Offices today are totally different from past few decades. All the information you need is available at fingertips. Generations today are digital natives and traditional work systems do not match their expectations. Everyone is connected by technology online.
Technology has both its positives and negatives and so does the technology connected workforce. With help of technology many people are able to work from home and able to balance both their personal and professional life.
It has also cut down the need of business travels saving a lot of time and money. On the contrary tech connected employees also has its downside. So let’s discuss a few tips on managing today’s hyper-connected workforce.
1. Realizing the Importance of Real Communication
In the shuffle of Skype, emails, chats, and video conferencing people are forgetting the importance of face to face communication. People have misunderstood the whole concept of communication. Words are not the only thing required for it.
It is a compendium of small gestures, expressions and emotions that humans tend to interpret unconsciously and these can never be replaced by virtual expressions called emojis. You can learn a lot many things about a person from personal interaction rather by digital communication.
So if you wish to turn back disasters before it happens try to find time and get your employees in same room as often as possible. Weekly meeting or one on ones can also be effective.
2. Digital Detoxification
We all are aware of the fact that a detoxification show positive result on human bodies and same does the digital detox. For people who do not understand the term digital detoxification it is time period during which during which a person abstains from using electronic devices.
This is to reduce stress and focus on improving social interaction in the physical world. Motivate your employees to take a digital vacations every now and then. A team outing can turn out to be really fruitful.
Encouraging a digital detoxification is one of the best things you can do for your employees and your business because wealth of a company depends on the health of workers.
3. Encouraging Employees to Pull the Plug
It is a motivating problem that usually businesses expect their staff to be accessible throughout working hours. On the contrary, the requirement to be reachable at all times could cause employees to be less productive.
A recent study showed that employees spend most of their time in cooperative activities with their managers leaving them very little to no time to actually complete their work.
Permitting and encouraging your staff to turn off their phones or place them on “do not disturb” mode will result in more productive workforce.
4. Setting and Enforcing Boundaries
These days it is lot more easier to reach out to people wherever they are. But once it involves business, this same accessibility might create a riddle. Seeing boss’s emails in the evening might be tough for several employees to ignore till the following day.
This can be wherever setting boundaries can be extremely necessary. Simply because you can send emails or direct reports to your employees at 10:00 pm doesn’t imply you must. If it’s not an emergency situation or you seek an immediate response, it’s always better to send it the next day.
5. Using Preferred Mode of Communication
It’s likely that you would prefer a certain mode of communication and there are chances of you unknowingly force everyone else in your company to use it. Different people are comfortable using a different means of communication. For example Gen X will prefer email communication; Millennia’s and Gen Z are more likely to want to video conferencing, IM or text.
Older people will definitely like a face to face convo or connecting over a phone call. Using their preferred mode of communication with your employees will help you connect with them better in terms of understanding and establishing a rapo. Doing so will definitely take you much further with your workforce
Conclusion
Irrespective of your business type, your employees being on site or offsite technology and digital communication plays an important role to connect. But these two if not managed carefully can lead to devastation.
Managing your hyper connected workforce will help you in long run helping you and you employees to achieve and maintain good work life balance.
In 2018, virtually 75% of employers struggled to fill positions with the proper candidates.Unfortunately, this talent shortage is simply worsening. Research by Korn Ferry predicts by 2020, the technology, media, and telecommunications industries alone may be short over one million complete staff globally.
Talent acquisition is growing globally at an astonishing pace. Considering global professionals, 70% of people in professional services work remotely at least one day in a week. These numbers might be a bit shocking for people who still work in a traditional work space. As we intensify our understanding of the massive increase in global hiring, we must also endow ourselves to compete effectively.
Below pointers suggest a global talent acquisition strategy.
Focus on better employer branding.
Employer branding is one of the most important feature for successful talent acquisition. Talented candidates compare companies before they apply for any position; they tend to choose the organizations which have simplest values, culture, and which promote work-life balance. By cultivating a powerful leader, you may attract higher talent and notice a lot of long-run success. Always keep your current employees in mind while developing your employer brand as they can help strengthen your value proposition.
Workplace adjustments
An impactful onboarding process can be the key to a long-term success of remote employees. It can also help establish a collaborative environment that reaches to different time zones, geographies, and cultures.Both employees and employers are in the nub of a workplace alteration. Team members can join meetings and contribute via cloud-based tools and video conferencing, no matter which place they are at.
Need of global talent acquisition
Before we act, let’s understand clearly the need, supported by a review of global talent acquisition growth trends.Businesses of all sizes let it be giants, well established or just the beginners are entering or expanding their reach in the global marketplace. The number of Fortune 500 companies based in global emerging markets is expected to exceed 45 percent by 2025, according to a research by McKinsey & Company, a management consulting firm.
According to 2018 survey by freelance website Upwork, less than 40% US hiring managers expect employees to do the majority of their work remotely in the next ten years, according to a 2018 survey by freelance website Upwork. All of these points in the same direction: With the increase in global workforce, we have to renew our commitment to cross-cultural and diverse communication. This applies to the full life span of talent acquisition, but it begins with your candidate engagement strategy.
A good talent acquisition strategy is always in transition
Designing a talent acquisition strategy is imperative to the success of your business and to ensure that recruitment as a process is conducted not merely on the need basis but as part of the strategy.
However, as you could probably discern from the points above, there is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to a strategy for talent acquisition. Instead, a good strategy is one that is designed to tailor to your business and is flexible enough to evolve as the business and market change.
To succeed long-term, you must attract and retain talented employees regardless of vacant roles. Talent acquisition will assist you to do that while solving for long-term organizational needs.
The pressure of getting a seat filled is always on. The hiring manager is calling you daily, the coworkers taking up the slack are at breaking point, and you just want to get it done. But finding the incorrect candidate is worse than finding none, it means having to start over again in a few months. Mistakes will prove pricey for any company, and particularly for any company’s HR department. Not only can bad hire damage your reputation, but your business will end up taking a serious financial hit, so here are top key practices to help you do just that.
Technology and Automation
Modern world is built on Technology. No matter what the job is technology and automation are anyway a part of it. Any candidate who has difficulty with the hiring process that includes advance methods like video interview, email conversations etc. will definitely have performance issues if hired.
Pre-Hire Assessments
Pre-hiring assessments can be a little scary for few recruiters, who may worry that an extreme screening process will turn away candidates early on in the whole interviewing process. Just remember that all candidates take great measures to present themselves as positively as possible, so exercising measurable assessments is a highly efficient and effective way to determine how much of that image is just illusory.
In 2014, the Aberdeen Group released a survey report which summarized the impact of pre-hire assessments, stating that 55% of companies who used pre-hiring assessment tests linked candidate’s performance level to these assessment results. These can range from skills tests, which are a great way to check a candidate’s aptitude or even there personality. Regardless of their specific focus, these add an extra layer of review to filtrate unsuitable candidates.
Making decisions without sufficient data
There are two ways in which knowledge is hidden throughout the recruitment process. The first comes from the avalanche of candidate most organizations typically receive. Traditionally, and still these days, many HR and hiring professionals find candidates from enormous stack of resumes. There is enormous amount of data to review and few might not even be eligible to consider. Pre-screening tools can help to quickly filter the pool of available candidates by eliminating those who do not meet minimum skills and job requirements.
Lazy Sourcing
How many hiring managers create the job description, post it, then expect for the talent to return to them? Do you think you’re getting the best talent when you do this? Just imagine If you’re dating do you present yourself on the walkaway and expect for the love of your life to appear? Then why do we think the job description is going to attract the “best” person for the job? The “best” talent is already happily employed and most likely isn’t even looking for a job or may be busy enough not to see you employment advertisement.
Skipping the Phone Interview
Pre-interviews, like a 10-minute phone call, are a key to optimize your time. The resume appears to be nice, but can’t always tell you critical information. It may indicate that the candidate has “excellent communication skills” for a Customer Support position, but only a telephonic interview can assure if it’s true. The need for a bilingual candidate can solely be verified by phone. Some candidates won’t embrace crucial data, like salary history, unless they get a phone call; others might no longer be available or interested. While the telephonic interview could also be a step candidates don’t like, it’s immensely useful for recruiters attempting to optimize the particular face to face interview time spent on each hire.
Hazy Job Descriptions
One of the most costly hiring mistakes is not being clear of whom you want to hire or the qualities or skill set you are looking in a candidate. Always ask these questions before drafting the detailed job description.
What key responsibilities does one expect this person to require on?
What deliverable’s will this person need to produce?
What skill sets must he or she have?
What expertise set should they need to achieve success during this role?
Minimum education qualification? (If needed)
What character and personality traits or temperament can they have to powerful, long run fit?
When you begin this way, then and solely then are you able to begin to craft the correct accomplishment strategy, prepare interview queries, and then begin to speak with candidates about the position.
Using few or all of the above strategies allows you to spot a bad hire miles away. These unorthodox interview methods ensure risk free and efficient hiring process. It helps filter Candidates who cannot follow directions during the interview process.
Lastly, these methods allow candidates to present themselves in a more creative and spontaneous way. You get all the information about the candidate like communication skills, personality and also the technical prowess even before letting him or her enter into your office, which will definitely save a lot of time and reduce chances of making a bad hire!
Diversity is imperative to all workplaces. People with completely different backgrounds and experiences, who come close together as a team, will develop innovative ideas that may keep your company alive and thriving. Despite this, companies in many industries and roles are not benefiting from this because they are dominated by a single-sex. For example, tech industry roles are typically filled by men, while nursing roles are typically filled by women. In each case, the customers are more diverse than the people serving them, which don’t bode well for understanding their needs. To better serve your customers, it’s important to cultivate gender diversity within the work.
Gender diversity doesn’t imply that an organization should have a 50/50 mix of males and females for every position in the company. However, it does mean that all the roles should have a fair representation of both sexes at every level in the company.
As leaders, we can employ a range of strategies to improve gender diversity in the workplace.
1. Encourage an inclusive and respectful culture
A survey report points out that though women connected with a lot of everyday slights and disrespectful behavior than men, 58 percent of all employees expertise some kind of micro aggression, suggesting incivility is common at work.
If things need to change, then it can’t just be about driving the culture and values of the company but also highlighting and communicating that there is no room for sexual harassment, disrespect, or bias, and when needed, stringent action will be taken. Communicate, communicate, communicate this a thousand times over, and start at the top.
2. Build a comprehensive workplace
Before making an attempt to hire for gender diversity, look at intervals and appraise your company culture. Is your company a decent place to figure despite gender? Do you treat people across the gender spectrum equally? Consult your employees to learn how you can build a more inclusive workplace, and put in the work to continually improve your company culture. An inclusive culture can facilitate build your employer brand, so you can attract and retain a diverse workforce
3. Restructure your pay and benefits program
To make your company as engaging as potential to a broader range of individual people, you want to erase pay difference between men and women within the same positions.
One way to try and do this is often to prevent asking a few candidate’s previous wage and offer the same pay range to every potential employee, no matter of what they made in an earlier position. Considering that asking candidates regarding their wage history is already prohibited in some states, this is good practice anyway.
When it involves to advantages, studies conjointly show that women in specifically value robust, family-oriented perks once seeking a new job. This means you should be as generous as possible with family leave, health insurance, remote work and flexible hours.
4. Analyze exit interviews
Exit interviews are useful to understand why people are leaving, so you can improve how you hire and retain talent. If you’re working toward gender diversity within the workplace, you‘ll conjointly poke into your differences in why men and women are leaving your organization. This can provide insights that are unique to your company, and allow you to monitor your progress over time. If, for example, you learn that women are less satisfied with compensation than men, you’ll take steps to enhance your compensation strategy and see however perceptions change over a year.
5. Reserve equal seats for women in a boardroom meeting
The higher they’re going; a lot of women realize themselves alone within the room, which typically makes them feel isolated. Companies need to stop having just two women in the boardroom because it checks a box. According to the report, companies need to examine and explore how they can move women through their organization.
The report explains, “One approach is to hire and promote women in cohorts; another is to cluster women on teams. As opposed to staffing one woman on several of teams, companies should consider putting groups of two to three women on teams together.”
And in to move far from reinforcing gender stereotypes, it recommends thinking twice before clustering women in functions traditionally dominated by women, like human resources and communications.
It additionally recommends making opportunities for the “only” women in a room to connect with other alternative women and to foster additional women’s networking teams inside organization.
Above discussed strategies are the few things companies can do for gender diversity and make more money while doing so. Promoting inclusiveness and variety at your workplace is one of the most effective ways that foster an open-minded, global company culture. Not only does this make good business sense serving your company to better understanding colleagues, clients, and customers around the world it additionally makes the workplace a lot interesting and personally enriching environment for everyone.
Considering millennial’s as the largest generation in the workforce, it’s necessary to find ways to nail the corporate culture since today’s corporate teams are mostly made up of millennial’s.
The millenary wants a strong culture where a company’s values and visions are clearly demonstrated and the work environment is fun.
But to keep these youngest workers from moving on before they fulfil their professional potential, here are following ways to entice the newest, biggest generation of workers to stick with your organization for the rewarding challenges it offers.
Make them engage in purposeful work that hit a larger goal:
Engaging in meaningful work is the foremost priority of millennials. JD is what entices the workforce so it’s important to take a hard look at the job description; process-oriented work is most likely to gain attention for a long time. Money isn’t the only thing driving force rather the work has to be meaningful. It is imperative for organizations to make sure to tie their job into the big picture and help the company fulfill its goals.
Offer transparent & performance-based pay:
These Millennial’s, like other generations are money-motivated, They expect to be fairly compensated, and they grew up with much more access to salary information – on the Internet and through their peers — than earlier generations had.
To retain these Millennial’s, companies need to move away from seniority-based, work-with-the-middle-of-pack approach, and individualize compensation,
and if you want Millennials to stay with your company, never stop offering them, performance based pay and opportunities to add more value and receive greater compensation in return.
Set a pace for rewards.
Millennia’s need to feel that they’re progressing in their field of work; they expect re-enforcement and spot bonuses. They expect to progress through titles and quickly to begin accommodating these preferences with blowing payroll.
Considering bonus strategy — Instead of giving a 3 percent annual raise — Provide a 1 percent increase every four months.
Proving the right Benefits and flexibility in job:
Office culture that promotes work-life balance (the norm these days) as the young generation respond positively to work flexibility. Due to the gig economy, the conventional 9-5 work is no longer the norm. It also encourages creativity and innovation.
To sum up, have an open door policy (sounds cliché but hardly practiced) which gives employees a sense of inclusiveness. Also, companies need to look beyond the ‘millennial’ reputation as job hoppers and focus more on their potential.
Providing guidance and creating opportunities for career development:
Millennial’s prefer bosses or managers who can coach them, guide them and at the same time give them trust and freedom to work on their own manner. And this requires clear disciplined communication, a mix of educational and motivational steps and apt mentor ship. Their skills set system allowing employees to get certified and attain a pay hike accordingly.
There are always certain vacancies in every organization for which employers are not sure whether to hire a permanent employee or not. This dilemma can be resolved by Temp-to-hire services.
The growing trend for employers in recent years has been to use staffing services to fill their open position through a temp-to-permanent or temp-to-hire strategy. The benefit to the employer is the opportunity to test-drive the relationship between the candidate and his job role before making the full-time commitment to him.
Temp-to-hire position is something where the job candidate is typically paid on an hourly rate for specified contract duration. Following that contract duration, the employer of the company or the end client that has hired the candidate has the option to convert him/her as a permanent employee.
In most of the cases, there are 3, 6, 9 or maybe 12 months temp-to-hires, 3-6 months being the most common contract duration.
With the help of Temp to hire services, it’s easier for the clients to test and judge the capability of the candidate. By doing this, the clients can get the right match to the position, by observing and testing the needful skills and qualities of the candidate.
Here are few advantages of temp-to-hire services in the perception of the job-seeker:
Generate Income
Whether you are between successes or embarking on different ventures such as looking at starting a Business, having a contract can sometimes generate immediate income for you in a short term.
Try Before Buy
Buy taking on temp to hire opportunity, you can work for an organization and see if you enjoy the work culture, the team, the work before you actually look at potentially working for this employer on a full-time basis.
Foot in the Door
This role may end up going permanent. So it’s a great way to get your foot in the door with an organization.
Keep Experience
You keep your experience relevant and current by taking on a contract opportunity.
Add experience
You can increase your experience and knowledge base in a particular area. This will be especially true to new comers in a country or to people who are looking to make a complete carrier change.
May Pay more
Typically with contracting, the employers pay a bit more. The reason for this is because they are compensating for lack of extra benefits that contract employees are eligible for.
Grow Network
This is the opportunity to network and meet new people. You never know who you might end up meeting who could be the lead to your dream job.
Easier to Find Job
It’s usually easier to find a job when you are already working. For many recruiters, the Holy Grail is the passive job seeker. So if you are working on a contract, most likely you are going to be targeted more by the recruiters.
Less Competition
Because contracting tends to be a less desirable option than working permanent full- time role, there is less competition in the market place for people who are looking for contract opportunities and with less competition, better your odds are for getting the interview and even getting the job.
There is no way that an employer can truly vet a job seeker effectively in any interview scenario, but temp- to-hire strategy gives you days and weeks to watch someone in action and truly see their skills and most importantly their work ethic.
Firms that adopt a temp-to-hire approach benefit from observing job candidates firsthand — and by hiring people who have gained a familiarity with your firm and its corporate culture. This approach to staffing provides a hands-on, realistic way of choosing a new employee with a lower risk of a hiring mistake.
Hence this is an effective way to get back potential candidates to work and save themselves from making expensive mistakes.
