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With UK unemployment almost at its lowest levels since the turn of the millennia; recruiting and retaining the best and brightest staff is a challenging endeavour for companies. From Curtis Peterson – RingCentral.
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With UK unemployment almost at its lowest levels since the turn of the millennia; recruiting and retaining the best and brightest staff is a challenging endeavour for companies. From Curtis Peterson – RingCentral.

Alongside pay and promotion prospects; candidates are increasingly concerned about working environments. From homeworking to mobile devices; organisations are recognising that employees have widely different expectations when it comes to how they communicate – differences that are based often on age, technology savviness and cultural difference. RingCentral’s Curtis Peterson offers a candid insight into the three generations of the modern workforce in respect to communications theory and day-to-day applications along with how organisations can retain and build strong and collaborative teams. 

Following the financial crisis in 2008, the UK economy went through a hard period of recession. What followed were major cuts to public sector budgets, massive bank bailouts and an increase in unemployment from a 5 percent pre-recession watermark to around 8.5 percent by 2011 along with depressed wage growth. Although still facing uncertain times following an inconclusive general election; the UK has managed to reduce unemployment to post crisis levels along with positive signs within consumer spending. However, the nation may be facing a skills shortage due to the decision to leave the European Union that brings uncertainty for the 2.2 million nationals of other EU countries that work in the UK, equating to approximately 7 percent of the workforce.

Work vs life balance
For organisations faced with the challenge of recruiting and retaining skilled workers, salaries are perceived as the biggest factor, yet a survey conducted online by Harris Poll among 4,000 adults found that for around 50 percent of the responders, a good location and flexible hours were the second and third ranking requirements when considering an employer. The results tally with other surveys that have found that work vs life balance is an increasingly important consideration and especially for staff filling roles that have a shortage of skilled or experienced employees.

As the old axiom says, a happy worker is a productive worker. Organisations that can deliver this mix of work balance, location and flexibility are ultimately in a much stronger position to both attract and retain the right staff without necessarily offering dramatically increased wages.  Some of these drivers have been with us for a while. For example, according to the Office of National Statistics, around 14 percent of the UK workforce regularly engages in teleworking. This figure has grown over the years due to better communication tools such as email, file sharing and cloud based applications that are better able to support transient users.

Another change is the growth of “Bring-your-own-device” (BYOD) policies that encourage and support staff to work on and communicate via the laptops, smartphones and tablets that are most comfortable for them. Yet the biggest shift in working practice has been amongst age groups as highlighted by a major survey by Gallup in 2014.  In simplistic terms, it found that younger age groups used more digital methods of communicating than older demographics. The data suggests that for the millennial generation that grow up in an Internet centric world, the ability to form digital peer groups and share information across devices is not even considered as new or revolutionary but simply an absolute given. Another survey commissioned by RingCentral in 2015 supported this position and also found web meetings were overtaking the traditional face-to-face sessions.

This shift in outlook of modern workers is forcing organisations to examine more closely some of the fundamental business norms, especially for collaborative endeavours where knowledge workers need to communicate, often and in real time, to deliver a beneficial outcome. With more business processes relying on digital and technology assisted tools, the days of the epic boardroom meeting lasting many hours are giving way to  more fluid huddles, especially as the rise of globalisation and teleworking means that key people are geographically distant.

Businesses are also embracing outsourcing and third-party agreements that mean stakeholders and key decision makers are not even necessarily within the same company. This makes both communication and knowledge sharing a more complex process, but potentially far more powerful in terms of access to vital sources of knowledge.

In response, organisations are turning to more integrated yet flexible commination platforms that allow the different types of workers to use the tools and methods that are required by the role while fitting in with the need for flexibility. The days of voice, video, email, chat and file sharing living within disparate and unconnected systems that only work on specific devices are rapidly falling out of favour.

Many of these modern unified communication platforms instead use the cloud as a way of bridging disparate applications, data repositories and dissimilar devices.  The fear for some is that with this switch comes challenges around management oversight and security yet, by and large, these are not technical hurdles but often the realm of defining and implementing new human resource and workplace polices that are designed around the modern internet enabled workplace. For example, banning the use of less secure file sharing platforms like Dropbox is a poor policy for workers that routinely need to share documents.  Instead, setting up a secure file sharing system within a collaborative working space with proper login credentials and IT security oversight is relatively easy to do and leads to more productivity.

As employees move away from working 9am till 5pm in a fixed office and towards a more flexible posture able to embrace personal circumstances in harmony with business imperatives, ultimately, it generates a win-win situation for both employer and employee. Teams become empowered to find better ways to get the job done while managers are able to finally see the big picture through the digital trail left by collaborative teams all using a shared system. The biggest challenge is not technology but a desire to embrace a new way of working and for the organisations that recognise that the change is already here – the benefits are within reach.

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