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As a Vehicle to deliver this Vision, Mission and Purpose, the VIRTUAL ETHICAL CAREERS CORPUS | CORPUSVEC Institutes | CORPUSVEC TALENTS CHAMBERS - 'Beyond Jobs & Profits for Optimum Value' is a distinctly 21st Century post-GREAT Recession 2007/08 Ethical Corporate Pioneering Sustainable Ethical Careers Paradigms, Workforce Talent Investments and Economically Empowering Entrepreneurial Cultures for ALL Global Citizens, Candidates and Corporate Employers.
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VIRTUAL ETHICAL CAREERS CORPUS | CORPUSVEC Institutes | CORPUSVEC TALENTS CHAMBERS notes the Diminishing Returns on Investment in Education, the mushrooming Graduate Unemployment phenomenon.
CORPUSVEC Institutes | CORPUSVEC TALENTS CHAMBERS is emphatic that costly aggregate investments in education and the Right to Decent employment are to precious for Citizens to leave to predominant control of institutions outside of our control e.g. Governments, State Actors or indeed highly volatile and pressurised Labour Markets.
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THANK YOU & BEST WISHES TO EMPLOYEES OF THE WORLD ON EMPLOYEE APPRECIATION DAY
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EMPLOYEE APPRECIATION DAY is an event, observed on the first Friday in March, meant for employers to give thanks or recognition to their employees. It was created by Dr. Bob Nelson who was a founding member of Recognition Professionals International in 1995, initially to celebrate the publication of his book 1,001 Ways to Reward Employees and to remind employers to thank their employees when they do good work. Dr. Bob did his doctoral dissertation on why managers do or do not recognize their employees and has since helped thousands of companies create a Culture of Recognition in their organization with significant impacts on employee retention, performance and the ability to attract talent.
Though the holiday is still gaining in adoption in the US and abroad, like Boss’s Day, Employee Appreciation Day has become an opportunity for managers, company leadership, and HR to remember the importance of appreciating employees. Companies often celebrate by letting employees leave early, offering gifts, events or special recognition for workers. Such publications as Inc. magazine, Forbes, and Boston.com, have written about the holiday to remind employers to recognize and reward employee effort and to offer tips for building a stronger corporate culture through appreciation.
Studies show that recognition and appreciation are growing in importance as drivers of employee happiness and engagement. Showing employees appreciation can result in a company’s higher retention rate, not only increasing the productivity of employees but the company as a whole.[9] This has resulted in more and more companies and organizations using the day to thank their employees
The world of recruitment is constantly shifting; more so than ever in 2022 as the job space has been permanently changed by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Whether that is more people working from home permanently or the need for workers in different sectors, recruitment is going to look a lot different in 2022 than it ever has done before.
It is important to understand what these changes might look like practically and for that reason TechRound has spoken to our panel of recruitment experts to gather their predictions and opinions for what the future of recruitment will look like in the coming year.
Our Panel of Experts:
Fadl Al-Tarzi – CEO of Nexford University
Ken Morrice – Founding Managing Partner at MM Search
Julien Gargowitsch – CEO at Nicholson Search & Selection
Manisha Agarwal – Head of Business Development at Arjun Global
Mandy Watson – Managing Director at Ambitions Personnel
Neil Armstrong – Chief Commercial Officer at Tribepad
David Whitfield – Co-Founder and CEO at HR DataHub
Dylan Buckley – Co-Founder at DirectlyApply
Deepak Shukla – Founder at Pearl Lemon Recruitment
Andrew Fennell – Former Recruiter and Director at StandOut CV
Khyati Sundaram – CEO at Applied
Neil Purcell – Founder and CEO at Talent Works
Katie Redfern – Founder at Meaningful Recruitment and Author of ‘Working Meaningfully’
As the visible and rapidly growing skills gap continues to present challenges to employers and employees on a global scale, one of the areas of focus we can expect to see innovation is in the hiring of entry level workers.
One of the main issues in recruitment of entry level talent is that, while new graduates may be educated in more theoretical subjects, they often lack the practical skills demanded by employers in the “real world” workplace.
An explanation for this is that many traditional universities do not consider their primary role to be helping prepare learners for their careers. Deep-rooted tradition and even bureaucracy prevalent at many universities is another reason, as is the fact that many faculties do not have the industry experience needed to teach practical skills and thus lack the incentive to focus on teaching them.
As innovation in the education and recruitment spaces continues to take place, one of the areas being explored is how student learning data could improve hiring of entry level workers.
With over 200 million tertiary education students globally, according to World Bank data, educational institutions and students themselves possess a wealth of data that, by applying advanced analytics, could provide crucial insights to help employers make better hiring decisions, and entry level jobseekers find jobs.
Re-thinking the way companies hire entry level talent could involve the development of more data-led systems to analyse applicants over a longer period before making hiring decisions. After all, wouldn’t it be much more meaningful to judge a potential applicant based on one year of data versus a few weeks of interviews?
Employers investing in education as a recruitment technique can result in (i) a more informed hiring decision and (ii) access to the best graduate talent.
Ken Morrice – Founding Managing Partner at MM Search
Throughout 2021 there were some evident and surprising recruitment trends, particularly for tech startups, from the increase in the demand for interim professionals to digital hiring and a new way of blended home/office work. What will 2022 bring?
We predict that one of the biggest trends will confirm that hybrid working works; it will be a mainstay for most businesses to demonstrate their trust in employees by allowing them to select their in-office days. The growth of the tech sector will also lead to the demand for more highly skilled and agile people.
This growth will bring big opportunities for candidates looking to develop their careers and also for businesses seeking the best talent to help drive their business forward. What we will see more of is the ability for businesses to tap into a global talent pool for interviewing and onboarding via technology and digital platforms, saving both time and money.
Tech startups are also in a great position to showcase their employee experience to potential candidates early on, many believe the candidate process is an indicator of how companies treat their employees, so make sure it is a good one!
Julien Gargowitsch – CEO at Nicholson Search & Selection
There will be a slowdown in the rate at which vendors are hiring compared to now; the current recruitment rush can’t go forever.
Companies will continue to see more value in specialist niche headhunters rather than generalist firms.
In FinTech there has been a shift from candidates chasing money and status to trying to find something they feel truly passionate about. This will continue in 2022.
Emails are getting fewer; phone calls are growing; in a WFH world people want to connect!
The war for talent will continue. Some organisations will continue to recruit as they did in pre-COVID with:
long and drawn-out interview processes
lack of flexibility in remote working policies
absence of diversity in leadership teams
below market rate salaries
non-existent company benefits.
These organisations will struggle to recruit and feel the impact of people shortages.
Inexperienced consultants ideally need to be in an office where they can hear more experienced recruiters on the phone doing the job and learning from what they hear. It’s important that their managers are able to hear the conversations and provide regular feedback. Most companies in recruitment are now moving to working from home for most of the week and as such this presents a significant challenge. This can be addressed by:
putting specific processes together that encourage more experienced people to communicate with junior ones when they are about to start calls and let them listen
scheduling more frequent one-on-one chats using video as opposed to voice when management, teams and individuals need to talk.
Manisha Agarwal – Head of Business Development at Arjun Global
It has been a difficult time, in all industries, due to the Global Pandemic of Covid-19, and I think no other industry than our own, in recruitment , know this better or feels this more than ever. The main reason this is happening is that there is a shortage of global skills and labour. There are also a lot of shifts going on, and more people are quitting their current roles to try to get new roles, therefore, trying to secure the right candidate for any position is proving to be a challenging process.
For 2022 I see this to pattern to continue so I think what all people in recruitment should be aware of is to maintain a good relationship with your clients. This will help to enhance your luck in finding more suitable and reliable candidates to fulfil the specific job roles.
My suggestion to get into your client’s culture is to go to their offices for a day or spend a few hours with some of their departments in meetings etc and observe what they are all about. Also ask key questions to senior management, or those who have with the company for longer lengths of time, to gain a full understanding of that company culture. If you understand a company’s culture then you can give your clients the candidates they want. It also produces longer lasting hires for the client/company.
For the candidates side of things, I believe it is important to record and track all the past recruitment data available. This can aid the client’s search for their job opening to be filled. By storing the recruitment metrics, it will make it less difficult in the future, as appropriate candidates will be honed into immediately, or be found to be right for more niche roles available. The key is to have a good system where this data can also be easily accessed and one that is always updated.
Mandy Watson – Managing Director at Ambitions Personnel
The world of recruitment was changing even before the pandemic hit and the general atmosphere seems to have accelerated some of the changes that were inevitable, but brought them forward by a few years.One of the greatest successes has been seen in the rise of the video interview – it has essentially kept recruitment, and therefore, the economy moving. The ability to recruit in a covid-secure way, while also reducing the time to hire has been essential to businesses. This looks set to stay now businesses have adopted this new way of working and seen the benefits.The staffing crisis has been widely reported already, with some of the biggest shortages hitting the low paid and unskilled end of the spectrum. Simply, we have a situation where there just aren’t the people to fill these roles now. We expect that tech – in particular, automation, will be the solution in the medium to longer term. This may also have been accelerated due to the pandemic through necessity.Whilst this might replace some volumes of people, it will bring with it additional opportunities for people looking for related careers. The workforce will eventually have to skill up or risk being left behind.
Neil Armstrong – Chief Commercial Officer at Tribepad
2022 is the year for tech to turn around the diversity issues in recruitment. British citizens from ethnic minority backgrounds have to send, on average, 60% more job applications to get a positive response from employers compared to their white counterparts, according to Nuffield College’s Centre for Social Investigation (CSI). Tribepad is looking at innovative tools to help employers redress this balance and is committed to enabling the recruitment industry to become fair and impartial.
Removing the possibility for unconscious bias is one of ways to increase diversity in recruitment. Tribepad’s Anonymous Applications feature enables applications to be entirely anonymous with no names, gender, date of birth, location, nationality or education institution names visible to hiring managers prior to inviting candidates to interview.
Neil Armstrong, Chief Commercial Officer at Tribepad said, “We’ve seen a 117% uplift in BAME applicants following the introduction of anonymous applications, which is very promising. The increase in confidence from minority applicants in applying for roles and sharing their ethnic origin information indicates a reduction in fear of prejudice.
David Whitfield – Co-Founder and CEO at HR DataHub
Unprecedented levels of reward and benefit will be offered to attract and retain talent in 2022
The research by HR DataHub showed that the top two strategic priorities for HR teams in 2022 are to attract top talent (score 9.51) and retain existing talent (score 8.81).
In the survey, respondents were asked what they already have in place to attract and retain talent in their business, and, what they plan to implement in the next 12 month, or, would consider implementing.
The research suggests that companies may turn to increased levels of monetary reward in recruitment efforts. To attract talent, 17% said they already pay above market pay and almost half (49%) would consider it. Whilst more than a fifth (21%) said they already pay a sign on bonus and 37% said they would consider bringing one in.
To retain talent, over half (52%) are considering the unprecedented move of paying their employees above market average pay increases, 9% said they will implement this in the next 12 months and 14% said they already have this in place.
The research also suggests that businesses may start to use retention bonuses as a tactic to retain talent; 28% of businesses said they already have this in place, 4% are implementing it in the next 12 months and 45% said they would consider it. More than a third (34%) said they would also consider above market bonuses.
Companies also appear to recognise that in the ‘war on talent’ monetary reward alone is not enough to attract and retain employees.
70% of respondents said they already implement and promote their flexible working practices in an attempt to attract new talent, a further 16% are looking to implement this in the next 12 months and 16% said they would consider it. In addition, only 7% of those questioned said they would not consider additional wellbeing benefits as part of their plan to attract new talent. 50% said they already use additional wellbeing benefits in their strategy to attract new talent, 14% are implanting this in the next 12 months and nearly a third (31%) would consider it.
Enhancing development appears to be a key strategy businesses are implementing to retain the best talent. 54% said they already have this in place, more than a quarter (28%) plan to implement it in the next 12 months and 20% said they would consider it. Notably, developing leaders was the fourth highest strategic priority for HR teams in 2022.
The research also suggests businesses believe promoting their commitment to environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues is key to attracting talent. Over half (56%) of companies already have this in place, whilst 16% are planning to implement this within 12 months and 24% would consider using it.
Outlook 2022 has illustrated an astonishing shift in employee strategy amongst the UK’s biggest businesses. Over half of the companies we surveyed said they will be looking to increase their headcount in 2022, which means the talent marketplace is only set to get feistier. It is encouraging to see more than half have already shared their commitment to ESG as part of their strategy to attract and retain talent. However, employees have become increasingly cautious about joining and staying in workplaces that pay lip service to ESG efforts. Leaders must ensure these pledges are not empty.
Dylan Buckley – Co-Founder at DirectlyApply
Video interviewing platforms
“The increased adoption and technological advancements of video interviewing platforms is only going to increase throughout 2022. Either in a live interview setting or asking for answers to pre recorded questions that the job seeker can complete in their own time (one way video interviewing).”
Salaries in Job Descriptions
“Many employers have been hesitant to place the salary or salary band in job descriptions which has long been a frustration and act of time wasting for jobseekers. Given that the candidate shortage looks set to continue across 2022, we are expecting to see salaries in job descriptions becoming the norm, which is good news for job seekers and employees in general.”
No degree? No problem!
“Previously it had been incredibly common to see organisations requiring a minimum of a 2.1 degree, often from a ‘top tier university’. However, thankfully employers are now placing less and less relevance on the importance on a degree and instead are targeting school leavers or people who have relevant work experience.”
Deepak Shukla – Founder at Pearl Lemon Recruitment
In 2022, more recruitment processes will be led by artificial intelligence. To a degree, it has already happened, but it’s likely to be even more AI-led during the rest of the year. Right now we have tracking systems that identify appropriate keywords in resumes. When you look at the funding in recruitment and tech platforms, you’ll see that there is a lot of innovation there. It’s possible that recruitment could become more audio/visual and rely on people’s personal following.
Andrew Fennell – Former Recruiter and Director at StandOut CV
In 2022, it’s almost certain that more recruitment tech innovation will be adopted across all sectors, and it will allow smaller businesses to access more hiring opportunities. The days of walking into a local business and handing in a CV are gone. More innovation means more competition which will continue to make recruitment tech cheaper across the board. 2022 and the rest of the decade will see more automation enter the market, it’s still important for all job hunters to personalise their approach and target employers rather than firing out hundreds of applications.
We’re also going to see the continuation of remote and flexible working as a key recruitment tool. There is now more of a ‘remote by default’ approach to recruitment. By this I mean, interviews are likely to be held remotely, but also candidates will likely be offered remote work-from-home days, hybrid approach, or even totally remote roles. Employees will continue to push for this and recruiters need to accommodate for this where possible.
Well qualified job-seekers look set to be in a strong position in the candidate-driven market this year. They will be well placed to negotiate desirable salaries and benefits packages given the high levels of demand. We’re also likely to see more creative recruitment campaigns as businesses strive to attract the best talent. With the widespread discussion of ‘The Great Resignation’ in the media, it’s expected recruitment teams may have higher budgets to attract talent through different channels.
There’s bound to be a decrease in the number of applications per role, as candidates hold out for opportunities that match up with their skills and aspirations. Prospective employers should be more prepared to go the extra mile, improving working conditions and other elements that are sure to be prioritised by target candidates.
With the continuation of the candidate-driven jobs market, we can also expect a business focus on retention. Positive changes might have to be made in terms of company culture and rewards for loyalty. Companies should be gathering and responding positively to feedback from established employees.
Khyati Sundaram – CEO at Applied
2022 will cement the death of CV, which will be replaced by skills-based applications.
“CVs have long been the cornerstone of hiring processes. But when it comes to objectively finding the best person for the job, it’s becoming increasingly clear that they’re not fit for purpose. Proxies like where a candidate went to school or where they’ve worked previously are poor indicators of their ability to do a job; but can trigger unconscious human bias in employers.
“To avoid this, we will see increasing numbers of employers ditching CVs and turning to skills based hiring this year. By assessing candidates for role-relevant skills rather than making a judgement based on their CV, lots of companies – including ASOS, HarperCollins and Comic Relief – are already unlocking previously overlooked talent and organically diversifying their workforces. More are set to join their ranks in 2022.
“With skills-based assessments shown to be three times more predictive of candidate performance than CVs, there’s more reason than one to change the status quo. The war for talent isn’t going anywhere. But CVs are one casualty we won’t need to mourn.”
Neil Purcell – Founder and CEO at Talent Works
The overarching theme for 2022 is that we have entered a candidate-driven market. It’s the first time in a generation that the candidates have held the power. When it comes to the hiring process I expect to see that the number of applications may decline. Prior to the pandemic, it was not uncommon for candidates to adopt a scattergun approach to job hunting, sending out as many applications as possible in the hopes of getting employment.
2022 will see a shift amongst candidates to a more targeted, more selective approach to job applications. Employers can expect to see a decline in the number of applications because of this. Growing numbers of candidates will make the time to define what they are looking for and then look for jobs that match up, as they know in the current market they stand a good chance of being successful.
As candidates are becoming more picky, employers really need to put their best foot forward when it comes to employer branding and candidate experience. Employers need to make their workplace desirable by promoting what makes them unique and the elements which will appeal to their target candidates.
They also need to look into “quick apply” options to make the candidate experience as easy as possible. Both of these things will help to counteract the reluctancy candidates may have around applying for a job with them.
On top of this, I expect that Employee Value Proposition’s (EVPs) to become bolder and more specific. EVPs will have to adapt in ways we’ve never seen before. It’s important to remember that not every culture is right for every candidate, and you cannot speak to everyone.
All people are different and have different motivations for work just like companies differ. Employers need to consider who their ideal candidates are and how to appeal to them, looking internally at what makes you unique. This means taking a deep dive into your company culture and truly understanding who you are as an employer but also who you want to be in 2022.
This way you can adapt strategies and tailor your messaging to talk to specific candidates and reach them on the platforms where they spend time. Saying you’re a great place to work is no longer enough and neither is waiting for applications to come to you. You need to be specific to entice the right candidates and also exclude the wrong ones.
Katie Redfern – Founder at Meaningful Recruitment and Author of ‘Working Meaningfully’
Not creating an accurate job description. – It’s important to ensure that the job description is very clear and detailed after all the purpose of a job description is to ensure the job will meet the needs of the organization and to recruit the appropriate the right person for the the position. When you clearly specify the qualifications and skills needed for a specific role, it will be less likely that employees who don’t fit the criteria apply. This will, in turn, help the business save valuable recruitment time by limiting the number of applications that come through the door, thereby improving the quality of the applications that come in.
Relying too much on Psychometric Testing and Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS): Psychometric tests and ATS’s are used in all aspects of HR work, although they are not a ‘magic bullet’. They are part of a menu of information sources, such as structured interviews, CVs, supervisor ratings and appraisal results which, combined in the right way, provide insights into how people work. They can improve the accuracy of processes that predict a person’s future behaviour, success in a job or learning a new skill so Psychometric testing can help employers make informed recruitment decisions but the balance needs to be right. We’d recommend filtering out some of the most unsuitable applicants first and not rely too heavily on the test scores when making final decisions. This is where the interview process needs to relied on as when you connect with the candidate through interviews and assessment centers future employers can make well balanced and informed recruitment decisions.
Failing to consider recruiting from within. Oftenbusinesses consider acquiring new talent from outside of the company, but there may be skilled individuals without proper training inside the existing workforce. So we’d always recommend a business develops their employees and considers advertising internally as they may be more effective than a new hire and they understand how the internal systems work already.
Dee Coakley – CEO and Co-Founder at Boundless
Recognising the more permanent shift towards remote working, prompted by Covid, organisations will be reviewing their hiring plans for the year ahead. For many, top of the list will be adapting their hiring strategy to access a wider talent pool by recruiting for remote-only roles – with no geographic constraints. This will not only create new opportunities to drive innovation and growth but also address those hard-to-fill domestic skills shortages. By allowing work from anywhere, they will also be able to address the demand of existing talent who may wish to relocate.
We will also see more businesses hire ‘Heads of Remote Working’ to oversee these overarching remote strategies and drive collaboration across distributed teams. Similarly, many are turning to expert consultants for ongoing advice about how to get the details right when hiring across territories, rather than take on this resource-heavy, time-intensive duty internally.
After all, to access a global talent pool, businesses need to understand the legal and cultural ramifications of making overseas hires, as well as the business implications of running dispersed teams across different territories and time zones. Employment laws, tax codes and statutory benefits all differ from country to country, creating a plethora of compliance concerns which can be difficult to navigate. Therefore, in 2022, we will see more employers use an Employer of Record like Boundless to take on all local employment responsibilities and go above and beyond minimum compliance measures. It’s this water-tight approach that will enable more businesses to recruit overseas and remain compliant in 2022.
Working past 65 can be an excellent way to get out of the house. It’s also great for financial security, mental stimulation, and social activity.
Finding a job as a senior can be a bit different from working when you were younger. Medicare, social security, and simply being out of interview practice can all come together for a confusing and stressful job search. This is why we’ve curated a guide to help you navigate the job hunting process in your golden years.
4 Considerations and Tips for Working Past 65
Take these 4 considerations and tips into account when beginning your job search.
Update Your Resume and LinkedIn Profile
If you’re over 65, chances are you worked your last job for many years and your resume is likely outdated. Update your resume with new skills and experience from the last ten years and remove specific dates.
Be sure to update your skills and experiences on LinkedIn as well to give yourself the best chance of standing out to recruiters and hiring managers. LinkedIn is also a great way to grow your network and find job opportunities.
Practice Your Interviewing Skills
If it’s been a while since you’ve been interviewed for a job, practice your skills with yourself or with a friend. Be sure to address the question of being overqualified during your mock interview. Also, show your willingness to work with a younger team and leadership.
Volunteer to Gain Skills and Improve Your Networking
Volunteering is not only a great way to give back to your community, but also a way to gain skills to add to your resume. Whether it be communication skills or physical skills, volunteering can make you a more marketable job seeker.
Volunteering is also great for networking. The new people you meet may know of a job opportunity that is perfect for you.
Avoid Common Medicare Mistakes
Even if you work past 65, you are still eligible to receive Medicare benefits, but you don’t necessarily have to if your company has 20 or more employees.Talk with your employer’s benefits specialist or a Medicare expert to better understand how Medicare will work with your employer’s insurance plan.
Not getting all the information you need may cause you to make some Medicare mistakes you’ll later regret, such as:
Missing the enrollment deadline
Continuing contributions to a health savings account
Not asking enough questions about private health insurance
Delaying Medicare enrollment
Whether you decide to work full-time, part-time, or do freelance work on the side, earning some extra income during your golden years can go a long way. The social and cognitive benefits are also good reasons to work during your retirement years. Look through the visual below for additional tips to finding a job after 65.
Being an HR professional these days is not for the faint-hearted. The events of the past 17-plus months have been uniquely daunting. Recent research found a 70% increase in stress-related leave per user in HR teams — the sector ranked third on the list of those suffering most, just after healthcare and government/international affairs.
It’s hard enough to complete the practical tasks and keep the plates spinning. Add to that the need to ensure the safety, security, productivity and connectivity of a workforce while under siege from a pandemic and its economic and social impacts. How about managing abruptly redistributed teams on unfamiliar digital platforms or in workplaces that don’t feel safe or, in some cases, sufficiently staffed? Or transmitting a sense of humanity across video calls, reassuring an anxious workforce that the organization is committed to doing the right thing — and knows what the right thing is to do? And managing to stay on top of employee individual needs with endless emails, texts, slacks, IMs?
Don’t forget the need to make sure the flurry of exits that happened over the course of the pandemic are filled by well-qualified, skilled people — who now have to be onboarded to a transformed workplace. Or getting new hires integrated quickly into a workforce likely still adjusting themselves to new realities. And gracefully shift to remote recruiting in the worst conditions.
Three words: You did it. HR rose to the occasion, and often did it magnificently. That’s the good news. The less good news is that we’re not done. In many work situations, the employee experience is broken right now — and it’s usually up to HR to take the key steps to fix it. As workplaces recover and weather the latest disruptions, it’s time to make sure employee experience is optimal.
So what do we do?
Employee Experience: Face It, Redefine It, Advocate For It
Now is not the time to set aside employee experience. I’ve had conversations with HR teams grappling with C-suite directives like “Do what’s most important right now.” Some are wondering if that means maneuvering through this next wave of the pandemic by conducting triage — and setting aside efforts to boost employee experience until we get back to “normal.”
Our Take: No offense against the C-Suite, but backpedaling on employee experience now is a move that belongs in the shoot yourself in the foot category. Employee experience remains a critical factor in engagement — but if it seems more complicated, it is. Yes: labeling all that it’s taken to sustain ourselves and our loved ones during a pandemic and get our work done as “employee experience” feels like an understatement. But that is indeed what people — employees — are going through.
The numbers don’t lie here, either: the correlation of recent employee experience to declining employee engagement is a big tell. Last month’s Gallup report found a drop in emotional well-being and employee engagement — and a corresponding plunge in GDP. Some 7 out of 10 employees say they’ve been having a tough time not just at work, but in life. Only 20% report feeling engaged at work — the other 80% are either actively disengaged or just not engaged (which is bad enough). The cost to the global economy is US$8.1 trillion in lost productivity, which is almost 10% of the entire GDP.
Business-wise, employee experience is a big factor. To make it real, it needs to be calibrated to employee well-being — a realm that extends outside the workplace in certain ways. But experience-boosting initiatives that are relevant and meaningful to the workforce right now are critical to improving engagement and retention. It’s time for HR to make its case to keep employee experience front and center.
Connect Well-Being To Employee Experience, Because They’re Integral
Well-being is such a key part of working now — and should be addressed within the framework of the overall employee experience. Integrating well-being initiatives and the commitment to boost employee experience is just a smart move. But we understand wellness differently now. For one thing, the concept went from a series of more or less fixed points to a moving target — with people’s most basic health at risk and their lives so radically changed, there’s a lot more at stake.
I’ve been asked why I don’t use the term “work-life balance” and the reason has always been the same: it’s a myth. Balance means either/or, a see-saw between one and the other. That’s not the way work, or life, happens. Before the pandemic we were already struggling with not having enough time to work and too much work to take care of our day-to-day lives. With the pandemic, any semblance of boundaries went out the window along with our commuter bags. But even work-life integration as a concept needs a reboot. We’d been extolling the importance of better work/life integration before the pandemic, but we now know just how hard that is to achieve without intentional interventions. It’s still a porous boundary.
As for wellness itself, we were already on the way to revamping our concept of wellness. Expanding benefits packages to include mental health and revamping benefits offerings to address a diverse employee population at varying stages in life was a welcome evolution. But in retrospect we were still thinking too granularly. Dividing up aspects of wellness in order to better address each one is fine — divide and conquer is certainly an effective strategy. But the problem is what happens in a crisis: you lose the bandwidth to proceed down that checklist.
That’s one good reason we saw organizations caught short come March of 2020: they hadn’t yet gotten to that other aspect of wellness. Take digital wellness: Organizations that had not addressed digital wellness found themselves with obstacles including accessibility, communication, workflow, diversity and isolation. Moreover, having been through the pivot to remote and hands-off transactions, digital wellness can’t just be about making sure people unplug — and the approach could be counterproductive. It’s about ensuring true digital democracy and equity — and closing the digital divide among your own workforce.
Seen through a longer lens, wellness is really about the sum total of the workforce’s ability to cope, adapt, grow and thrive; to weather a crisis and stay productive; and the employer’s ability to develop resilience in individuals as well as the entire organization. I don’t see companies offering boilerplate resilience packages, but I do think resilience is going to become a hugely important factor in how we provide wellness offerings to our workforce. And resilience is a key aspect to a great employee experience: when employees feel the organization’s ability to anticipate, to flex, to adapt, and to protect its people as well as its interests; they also feel the leadership’s resilience; the manager’s, and their own.
Preempt The Next Crisis By Making Clear Decisions
A very recent survey by SHRM of 1,000 HR pros reports that half of U.S. organizations are concerned about the Delta variant — and while half is better than less than half, I’m troubled that it isn’t nearly all. The CDC just reversed course on masking indoors in some states, counties and cities — even for vaccinated people. We’ve seen what happens when we don’t reach herd immunity — we wind up with cases spiking, and please for vaccines at the last minute, when it’s too late.
The good news is that 50% of HR professionals say they will encourage their employees to get a booster shot — if there is one, and it looks like there will be. The bad news may be that encouragement isn’t enough. This may be the point when tough policies need to be enacted to mitigate more risk — as just happened with Google, who is mandated employee vaccinations and postponed reopening until October, for the moment. What happens when we bring people back to work and we can’t protect them from each other? What does that do to workforce cohesion?
I find glossy announcements from organizations about reopening somewhat jarring right now, to be honest. Business must go on and work must continue and employees need to keep making a living, and those are common denominators — but people need to be safe — that’s a fundamental, legal employer responsibility. Now that we’re facing the Delta variant — and the next one that inevitably follows, we have a choice here. And what we do or don’t could have a tremendous impact on our workforce. And that’s a part of employee experience now, including how we handle employee well-being, and where HR can really step up right now.
Being an HR professional these days is not for the faint-hearted. The events of the past 17-plus months have been uniquely daunting. Recent research found a 70% increase in stress-related leave per user in HR teams — the sector ranked third on the list of those suffering most, just after healthcare and government/international affairs.
It’s hard enough to complete the practical tasks and keep the plates spinning. Add to that the need to ensure the safety, security, productivity and connectivity of a workforce while under siege from a pandemic and its economic and social impacts. How about managing abruptly redistributed teams on unfamiliar digital platforms or in workplaces that don’t feel safe or, in some cases, sufficiently staffed? Or transmitting a sense of humanity across video calls, reassuring an anxious workforce that the organization is committed to doing the right thing — and knows what the right thing is to do? And managing to stay on top of employee individual needs with endless emails, texts, slacks, IMs?
Don’t forget the need to make sure the flurry of exits that happened over the course of the pandemic are filled by well-qualified, skilled people — who now have to be onboarded to a transformed workplace. Or getting new hires integrated quickly into a workforce likely still adjusting themselves to new realities. And gracefully shift to remote recruiting in the worst conditions.
Three words: You did it. HR rose to the occasion, and often did it magnificently. That’s the good news. The less good news is that we’re not done. In many work situations, the employee experience is broken right now — and it’s usually up to HR to take the key steps to fix it. As workplaces recover and weather the latest disruptions, it’s time to make sure employee experience is optimal.
So what do we do?
Employee Experience: Face It, Redefine It, Advocate For It
Now is not the time to set aside employee experience. I’ve had conversations with HR teams grappling with C-suite directives like “Do what’s most important right now.” Some are wondering if that means maneuvering through this next wave of the pandemic by conducting triage — and setting aside efforts to boost employee experience until we get back to “normal.”
Our Take: No offense against the C-Suite, but backpedaling on employee experience now is a move that belongs in the shoot yourself in the foot category. Employee experience remains a critical factor in engagement — but if it seems more complicated, it is. Yes: labeling all that it’s taken to sustain ourselves and our loved ones during a pandemic and get our work done as “employee experience” feels like an understatement. But that is indeed what people — employees — are going through.
The numbers don’t lie here, either: the correlation of recent employee experience to declining employee engagement is a big tell. Last month’s Gallup report found a drop in emotional well-being and employee engagement — and a corresponding plunge in GDP. Some 7 out of 10 employees say they’ve been having a tough time not just at work, but in life. Only 20% report feeling engaged at work — the other 80% are either actively disengaged or just not engaged (which is bad enough). The cost to the global economy is US$8.1 trillion in lost productivity, which is almost 10% of the entire GDP.
Business-wise, employee experience is a big factor. To make it real, it needs to be calibrated to employee well-being — a realm that extends outside the workplace in certain ways. But experience-boosting initiatives that are relevant and meaningful to the workforce right now are critical to improving engagement and retention. It’s time for HR to make its case to keep employee experience front and center.
Connect Well-Being To Employee Experience, Because They’re Integral
Well-being is such a key part of working now — and should be addressed within the framework of the overall employee experience. Integrating well-being initiatives and the commitment to boost employee experience is just a smart move. But we understand wellness differently now. For one thing, the concept went from a series of more or less fixed points to a moving target — with people’s most basic health at risk and their lives so radically changed, there’s a lot more at stake.
I’ve been asked why I don’t use the term “work-life balance” and the reason has always been the same: it’s a myth. Balance means either/or, a see-saw between one and the other. That’s not the way work, or life, happens. Before the pandemic we were already struggling with not having enough time to work and too much work to take care of our day-to-day lives. With the pandemic, any semblance of boundaries went out the window along with our commuter bags. But even work-life integration as a concept needs a reboot. We’d been extolling the importance of better work/life integration before the pandemic, but we now know just how hard that is to achieve without intentional interventions. It’s still a porous boundary.
As for wellness itself, we were already on the way to revamping our concept of wellness. Expanding benefits packages to include mental health and revamping benefits offerings to address a diverse employee population at varying stages in life was a welcome evolution. But in retrospect we were still thinking too granularly. Dividing up aspects of wellness in order to better address each one is fine — divide and conquer is certainly an effective strategy. But the problem is what happens in a crisis: you lose the bandwidth to proceed down that checklist.
That’s one good reason we saw organizations caught short come March of 2020: they hadn’t yet gotten to that other aspect of wellness. Take digital wellness: Organizations that had not addressed digital wellness found themselves with obstacles including accessibility, communication, workflow, diversity and isolation. Moreover, having been through the pivot to remote and hands-off transactions, digital wellness can’t just be about making sure people unplug — and the approach could be counterproductive. It’s about ensuring true digital democracy and equity — and closing the digital divide among your own workforce.
Seen through a longer lens, wellness is really about the sum total of the workforce’s ability to cope, adapt, grow and thrive; to weather a crisis and stay productive; and the employer’s ability to develop resilience in individuals as well as the entire organization. I don’t see companies offering boilerplate resilience packages, but I do think resilience is going to become a hugely important factor in how we provide wellness offerings to our workforce. And resilience is a key aspect to a great employee experience: when employees feel the organization’s ability to anticipate, to flex, to adapt, and to protect its people as well as its interests; they also feel the leadership’s resilience; the manager’s, and their own.
Preempt The Next Crisis By Making Clear Decisions
A very recent survey by SHRM of 1,000 HR pros reports that half of U.S. organizations are concerned about the Delta variant — and while half is better than less than half, I’m troubled that it isn’t nearly all. The CDC just reversed course on masking indoors in some states, counties and cities — even for vaccinated people. We’ve seen what happens when we don’t reach herd immunity — we wind up with cases spiking, and please for vaccines at the last minute, when it’s too late.
The good news is that 50% of HR professionals say they will encourage their employees to get a booster shot — if there is one, and it looks like there will be. The bad news may be that encouragement isn’t enough. This may be the point when tough policies need to be enacted to mitigate more risk — as just happened with Google, who is mandated employee vaccinations and postponed reopening until October, for the moment. What happens when we bring people back to work and we can’t protect them from each other? What does that do to workforce cohesion?
I find glossy announcements from organizations about reopening somewhat jarring right now, to be honest. Business must go on and work must continue and employees need to keep making a living, and those are common denominators — but people need to be safe — that’s a fundamental, legal employer responsibility. Now that we’re facing the Delta variant — and the next one that inevitably follows, we have a choice here. And what we do or don’t could have a tremendous impact on our workforce. And that’s a part of employee experience now, including how we handle employee well-being, and where HR can really step up right now.
We have all seen the impact of Covid-19 on our working lives through the last 15 months. Individually, our organizations, our social networks and our governments have all tried to adapt to the evolving challenges in navigating through the pandemic waves.
One word that probably best defines our world today is resilience. If not for our combined resilience, we may have found the world in a much worse situation.
Looking forward, we need to actively curate a workforce experience that leverages our learnings from this pandemic and not aim to go back to our pre-Covid ways of working. We are at an inflection point, where our workplace is transforming into a nonlinear experience. HR leaders should consider the following themes in creating their workforce experience of the “new normal.”
Empathy
An empathetic response on issues impacting people (or an individual) in the workforce is of utmost importance now. Ensuring that employees get a calm, reassuring and transparent message from leaders will help strengthen a culture of trust. This is crucial when the external environment is fueling emotions of mistrust and fear in general.
HR leaders should consider upskilling workshops, dialogues with leadership and other such interventions that help establish empathy as an important value in the workplace. Leaders sharing their personal stories around challenges and struggles will foster an environment of trust and encourage employees to share and seek support with confidence.
Empathy is not a new topic for most in HR functions, and its amplification now should not need to cover a lot of fresh ground. Establishing empathy as a key value in the organization can be driven further through the introduction of a personal resilience framework that empowers employees to assess their individual resilience and get access to resources to help with managing their situations.
Talent Beyond Borders
Physical proximity to a talent pool is no longer a constraint of the same proportions as it was in the pre-Covid workplace. We have experienced a short-term 360-degree view of remote working through different lockdowns and survived, for the most part.
HR leaders should consider identifying roles that can work remotely over extended durations and develop strategies for attracting geographically diverse talent that brings the best skills to the organization. This approach allows for a greater diversity of talent as well as access to wider skill families.
The challenge with an extended remote workforce is around building culture and engagement for a geographically distributed cohort. This will need a concerted effort and investment. Another challenge is to upskill the existing workforce in effectively collaborating in a remote working environment, without the traditional water cooler chats or quick catch-ups over coffee.
Technology adoption of collaboration tools has made remote working a practical option for working professionals. Employers integrating this approach will be able to attract and retain talent over those that still manage remote working as an exception to the expected norm.
One Size Doesn’t Fit All
HR manuals have generally preferred processes in favor of equity when it comes to decision making. Consistency of employee experience across the workforce has been rewarded for years, and there is value in this approach. The opportunity we have now allows the experience to be customized by the employee as they prefer. A flexible benefits model is a great example of such customization.
The questions HR leaders should ask include: Why should everyone be paid on the same date? Why can’t employees work on their own time, as long as they deliver agreed outcomes? What if someone needs more time off to take care of a family member? What if an employee is a victim of domestic abuse and they need help? Is the current talent management framework working, following the same process every year? Do we know our employees well through the data points we have?
We need to move to the principle of purpose over process. The employee experience target needs to be more clearly defined than the process to get there. This requires a hard look at HR’s own engine room to identify what needs changing.
Simplify
HR, as a function, exists to support employees and their leaders in optimizing performance for the organization. If a line manager needs to go through three different sub-functions within HR to get support with a challenge, then the function is failing in its core objective.
Complex HR structures with specialist teams and sub-functions are exceedingly competent, yet the need going forward is more of an agile response. HR leaders need to focus on upskilling and retaining top talent for the function. The first point of contact in HR should be equipped to be the single point of contact for their stakeholders. Investment in HR skills and technology will be a key differentiator for employee experience.
Covid has brought challenges and changes across the board. It has also brought unique opportunities, particularly for the HR leadership, to reimagine the workforce for tomorrow. Will it be HR’s finest hour?
Our regularly updated assessment of the global impact of COVID-19 on economies and labour markets, together with policy recommendations for lessening its effects and aiding a fast recovery.
Current situation Background In June 2019, the ILO’s 187 member States adopted the ILO Centenary Declaration for the Future of Work, calling on the Organization to pursue “with unrelenting vigour its constitutional mandate for social justice by further developing its human centred approach to the future of work, which puts workers’ rights and the needs, aspirations and rights of all people at the heart of economic, social and environmental policies”.
The ILO’s policy framework to respond to the COVID-19 crisis The present crisis is quite different from previous ones. The impact of the lockdowns adopted to mitigate the pandemic has vastly surpassed that of the initial trade shocks and of the travel restrictions introduced soon after the outbreak (these restrictions had significant but mainly sector specific impacts).
Pillar 1 Stimulating the economy and employment The COVID-19 crisis impacts on both the demand and the supply sides of the labour market, and it has major implications for the goal of ensuring full employment and decent work. In particular, the crisis is pushing many families into poverty and increasing existing inequalities.
Pillar 2 Supporting enterprises, jobs and incomes Efforts to contain the spread of the virus have disrupted production flows, caused demand for non-essential goods and services to plummet, and forced enterprises around the world to suspend or scale down operations.
Pillar 3 Protecting workers in the workplace While many people have lost their jobs and income, many others continue to work. Making sure that work can be performed safely is a shared priority.
Pillar 4 Relying on social dialogue for solutions The lessons from previous global crises have shown that governments alone cannot address the challenges stemming from strong shocks.
Conclusion COVID-19 continues to spread across the world with a trajectory difficult to predict. The health, humanitarian and socio-economic policies we implement will determine how quickly and strongly we recover.
Our regularly updated assessment of the global impact of COVID-19 on economies and labour markets, together with policy recommendations for lessening its effects and aiding a fast recovery.
Current situation Background In June 2019, the ILO’s 187 member States adopted the ILO Centenary Declaration for the Future of Work, calling on the Organization to pursue “with unrelenting vigour its constitutional mandate for social justice by further developing its human centred approach to the future of work, which puts workers’ rights and the needs, aspirations and rights of all people at the heart of economic, social and environmental policies”.
The ILO’s policy framework to respond to the COVID-19 crisis The present crisis is quite different from previous ones. The impact of the lockdowns adopted to mitigate the pandemic has vastly surpassed that of the initial trade shocks and of the travel restrictions introduced soon after the outbreak (these restrictions had significant but mainly sector specific impacts).
Pillar 1 Stimulating the economy and employment The COVID-19 crisis impacts on both the demand and the supply sides of the labour market, and it has major implications for the goal of ensuring full employment and decent work. In particular, the crisis is pushing many families into poverty and increasing existing inequalities.
Pillar 2 Supporting enterprises, jobs and incomes Efforts to contain the spread of the virus have disrupted production flows, caused demand for non-essential goods and services to plummet, and forced enterprises around the world to suspend or scale down operations.
Pillar 3 Protecting workers in the workplace While many people have lost their jobs and income, many others continue to work. Making sure that work can be performed safely is a shared priority.
Pillar 4 Relying on social dialogue for solutions The lessons from previous global crises have shown that governments alone cannot address the challenges stemming from strong shocks.
Conclusion COVID-19 continues to spread across the world with a trajectory difficult to predict. The health, humanitarian and socio-economic policies we implement will determine how quickly and strongly we recover.
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