roundtable TALENT & SKILLS - EVOLVING THE STRATEGY
We are trying to reconnect people with a sense of purpose; it’s not just accounting or management advice, it’s about making a difference to the world around us, and building confidence in business.
LET'S LOOK AT ATTRITION AND RETENTION - THERE IS THIS ISSUE OF EXTREMELY SHORT TENURE - CAN YOU AFFORD TO SPEND OUT ON THEIR DEVELOPMENT, AND PRAGMATICALLY WATCH THEM TAKE THAT TO A COMPETITOR?
Mito Mackin: Indeed, and some people may want to repeat their experience in a specific domain which is fine, but some people may want to continually evolve so internal mobility would be important. It's also about what they have learned and being able to see how their contribution has factored in the company's success.
Andrew Ward: We’ve created a career development team whose job is to give individual career advice to
THE LENGTH OF AN EMPLOYEE'S POTENTIAL TENURE SHOULD NOT PREVENT YOU FROM INVESTING IN THEM, FIRSTLY YOUR INDUSTRY AS A WHOLE BENEFITS, AND WHAT GOES AROUND COMES AROUND. PLUS TECHNICAL SKILLS IS ONE THING BUT BEHAVIOURAL-TYPE SKILLS NEED TO BE DEVELOPED TOO
Ian Dowd: Every business has its challenges whether that be an unhealthy lack of turnover, or a real problem with attrition and retention. An organisation we work with recently identified that the people that stayed tended to have a change in their role every 18 to 24 months, either a change in job or role or responsibilities and the people that had left tended to stick with the same role.
Andrew Ward: Too many organisations I have worked in have separate recruitment and talent teams. It's important to create programmes to attract people and hire them but we do less in many cases to support actively internal mobility. We need to do more to develop career management skills, to promote internally opportunities that exist. I don’t think we put enough investment in that part of our world compared to what we invest in external recruitment.
Anne Comber: We’ve all had those challenges where managers struggle to release people to do project work or secondments or shadowing opportunities. There is a challenge taking managers with us on that journey to support our aspirations to create internal development opportunities.
people who would otherwise think of leaving. That’s been unbelievably successful. People tend to go to it when they are thinking of leaving and a good third, so far, have actually decided to stay as we’ve been able to offer them alternative challenges.
Michael Woodhall: Agreed, success with individual aspiration and fulfilment is down to the quality of the supervisor, having that mind-set to support those that want to develop and change roles every two or three years, and that's about confidence.
SHORT TENURE CAREERS AND THE MULTI-GENERATIONAL WORKFORCE ARE ACCEPTED REALITIES, SO WHAT IS THE MOST APPROPRIATE STRATEGY FOR THE FUTURE AND, ALSO, HOW CAN RESKILLING AND UP SKILLING PROGRAMMES BE BETTER MANAGED AND OPTIMISED TO PROVIDE SOLUTIONS TO SKILL GAPS?
Stuart McPherson: The length of an employee's potential tenure should not prevent you from investing in them, firstly your industry as a whole benefits, and what goes around comes around. Plus technical skills is one thing but behavioural-type skills need to be developed too. So define the skills that you need to plug and develop people to fill the gaps, use values-based reward programmes and encourage employees to live the values day-to-day and celebrate good progression and performance.
Andrew Ward: HR always strike me as rather paternalistic, but really the responsibility for learning and development is with the individual. It’s really not my job to tell them what to do and create a perfect career path and say you do this first and then you do that. There are different approaches to that and you could go further giving people the responsibility for choosing and funding their own learning and development accounts, repositioning learning as a supplier to an internal marketplace.
16 thehrdirector SEPTEMBER 2016
Jane Nicholson: We have had a very hands off approach up until relatively recently, where learning is an individual's responsibility, and for the Home Office, it has failed, mainly because people have prioritised task over themselves. There may be some deeper cultural issues around why people don’t do training; they think it's about fixing problems rather than continual professional development. So we are having to step in and introduce a paternalistic approach, in depth development planning, some real psycho analysis about what is stopping them from being the best that they can be and really being more interventionist.
Ian Dowd: As automation takes hold, the necessity for softer skills is rising, and the more marketable skills will be things like teamwork, collaboration, the art of persuasion and teaching others, how we relate to each other. It can be quite difficult sometimes to teach those skills online - it needs classroom training, group work and face to face interaction, so your way of learning is about how you use your knowledge to collaborate, not about how much knowledge you consume individually and then output from that.
Jane Nicholson: The big thing that we are losing out on is the people skills that we want to develop, and collaboration with team working. But since taking a much more interventionist approach, the response we are getting is one we didn’t expect, as people are saying “we feel so much more valued by the organisation, because you are actively coming in and supporting our development”.
Andrew Ward: I think one of the challenges is, if people take responsibility for L&D, how do they know where the gaps are, the future demand and opportunities? Also, I think most HR teams struggle with keeping role based competency models up-to-date in a way that is actually useful. We need to find a more dynamic way of doing that.
Michael Woodhall: I wonder if it’s as simple as the fact that workload for a lot of people has increased over the last 20 years as organisations have got leaner? I think most people get the importance of L&D, but on a day to day basis, if you’ve got a project that is due tomorrow versus the learning opportunity, what do people prioritise? I do sense a shift, but some people still struggle to give themselves permission to learn.
Sonya Alexander: Making space for learning is a key challenge. In part, it is the perception of learning that needs to change and most organisations are embedding the 70, 20, 10 model. I think ownership for learning also needs to be reviewed. We have designed a new management programme and it is entirely learner led, starting with a self-assessment of strengths and
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