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Our End Of Year Review – Six People Trends We’ve Observed In 2010

The year has remained dominated by economic uncertainty, with some sectors still in recession, whilst some (exporters) are having a best ever year. Growth has remained elusive for many with a fatal cocktail of oversupply and increasing commoditisation driving down prices.

What does this mean for people management?

1. The recession has not flooded the market-place with high calibre people, because either they have been locked-in to where they are or have moved jobs below the recruitment market’s radar.
2. The people who decided to hunker down in not wanting to be last in/first out are beginning to look around. If 2009 was about going backwards, and 2010 was about standing still, 2011 had better be about moving forwards otherwise there is large cohort of people who will be in the job market.
3. Self-Employment. A confluence of economic factors, lifestyle changes, enabling technology and organisations shrinking their core activities continue to drive the increasing size of the freelancing/contractor/consultant part of the working population. The people doing this kind of work range from a minority of hyper successful who through a combination of the right smarts, the right temperament and the right work ethic enjoy as much work as they want, to the majority who fashion some kind of living. And beware the consultant who is really out of work looking for a job and offers to work on a project at much reduced rates.
4. People engagement has been on many HR peoples’ minds. How to mobilise the whole organisation’s discretionary effort in support of common goals? Why is the correlation so strong between seniority and the application of this discretionary effort?
5. Many UK businesses are still over-managed and under-led. UK plc productivity figures have gone backwards in recent years, we’re still behind the US and even France with its shorter working week. Getting the middle layer of managers (the ones that deal with the bulk of employees on a daily basis) to consistently and collectively offer leadership and a sense of purpose to their teams remains a major challenge. Our own work in this area suggests a small increase in leadership behaviour demonstrated by critical mass of middle managers has had a massively positive (and more profitable) effect.
6. The generational divide. This seems to be increasing. Younger workers having a very different mental approach to work and their employer than their middle aged equivalents. And its more than being at different life stages. Younger people have no mortgage worries (they can’t afford one), and no pension lock-in (final salary gone and money purchase a laugh). The two main UK reasons for conservative career decisions. We sometimes work with clients where the room composition can be 1:1 in terms of number of people and number of nationalities. But then you notice they are all under 35. Technology will also drive the generational divide, not in terms of technical understanding, but in terms of application usage. Social networking, a preparedness to share personal data, affinity groups, and tribal loyalties will amplify these differences. Email is seen as the middle aged communication medium of choice.

Your own hiring/selection/development/succession planning/retention/exiting of people needs to be adaptive, innovative, motivating and sustainable. Above all it needs to be strategic.

If you would like to talk over any of the issues raised in this article or how Predaptive might be able to assist with your people policies we’d love to hear from you. Please contact us.

A Most Dangerous Position To Be In, When All The Sexy People Stuff Had Been Said But Nothing Has Changed

Some organisations give good rhetoric. They talk about inclusiveness and claim to follow the latest thinking about engagement. They launched a Vision and Mission some time ago and have a laminated set of values issued to all. They’ve run a 360 and the CEO has held a series of ‘doughnut and coffee’ sessions. The Directors have done a ‘back to the floor’ to discover the ‘real’ story and the company made a matched contribution to Children in Need.

Yet when to talk to ‘the workers’ about how things feel in the organisation or ask them about morale, or look at how enthusiastically people have signed up for the Christmas party, peoples’ views bear little relation to all the enlightened management practice that has supposedly been going on. Cynicism, suspicion and a general weariness flavour the comments as if the organisation has done nothing at all. And that’s the point, if people receive all this communication about cultural change, about how things will be different and about a new way of doing things, and then nothing much happens, what are they supposed to think? Launching all the things in the first paragraph doesn’t make them happen.

Questions that should be asked beforehand. Why does management believe all this stuff is required? Has it articulated the problem to be solved, or the opportunity to be exploited? Has it defined measures of success for each intervention? Has it created some accountability in the process of implementation and follow thorough?

And that brings us to an uncomfortable principle. An organisations’ delivery of enlightened people practices cannot exceed the quality of its management’s ability to do so. Put more simply, management has to change and improve before the wider organisation can make the same journey. That ability to be consciously aware of its own shortcomings and to transcend is a critical early stage requirement in any people related change process.

Predaptive’s work always includes working with management on making sure any given messages always aligns with behaviour and is followed through with measurable actions. Building a world class organisation isn’t about launching things; it’s about doing things and making change stick.