Featured Archives | POST A RESUME HR Consultancy

What does agile HR actually look like?

Vipul Mali — Fri, 19 Feb 2021 10:46:33 +0000

The upheaval of 2020 had many organisations scrambling to adopt more agile HR practices or risk falling behind. But what does it take to get it right?

Survival in 2020 required rapid adaptation. This meant organisations that had baked agility into their processes were already one step ahead.

Research from McKinsey found mature, agile organisations were able to adapt faster to the pandemic; it measured the time 36 telco providers across 11 Asian and European countries took to launch services in response to COVID-19, such as providing additional data or bandwidth.
Highly agile telcos responded on average two times faster than non-agile ones. When the telcos were asked why, the answers fell into two broad categories: response at a team level and response at an enterprise level to rapidly align with shifting priorities.

The fundamentals of agile structures make this unsurprising; two of their hallmarks are a focus on customer outcomes (which makes it easier to respond to their needs in times of change) and empowering staff to do their jobs independently (which helps when everyone is suddenly being forced to work from home).

“In the current environment, all leaders can really do is coach others. So many people have had to take a step up and complete tasks on their own,” says organisational psychologist Graham Winter of Think One Team.

Because agile thinking and processes bring widespread changes to the way a company and its employees operate, HR’s guidance is essential.

Adopting agile HR practices

A 2020 report from Gartner found 74 per cent of HR leaders indicated that their organisations are undergoing a broad, agile transformation.
Generally, these transformations cover areas such as: challenging ways of working, revamping processes, examining strategy, energising people, allocating resources fluidly where they are needed and looking at technology usage.
“It’s about pulling together all the elements, such as changing HR practices, rewarding staff, removing silos and delivering more value for clients,” says Winter.
HR needs to drive this mindset shift towards new ways of working, but this doesn’t mean working alone. As Eduardo Nofuentes, director of consultancy Neu21, says, the impetus has to come from both the bottom and the top – because without this, any transformation is going to be difficult.

Swiss-headquartered pharmaceutical company Roche knew this from the start. It began its transformation in Australia in mid-2019 (it’s also transforming on a global scale) and it’s still ongoing. Rebecca Casey, people and culture lead at Roche Pharmaceuticals, agrees that while HR played an important part in rolling this out, they were careful to make sure the change came from leadership as they didn’t want it to be seen as just “another HR initiative”. And that, she says, is what led to the transformation’s success.

Under agile structures, Roche’s leadership is now based around being a visionary, architect, catalyst and coach rather than more traditional notions of management.
This also means staff are “treated like adults” and empowered, and in return expected to be accountable and transparent, says Casey.

Some employees have found this transition hard, while others have responded well. Casey says this means Roche will naturally attract and retain those who fit with its preferred way of working.

The next part of the process will be around finalising how to incentivise and reward employees – for example, moving away from the typical manager-led performance reviews and trialling something new – because when you pledge to overhaul your work system to align with modern expectations, you often need to make sure no processes are left behind.

What are your next steps?

But what can HR do in practical terms to help facilitate agile thinking and approaches? The first step is to help organisations switch focus.

“How do we change from delivering projects to understanding a concept and delivering an outcome?” says Jason Inacio, partner at McKinsey.

As Gartner found, 78 per cent of HR professionals have neither a defined strategy nor outcome in place to guide their application of agile structures in the HR function. This makes it difficult for HR to take action because they are the ones responsible for spearheading the implementation of agile working models where employees feel trusted and managers guide rather than give orders.

“Agility is being able to move quickly and easily, so trust is essential. And because employees feel they are being judged on their outcomes not output, they are more able to adapt,” says Nofuentes.
If you need a place to start on your agile journey, look at how people spend their time.

Gartner’s research found only one-third of HR leaders agree projects are paused or stopped if they are no longer deemed strategic or valuable. Roche identified this as a friction point for its workforce, so to save time it adopted a philosophy called ‘pragmatic over perfect’. For example, one of the first changes implemented was in finance planning, which included doing away with unnecessarily complicated budgeting processes.

Another example might be to not perfect an internal presentation when time could be better placed working on something with customer-related outcomes.

Inacio says some other examples of agile working structures could include daily stand-ups to discuss work, retrospectives on projects and teams deciding for themselves what they will work on – this encourages a culture of consistent feedback and iteration, which improves results and removes unnecessary barriers to the desired outcomes.

These are only examples, and small ones at that, but by taking the time to assess where time could be trimmed and friction points remedied, it can make all the difference in the world. Agile transformations will likely continue increasing in popularity as the ongoing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic force employers to better respond to customer and employer needs in times of change and uncertainty.

HR must take a front seat in driving mindset shifts and new ways of working, alongside buy-in from management. Focusing on outcomes, ensuring people are trusted and managers act differently are all areas where it’s crucial for HR to take the initiative in bringing about change.

Join Our WhatsApp Group

Join Our Telegram Channel

The post What does agile HR actually look like? appeared first on POST A RESUME HR Consultancy.

Redeployments: a legal refresher

Vipul Mali — Fri, 19 Feb 2021 10:46:26 +0000

As JobKeeper comes to an end next month, redundancies could be on the table for some organisations. So now is the perfect time to brush up on your legal obligations around redeployment.

With the COVID-19 pandemic (generally) under control in Australia and restrictions significantly eased, many businesses are reviewing structures in an attempt to survive and succeed in the post-COVID economy.
When businesses restructure this often involves significant workforce changes, such as redundancies and redeployments, either on a small or large scale.

While many employers would be aware of the general need to offer redeployment opportunities to employees, there is still a lack of understanding of employers’ obligations and potential areas of risk.
In order to avoid landing yourself in any hot water, it’s best to brush up on exactly that’s involved in redeployments.

Redundant employees: retrenched or redeployed?

First, it’s important to understand the language. Redundancy means the abolition of a role (not a person) and redeployment is the employer’s obligation to find the person who used to hold the redundant role another role within the business.

Retrenchment occurs when an employee is dismissed by reason of redundancy and they end up leaving your organisation, usually when redeployment has been unsuccessful. So a redundancy doesn’t necessarily mean that an employee will be dismissed. In fact, most employers have a legal obligation to attempt offering redeployment opportunities before letting employees go.

Second, it’s important to understand from where the obligation to redeploy comes. Many employers will have redundancy policies which impose obligations to redeploy – in those situations, employers (usually HR professionals) need to read the policy closely to understand the organisation’s obligation.
Also, an enterprise agreement may impose specific conditions, such as a redeployment period, so it’s important that employers and HR professionals are aware of obligations owed to each individual in their companies (lawyers can assist with clarification).

Compliant redeployments

Employers and employees need to be aware of what redeployment actually means.
A redeployment obligation does not require an employer to create a new role for an employee, and it does not force an employer to place an employee in a role. However, it does require a genuine attempt by the employer to identify roles which may be suited to the skills and experience of the employee. Simply providing a list of vacancies in different locations and with different skill sets won’t be sufficient; redeployment attempts need to be more comprehensive than that.

Employers should consult with the employee as they may have skills beyond those used in their current role, and employers are required to provide a reasonable level of training required for redeployment – so this is also worth keeping in mind.

The employer should then outline any vacancies that match the skill sets of the specific employee, which may be an involved task in a larger organisation. You need to be able to prove that you took into account the employee’s unique skills and capabilities before deciding that redeployment isn’t an option.

“A redeployment obligation does not require an employer to create a new role for an employee.” – Andrew Jewell, principal at Jewell Hancock Employment Lawyers.

Redeployment can be a competitive process – especially where there is a reduction in roles. However, it should never initially include external candidates; the affected employee should be assessed for suitability in a role before any external candidates are considered.

Risks to keep in mind

Even if there is no enterprise agreement or contractual redundancy policy, employees can still claim they were unfairly dismissed if you fail to follow correct processes.

If an employee is dismissed due to a redundancy, the employer can only defend any unfair dismissal applications on the basis that the dismissal was a case of ‘genuine redundancy’. A dismissal will not be considered a genuine redundancy if it was reasonable to redeploy the employee within the employer’s business or an associated business.

So while there isn’t always a positive obligation to redeploy someone, genuine redeployment is an important consideration to avoid an unfair dismissal claim.

While the need to make a reduction in roles can be genuine, when a redeployment process isn’t done correctly, it can open employers up to discrimination claims.

For example, if there is a need to choose between two existing employees for a vacant role and the employer chooses someone over a pregnant employee, the decision could be seen as discriminatory, and the employee could bring a claim under anti-discrimination legislation or the general protections provisions of the Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth).

Join Our WhatsApp Group

Join Our Telegram Channel

The post Redeployments: a legal refresher appeared first on POST A RESUME HR Consultancy.

HR’s role in building the future skills needed for tomorrow’s workforce

Vipul Mali — Fri, 19 Feb 2021 10:46:12 +0000

Much has been written about the gaping holes in the skill sets of workforces as we prepare for the future of work. The good news is that experts believe it’s not as bad as we might think.

Common across most of the research around the future of work, and the skills required to carry out that work, is a lack of confidence that employees will be able to acquire those skills easily and quickly.

Therefore, the problem of a skills gap, as we are launched by the pandemic into the ‘future of work’ sooner than we anticipated, is a real one, says Aaron McEwan FAHRI, Gartner’s VP of research and advisory. However, he is quick to point out that the problem is often overstated.

“I would look at the general response employees had to the shift to remote working during the pandemic as a pretty good indicator that we’ve probably misjudged our employees,” says McEwan.
“They have proven to be highly capable of upgrading their skills in response to a massive and urgent need for them to do so.”

The majority of organisations, says McEwan, are at least part way into a process of digital transformation. One concern businesses have is that employees won’t have the digital dexterity to keep up with such a transformation. Once again, this concern is justified but probably not as desperate as many might think.

“Digital dexterity is the ability to use and manipulate emerging and existing technology to drive business impact,” he says. “Here again, I think we do our employees a disservice.

One of the reasons employees aren’t keeping pace with the technological requirements of the organisation is that most organisations are still investing in unintuitive technology.
“If you look at the average person in Australia – a nation famously populated by early adopters of emerging consumer technology – in their private lives most individuals are using cutting-edge technology. But when we come to work, we’re faced with unintuitive, clunky systems. Then, organisations wonder why employees struggle to adapt to it,” says McEwan.
KPMG’s 2020 HR New Reality Pulse Survey backed up the argument that digital dexterity is a big-ticket item in terms of future workforce skills. After interviewing 1,300 HR executives, it found more than three in ten employees will need to be reskilled to fulfil growing demand for digital capabilities.

Outside of technology, what are the skills experts believe will fuel success in the future of work? Interestingly, many future skills requirements will be far more human, they say.

From head to heart

Dr Jim Stanford, economist and director of the Centre for Future Work at The Australia Institute says, it’s important to recognise that despite all of the hype around robots and artificial intelligence (AI), our jobs haven’t actually changed much since such technology was first introduced.
“In fact, if anything, our jobs have probably become a little bit grittier and harder to perform,” says Stanford.

“Of course, we’ve all learned how to do Zoom calls and some of the other mechanics of working from home. But even then, it hasn’t fundamentally changed the nature of work. The people who can work from home are people who were already doing most of their work on computers,” he says.
In his organisation’s research, it has been revealed that employers aren’t necessarily interested in particular skills as much as they are looking for the capacities of their workers as human beings.

A large number of employers, says Stanford, are more interested in skills such as leadership, communication, teamwork and collaboration.

Of course, HR professionals know these skills can’t just be taught, but must also be enabled by the culture of the organisation. Hence, of vital importance to the organisation is HR’s guiding hand in shaping that culture.

“HR is the steward of that culture, helping facilitate its development. HR must work alongside senior leadership to put into practice initiatives that help drive the way of working that the organisation wants,” says Susie Quirk, head of HR advisory at KPMG.

Even when discussing human traits and organisational culture, the influence of technology is never far away.

Pip Dexter, national lead partner for Human Capital at Deloitte, says technology allows us to play to our strength as humans.

“We’ve seen, particularly in this global pandemic, that you need skills around empathy and problem-solving,” says Dexter. “When you think about the complexity of the world, we’re never going to be short of problems, so there’s always going to be demand for those human skills.”
A 2019 Deloitte report describes a shift in future skills from head to heart. In other words, rather than the cognitive skills of the head, or the manual skills of the hands – both of which are increasingly easy to automate – the jobs that use our hearts will be in greatest demand. These skills include creativity, customer service, care for others and collaboration. The COVID-19 pandemic has only further propelled the importance of cultivating these ‘heart skills’.

“I would look at the general response employees had to the shift to remote working during the pandemic as a pretty good indicator that we’ve probably misjudged our employees,” Aaron McEwan FAHRI, VP of research and advisory, Gartner.

Prepare for the future

The problem with attempting to predict the necessary future skills, says Stanford, is that you are doomed to fail.
“We can’t know the exact mix of attributes employers are going to look for [in the future]. Some of the knee-jerk advice that students have been given, like focusing on STEM, hard tech skills and computer programming, hasn’t necessarily resulted in better employment opportunities.”
What does this mean for HR professionals looking to help create the workforce of the future? It means they need the ability to see, in real time, exactly what’s going on within and around the organisation and its market, in terms of talent.

A research paper from Gartner describes a dynamic skills approach.
“Picture a hockey rink,” the report reads. “HR thinks it needs to skate ahead of the hockey puck to where the puck will be. But it does not actually know where the hockey puck will go. HR could end up at the other end of the rink before it realises it’s nowhere near the puck. Instead, HR should skate with the puck, sensitive and aware of its movement, ready to respond to changes and course-correct when it starts to get away.”

This approach works because it allows HR practitioners to sense shifting skills in real time, meaning they can develop workforce skills at the time of need. It also helps employees to identify their own upskilling opportunities for the good of the organisation as they recognise a real and relevant need.

Quirk says it can be difficult for HR professionals to achieve real-time insight because some have skills gaps themselves.

Before becoming dynamic decision-makers and insight providers for their organisations, they themselves must reskill.

“HR professionals have been skilled in certain competencies and capabilities to deliver on a particular type of operating model, which is HR as a business partner. But that model is changing with more digital automation,” she says. “HR must adapt its operating model to put digital capability at its core.”

For HR to deliver its primary value to the business, it must be able to offer insight into what’s happening in the workforce in real time.

One of the key skill requirements we’ll see in the HR function, says Quirk, is a deep understanding of data and analytics. For some HR professionals, this is an entirely new skill set and one that needs to be quickly mastered as the people department develops more influence than ever before.

Learning on the job

We’re moving beyond IQ and EQ (emotional intelligence), says Dexter, today, the focus is on ‘AQ’ – a person’s adaptability.

“Personal adaptability is going to be one of the critical strengths we will look for in workforces,” says Dexter. “To build such traits, one of the critical things we have to do is make people feel safe to learn.

“This might begin with leaders sharing their own vulnerabilities or sharing stories of times when they didn’t know how to do something, then learned how to do it.

“It also means rewarding the right behaviour. It’s important for businesses to recognise when people are trying to learn new things and reward that effort, rather than criticising if they don’t perform.”

With new technologies, Dexter recommends rather than sending people to training sessions, wait until the technology is absolutely relevant to their job. This creates an immediate reason for them to use the technology. After all, that’s how people learned how to use Microsoft Teams and Zoom when we first had to work from home.

“At a recent virtual off-site, the only way to participate was to use a particular digital whiteboarding tool,” she says. “We spent the first few minutes learning how to use it – one of our people simply gave a quick tutorial, then we used it all day long. That was a very successful way of building learning into the flow of work.”

HR needs to closely manage learning in the flow of work, rather than sending people to training courses en masse, where they often lack a deep motivation to learn. We also need to give knowledge workers the time and space to be human, to allow the creative process the room it requires. And this must all be done in real time, without trying to look too far into the future or the past. Much of this will be aided by technology.

“The fundamental value that technology adds is to be able to centrally manage role-based positions,” says Quirk. “That is critical to managing your workforce in real time.

“As long as you have the integrity of data, HR will have meaningful, competent, real-time and insightful conversations with their clients and business partners. Most importantly, there will be a level of confidence and boldness about strategic workforce planning. That boldness will be the differentiator between those who succeed and those who do not.”

Join Our WhatsApp Group

Join Our Telegram Channel

The post HR’s role in building the future skills needed for tomorrow’s workforce appeared first on POST A RESUME HR Consultancy.

What will happen to this generation of overworked employees?

Vipul Mali — Sat, 26 Sep 2020 13:28:40 +0000

Businesses have been forced to tighten budgets this year and it’s employees who will feel it the most.

We all know about the long-term impacts of overworking. It makes us fatter. It makes us more unhappy. It diminishes our mental resilience. It ends our marriages. It even kills us.
For many, these facts are just words on a page. We have to personally experience a combination of the above in order for it to have any real impact.
This happened to Jeremy Britton. In the early 2000s he was working as a financial planner for one of the big four banks. As you might imagine, his hours were insane. It wasn’t uncommon for him to clock a 76-hour week. He was at the height of his career and the money and praise he received justified such gruelling hours – or so he thought.
In 2005 his team shrunk from 10 to six people and rather than hiring replacements his boss told them they’d just have to work 10 per cent harder.
“We didn’t really notice it at first. It was like that analogy of throwing a frog into water. If it’s already boiling it will jump right out, but if you increase the temperature little by little, it doesn’t realise,” says Britton.
His diet disintegrated along with his physical health. And his marriage wasn’t far behind. He was working into the evenings and on the weekends, chasing that adrenaline hit so many of us get from ‘working hard’.
At just 33 years old, he suffered a heart attack – and he didn’t even know it had happened.
“I was feeling run-down and thought I was coming down with a flu or bad indigestion. When I had heart pains, I thought it was just heartburn. So, I popped Quick-Eze all day.”
After months of feeling ill, he finally went to the doctor and was told he’d suffered a heart attack.
“My surgeon warned me I’d face another heart attack within 12 months if I didn’t change my lifestyle. And the second one, he said, would probably be fatal.”
You might think this shocking news immediately jolted Britton out of his overworking habits. But addiction is not so easily overcome. His plan was to leave the doctor’s office and go straight back to work to tie up loose ends and hand over ‘important tasks’. Thankfully, his doctor wouldn’t allow it.
It would take some time before Britton would be able to untangle himself from his complicated relationship with work. His doctor often had to call someone at his office to make sure he wasn’t working over their agreed hours (he often was). The health scare was just the beginning of a long road to recovery.
“My heart attack was followed by a divorce. My relationship was so bad by that stage. I hadn’t been there for my partner. I was always patting myself on the back saying, ‘I’ve bought this big beautiful house and I’ve got my wife all these beautiful things: cars, diamonds, international holidays.’ But, you know, she was going on those holidays without me.
“When I eventually did have to stop work for a couple of weeks, I basically laid on the bed for the first three days. I didn’t know what to do because work was so much part of my life. It wasn’t just where I got my pay, it’s also where I got my social interaction and my pats on the back. Work had become everything to me.”
[the_ad id=”1745″]

Worked to the bone

Overworking is nothing new, but COVID-19 has made it common. In order to survive financial turmoil, organisations are making deep cuts and asking employees to maintain or increase their regular output with fewer resources. And working from home makes it that much harder to switch off at the day’s end.
“When we talk about overworking, that means having such a high workload that you feel you’re constantly under pressure, and that work spills over into your non-work time, like the evenings or weekends,” says Stacey Parker, senior lecturer and centre director at the Centre for Business and Organisational Psychology, University of Queensland.
Parker specialises in occupational health psychology and work motivation, with a particular interest in managing workplace stress and improving employee performance.
“This sort of job stress has serious implications for peoples’ mental and physical health, as well as their motivation towards their work, and their commitment to their job overall. There have even been links between overworking and the development of cardiovascular disease.”
A 2010 study of over 10,000 civil servants in London found that employees who averaged three or more hours of overtime (when a seven-hour day is standard) are 60 per cent more at risk of heart-related problems. Different research from the University College London showed those working over 55 hours per week are 33 per cent more likely to have a stroke than those working 35-40 hours per week.
So Britton is not alone. If anything, he’s somewhat lucky.
Japanese journalist Miwa Sado died in 2013 from heart failure after clocking around 156 hours of overtime the month before her death – she was only 31 years old.
Mortiz Erhardt was interning in London at Bank of America Merrill Lynch when he was 21. He was averaging 20-hour workdays, according to Reuters, and died from a seizure while in the shower.
Mita Diran, a 24-year-old copy editor from Indonesia, reportedly threw back energy drinks in order to be able to work through the evenings. Just hours before she slipped into a coma, from which she would never awake, she tweeted: “30 hours of working and still going strooong”.
These days, overworking can feel part of the job description. People who’ve taken a pay cut or witnessed redundancies due to the pandemic are often compelled to work themselves to the bone to prove they’re worth keeping.
We were already living in a state of chronic urgency, but COVID-19 has accelerated that, says Dermot Crowley, founder of Adapt Productivity and author of the upcoming book Urgency: strategies to control urgency, reduce stress and increase productivity.
“We have a culture of ‘everything needed to be done yesterday’. And when people are working in that state for too long, the stress levels go up and they burn out,” he says.
It’s not just the act of overworking that’s bad for us, the ripple effects – such as a lack of sleep – can have equally devastating effects. Researchers from the university of Groningen in the Netherlands studied the brains of rats and found that when the rats didn’t get enough sleep, their hippocampus – the part of the brain that regulates motivation, emotion, learning, and memory – shrunk. When hypothesising how the results would affect humans, the researchers said a lack of sleep could affect our learning abilities and mood.
Burnout has also been linked in many studies to an increase in workplace accidents. For example, a 2013 study of 915 Taiwanese public transport drivers found a direct link between the two. More alarming is that burnout is associated with more traffic accidents in people who don’t drive for a living. A study published in May in the journal Stress & Health looked at 509 schoolteachers and found that depersonalisation (emotional hardening and detachment from work) was linked with an up to a 119 per cent increase in risk of being involved in a car accident.
While individuals’ health should be of the most concern, asking employees to work very hard for long periods doesn’t even make sense from a business perspective.

“We have a culture of ‘everything needed to be done yesterday’. And when people are working in that state for too long, the stress levels go up and they burn out.” –Dermot Crowley, founder, Adapt Productivity

Research from the UK’s Department of Business Innovation and Skills shows our individual wellbeing is lower when the demands of our jobs and personal lives are high. It points to empirical literature that suggests higher wellbeing levels can lead to improved cognitive abilities, such as increased creativity and problem-solving skills. There’s also a strong correlation between employees’ wellbeing and their workplace attitudes, such as their willingness to be cooperative and collaborative.
Perhaps most importantly, the research found that high levels of wellbeing can help people recover from illness faster, gain more energy and improve their cardiovascular health. So it’s not just that overworking is bad for you, actively improving your wellbeing tips the scales in the other direction.
While this is certainly interesting, the researchers are quick to point out that wellbeing and performance and aren’t inextricably linked.
“For example, raised levels of creativity and improved social interaction is only likely to generate better employee performance in jobs with a substantial degree of autonomy and those that involve teamwork or customer interaction,” the report reads.
To overcome this hurdle, Crowley suggests employers think differently about work and productivity. He separates the latter into two different types. The first is personal productivity. Most productivity advice you hear addresses this type – such as tips about getting more out of your day, being organised, getting on top of your tasks, and so on. But the second type is a little more complex. He calls it “productivity culture” and this can easily become toxic if it’s not strategically managed. Britton’s former workplace would be a good example of this.
Another example might be a work culture that has silent expectations around working past the official clock-off time. While they never explicitly tell staff to do this, there are subtle cues from management that encourage this behaviour, such as publicly rewarding those who are always seen to be staying back late or mentioning that ‘so and so’ is such a hard worker because they came in on the weekend.
Essentially, a toxic productivity culture is one where the bar is set at an unhealthy level and employers aren’t meeting their people in the middle.
[the_ad id=”1630″]

Clear expectations

It’s not just that overwork hurts organisations in the long run, it doesn’t even help them in the short term. Overworked employees are more likely to lash out, make mistakes, lose focus and make bad decisions. On top of that, most managers are incapable of knowing if someone is actually overworking.
Research from Erin Reid, assistant professor of organisational behaviour at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business, found that managers could rarely discern between those who actually worked 80-hour weeks and those who simply pretended to.
Reid’s study looked at employees working in a high-profile consulting firm. The employees (mostly male) who logged 80-hour weeks even though they were actually working around 50-60 hours were still completing their tasks, just like those actually working 80 hours. The pretenders were receiving recognition and promotions as a result.
A separate group of employees in that same office were transparent about wanting reduced hours in order to have a better work/life balance. They were given what they asked for, but they weren’t showered with the same rewards as those working 80 hours and those pretending to.
Reid’s data showed employees were capable of completing their work in 50-60 hours. Organisations that put the image of an “ideal worker” on a pedestal like this are shooting themselves in the foot. Instead, employers should encourage staff to work more strategically, rather than just more.
People require different levels of ‘cognitive closure’ – the desire for definitive answers and guidelines to avoid ambiguity. Some are happy to operate within more ambiguous environments while others have a strong preference for absolute clarity.
However, when faced with pressure, tight deadlines or mountains of work, everyone tends to slide up the scale. The more stressed we are, the more cognitive closure we desire. During a time of crisis, giving both clear expectations about what’s required and how long should be given to it is a simple way to alleviate employee stress.
Another part of working strategically is having a wellbeing framework in place that protects your people. This is an issue during the pandemic, because in times of financial crisis wellbeing initiatives can be the first thing to go.
In a research paper titled Corporate Philosophy: Making Stress and Wellbeing a Priority, researchers Emily Livorsi and Olivia Wallis say this frequently happens when organisations don’t have KPIs attached to their stress and wellbeing outcomes. When it comes time to make cuts, these seemingly non-revenue generating programs are axed.
To overcome this, they suggest conducting a needs assessment prior to implementing any wellbeing program to identify the gaps in your organisations. This way you can tailor your approach to your peoples’ specific stressors and challenges.
Wallis and Livorsi say a comprehensive needs assessment will include analysis through “some combination of survey administration, interviews, and focus groups”. With this data in hand, you figure out what level of intervention is required.
They break it down into three categories: primary, secondary and tertiary.
“Primary interventions are often preventative and proactive, where the purpose is to reduce stress risk and maximize opportunities for employees to have high levels of wellbeing,” the paper reads.
“The role of secondary interventions is to improve employees’ chances of coping with stressful situations that are present. Finally, tertiary interventions are reactive in nature and are used to treat symptoms (e.g., chronic stress) already present in the work environment.”
[the_ad id=”1630″]

Leadership impact

Crowley says it is crucial managers are checking in on staff rather than checking up on them. When they micromanage, it’s clear there’s a lack of trust, he says, and that can have the opposite of its intended effect.
And this shouldn’t just be happening on an individual level – trust needs to be a value that’s held across the organisation. For example, prior to COVID-19 many employers strongly believed remote work would diminish productivity levels, however after being forced to trial it, they quickly discovered that output was soaring in many cases. Without trust from both sides, this wouldn’t have been possible.
Of course, there will always be managers who completely miss the mark. After getting his heart surgery, Britton was advised he could only return to work on a part-time load. His manager was having none of it.
“My boss said, ‘You can’t do that. We can’t hold the position for you.’ He was giving me grief saying he was going to fire me.”
When Britton relayed this news, his doctor got on the phone.
“The doctor rang the boss and said, ‘If this guy dies in your workplace, are you going to take care of his family? Because I don’t care who you are or what rank you are in the company. You are not going to be responsible for this man’s life. I am. So, you take your orders from me.’”
But we can’t all rely on having a medical professional to go to bat for us. The fact of the matter is that employers simply need to respect peoples’ non-work hours, says Parker. And HR professionals play a huge role in cementing that expectation.
To make this happen, Parker encourages HR to think differently about the tools they might usually reach for to remedy overworking, especially during the pandemic.
“I’ve noticed some psych and HR professionals seem to think employee engagement and motivation is always the answer. We think we just have to make our workers happy and motivated and the rest will fall into place. But you can’t just focus on the work experience. They’re a whole person; they’ve got a whole life outside of work. I think the most important thing you can do to support them is give them uninterrupted time and space outside of work hours.”
Parker refers to research which shows that while engagement often eases the pressure valve on employees in the short-term, six to 12 months later burnout will catch up with them.
“People can burn out when they’re passionate about their work. Passion takes a lot of energy,” she says.
She adds that giving staff more autonomy over their work is a great way to help ease burnout.
“For people who have a really high workload or high job demands, if they feel like they have control over how they go about organising and managing their work – such as when and how they do it, the pace of it and so on – that’s hugely protective for not only the health outcomes, but also motivation and performance.”

The doctor rang the boss and said, ‘If this guy dies in your workplace, are you going to take care of his family? Because I don’t care who you are or what rank you are in the company. You are not going to be responsible for this man’s life. I am.” – Jeremy Britton

The Department of Business Innovation and Skills research paper backs this up, with results indicating that when employees participate in decision-making and have autonomy over their roles, their personal wellbeing increases. The paper said other protective factors include variety in work, clarity around expectations, feedback on performance, a sense of job security and clear career prospects.
Parker says that during the pandemic, where possible, employers should also be thinking about how to lower the bar on their expectations.
“I know we’re in the middle of a crisis. It can be appealing to throw what we know about all those good things out the window because in crisis mode, but we’ve been in crisis mode since February. People can only take so much.”
And in case you think leave might be the answer, Parker says beating burnout isn’t as simple as telling staff to take a well-deserved holiday. She cites research which suggests the benefits of a holiday only last two-four weeks. After this, we return to our pre-holiday burnout state.
“You can’t keep going and going and going and then rely on a holiday a couple of weeks per year as your way of disconnecting or recharging. You need replenishing daily or weekly habits that help you disconnect outside of work.” (See break out box for some of Parker’s personal habits).
[the_ad id=”1745″]

Taking matters into your own hands

Empowering staff to take on a manageable workload while still delivering on organisational outcomes can be a hard balance to strike. To keep the lights on, employers often feel compelled to demand more from their staff.
The harsh reality of this is reflected in the ending of Britton’s story. He wasn’t able to truly slow his life down until five years after his heart attack, when he called it quits with his high-powered banking gig. He went out on his own to get the work/life balance he desired.
He now owns a financial planning firm and determines his own hours (24 hours per week). He stays on top of his workload by outsourcing some of the smaller tasks and enjoys getting to spend more quality time with his children.
“Working 60 per cent less hours, I thought my income was going to drop 60 per cent. So, I sold off my house and bought a little beach shack. I downsized my life significantly. I just wanted to focus on my health. But my income only ended up dropping by 10 per cent. If you’ve got eight hours to complete a task, it will take eight hours. If you’ve got four hours for the same task, it will probably take four hours,” says Britton.
This seems like powerful proof of the above research that suggests overwork and bottom-line success are not linked. Sixty per cent fewer hours every week is a tremendous amount of time. Ten per cent less income is insignificant in comparison – that’s a trade most people would be willing to make. Britton also has advice for HR professionals and employers.
“Most people drive a car. So, they understand if you drive it at 120kms all day, every day, eventually something’s going to wear out. In the workplace, it’s not enough to say, ‘Look, we have an employee assistance program.’ Because people are usually past the point of burnout before they think to contact a psychologist. Instead, that sort of stuff should be integrated into your culture.”
[the_ad id=”1884″]

[the_ad id=”1973″]
[the_ad id=”1904″]

The post What will happen to this generation of overworked employees? appeared first on POST A RESUME HR Consultancy.

Jealousy at work: keeping green-eyed monsters at bay

Vipul Mali — Sat, 26 Sep 2020 13:28:27 +0000

While jealousy might feel like a private emotion, when it seeps out in the workplace it can have significant impacts on culture.

Jealousy is one of those emotions we can’t escape. And it can easily overcome us in the workplace. It crops up when someone gets a promotion over you; when the boss starts showing favoritism towards a particular employee; or when we feel we’re getting less praise and recognition for our efforts in comparison to others.
While it’s relatively impossible to suppress these feelings, it is crucial we know how to manage them because unchecked jealousy can quickly snowball into destructive behaviour that can damage workplace culture.
It’s not just important to know how to keep jealousy at bay within yourself. HR managers and leaders need to know how to identify and quash it in others too. Here are a few things to keep in mind.
[the_ad id=”1630″]

Where does the jealousy come from?

In a 2001 research article Managing Envy and Jealousy in the Workplace, Kim Dogan, principal at Dogan Pelzar, and the late Robert Vecchio, Franklin D. Schurz professor of management in the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business, outline the difference between envy and jealousy.
The former, they say, involves two individuals (Tom is envious of Sally’s promotion) whereas the latter involves a third party of some kind (Tom is jealous of Sally’s relationship with their mutual boss). Both stem from a place of insecurity, they write, and are generally reactions to stress-related concerns.
For example, Tom could be jealous of Sally’s newfound closeness to the boss because he’s worried he’ll be overlooked when it comes to the dividing of responsibilities or development opportunities.
Dogan and Vecchio also note that an individual’s personal life has a strong correlation with the manner in which they respond to workplace stressors.
“For example, a person may have experienced strong feelings of competitiveness in childhood (such as severe sibling rivalry)… [and] a person who has frequently experienced envy or jealousy outside of the workplace may be more prone to these feelings in dealing with coworkers and supervisors,” they write.

“Jealousy is a mirror to that inner world of desire that has been unfulfilled.” – Karen Gately

Dogan and Vecchio cite job insecurity as the perfect breeding ground for jealousy. If this was the case in 2001, it must be even more true today. They say the element of competition that’s introduced when headcount drops can cause people to feel “threatened by management and their co-workers because they’re questioning who may be next to go”.
Jealousy can bring a variety of other destructive behaviours with it, says Caryn Walsh, organisational development strategist and team building specialist.
“People who are jealous very seldom keep that jealousy to themselves. It tends to come out in their behaviours, such as snide or cutting comments or passive aggressive behaviours,” says Walsh.
She says such behaviour can result in employees being overly critical of one another (to their face or behind their backs) or they might be resistant towards collaborating with or assisting them, meaning opportunities for innovation are hampered. In the most extreme cases, Walsh says it could even lead to a team member sabotaging someone’s work or causing a normally positive workplace culture to feel off balance.
“If morale is low, that can be detrimental to the outcomes of the entire team,” says Walsh. “Goals might be affected or compromised. Ultimately, that leads to an unhealthy and toxic workplace culture.”
[the_ad id=”1745″]

A preventative measure

“Jealousy is a mirror to that inner world of desire that has been unfulfilled,” says Karen Gately, founder of HR consultancy Corporate Dojo.
“Most of us will feel jealous but we’re very hesitant to admit it. We’re more likely to acknowledge that we feel hard done by or mistreated. It takes a pretty emotionally intelligent person to be able to say, “Ooh, I feel a bit of envy coming on”. If you can see that emotion, you can start to unpack it.”
It’s a completely normal emotion to experience, says Gately. It’s how you deal with it that matters most.
Leaders and HR professionals play an important part in shaping individuals’ responses to jealousy, she says.
“The more we can properly understand the aspirations of the people in our teams – what they’re hoping to achieve in their work life – and the more we’re coaching and supporting them, the less likely jealousy will arise.”
For example, when Sally is promoted over Tom, Tom’s manager will be able to nip his jealousy in the bud by saying, “I know you might have thought this role would go to you, but here’s our plan to develop you and here’s when we think you’ll get to where you want to be”.
“If someone feels they’ve been overlooked for a promotion two or three times [and it’s not acknowledged by management], that person can start to feel seriously sidelined,” says Gately. “Having an open conversation about this means those feelings can be put to the side.”
Gately adds: “It’s about creating a cultural environment, that HR can lead, where there’s an awareness that these emotions exist in the workplace paired with ongoing coaching conversations… that way we’re proactively getting in front of the jealousy.”
[the_ad id=”1745″]

Turning jealousy into motivation

Well managed jealousy can act as a motivational push, suggests Nihar Chhaya, president of PartnerExec, in an article for the Harvard Business Review. However, it can just as easily derail one’s career progression efforts. So, how do you find that sweet spot?
Chhaya says it’s about managing your feelings as soon as they crop up – he points to 2019 research which shows that most people experience the majority of their jealousy before something happens rather than after it has occurred.
The research, published in the journal of Association for Psychological Science, highlights that it’s common for humans to experience heightened emotions about future events – our imaginations often run wild and many of us have a natural tendency to lean towards negative thinking.
So when you hear news that results in a pang of jealousy – say, a colleague has been given a pay raise when you’ve been working equally as hard as them – Chhaya says it’s best to acknowledge the feeling but not let it fester.
“When envy grips you, if you begin to “feel bad about feeling bad,” you essentially turn a human emotion we all feel into even more painful self-loathing and shame,” he writes.
For HR professionals coaching an employee through this experience, he suggests encouraging them to examine why they felt a pang of envy in the first place.
What can be learnt from that? Is there room to improve? With the answers to these questions in hand, HR professionals can work with leaders to create a concrete plan of action, be that a development plan, clarity around pay scales or new/more responsibilities.
[the_ad id=”1630″]

Slaying the green-eyed monster

One way to steer jealousy into a more positive place is to identify those who are high performers (and therefore likely to be the victims of workplace jealousy) and create mentor roles for them to step into.
“Great organisations are those that have a mentor or buddy system,” says Walsh.
Formal, cross-organisational mentorship is important, she adds, because it not only gives the jealous employees the opportunity to learn something valuable from those they might consider to be doing better than them, but it’s also a safe and helpful avenue for them to vent.
“If you’ve got a situation where someone feels jealous because they were passed over for a job, for example, they might be able to go to their mentor to talk about it,” says Walsh. “They can talk about it and the mentor can put a framework in place to help them to get the job they want in the future.”
Gately says mentorship can also act as an important reality check.
“If you go to a trusted mentor and you’re peeved at somebody, but you’re actually just jealous, they’re more able to hold up the mirror and say, ‘What’s this really about? Because it seems more like you’re disappointed.’”
Walsh adds that it’s important to implement bystander training in order for other colleagues to be able to call out jealous behaviour before it gets out of hand.
Jealousy has a long tail when it’s not addressed, says Gately. “While we might be able to roleplay that we’re not jealous, it will rear its ugly head at some point and it is evident to other people because there can be a shift in our body language or our energy levels, or our mindset and emotions in relation to that other person.”
She encouraged HR professionals to ask employees this question: “Are you going to let it inspire you to get to where you want to be? Or will you let it eat you away?”
[the_ad id=”1884″]

[the_ad id=”1973″]
[the_ad id=”1902″]

The post Jealousy at work: keeping green-eyed monsters at bay appeared first on POST A RESUME HR Consultancy.

How to build resilience in your hybrid workforce

Vipul Mali — Sat, 26 Sep 2020 13:27:44 +0000

By leaning into discomfort and disruption, leaders can forge a path towards resilience.

It’s no secret that we’ve been working a little differently this year. From all-out lockdowns, half-full offices and myriad other combinations – our ways of working have become increasingly hybrid. But what impact does this have on resilience? Let’s see what Canada-based positive psychology expert Dr Michelle McQuaid has to say on this.

Defining resilience

Before we start to think about how resilience might look in this new world of work, the way we understand resilience needs to be clearly established. There’s a common misconception that resilience means bouncing back from adversity, but that requires constant adversity from which to bounce back. If we constantly need something to press down on us in order to activate our resilience, we will eventually run out of steam.
“If you keep pushing down on a basketball so it bounces back, you’re going to lose energy and the ball is going to dribble away,” says McQuaid.
She says resilience should be framed as leaning into rather than away from what’s in front of us.
“At the moment we have choices, particularly when we’re confronted with struggle, uncertainty, discomfort – all those things we’ve been experiencing over the last nine months at a heightened pace. We have a choice whether we are going to lean into those moments or lean away by numbing and distracting ourselves, projecting that discomfort onto others, or burying our heads in the sand.”

With hybridity comes diversity

What’s become apparent this year is that there’s suddenly a lot more diversity in the ways we work, says McQuaid.
“Long term, as we’ve seen in all sorts of studies, diversity is actually a good thing. It generally leads to higher performance and wellbeing in teams. But what we also know is that diversity, at least in the short term, creates more challenge because we suddenly have different needs, perspectives and ways of wanting to do things.”
When those different elements are introduced, it can spark creative conflict in teams and some navigation is required to generate new possibilities in how we work.
McQuaid says that acclimatising to this hybrid workforce model and the diversity of different working situations is going to require a heightened level of psychological safety, which we were already struggling with pre-COVID.
And it’s bound to get messy. Like most change that’s disruptive, there is an eventual period of struggle while we figure out how to adapt to it. But there is much to gain.
“If we can find our way through by being resilient and leaning into the disruption when we navigate, so that we do it together and we’re committed to figuring it out in ways that work for all of us rather than just settling for compliance – then we actually stand to achieve much greater benefits than when we had a far more homogeneous workforce.”

How to approach resilience in a hybrid workforce

Resilience requires psychological safety so that we feel confident in our abilities to problem solve and stay motivated.
If we’re not careful, we can slip back towards learned helplessness – the opposite of resilience. This state of apathy leads people to feel that whatever they say or do isn’t going to make a difference, so why bother.
What can happen when facing disruption, says McQuaid, is that the old style of leadership based on power and control rears its head. In this mode, leaders feel they need to have all the answers and dictate the ways of work – reducing psychological safety and generating learned helplessness.
“At best you’ll get short-term compliance, but you’ll rarely get long-term commitment because their own hopes or wants are not being met. It’s not meaningful to them. If I’m told to do something by a leader and God forbid I’m struggling or it’s not working for me, then I’m seen as the person who’s not being a team player.”
The best approach, says McQuaid, is to let teams find their own way to bring order to this hybrid setup by ‘inviting and inquiring’.
Instead of leaders needing to have all the answers, they can invite their team to identify their different needs.
‘Working from home’ is not a stock standard environment. It will differ for people in terms of how well they’re set up, who else is in their environment, whether they thrive in that format or not, whether they had a choice to be working at home or whether they’re longing to get back into the workplace environment. As working from home isn’t a one-size-fits-all scenario, we can’t expect different people to operate in exactly the same ways.
Same goes for those back in the office, says McQuaid. Even though the environment might be a bit more stable and consistent because our work premises set it up that way, there are still variables such as how long our commute is, whether we thrive being around people in a noisy setting, or whether we’d be better off working from home but have to be in the office.
Faced with this diversity, leaders need to get curious and ask their people what works best for them, and be willing to create psychologically safe spaces for them to be heard.
When these needs have been identified, we must inquire as a team how to support those different requirements within the resources and realities available.
Importantly, says McQuaid, both leader and team need to give each other space to experiment and keep checking in on what’s working well, where they’re struggling and what to keep trying.
[the_ad id=”1630″]

Resilience-building in practice

To start with, leaders should open a conversation with their team using the invite approach. Acknowledge that the ways of working are now different and ask people what they need to thrive and work together as well as they can in this new environment. This conversation should identify what people need individually, collectively and what they expect from each other.
“I think leaders often fear that this will lead to complete chaos, but the good news is that we likely have more in common with each other than we’d ever suspect because we’re wired for belonging,” says McQuaid.
“We will actually forgo what we need individually in order to be part of the collective good. It’s ok to not fit into that diversity, but it’s good to put it all out there and consider what can be shaped to serve the common good.”
The second step is to get people to take responsibility for how they’re going to work as a team and what they’re going to do individually to support that. To own responsibility as a part of this solution – whether that be turning up to team calls, communicating on chat forums or coming into the office every Tuesday – they need to care enough about it in order to commit, otherwise it will be a matter of short-term compliance. There needs to be a level of inquiry to allow team members to be clear about what responsibilities they care enough about to own.
And lastly, there needs to be some structure around all of that through routines, rituals and rhythm which will shape team culture.
[the_ad id=”1745″]
Routines are centred around what the business needs from us to deliver what’s required, such as team meetings and feedback processes. The hybrid team needs to elect the routine that will allow them to function at their best.
Rituals, on the other hand, tend to be a bit more about what people need from the business. Do they want to partake in social Zoom calls on Friday afternoons in lieu of afterwork drinks? How should birthdays be celebrated, new team members welcomed and milestones marked?
After identifying these routines and rituals, the rhythm, or frequency of these elements, should be set.
“It’s a living experiment,” says McQuaid. “You want to review that once a quarter and decide on more or less. What’s the right amount to keep us connected, productive and engaged?”

[the_ad id=”1884″]
[the_ad id=”1973″]
[the_ad id=”1902″]

The post How to build resilience in your hybrid workforce appeared first on POST A RESUME HR Consultancy.

Ask a recruiter: the most difficult recruitment assignments

Vipul Mali — Sat, 26 Sep 2020 13:27:34 +0000

From meddling mayors to fickle candidates, sometimes there are assignments that just make recruiters want to pack it all in.

In a perfect world, recruiters would already have the perfect person in mind for every role that opened up, and the journey from initial conversations to first days on the job would be as straight as an arrow.
But as 2020 has proved resoundingly, we don’t live in a perfect world. And in the world of recruiters, difficulties can come from all sides – perhaps a difficult client, a flighty candidate or even a rogue politician.
In previous “Ask a Recruiter” articles HRM has asked the experts for practical advice on topics like when to discuss salary or how to recruit during COVID-19. This time we let recruiters vent a little when we asked – what was your most difficult recruitment
[the_ad id=”1630″]

Third-party interference

“This role was for a CEO position at a not-for-profit tourism organisation and to make matters interesting, three local councils were key funders of the organisation,” says Ineke McMahon, director of Path to Promotion.
McMahon scheduled interviews for four candidates with the organisation’s board. Two were selected to progress. However, there was one slight hitch.
“A mayor from one of the councils knew a candidate on the shortlist and had expected them to get the role. But the candidate wasn’t one of the chosen top two,” says McMahon.
“Suddenly, rumours began circulating that this council was considering breaking away from the organisation to start their own tourism marketing organisation.
“The mayor insisted that “their” candidate be included in the second stage.”
For the second round of interviews, McMahon wrote some very specific behavioural questions that directly addressed the criteria in the success profile. One candidate stood out head and shoulders above the rest. It wasn’t the mayor’s candidate.
“It was an absolute drama! The mayor threatened to pull funding, and I had to work very hard to keep the preferred candidate interested in the role. Eventually, the best candidate was offered the position, and worked hard in their first few months to get the difficult mayor onside,” says McMahon.
“Thankfully, once the mayor realised the value that the selected candidate could bring to the role the relationship improved significantly and the council decided to stay on board.”
McMahon says she believes it would have been beneficial to include the mayor earlier in the process, so they felt they had an input and were less likely to be “difficult” later on. She says it’s important to identify all key stakeholders at the beginning and what they hope to get out of the process.
“Once I understood the key drivers for that particular stakeholder, we were able to talk them through how the preferred candidate would be able to address their issues and challenges, and make their job easier,” McMahon says.
“This helped to get them over the line, and also helped the candidate understand how to best build a relationship with that individual in their first few months.”
[the_ad id=”1745″]

Great expectations

“We were recruiting for a multinational headquartered in south-east Asia,” says Frazer Jones manager Roxane Sexton. “The role itself was a bit prickly because the company had really high turnover and had just gone through a really tumultuous time. They’d recently changed CEO.
“It was a bit of a problem role in a problem business.”
Despite these issues, the organisation still expected extremely high-quality candidates and Sexton struggled to temper those expectations.
“In Australia, I think we’re quite used to being able to influence hiring managers. If they want one thing, we can gently say “consider this option instead”. But hiring in south-east Asia is very different…you can’t really influence in the same way,” she says.
Sexton says it was one of the longest recruitment assignments she’s worked and although they eventually found the right person it was a learning process on both sides.
“For me, it was learning how to recruit within this cultural environment and the expectations the hiring managers had, but also I worked really hard to help to build up the relationship with the client so they understood why they might not be attracting the exact candidate they were looking for,” says Sexton.
She says it’s also important not to mislead any candidates about the position. Instead be upfront and explain the benefits the position can have on their career.
“Expectations need to be managed both ways. You need to be really transparent with the candidate too. Explain, “this is the situation, these are the problems”, don’t dress it up. But also find the opportunities and positives of the position.”
[the_ad id=”1630″]

A change of heart

“We were recruiting for a senior role in a very male-dominated profession and the client asked for a gender diverse shortlist,” says Amanda Mannix, co-Founder of Onten Strategic Recruitment.
“This isn’t a problem in itself, but it does make the search more difficult and dramatically narrow down the field of potential candidates.”
“So, we’re looking for female candidates in a field that is 90 per cent male. They have to have the right amount of experience and qualifications, and they need to be in a place where they are open to moving roles in the middle of a pandemic. That doesn’t give us a wide scope to work with.”
Mannix says they found one particular candidate that fit the criteria. The candidate went through three interviews and coffee with the CEO, which by all accounts went really well. All the while the candidate seemed really involved and keen for the position. Mannix even put the candidate through expensive comprehensive psychometric testing and conducted reference checks. Overall the process took roughly eight weeks.
The client was pleased and Mannix moved to make the candidate an offer.
“So, I call the candidate, and she says “I was just about to email you… I’ve changed my mind.”
Mannix says the candidate worried that if she took the role “her manager may change in the future and decide they want to bring in their own person”.
“We had to start the whole process over again,” says Mannix.
While this incident was quite a letdown for Mannix, she’s proud she can look at each step of the process and know they followed best practice.
“We were in contact with the candidate and client constantly throughout the whole process. We even did a trial close pre-offer to ensure everything was on track. It’s a reminder how fickle people can be,” says Mannix.
Mannix says recruiters should be prepared for these kinds of let-downs occasionally.
“Most days everything is great and runs to plan. Other days it’s frustrating, but it’s all part of the job for external recruiters.”
[the_ad id=”1884″]

[the_ad id=”1745″]
[the_ad id=”1973″]
[the_ad id=”1902″]

The post Ask a recruiter: the most difficult recruitment assignments appeared first on POST A RESUME HR Consultancy.

3 ways to bring job crafting to life

Vipul Mali — Wed, 22 Jul 2020 11:30:40 +0000

Despite compelling evidence for doing so, we seldom actively encourage employees to personalise their work. An HR consultant and job crafting specialist explains how organisations can bring job crafting to life.

Job crafting offers organisations an evidence-based approach to enable people to bring their whole and best selves to work, one that is increasingly being recognised as a way to create a compelling and personalised people experience.
On a basic level, job crafting just means the tailoring of a job to suit the person doing it. If we use the example of a store manager who has a preference for customer interaction, job crafting could involve him finding ways to do more of it.
Or take the example of a CFO who feels they have a lot to offer the next generation. Even though it is not in their job description, her organisation might find a lot of value in giving her opportunities to mentor others.
The goal of job crafting is for people to make deliberate and proactive changes to how they act, interact and think about their work. It taps into the diverse strengths, talents and experiences that too often lay dormant and untouched within organisations.
Since the first paper on job crafting was published in 2001, there have been over 130 peer reviewed papers involving over 44,000 employees (ranging from cleaners to CEOs) from across the world. This huge amount of research shines a light on the individual and business benefits of encouraging people to customise elements of their job. It finds it can have a significant impact on performance, growth, wellbeing and resilience at both an individual and organisational level.
But despite the growing evidence, to date job crafting has not made the jump to mainstream HR recognition and attention in the way that concepts such psychological safety and the growth mindset have.
To bridge the gap between research and practice, below are three evidence-based approaches that will help you bring job crafting to life in your organisation.

1. Job crafting sessions

Job crafting workshops are designed to encourage and enable employees to personally explore and experiment with taking a more customised approach to their work. There is a growing body of research that shows the efficacy of high quality and well designed sessions of this nature.
A 2019 study evaluating the value of a number of different job crafting interventions found that they led to an average increase of US $2,310 per employee in revenue. What’s more, the researchers concluded that job crafting workshops led to a greater than 14 per cent performance increase over over a three month period.
These sessions don’t just teach people the benefits of job crafting. They encourage people to personalise work and directly demonstrate a commitment from the organisation that they care and are committed to the development of employees.
As a workshop participant recently wrote in feedback from one of my sessions: “By encouraging job crafting, I can see that you [the organisation] care about me as an individual and I’m not just seen as a cog in a machine.”
While job crafting workshops can take many different forms (including person-to-person, online video calls, eLearning, etc) they all tend to have a similar structure and content. Typically they involve introducing job crafting as a concept, sharing ideas and examples of how people can apply job crafting, and encouraging people to set a job crafting goal.
[the_ad id=”1630″]

2. Team crafting

Job crafting doesn’t have to be an individual pursuit, it can also be done collaboratively. Team crafting sessions create opportunities for team members to help each other with their crafting. They can swap different elements of their work so that more people are doing the tasks they value more often.
Professor Amy Wrzesniewski, who with Jane Dutton was the originator of the term job crafting, has studied the potency of team crafting and task swaps. In the book How to be a Positive Leader she says that team crafting can effectively create positive alignment and synergies between the individual strengths, interests and experiences that exist within a team.
I’ve seen lots of examples of how teams value the opportunity to swap or re-allocate their tasks. Just recently a marketing team I worked with re-allocated the split of tasks between them. There was a “swapping” of the creative aspects of developing social media content with the more strategic task of developing marketing plans – the same things were getting done, but they were now going to be done by people who had a true passion for the tasks. Showing best practice, these changes were made for a period of three months after which they would be reviewed.

3. Crafting conversations and check-ins

Job crafting doesn’t have to be isolated into specific workshops, it can be an ongoing conversation. Managers and team leaders can give encouragement and create the space for people to reflect on how to make their jobs better in both formal and informal discussions with colleagues.
Through check-ins, traditional ‘one to ones’ or development-focussed sessions, managers can enable colleagues to reflect on the areas of their job that they could customise to create a better fit with their individual passions, talents and strengths.
One company that has embedded job crafting into quarterly catch-ups is Connect Health, a UK provider of quality musculoskeletal physiotherapy. In each of these sessions team leaders and their colleagues explore a different job crafting theme, including their task and activities, their skills and development and their wellbeing.
[the_ad id=”1745″]

Time to trust rather than tether

The ideas shared in this article may strike you as pretty straight forward – perhaps even glaringly obvious. That’s the point. Bringing job crafting to life does not have to be complicated; all it requires is an organisation that is willing to create the space, framework and opportunities for employees to reflect and experiment.
Rather than tethering people to their jobs, we need to trust them to find, create and shape their jobs in ways that best serves them, their colleagues and the organisation. It’s time to bring the personal touch to work.

[the_ad id=”1884″]

[the_ad id=”1973″]
[the_ad id=”1745″]

[the_ad id=”1902″]

The post 3 ways to bring job crafting to life appeared first on POST A RESUME HR Consultancy.