.

2.  Maintain employee engagement

• Redouble your efforts to boost or maintain employee engagement.
• See CIPD Research Insight Employee Engagement in Context
• Manage expectations and set a clear sense of direction.
• Keep employees in the picture even when there is little concrete news. 
• See Acas guide Employee Communications and Consultation 
• Use all available media to beat the rumour mill.
• Think about creative, non-financial ways of motivating employees such as recognition schemes, team-building days and employee awards.

3.  Strengthen line management capability

• Support your managers so they are better able to operate in periods of traumatic change.
• Brief line managers in full on developments so they can talk to their teams – face-to-face communications are best.
• Recognise the vital role that line managers play in every aspect of the employment relationship – make sure they are properly trained in day-to-day people management skills.
• See CIPD guide Line Management Behaviour and Stress at Work 
• Line managers also need support and leadership from senior management and from HR to equip them to manage difficult situations and avoid burning out.

4. Support employees’ health and well-being

• Recognise the psychological burden and impact that can arise in a recession – make sure workplace support and occupational health provision are in place to prevent high levels of work-related stress.
• See Acas guide Health, Work and Wellbeing 
• See CIPD Research Insight What’s Happening with Well-being at Work? 
• Where possible provide opportunities for flexible working to help employees balance their work and home lives.
• See Acas guide Flexible Working and Work–life Balance    
• Ensure you have mechanisms in place to deal with workplace stress and potential conflict at an early stage.
•  Acas guide Stress at Work 
•  See CIPD/Acas guide Mediation: An employers’ guide
• Recognise the potential negative impact of ‘survivor syndrome’ if your organisation has made redundancies – employees that remain in organisations where there have been job cuts often suffer from guilt while coping with increased workloads.

Are Job Seekers now having to deal with Interviewers that have returned to the Dark Side?

Just like Star Wars has been enjoying a resurgence of popularity with the good that is, Luke Sywalker fighting the evil that is, Darth Vadar, it seems like the Evil has returned to the job market!

There is one simple reason why this is happening - the global credit crunch.
The unfortunate effect of the recession is that many more people are looking for, and applying for jobs. And this has given the interviewers too much choice!

So why is this a problem?

Many interviewers - and I include both corporates and recruitment agencies in this - don't possess a fantastic array of interviewing skills. They have probably taught themselves through experience, and it is unlikely that they will have had much training at all. For approximately 12 months prior to the start of the credit crunch, these interviewers were really 'trying hard' to up their game when interviewing new candidates - they had to as there were very limited job seekers out there. So we saw them working hard at learning new skills like competency interviewing, taking advice from colleagues and, dare I say it, actually doubting whether they had the skills to be able to interview in the first place! Then came the credit crunch......

Now there is more choice and some ugly habits have returned!

Does Your Business need a Recruitment Pinch Hitter now?

I am sure that many of you are not fans of Baseball, so first let me explain what a pinch hitter actually is:

They are simply defined as a substitute for another person, especially in an emergency or a moment of need.  This expression comes from baseball, where it is used for a player substituting for another at bat at a critical point or in a tight situation.

So to put into a business context, it would be someone with specialist skills being called upon to go into a company and solve specific needs of that company, for problems or issues they are experiencing.

Yes it's not brilliant out there, but it's NOT THAT BAD

We all know the state of the economy, it is something that everyday the media seem to taking great pleasure in telling us because they think people want to hear about it!
But what is more significant, is that all this bad news and the continual overkill of doom and gloom  (in my opinion, anyway) that comes out of the British Chamber of Commerce is ever-shrinking the confidence of recruitment and employment in UK businesses.

But let me be clear here, yes there is alot of bad news out there, but it is not effecting every company in the same way, as many are still recruiting staff at all levels. There are still big recruitment problems out there for some companies, as the quality and availability of candidates is becoming very limited.

A large retailer I spoke to last week, told me that their usage of recruitment agencies has actually increased since the credit crunch took hold!! Is that so surprising?
They now receive ten times more CV's, and the quality has dropped dramatically, so for this retailer to get to speak to the skilled individuals they need in their business, they are needing to use agencies to source them.

What would you do with a career break?

Don't you just love it when a company does something different and innovative? Well, while spending last week in Dublin with a client, I came across this piece of innovation from an Irish Bank.

Permanent TSB has come up with the innovative (and brave) move of offering paid career breaks to their staff. Now, there may well have been other companies doing this, but have they done it in a recession? No, the likelihood is that they would have simply gone for redundancies instead.
Obviously the intention of Permanent TSB is to cut spending while keeping skilled workers on standby, rather than lose all that well gained experience. And career breaks are more cost effective than redundancy:
Employees will be given half their salary up to 20,000euros to take a two year break, or 35,000euros to take a three year break. And it is open to staff of all ages and levels!

There will obviously be certain conditions imposed, and of course it won't suit everyone, but to have a career break with a guarantee of a job at the end of it is a step forward for those that are in need of a break.

Then the question comes......what would YOU do if you had a career break?

Mine is a simple one (once the children are self succient) - I would fly to Canada with my wife, buy a motorhome, and spend the time working my way down through many of the US states until we run out of land (ie the Keys)!

What would you do with a career break? (Please share your idea in the comments.)

Talent Management and free beans for a year!!

If someone mentions the product, baked beans, to you, which brand is synonymous with them? Well for me there is only one brand - Heinz. The same goes for soup, Heinz again!
But even with two such powerful brands (and others of course), the company were starting to lose market share, and even confidence in their own products - they didn't even serve them in their own canteen!

So, a new CEO was ordered  - the third in four years! So how did the new one, Dave Woodward, turn around the performance?
He realised that the future of the company lay in the strength of its talented employees. He encouraged employee involvement, engagement and empowerment - after all the employees should know their product and have their own great ideas and opinions, shouldn't they?
He went about the task like a steam train, firstly replacing ten of his twelve senior managers within four months, and put in place new talented managers who believed in his vision that success can be driven by internal talent - but only if they are correctly managed and motivated! Some of the other interesting changes he made were:

• At 8am every Monday morning, his most senior managers would attend a tasting session to tase every single new product.
• Every month, there would be meetings for all the 2300 - by video if needed. He used texting as the medium to collect questions to be asked at these meetings.
• He set up a group of 42 leaders who had to work in the factories, visit the retailers, talk to in store customers and even spend time in consumers homes!! He wanted them to get closer to their product and their customers.
• Introduced a Dragons Den initiative to help staff present their new ideas. Successful new products have been produced because of this. Rewards for this? Well one was a years free supply of beans!!

His belief in his staff and the initiatives he put in place worked because now two years later, Heinz have regained their No 1 position in their respective markets

I believe many companies should show more belief to their existing employees. Given the encouragement and involvement, they may well find that many more of their staff join internal talent management programmes. It will also improve staff retention, help further develop an employment brand and will help improve staff recruitment.
Companies don't always have to go externally to find the talent they need. They may just have to look a little harder - and maybe therein lies the answer. Is talent spotting the real issue?

 

Teach your children to speak chinese!

If you think we have got talent issues in the UK, then think again! China, now one of the new superpowers of the world, is needing to feed it's exponential growth with talent. Therein lies the problem. One, there isn't enough skilled people to meet the huge demand and two, one of their biggest problems is retaining employees, particularly Management.
Competition is stiff for Managers in China and high turnover just compounds the issue. Management-level attrition rates in China are more than 25 percent greater than the global average, and replacing a high-performing manager can cost 300% to 2,000% of that individual’s salary.

Jonas Prising, President of Manpower North America, says,“The United States is the biggest investor country in China, yet many of its companies are struggling to generate the growth they want because of people issues. Recruiting the right people, retaining the best staff and developing leaders of the future are difficult tasks in any market. For foreign companies operating in China, there is the added difficulty of understanding how to adapt talent management strategies to the country’s unique business culture and values.”

The rapid economic and social change that has already impacted China in a big way in the past few years has spurred a skills shortage that is expected to be massive in the next few years. The labour shortage in China is even more problematic than in other nations because it is most severe among managers. 40% of companies find it difficult to fill senior management positions.  Mid-level managers are also in short supply, particularly those who are Chinese nationals and can interact with local people.

So is it any wonder that search for talent in China has gone online, in this extreme example of a candidate driven market. The job board stats would be a dream for online companies in the UK, with the Chinese employments sites such as Zhaopin.com and 51job.com having daily hits in excess 4 million. But when you realise that China’s population is well be over 1.3 billion people you realise that it is just a drop in the ocean.

So if you are advising your children which GSCE's to study, or you really do want to give you little generation Z'ers a leg up into the global workplace, then start them studying mandarin or cantonese!!

Is there really a talent shortage or are companies just jumping on the bandwagon?

There is a recognised talent shortage in the UK currently..........isn't there?  Well that's what we are being told every day, so it must be true!!.

But is it a real talent shortage or is it a case of companies not being able to find the talent out there in the market? (Yes I know there are some genuine talent shortages such as engineering, construction and accountancy before you accuse me of being blase!)
There are those that jump on certain bandwagons without experiencing things for themselves, and I believe the 'shortage of talent' is no exception. Companies must not assume that the talent shortage applies to their industry until they have discovered it for themselves. If they don't do this, then they will be potentially missing valuable talent, that they would have otherwise missed.

There are three things that point to this happening right now:

• We know already know that companies don't use new technologies such as web 2.0 to source employees - technologies that we know prospective job seekers are actually using themselves, and want to use while looking for a job. STRIKE ONE.
• The CIPD says that only half of companies in their recent annual recruitment and retention survey have a formal resourcing strategy, meaning that resourcing is at best unplanned and random for a large number of companies (7P's).  STRIKE TWO.
• There is still a lack of respect (and some would say apathy) for recruitment in business. It is not given the standing and position it deserves in a company, usually just tucked away as part of HR.( In the US Resourcing/Recruiting is a stand alone business function that is part of business strategy and planning). So it has little chance of getting the resource , time and commitment it needs from the business to really perform effectively.  STRIKE THREE

So are companies doing all they can to recruit staff? Of course they aren't, but THEY BELIEVE THEY ARE, which is the problem!

The rise in recruitment agency spend highlights that the default method of recruiting staff  still appears to be  recruitment agencies. All the time companies fail to address their recruitment needs directly, then their level of spend with recruitment agencies will remain on the high side.
I am certainly not against using recruitment agencies, but companies should pick the 'low hanging fruit themselves'. Only then will they understand the talent marketplace, and what the issues around talent really are - and of course they will save themselves a fortune at the same time!!

Sticking your head in the sand is not the answer!!

Having attended the CIPD show on recruitment and retention this week, it has left me feeling a little disillusioned. Don't get me wrong, the show was very good and it was very well attended by many companies, but there seems to be a state of apathy around recruitment - more specifically, how to recruit new employees using modern technologies.
You are probably reading this and thinking I have gone mad, after all isn't every company saying they are trying hard to recruit talent? Well they may well be trying to recruit staff, but they are using the same recruitment tools and methods they have always. They seem to be allergic to trying anything "new" - and by "new" I simply mean online (reactive and proactive), networking, social networks, blogs etc
They have their heads firmly stuck in the sand, and are not even coming up for air to check on what is happening around them!

The New World of Work - fail to engage with generation Y at your peril!

Yesterday I was at the CIPD Recruitment and Retention show in London. There were a good range of half hour showcases on subjects like Web 2.0, Tesco's graduate recruitment and online recruiting. But for me there was one that was by far the most engaging of the day. It was from Bruce Morton of E3unlimited, who is renowned speaker on talent management. His subject was Generation Y. He not only talks with real knowledge  and passion, but he also engages with the audience very quickly.
Unfortunately there isn't a video from yesterday, but this video from his website shows you some of the thought provoking facts that are just around the corner for companies. Talent management and generation Y are problems of today, and should not be put on the shelf, just because companies don't think it applies to them right now. Anyway, enjoy The New World of Work.