Employee wellbeing is a very hot topic at the moment and many organisations are exploring ways to keep their teams engaged, productive and in the business for a long time. The challenges with initiatives are: - What do you offer? - Does it cover the office demographics? - It is consistent and how do you manage it? - Does it add value? The more people I meet, the more say that money is a factor when looking for a new career option, but the need for the right culture fit is critical. When they attend interviews, they are no longer going in with the sense of “they have to employ me” but more so “do I want to work for them?” Which is why a number of organisations are exploring options that they can introduce in the workplace to add to a positive culture…without breaking the budget! What we are hearing in the marketplace currently is: - A simple fruit basket in the common area goes a long way to show appreciation but also helps healthy eating… - A quarterly lunch / BBQ to show appreciation - Flexible working hours - Lunch time yoga or massage - External partnerships – working with outside businesses to offer discounted rates to gyms, travel etc. - A crèche on site for young families - Reward and recognition – employee of the month / quarter / year in the form of a trophy or vouchers The list of options is only as narrow as your imagination. The challenge is to ensure you cover all demographics – what motivates a Baby Boomer won’t necessarily do the same for a millennial. Ultimately, that little gesture can go a very long way for the team and/or office culture which can impact the bottom line of your business. We would love to hear what your organisation does to add value to you and your colleagues, or as an employee, what you would love your employer to offer you. Sometimes, sharing best practice helps an organisation and an economy as well!

Career Compass – affordable career support when your employees need it most. “Without significant new government financial support, many businesses that continue to be adversely impacted by COVID-19, particularly in the tourism, travel, wholesale and retail industries will come under renewed liquidity and employment pressure from April this year”.

It’s the opening line of Maybe the Horse Will Talk, a new novel by Australian writer Elliot Perlman. The protagonist, a second-year lawyer at a prestigious Melbourne law firm, who is trying to pay off his house and support his family, becomes extremely anxious about his career Catch 22 at 3.30 am! Having worked in career management for over 15 years and speaking with many people, this is a familiar refrain. Reinforcing this workforce malaise was the ABC News article by David Taylor; Redundancy and job insecurity are growing and it’s a problem for the economy at large (17/10/19). According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, redundancies in Australia have jumped significantly in the last two years. In 2017, 187,000 Australian positions were made redundant, in 2019 that number has jumped to 272,500 redundancies. That’s a 45% increase. Of those redundancies, many individuals are not provided outplacement support and are left entirely to their own devices to find new employment. Job seeking in the context of organisations going through digital transformation where many existing roles or skillsets are no longer required can be a daunting and disheartening prospect, irrespective if people have outplacement support. Job seekers are confused about what to do after redundancy. If they have a severance package, do they use some of it to reskill, or do they sit on it, or use it to meet their everyday living costs, which in Australia are very high? Having spent a large part of my career involved with HR, talent and career management, I am acutely aware of the challenges redundant employees face, but have also been surprised by the number of individuals that I’ve met, who stated that redundancy was the “wake up” call they needed to pivot on their career direction. Typical responses were that they were stale, had no clear career direction, were not aligned with their organisation’s direction, and frustrated and demotivated in their current roles. Asking themselves “how did I get here?”. A perspective that has been substantiated by Right Management’s research that states that one in five people are in the wrong role, or more tellingly that approximately 50% of employees at any one time are disengaged and passively or actively looking for a new role! If employees now value career development and flexibility above remuneration, where does this leave organisations and their responsibilities? Many offer career development, but many don’t. Outplacement is important, but it could be argued that it’s too late and that early intervention would be better i.e. proactive career transition. Proactive career transition explores the alignment between an organisation’s strategic requirements and an employee’s alignment with both the skills required to progress in that organisation, and the culture. If organisations are changing and evolving constantly, don’t they owe it to their employees to be transparent about the changes coming and supporting individuals either to upskill to progress in the organisation, or reskill to move out of the organisation? This is a mature conversation that organisational leaders should be having more regularly and with discipline. To grab both employers’ and employees’ attention about the importance of career planning, I often open with the statement “most people spend more time researching their vacation needs – country, climate, culture and the logistics of their annual holiday – than they do their career”. It’s true for most of us that we are socialised into careers by well-meaning influencers, such as parents, school and university teachers, peers and friends. We fall into careers, and continue in careers without ever really asking – Who am I? Where am I? Where do I want to go? And how am I going to get there? Outplacement provides important support for impacted employees and protects the brands of those organisations instigating the redundancies, however as an employee I would want to work for a company where career development was part of the organisation’s DNA, supporting my career choices proactively, whether within the organisation or outside it. It would be both good business, and good for the economy to reduce the anxiety of employees, who fear job loss in the context of the high cost of living with little room for upskilling on their own dollar. It may also ensure we don’t wake up fearing ‘I am absolutely terrified of losing a job I absolutely hate.’

Has the impact of Covid-19 have you weighing up your career options or even thinking about making a big career change? It’s clear, many businesses and industries won’t be the same post Covid-19. The impact of people who work in these industries will be significant and will undoubtedly result in individuals looking to reset their career and look for safer employment havens. For many, the past few months has been the perfect time to reflect on their career and in turn, has been the motivation to explore a big change. “I’m unhappy at work and my role doesn’t challenge me anymore”, “I want to do something completely different, I need growth”, “I like my company, but I want a better role”, “I don’t know where to start”? and “I don’t think my industry will ever recover, I need to consider my options” are familiar conversations which create the perfect career storm! In today’s environment, working from home, and with more time to think, there are thousands of people considering their career options and in need of career counselling to find a new direction. Often when prompted with the question “what do you want to do next? “A typical response is something like “Not this. But I don’t really know what I want to do next”! Pondering the truly big questions like How did I get here? What am I doing that I really don’t like to do? What shall I do next? What really motivates me? Can be truly daunting and liberating at the same time. What if you could create a new direction for yourself? How do you make the change? Too many people shy away from the big questions, in many cases because they are wrestling with them on their own. Given that Covid-19 has for many of us resulted in more time to reflect, there may be never a better time than right now to change the course of your career and life, but doing it alone is hard. With a good career coach to help you answer the core questions Who am I? Where am I?, Where do I want to go? And How am I going to get there? You can get a clear understanding of who you are from both a professional and personal perspective. Through this process, you’ll establish and identify career options, and then build a strategy to achieve your job objective, which includes mastering new skills, using your talents and transferable skills to move on to a new position and career where you are happier. You can do this too. It takes time but your happiness is worth the effort. Where do you want to be in the next five years? Is it time to reset your Career Compass?

Sometimes it’s hard to find the right person for the role you have advertised, especially if you’re in the market for a specific skill set. As recruiters, our responsibility to our clients is to source those skills, whether through our network, advertisements, data-base searches, or going out into the broader marketplace to seek out that skill set. Often this means speaking with people who are already in roles where they are comfortable, and potentially earning more than what you have on offer. We can find those people, and we can present them to you, but ultimately the decision to join you, or stay with their current employer is about what you can offer THEM, and not just what they are able to offer you. More Than Money The good news is that, for a lot of people, it’s not ALWAYS about the money. We speak with a lot of people, week on week. Job seekers, employers, those wishing to re-join the market after a break, or those looking to move between companies. What we learn through these conversations is that candidates are interested in more than just their salary package. Incentives such as flexible work hours, wellness and health programs, insurances, and other commercial benefits (work car, work phone, work computer) all come into play when people decide whether to leave the company they are with and commence with a new employer. Offering great incentives not only entices potential high performers, but it also has immediate pay back for the business. Much of the today’s research demonstrates that healthy work environments promote efficiency and a positive culture, and they decrease sick-leave and stress-induced illnesses. And the market knows it. Ask Yourself These Questions So, if you are having trouble finding and on-boarding that skilled person, or if you’re experiencing high-turnover within your business – or even within a specific role – you need to ask yourself, as the leader, what can you change to make working for you more advantageous than working for your competitors? What can you offer outside of a salary package, to make that person with the right skills come to you? 

Let me start by saying that since returning to work after the birth of my third child last year, I have been working a 4 day week and I love it!  For me, it’s not just the work side of things, it’s having more time to get stuff done on the weekends that is the massive bonus.  Read more to learn if the way of the future is a 4 day working week.

One of our recruitment consultants was working with a hiring manager from HR. This HR Manager called and asked if they knew when the job seeker they had represented was planning to start a family. The question was literally, “Is she going to get pregnant in the next two years?” Oh and this HR professional made it very clear that they wanted to know the answer to this question, so they could either rule the candidate in or out for a vacancy. Seriously, I thought HR professionals were supposed to know better than that. To keep is simple, YOU CAN’T ASK THAT. It’s against the LAW. You are not allowed to discriminate against any job seeker at any stage of the recruitment or employment process, based on their familial situation and the possibility of or actual pregnancy. Quite frankly, if a woman who is ninety million years pregnant applies for a job with you, you are not allowed, under any circumstances, to refuse to employ her simply because she is about to give birth at any minute. You are not allowed to make assumptions about her ability to do the work, to meet deadlines or to demonstrate the kind of commitment you require to the role just because she has an occupied uterus. The ONLY time it would be even imaginable to discriminate against a pregnant woman, would be if the job was one that she would not be safe to undertake whilst pregnant e.g. if she would be exposed to radiation or toxins that would harm her or her unborn child and you could not readily make allowances for her to work in that environment. Note, you can’t just say you’re not employing her because you don’t want to buy a special face mask; you would have to prove that it was uneconomical or impacted other employees in a significant way or would require unreasonable changes to business processes or the environment. See how hard it is to justify discriminating against a pregnant woman? And as for discriminating against a woman who isn’t even pregnant, but is between the age of 12 and 50 and may possibly have a functioning reproductive system, well, that’s just plain stupid. Needless to say our recruitment consultant made it clear to this guru of human resources, that we would never ask a job seeker about their plans to breed and advised them that they should not ask it either. I hope (and expect) they have taken our advice.

I am old enough to remember the days when the way you selected a restaurant to eat at you walked down the high street and read the menu in the window and casually checked how many people were sitting down inside. It was also possible that friends had given me the heads up on a new place or I had read an article in a prehistoric thing called a newspaper! Times have changed! A friend of mine recently returned from New York with her two teenagers and she was not able to enter any eating establishment, causal or otherwise, before a comprehensive check of the reviews online had been done. It seems that looking at the menu and through the window is simply not good enough. You need to check what other people have said and on a platform you can trust. Restaurants, hotels and the hospitality sector in general have had the experience of having the public review their business online now for many years. At first there was a lot of kickback and trepidation about these platforms but today they form part of any hospitality business marketing plan. From a consumer point of view they are now almost ubiquitous. Imagine booking some accommodation without first taking a look at the reviews on Tripadvisor? So it is that service based industries such as recruitment agencies are now going to have to embrace the opportunities and challenges that arise when your service is being reviewed and subsequently publicly available on a third party site. Frankly, as Group Managing Director of people2people, I am very much looking forward to this change in the marketplace as I see it as a much greater opportunity than a threat. Although there are likely to be many platforms emerge in the coming year, at people2people we decided to partner with Talentwolf.co as our preferred platform for reviews. Of course we conduct our own feedback surveys and publish reviews on our own website, but as has been shown in other sectors consumers (candidates and clients in the case of the recruitment sector) will trust a third party over a corporate website every time. Our decision to partner with Talentwolf.co was made because the platform was easy to navigate, was cost-effective and provided the additional benefit of being a way for our consultants to engage with talent they otherwise may not have been able to connect to. This feature above all others meant that Talentwolf.co was a standout against the competition. Talentwolf is not just about reviews, it’s a seach engine for talent to find the best recruiters in the market they are in. For the recruiter it’s a platform to showcase just how much better you are than your competition through great reviews examples of your thought leadership and even via video. Going forward I will be keenly watching how Talentwolf grows and also what other opportunities are created for people2people by having our consultants participate on a platform such as Talentwolf.co