Comments on: The Right Stuff – attraction, engagement, retention in a hyperconnected world

By: Michael Specht

Michael Specht — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 01:59:03 +0000

Interesting discussion. Let’s take this further.

By general agreement somewhere around 20% of Australia’s workforce is actively disengage, meaning disruptive, unproductive, disloyal and unenthused. Costing the economy somewhere in excess of $A30 billion in lost productivity annually!

Global HR consulting firm Watson Wyatt found that the top 4 drivers of workplace satisfaction are communication, pay & benefits, customer focused approaches, and strategic direction & leadership. Improved communication effectiveness is associated with a 15.7% increase in market value and research has shown organisations with effective communication had an employee engagement level 4 times that of others.

Taking this further companies that are great places to work (ie care about their employees) perform at least twice as well as other organisations. While many people understand this, it was the basis of a research report by Professor Alex Edmans from Wharton School.

Now these issue are not easy to solve BTW, and the approaches from the 90’s will not work. By 2020 over 40% of the workforce will have been born since 1985! So organisation that ignore these issues I doubt will be in business by 2020.

By: Stephen Collins

Stephen Collins — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 01:39:24 +0000

Chris, Ricardo Semler is definitely a crazy genius, but what he did with Semco is definitely not going to work everywhere. Maverick is a favorite book of mine.

Some of the consulting I do talks to the ideas expressed here in the context of improving business productivity and work practices. I’d be more than happy to have a chat about it with you at any time.

By: Chris Hitchen

Chris Hitchen — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 01:35:15 +0000

I’ve come around to this way of thinking, but it’s taken considerable time and has certainly not come naturally. I’m now constantly wondering how to engage my staff in more meaningful ways and, short of adopting the Ricardo Semler methodology –
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardo_Semler – am keen to encouraging discussion and dissent, provided it all keeps happening at a rapid pace.

To paraphrase Google’s Eric Schmidt in an interview with McKinsey Quarterly; management by consensus is good (wisdom of crowds) and listening to customers is critical, however two things are needed to make this process work:

- someone needs to enforce a deadline (otherwise you have a university!)
- dissent is critical to the process

By: Stephen Collins

Stephen Collins — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 00:33:40 +0000

I believe these types of employers do exist, but they aren’t yet the norm. There are major shifts in management practice and business approaches emerging from the leaders, but many are yet to follow.

By: Gary Barber

Gary Barber — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 23:44:19 +0000

Totally agree.

Not that I have been looking, but I don’t really know of any places that don’t use their staff to grind out mindless projects or treat them as old school employees, slaves to the man.

Do these new age employers really exist?

By: Madhumalti

Madhumalti — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 07:55:55 +0000

I completely agree. Being a consultant in the human capital management function of the consulting organization i work with, this is what we are telling our clients – to focus on identifying and getting their Top Talent rather than thinking of cutting jobs randomly…

By: Michael Specht

Michael Specht — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:28:20 +0000

Steve I could not agree with you more! The concept of not owning employees is one business’s still need to get their minds around.

By: Jodie Miners

Jodie Miners — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 22:38:29 +0000

Wow, where are these companies. I’m a committed, engaged and loyal employee who doesn’t have a fantastic company to work for right now… and all I’m seeing is the negatives – there are no jobs, you can’t get a job and you don’t have the right skillset for what we need (I’m over specialised).

So from the other side of the fence employers need to think outside the square a bit and think that there may be fantastic candidates out there even if they don’t “tick all the boxes” on the job description. Yeah it’s easy to get someone that looks like they tick all the boxes on their resume, and have done the whole keyword matching thing, but there are other people out there who are fantastic employees who have the potential to learn your systems and pick them up very quickly.

It is very hard to not be stuck in the negative when you are in the job hunting market at the moment. I feel that I’m doing all the right things as per your post, I have the “Right Stuff” but I’m just not breaking through.

So there is a definite gap here – Employers are saying they can’t get the right people and the right people are saying they can’t find the right employers… Not sure how we get over this gap?