Harmonics

With the recession behind us and the economy growing, the competition for top talent is intensifying. Interestingly, it’s not just the experienced or specialist employees that are in demand but the open-minded, fresh-thinking millennials are just as sought after as our workforce becomes increasingly transient.

They are the much talked about generation fuelling endless tomes of research, studies and reports. And while past reports of job-hopping millennials may have been exaggerated – some companies still struggle not just in hiring millennials but retaining them. They will make up 50% of the global workforce by 2020, so companies need to consider making changes to their organisational structures and management styles – now.

Engaging and Retaining Millennial Talent in the Modern Workplace

Overall, millennials value career and personal development over money and status. So, strategies beyond remuneration need to be developed. Here are our 5 recommendations for businesses who want to respond to the new world of work and engage millennial talent:

1. Flexible and trusted – Millennials have ambition and drive but this should not be seen that they want to work all the hours to be like the generation before them. Now they are seeking more work-life flexibility. They want to be trusted to work remotely, they want to dress casually, speak liberally and receive feedback to help them grow.
2. Career Growth – They need to see opportunities to grow, where they can join a team working on projects that have meaning and purpose. They may only be around for a few years so don’t speak tradition and legacy, instead redefine the career development conversation and give them time to speak about their career and personal interests.
3. Openness and transparency – Growing up with technology and social media, millennials expect a culture of transparency and for management to be upfront on why decisions are made. Keep them informed and satisfy their sense of purpose by helping them understand how their purpose links to company values. Millennials will be more engaged and committed if they are informed regularly on progress against the company’s strategy.
4. Mentorship both ways – Millennials appear to be more interested in finding mentors than their previous generations. Leaders and Managers can play a key role here (and not just their direct line managers) – helping millennials with their personal growth or demonstrating the characteristics of a strong leader. However, the real opportunity is in millennials offering ‘reverse mentorship’. If Managers are open to accept the mentorship, the reverse mentor-mentee relationships can add significant value for both parties to learn and utilise one another’s strengths.
5. Listened and recognised – Millennials expect a high-touch approach to management – listen to them and give them feedback. Since their early education, they believe their ideas are important and valuable, so listen to them or they won’t respect you. They really desire a great deal of  feedback – which goes outside the normal parameters of a performance management system. Managers must take the time to engage in formal and ad-hoc constructive feedback on a regular basis.

Perspectives from here and abroad

It’s all about Change

In October, I attended our OI Global Partners meeting in Turin, Italy where over 20 European, Australian and US Partners came to share best practice and themes from their respective countries. Harmonics is the exclusive Irish partner firm of OIGP, a global network of independently owned consultancy firms specialising in Organisation and People Change.

There were a number of themes that dominated our discussions that has implications for us all – whether as employers or employees:

Digital Disruption – Each partner firm reported digitisation was disrupting organisations business and workforce planning. Automation, robotics and AI are now rapidly changing the nature of work as we used to know it. D Amazon, Airbnb, Netflix are all examples of Digital platforms offering global market reach and capturing exponential market share at record speed. We are seeing the 4^th Industrial revolution take hold as digital start-up ventures are infiltrating traditional business models.  What will this mean for people at work? In a recent PWC Survey of over 10,000 global members, 60% think “few people will have stable, long term employment in the future”. This means we will all have to adapt to much change.

Adapting to Change – Our own recent OI Global Future of Work study indicated ‘adapting to change’ as the number 1 challenge facing HR Directors. There was consistency across partner firms that requests to design and develop change programmes was on the rise to enable Leaders and Managers to adapt to change. There is also an interesting development in organisations offering “should I stay or should I go?” career planning programmes. These interventions are to help those who need to decide if they want to stay and upskill to meet changing business needs or leave on a voluntary redundancy programme to pursue new external career options. This career alignment support is now forming a critical part of organisations change programmes.

Growing divide between haves and have nots – Each country shared low unemployment levels but also a growing inequality between the highly paid, highly skilled and the lowly paid, lowly skilled. The hollowing out of the middle class, middle age worker is taking hold and there are worrying signs that this will lead to even greater future inequality. Specialism in much sought after skillsets is highly valued by employers. Technology is moving so fast that the highly valued specialist skillsets are changing rapidly, so there is a perpetual need to unlearn, relearn and learn new skills. We are being approached by many of those in their 40’s and 50’s who are now being impacted by this change and are seeking career coaching to plot a new way forward. This is something that we will see more and more of as the huge disruption takes hold for those with previously well paid and skilled jobs. Organisations need to become more proactive in putting career planning and upskilling in place to support this change or fear losing previously talented people who are not prepared for this change.

International mobility – We are seeing a growing rise in coaching to support international career moves. This is predominantly for millennials who have been promoted to a global role and need to hit the ground running in a new international location. They are coming to terms with a promotion and embracing a new culture in one sweep. This can be overwhelming and career transition coaching is being seen as an imperative to succeed in a new country and in a new role

Future of Work Global Research Study – There has been excellent feedback from our clients to our 2^nd Global Future of Work research study. We are seeking to further deepen the research for the year ahead. This added value to our clients is helping them to understand the challenges and skills required to be successful in the highly competitive and changing world of work.

Market saturation of coaches – The number of people becoming qualified in coaching is growing year on year. While this is great for more and more people to have new coaching skills in the workplace, it is leading to oversupply in the coaching market. Many partner firms reported requests from newly qualified coaches to become join their books and become associate coaches. I have seen this first hand and receive multiple requests weekly from newly trained coaches to join the Harmonics team. From our perspective we need to offer our clients qualified coaches with at least 5 years coaching experience, commercial business experience and specialist knowledge in a core area that matches our client’s needs. Many enter the coaching profession because they are passionate about helping others but what each coach needs to learn most is how to commercialise and niche their offering to become attractive to clients and partner firms like OI. It was recognised by clients that our strength in OI is being recognised as the home to quality coaches globally.

Overall a great meeting and an opportunity for us to take time out with our partners to see how we will pivot our own businesses to stay ahead of the change curve. This quote below was never more relevant.

“The secret of change is to focus all of your energy not into fighting the old but on creating the new” – Socrates

It’s September and back to school season. Every household with school going kids are now firmly back into the routine. My daughter Sarah is starting Junior Cert this year and I look at her books and wonder how much has really changed since I went to secondary school. The big difference seems to be schoolbags got heavier with bigger books, yet we are living in a technology enabled age! In this post, I want to share how our life journey from school to college to work can be one of endless opportunities but only if we approach it with the right mindset.

Routine and archaic

Sarah, like me circa 3Oish years ago, is educated in a similar size classroom by teachers who will teach the same subjects with little change year in year out. Each night she has routine homework to do, answering questions and memorizing stuff for her teachers. Unlike me 30 years ago, she can now google the answers from her mobile device. This is an example of humans applying technology to become more efficient in the modern technology enhanced world. And rightly she wonders why she should learn off stuff she can google and find instant answers. Her generation are stuck in an archaic school system falling further behind to stay relevant in meeting the needs of the Future World of Work. There is an increasing and growing disengagement in the classroom between teachers following the system and students who don’t believe in the system anymore. This is leading to increasing stress for teachers, students and parents.

Questions not Answers

Pablo Picasso once stated, “Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.” I think Picasso just meant that real intelligence stems from curiosity or the ability to ask questions. In science, it is curiosity that makes you ask questions and then you go and experiment in order to answer them. So if Picasso were around today, he might ask “why are teachers looking for kids to remember answers that computers can give them in a millisecond?” He might also wonder why our teenage kids are not now educated in live learning labs that foster deeper questioning, curiosity, creativity and social interaction. A great example of teenage kids becoming highly engaged is the Young Social Innovators Project. Here they get to work voluntarily on projects they are passionate about and make a difference to society. They have a purpose and they want to learn.

Disengagement and College Drop Offs – 70%

The current approach to education creates a high level of disengagement in the classroom.  Instead of creating well rounded young adults, the one measure of success after six years in second level education is the number of points earned to claim a coveted college place. There seems to be little or no research undertaken by the students or assessment by the college on whether the student is a fit for the course subject matter. This makes it easy to explain why up 70% of students drop out of certain college courses.  Interestingly computer science and business courses recorded some of the highest levels of non-progression. Yet these are considered two of the most important courses in terms of preparing for the future of work. The system is badly broken and no one seems to want to fix it.

We need to move away from “heads down and study hard” education only. Space needs to be created for students to explore the Future World of Work and the changing skills required to succeed. This will give them a clear strategy and help them identify the courses and work that align to their talents and market needs.

Disengagement at work – 70%

We progress to the workplace and find the same number; 70% of millennials are not engaged or actively disengaged at work according to Gallup research. Millennials are accused of job hopping, but from experience they are simply looking for organisations with a purpose they can connect to or work which they find challenging with an opportunity to learn new skills and knowledge. They want an environment that stimulates them and offers them opportunities for growth.

Jonathan Mildenhall Airbnb’s Chief Marketing Officer makes this excellent point about purpose. “Purpose-driven companies outperform their competitors in terms of the financial performance of the business, creating much, much more shareholder value than non-purpose-driven companies. There’s also increasing research and data that proves that purpose-driven companies naturally attract top talent, but they also manage to retain top talent as well,”

If purpose driven organisations outperform their competitors, we as individuals need to define our purpose and what we stand for and believe in to outperform our competitors for jobs.  We in turn will attract more career opportunities in alignment with our purpose because we are clear on what we want and where we want to work in the future.

Creating Chances – 70%

Dr. Jim Bright co-author of the “Chaos Theory of Careers” shows in his research that approximately 70% of interviewees reported chance events had significantly influenced their careers to date. Change, Chance and Complexity play a huge role in where we end up working. In my own career, this happened many times. The first time was a chance meeting in a Co. Clare hotel lobby with an American entrepreneur in my early twenties. This led me to emigrating to the US three months later and changing career direction. I have seen this play out time and time again in our career coaching practice. A chance meeting at an event leads to a change in career direction. It is complex to explain but it does happen and changes the course of careers at least 70% of the time. In sport, if you don’t create chances, you don’t score. In our careers, we need to create more chances by meeting new and interesting people and learning more about the changing world of work. It is not something we only do when we finish our exams or when we lose our job.

My Career –My Business Model

We have developed the My Career-My Business Model below in response to the rapidly changing future world of work and increasing levels of disengagement and to offer people a practical career model. Let me explain briefly how the model works. It applies strategic business planning directly to career planning. Every successful business will have three core functions;

Research & Development – Develop new products and services to stay ahead of the game

Operations – Manufacture products or deliver services to clients

Sales & Marketing – Create and maintain a pipeline of sales to deliver revenue

If the Business focuses all of its efforts in Operations mode and does not invest in Research & Development or Sales & Marketing, the business will no longer remain commercially viable. New products and competitors will eat their market share. And it’s the same for our careers.

At school, college and work we spend the majority of our time working in Operations or ‘Doing mode’. We have been taught to work hard and you will succeed. The rules have changed and today, we need to work smarter to succeed and this means having a “heads up approach”. Our career advice is to see your career as a business and use the three core functions to guide your career focus;

• Research & Development – Seek to bring new ideas and thinking to the table. As Picasso might say, ask more questions in work meetings and experiment more to add value to your employer and customers.
• Operations – Execute and deliver excellent services for your employers and customers, but do not become swamped with only working hard in this function as the other two functions are door openers to future career opportunities.
• Sales & Marketing – Create and maintain a pipeline of valuable connections both inside and outside your current employer and keep your LinkedIn updated with recent work achievements which showcases your purpose, passion and potential to future employers.

70% Lessons

While we cannot change elements outside our control, like the economy or the environment, we can control the controllables. So, like we used to do in school, to revise on my 70% stats:

70% College Drop Out – This statistic could be reduced significantly if we use our Research & Development Skills to find out what we want to study and why.

70% Disengagement at Work – If we are clear on our career purpose, we can use our Sales and Marketing skills to seek out and attract employers where we will be engaged and aligned to their purpose.

70% Creating Chances – If we are curious and open minded about the wider world and interested in meeting different people outside of our own network, we can change the course of our career direction in the most interesting of ways.