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The Great Resignation may be in the rear-view mirror, but in an economic downturn, EX has never been more critical to an enterprise’s success. Leveraging talent through empowerment, purpose, and greater alignment in a hybrid world can make the difference between growth, stagnation, and failure in a world on fire.
We’ll hear from leaders on the front line of driving improved EX speak on these topics:
You can listen above or watch this HFS Videocast here:
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This transcript was auto-generated from the original recording and lightly edited for readability. We've done our best to catch errors, but names, technical terms, and company references may be misspelled or imperfectly captured. For the definitive version, please refer to the original audio or video. Views expressed are the speakers' own.
Before we get on — Phil, you’ve introduced yourself a number of times, so I’ll skip you, and Leslie as well. But for the rest of our crew here, maybe, Roger, we’ll start with you. A very quick introduction, and why you’re on our talent panel.
So I’m Roger, president and board member of Hitachi Vantara. For those of you not familiar with Hitachi Vantara, it’s the product engineering and system integration arm of the larger Hitachi conglomerate. I have no HR background, so I don’t know how qualified I am to be on this panel today, but I have managed teams — global teams of over 60,000 people — so I guess I’m a little bit of a practitioner, and delighted to be with you today.
That’s why we called you, right? Because we wanted an HR panel that isn’t about HR, that’s about actual talent management. So thank you for joining us. Andrew?
Hi, I’m Andrew Warner, nice to meet you all. I run a consultancy — I feel a bit embarrassed to say that after the Steve Jobs video earlier — but essentially I run a consultancy called The Brand Pharmacists. I’m a Chief Marketing Officer by background; I work for very large companies on their boards as their CMO. Our consultancy basically helps with that intersection between HR and marketing, and really we help brands make sure that their internal values and internal cultures match the external perception that they’re trying to aspire towards.
Fantastic.
Yeah, Leslie Willcocks, professor at London School of Economics and Political Science. I guess my angle, apart from being a researcher and advisor in this area, is that I’m at a university, and we do a lot of training and development, a lot of skills, with young people.
Irene?
I’m Irene Sandler. I work for Cognizant, which is a large technology services firm. I run a big chunk of our marketing — our marketing strategy, our portfolio marketing, our thought leadership, our analyst relations, which is why I know Phil. I believe I’ve been invited here for two reasons. One, I’ve been managing hybrid teams, although they weren’t called hybrid teams, since before Cognizant, since 2004, which has been quite a while. And second, I think we needed some female representation.
Srikanth?
I’m CEO for Workforce Development. This is the B2B business of a talent-upskilling business called upGrad, a global business headquartered in Mumbai. We skill about 8 million people a year across 100 countries in the world, so I think that’s why I’m on the panel — skilling is integral to the employee experience. I’ve spent some time in the tech services space before; a lot of ex-colleagues in the room, from Infosys and Capgemini. So good to be here.
Everybody knows Phil, but one thing you might not know is that he also leads our research around employee experience. So that’s why he wanted to be a panelist — not just to ask questions, but for a change, to give some answers. The thing I wanted to talk about is that last year was all about the great resignation. There were these jaded employees saying, ‘We want to change, we want to go somewhere else.’ We saw attrition at high levels, and it was an employee-led talent market. There’s always this balance between employees and employers, and last year it was definitely employees. But this year it’s something different. It’s becoming almost like the great freak-out, where you’ve got massive tech layoffs, you’ve got inflation, you’ve got back-to-office mandates which are pretty much not really working. A hybrid workforce isn’t about giving everybody a Zoom or a Teams license and saying this is now a hybrid workforce — we’ve not really figured it out, right? There’s a highly uncertain economic environment, so people might be sticking to their jobs just because they don’t know where to go, but it’s freakishly scary. While our whole theme for today’s summit is the three horizons, I think talent cuts across all three — whether you’re at Horizon 1, 2, or 3, talent is the elephant in the room, and that’s why it was important to have this discussion. The other elephant in the room is the layoffs. What is the real reason behind all these tech layoffs? I was just reading the news today — even Accenture is laying off some people. We’ve seen SAP, Salesforce, Google, Meta, practically all these companies which had a boom during the pandemic, starting to lay off people in fairly 3-4% cuts. So what’s really behind it? Were we just over-exuberant last year in hiring? Is there a slowdown? Is there a need for changing the skill mix, which we’ll get into? Is it just the opportunity to get rid of dead wood — nobody will say anything right now, so get it done? Or is it maybe the automation investment paying off, and we don’t need as many people? It’s the fear of recession, the slowdown, over-exuberant hiring — it’s pretty much tied. What do you guys think? You’re the experts. Phil, let’s start with you. What’s behind these tech layoffs? On one hand we’re talking about a talent crunch; on the other hand we’re laying people off.
If you actually look at the numbers of layoffs in Silicon Valley, it’s only about 10% of the total number of additions in the last couple of years. So there was over-hiring during the pandemic, but also cost correction is hitting the tech sector, and it’s gone completely across the industry, with all the big tech firms trying to pull back on investments — especially expensive people in California who don’t come cheap — and an opportunity to make some snips. So that sector is correcting a little bit. So: over-hiring. Roger, what do you think?
I was in some shocking conversations with customers who basically said to me, ‘Listen, I have $10 of digital transformation budget allocated to me, and I’d better spend it, because if I don’t, I’m not going to get it next year.’ I hadn’t had that kind of conversation in 10 years prior, and I think a lot of it was driven by the urgency of transformation. These companies felt that if they didn’t transform, they’d be dead within 18 months, or behind within 18 months, and I think that drove a disproportionate demand that was not forever. It became very, very difficult to forecast demand, and the velocity of it. But also, a lot of these companies treated human resources as an option value — ‘Well, let’s stack up as many software developers as we can, just in case.’ So there are a couple of articles coming out recently about how people are completely underutilized, and that probably accounts for a lot of it. You know, in your survey: ‘Would I jump? Am I bored? Am I loyal?’ Well, yeah, they’re bored and they’re not loyal, because they’re not doing anything.
So the other question around this is the hybrid workforce. As I was saying, a hybrid workforce can’t be about giving people Zoom and Teams licenses. And while I think the hybrid workforce is here to stay — I don’t think we’re getting away from it — I don’t think we really know what it is, right? We did this research where we reached out to both employers and employees, and employees seem to be a lot more comfortable with the hybrid workforce than the employers, as you can see on this chart. Nearly half of them are saying this is a very effective way for me to live my life, but from an employer perspective, that’s about 13%. So what is the biggest challenge with the hybrid workforce from an employer perspective, and what needs to be done to manage it? Maybe, Andrew, I’ll start with you.
Yeah, sure. It’s interesting. Often when we’re talking about hybrid, it feels a little bit like a compromise between employees — who, particularly in the UK where there are long commutes, tend to favor remote working — and employers, who actually want everyone back in the office. Something like 66% of companies put out a back-to-work mandate, which sort of tells the tale. It’s interesting in your data where you’ve got roughly a third of employees thinking hybrid is effective. I think the biggest challenge is really one of mindset. Like Irene, I was lucky enough to work for two businesses that implemented hybrid working before it became fashionable. Microsoft UK back in 2000 and Expedia were both hybrid organizations way, way before the pandemic, and what we saw was a real shift from a human-resource management perspective to a human-resource enablement perspective. It was very much around shifting the mindset from control and management and supervision towards creating shared objectives and a shared culture, and then enabling people to achieve those shared objectives together. With that comes some practical stuff as well. A lot of companies kind of lurched into hybrid but kept the same IT policies, the same infrastructure, the same HR policies in place, or tried to retrofit existing technology investments and sweat the assets. And there’s another really interesting thing — I think it was in a survey — where they were asking people about hybrid working, and the employees said the thing they really wanted most to improve the effectiveness of hybrid working, by a long way, like 70%, was empowerment: they wanted the tools to take decisions. Whereas the second thing employees wanted was just better video communication. And for employers it wasn’t better, it was more — they said we need to make more investments in technology. So there’s a disconnect between wanting to invest more in the infrastructure and the process on the employer’s side, and the employees basically saying you need to re-engineer your processes. That’s very much what we found at Expedia in particular: to be effective, we had to change the culture, so everyone understood what it was we were buying into, and then have the tools in place to let people go away and, almost on their own terms, achieve those objectives. We had that great presentation about decentralization. That’s the mindset, I think, where leaders become empowerers rather than supervisors.
Yeah, that’s great. Professor Leslie, you obviously work with a lot of students — that’s your day job — but you also work and partner with a lot of enterprises and organizations. Why are organizations reticent about this hybrid workforce? What’s so difficult about it?
Well, what I’m finding is that organizations are settling down on a sort of, ‘We can let them go home for two to three days a week, but more than that it’s not actually beneficial to us, or even to them.’ That seems to be how it’s settled down, because at one point everyone thought this was the future and we were all going to need less office space. That’s not true. And when they investigate the downsides of remote working, in particular the remote side of working, they discover that people feel lonely, they procrastinate, there’s big work-home interference, and communications get poor. The remedy to that is always social support — the number-one thing most people need when they work at home is social support. But sometimes organizations have responded in the wrong way: they over-monitor, they intensify the workload to make sure people are working when we can’t actually see what they’re up to. Another ambivalent approach has been to give people more autonomy in the way they do their jobs, but that’s OK only as long as people are self-disciplined in their ability to work at home by themselves. People like Mary and I, as academics, are very good at self-disciplined homeworking, but most people are very unfamiliar with this, so giving them job autonomy doesn’t actually help at all. So I think we’re settling into a different model. You’ve got to remember that, on average across the major economies — the top 21 economies by size — over 50% of people cannot work remotely because of the nature of the job. So you’ve got to remember that before you go too heavily into the idea that we’re all remote workers these days.
Yeah, I wanted to bring you into this, just so we get to see both sides — we’ve seen employers and employees, or learners, if you want to call them that.
Look, we’re in an industry where the average age is relatively low, so a lot of us who work in this industry are learning all the time. It’s an industry that evolves, and traditionally working environments have evolved with on-the-job training — you learn from watching others, from collaborating with others in person — and hybrid just upends that equation completely. There’s a fundamental question for the industry as to how you make sure people are skilled to be able to grow the way they would have in the past. Will your workforce be as skill-ready 10 years from now as they are today if you let them work remotely? Because they’re doing the job they’re doing today, but are they building the skills they need for tomorrow? And — maybe a slightly controversial point — I think our economy is not set up for hybrid working, because global commercial real estate is one of the biggest investments that pension funds across the world have made. So there is a significantly large vested interest against hybrid working, because the whole industry is going to disappear or reduce, and I think that also plays into the narrative, but naturally not very obviously.
So yeah, Irene, what’s been your experience of managing a hybrid team?
I think it’s beyond skills. Skills are certainly one, and you have to get a little bit granular. There are some skills that are easier to teach remotely. I’ll pick on pair programming, right? You can actually pair-program — it’s better to do it side by side, physically, but you can do it with the tools we have nowadays, remotely. It’s the watching of the other person’s screen that really helps with learning the programming skill. But when it comes to building the culture, which is what Andrew was talking about, there’s no substitute for being in the same room. So when I think of hybrid work — when I was at Cisco, I was 100% remote. I was based in Portland, Oregon; my team was mostly based in San Jose. I would go down once a week and spend three days, and use all that time meeting with them to build the culture and the mindset, set the goals jointly, kind of look them in the eye and say, ‘How are you doing?’ ‘I’m doing fine, but thanks for coming.’ You get a real sense of them as a person, because work is just such a compartmentalized, smaller part of our overall lives, right? It’s just one of many things we want for ourselves in our future. So that’s, I think, the critical thing — to be able to have that in-person contact to create the one-on-one relationship, and then the group contact, to create the culture you want to develop.
Can I just quickly add a recommendation to everyone? If you’ve never read it, read The Social Life of Information. It’s a marvelous book about how important these sorts of things are. It was 1993, wasn’t it? Yes — and they reissued it in 2017, because it was so valid in the modern work environment.
So Phil, you’ve been doing a lot of research, and besides the research, you’re managing the HFS team as well. How do you attract people to offices, man?
Well, I was trying — we had an off-site a couple of days ago and I’m literally trying to convince people to come to the office more, and the excuses are, ‘The 45-minute commute each way is dead time.’ And I’m like, ‘Well, what about the extra time you get in the office?’ We do one day a week in the office where we get everybody in, and we try to have a no-meetings Wednesday where you can actually go in and collaborate with your colleagues — otherwise everyone’s just sitting around doing Zoom calls all day and feeling awkward, and maybe having a pint at the end of the day. So you’ve got to arrange things that way. But in general, I think we had it right before the pandemic. I realized I used to go to the office three days a week — I’d probably work at home Monday and Thursday, get some work done. And then we had a grad scheme, and we negotiated that they could work at home on Fridays if they were doing their job well, so they’d get this one cherished day at home a week — and that’s now become, from one day at home, to four days at home a week. But I think we had it right. There were a lot more conferences; we traveled a lot. We’re in the analyst industry, so people were out and about all the time, seeing clients, seeing colleagues, going to conferences, learning. It was very vibrant. What’s happened now is there are a lot fewer conferences on; people aren’t having them as much. They’re cranking up a little bit, but I don’t think they’re ever going to come back to the level they were before. A lot more is done remotely; it’s cheaper. So more conferences are digital, not physical, and people aren’t physically seeing each other as much. My concern is that the value of their job and their career is actually diminishing to themselves, and they’re valuing their personal life, their family life, whatever they do, more — and that’s my concern longer-term. At some point there’s a generation coming up which needs money, needs a job, needs to earn, and if the economy goes south, employers are going to start looking at non-performers. You saw what Meta came out with: they’re basically gunning for all the low performers, especially the ones who are remote. They want them out of the company. So the pendulum has swung. Six months ago we were still talking about nurturing everybody from home and ‘hybrid is here to stay,’ and now it’s more, ‘We need to get the dynamic right.’ We need people passionate about their jobs. One of the things we’ve spoken about is that you need to figure out what you want in your company. You want people who are passionate, inclusive, collaborative, somebody who’s proud of their brand and their company. And you saw the data we presented earlier — it was the same study — where only 45% of employees care about their corporate rhetoric and brand and values. It’s the lowest, and they don’t care. They don’t give a damn anymore. They just care about who their direct boss is, who they’re working with, and how they get the job done through the day. And that’s it.
And the economic point about the offices, I think, is really interesting also. We were talking to Phil in the break, just before we came on here, about this switch from staff acquisition to staff retention. In the IT space there are 870,000 vacancies in IT at any one point in time in the UK, according to the data. But there’s a really interesting study that MIT did — I think it was MIT Sloan — where they looked at a cohort of companies, and effectively, if you compared them, identification with the company — or alienation from that company’s mission and values — was 10 times a greater predictor of attrition than salary. So in a peer group, if one company paid less than another, but people really identified with what that company was doing, the talent was less likely to leave. Which is really interesting. And then when you layer on that remote piece, there was another study — this was Harvard — where they took a load of data, I think they worked with Microsoft, they took Teams data and Zoom data and Slack data, and mapped out the communication paths. One of the things they saw shift over time, particularly during the pandemic, was that you’ve actually got silos being created — virtual silos — where the communication meant people were identifying more with a team than with the organization. So you were effectively creating digital cliques, almost, and people were identifying more with a group than with the organization. So there are some really interesting dynamics coming out of this which also have quite serious economic implications for these businesses. But that’s, in a way, completely natural, right? We can only handle relationships one-on-one with 150 people — Dunbar’s number, or whatever they call it. So the ideal is for a manager to use common-sense management, to create an environment, because at the end of the day we just want to do interesting work with people we enjoy working with. And that’s very, very local. The challenge for large enterprises, then, is how you cohere all those different groups, because it has to be at the group level, under something that’s compelling enough from a cultural and purpose standpoint. And I think that’s where things fell apart, in a large sense, during the pandemic.
Yeah, so Roger, if I may come to you — you said you have a team of 40,000 people. That’s just a small number to encourage to get to offices! How are you managing that? What are you doing?
So we are right now primarily in a hybrid operating model. But just to comment on some of the things I’ve heard — and I agree with a lot of what my colleagues have said — one of the things you mentioned is that employees are more comfortable than employers. My sense is that right now neither party is very comfortable. I’m seeing more anger and anxiety in the talent market than I’ve seen in a long time. It’s almost like politics, right? I feel that employers and employees at some point need to call a truce, because the employers are still violently angry about what has happened in the last two years. They feel they’ve done what they had to do — they helped their employees at the time of COVID — and then these guys quit anyway, right? All the investments they made as employers, essentially, out the window. And there was almost a kickback reaction, almost emotional, on the side of the employer, saying, ‘Hey, get back in here, or if you don’t like it, good luck to you, go find it somewhere else.’ That’s not sustainable long-term. The employees will remember, and the markets are cyclical — we know how it’s going to work. On the other hand, the employees’ side isn’t a sensible conversation either. I have it around my dinner table with some of my friends, and they say, ‘Hey, I have to go back three days a week, and therefore my CEO is an old stooge, he’s 62 years old, he doesn’t know how the modern world operates,’ and so on and so forth — which, of course, is also nonsense, right? So I think we’ve lost that balance in conversation. The one thing I’ve been trying to be very careful of is really clear communication — explaining why, and explaining when, and trying to find a balance and diffuse the situation. Otherwise it becomes very personal very quickly, and when you’re dealing at scale, you can’t handle it.
I think you’re talking about employee experience in general, which is where I wanted to go. Because if you look at the IT business services industry, despite all the conversation around employee experience, it has been poor. You can look at this chart here — half of the employees are saying they are actively looking out. Another 20-30% are saying, even if I get a 20% pay bump, I’ll move from Company A to Company B. There’s no sense of loyalty or alignment.
This industry is not sexy anymore, right? Take my example: I graduated from an engineering school, and my first job was as a software engineer with one of these companies. Maybe my parents had low expectations, but they were quite happy when I joined them — growing up in India, that was one of the things you wanted to do. Now I look at my nieces and nephews, and that’s not the case. Either they want to join a startup or a tech company, or they want to start up on their own. So this industry, compared to 20 years back, is not that sexy anymore. And I think that’s a fundamental issue, because otherwise there’ll be a cycle of mediocrity. We talk to our learners all the time — I just want to point out, our biggest learning markets are India, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Malaysia. So, a very young workforce: tech, business process services, and so on. When we do learning-outcomes programs with them, we define outcomes, and 98% of people want, obviously, a higher-paying job, a promotion, or mobility. In that context, I want to highlight the pecking order in India — and this is across a few million people. Like you said, 20 years ago IT-BPS was aspirational; people got in because the work environments were world-class, the offices, you got opportunities to go international, and you grew very quickly, because these were companies growing 30, 40, 50%, and that created unprecedented opportunity. Now all of that has changed. Today growth rates are good — they’re 15%, 12%, whatever — but they’re not 30, 40, 50%. So there’s a huge logjam in terms of progression. International is not as appealing anymore; there are loads of young people who say, ‘India’s world-class, I want to stay here, why would I go abroad?’ And the pecking order has changed. We recently looked at the pecking order among 25-, 27-, 28-year-olds in India. First is the MNCs, of course — despite the recent layoffs, the MNCs are still pretty attractive. Then startups — startups are a big source of aspiration for a lot of these guys; they want something that’s funded, all of that. Then come global conglomerates who are creating other kinds of centers — for example, the Ubers and Deliveroos have large centers in India, creating new kinds of companies. And then comes IT-BPS. So clearly there’s a pecking order where this comes a little lower down the value chain. So there is that question the industry has to address: like Saurabh said, how do you make this industry sexy again and get good people — better people, let me put it that way.
I think there’s a micro answer and a macro answer to the problem of employee experience that we’ve got. The micro answer is that we do actually know what makes a nice job — what most people want — and there are six criteria, really. The first is purpose. There’s a famous saying: if you have a reason why, you can tolerate almost any how, which is quite fundamental to life itself. I think a lot of organizations don’t give people a real purpose anymore. Mastery and competence is another one — if they’re not trained to actually do the job well. The third is that every job should be a learning experience, and if that’s not in the job, people will leave, because they’ll find the learning experience somewhere else. The fourth is social recognition. The fifth is fair reward. And the other one is a degree of autonomy suited to that particular person — in terms of the discretion of how to do the job, and the time in which to do it. When you look at that, it’s pretty obvious. You go to the average person, use it as a benchmark in your own organization, and say, ‘Why is this person so pissed off?’ And the answer is that four of these things are not true in their job, generally speaking. There is a macro explanation, but I’ll stop there.
So Phil, one of the things you and I were talking about a few weeks back — we were saying, what are we proud of? And one of the things we’re perhaps most proud of is that we had 0% attrition last year in our analyst team. There was one guy who left, who wanted to become a data scientist, and he might come back — fingers crossed. So what did you do to get that during the great-resignation period?
We dug deep and got close to our staff, and led by example with the team’s management — including yourself and others — and just made it very clear we cared about them and their careers. Even during the worst of the pandemic, when everything was going to crap, they knew we were trying really hard to keep the company moving forward. I felt the work was exciting, it was engaging — we were constantly having intellectual team meetings, that sort of thing. Now we’re getting back into this hybrid; it’s slightly different. But I certainly believe if you don’t get out and about, you don’t learn very much. If you’re just sitting all day, it’s not the best learning environment for people. One of our competitors did a conference recently, and apparently they were still going on about Blockbuster versus Netflix. People came out of there thinking, ‘Oh God, they’re analysts, they’ve gone backwards.’ The last thing I want people to say about HFS is that we’ve gone backwards — we need to be constantly out there talking to people, engaging. The reason we do these conferences — we don’t make a lot of money out of this, trust me — is more just bringing everyone together and having a fantastic conversation. Everyone comes away inspired: ‘That was interesting, I learned something today.’ My joke to people was, do you ever regret going to a conference? Do you ever regret going into the office — ‘Oh God, it was such a terrible experience’? No — you got out of the house, you did something. But making people feel included and special, showing them some attention, getting your managers to spend more time with their teams — it’s all you can do. It’s a human business, and if people want to leave, they want to leave. But I go back to the values of the company. If you want people who have pride in the brand, energy, and passion, you make it very clear when you hire them that that’s what you want. When you manage them, that’s what you measure them against. And if they’re not showing passion, they’re not meeting their numbers, or they’re not doing their work, then you’ve got to have that conversation: do you want to be here or not? Having honest, direct communication is important. As a manager, I learned to let my emotions be more open with the company — if I had a bad day, I think everyone knew it, whereas before I was a bit more reserved, living in a little ivory tower somewhere and letting other people deal with it. But being more open with your people, letting them know what pisses you off or makes you happy, and sometimes having a culture that is a little informal — obviously there are boundaries, you’ve got to be a bit careful — it really helps make people feel that they know where they work, and you build that trust with your staff. Then, if you do have to let people go, everyone knows why. They knew why that person was moved on, because everyone could sense it wasn’t a good fit. So, having open, transparent communication and trust — if you can get to that point, you’re in a good place.
So Irene and Roger, I wanted to understand — both of your companies are huge, right? I feel like some of these companies shouldn’t be called companies, they should be called countries, with the number of people they have. What are one or two big EX-related initiatives that you guys are undertaking?
So maybe I’ll start. The ironic part is that in 2003 I joined the company I now work for, and I spent 16 years with that incredible organization. About a year into it — I was in my mid-20s, an engineer on an account — I got promoted, I don’t know if it was a promotion or not, to account manager. It was a $1 million account. I was so happy — I was like a teenager with a brand-new car. I called my mom and dad and said, ‘I’m now an executive!’ Of course it was completely absurd — this was a tiny account, and I don’t know that it was strategic or not — but I genuinely felt like I was the CEO of that business, no matter how large or small it was. I felt like my organization gave me the autonomy to do something with it, and that feeling persisted over the 16 years I stayed with the organization, even as my roles got bigger. I always felt that I had that empowerment. At Hitachi, one of the really exciting things — and there’s been something said about purpose in both directions, that employers and employees don’t necessarily care about the values, but on the other hand purpose is important — I think purpose is critical. At Hitachi, the purpose is really around improving the well-being and happiness of the global population through technology, while respecting the planetary boundaries. It sounds like a mouthful, and I’m a skeptic by nature, so I just assumed it was greenwashing. But the reality is the company produces software and products that impact daily lives, that industrialize the world, conserve water, improve air quality — these are things you can touch, you can smell, very practical things. It makes a difference with young employees. When you go to the universities, you can say, ‘You can be a generalist consultant, or you can take on a job that has this purpose,’ and it does bear a lot of attraction. It also unites parties that may not otherwise have a lot in common, because we have people in the company who build trains, and people who write software. So united purpose, I think, is very important.
And it’s not just the united purpose — though that’s absolutely important. As a company grows — and as you well know, Cognizant grew so fast — one of its characteristics was to have this empowered front line, this very entrepreneurial spirit. Our founder was our leader — one of our founders was our leader for many, many years — and so it was never considered an urgent priority to articulate what our purpose was. We didn’t actually do that until that founder left and a new one came in, and there was a whole bunch of sessions: what is our purpose? We ended up with ‘We engineer modern business to improve everyday life.’ Similarly to Roger, the work we do on the Global 2000 has a measurable impact on everyday life, in various facets. So it had to be articulated, it had to be agreed upon by a good chunk of the leadership, and, most importantly — and this is where we can continue to improve — it has to be communicated. I read somewhere that it takes three times for a particular thing to even register in a brain, especially given the competition for attention. I think attention is going to be the scarcity of this digital age — to borrow from, was it Herbert Simon? He used to say that in the past the scarcity was land, then it became capital, and now it’s attention. Similarly, we have to make sure we capture the attention of everybody in the organization, and use that purpose as a way to combine these small, discrete teams — that are hopefully well managed, with common-sense management — and then you’re able to move forward together as one.
I’m just noticing the time — we’ve got probably a minute left. But I did want to touch on this particular question. We are, despite the layoffs, despite the great resignation, still facing a talent crunch. The number of people we want, we’re not getting. The people with the right skills, we’re not getting them. And I don’t know how we’re going to solve this talent crunch unless you find a hidden continent somewhere under the ocean — the chances of that are probably 0.0001%, or basically 0%. So how do you solve this talent crunch?
It’s a really big question. If it were an easy question to answer, I’m sure you’d have no seconds either — but I’ve got to answer it as well. I’m now feeling the pressure of the nose. One of the things I’ve seen is that a lot of companies are talking about how they can’t attract talent. And actually it’s not that they can’t attract talent — it’s that they go the wrong way about attracting talent, frequently because they’re trying to apply an old model to a new paradigm. Essentially it’s an industrial-age model of recruitment. Some of the companies I work with — I’m going to generalize wildly, so forgive me — are trying to minimize risk by going for people from Russell Group universities, so in the UK, Oxford, Cambridge, or Ivy League in the US. They’re looking for people with MBAs, people who fit certain criteria. And they work with big headhunting companies who are set up for a linear career path: someone starts here, becomes more senior through their career, and this is the logical next step. But demographically speaking, we’ve got two things — the highest level of educated people ever coming out of universities with degrees, and also a shift, so we’ve got more over-50-year-olds than ever before, and a lot of those people aren’t following linear career paths anymore. We just have to rethink how we approach talent. It’s something like 18% of women in senior leadership roles in IT, versus 33% of women in IT as a whole, and obviously 52% of the population. There are some real differences — what’s the word I’m looking for — between the general population and, particularly in IT, the people companies are recruiting. At a previous company I worked for, we did a thing called the Tech Talent Charter a while ago, really trying to tackle this problem, and we did some sessions with recruiters where they were able to tell us stuff they couldn’t say publicly, and some of it was shocking. The way they were approaching things — their clients, the number of companies which would only recruit men into senior IT roles but would have to recruit women into HR to hit a quota — there were all sorts of horrible things. But really, if we rethink this in a more logical way — how we match people to those six criteria that Leslie was talking about earlier — I think that’s a fascinating approach. Stop putting barriers in the way of our own recruitment, and then we can start to address this problem. It’s not easy, but stop putting things in the way of our own jobs — that’s what companies are doing. They’re making it harder for themselves, rather than easier, to find the talent that’s out there.
I can suggest a couple of quick ones — and by the way, Elina will chop our heads off if we don’t wrap this up in 30 seconds. One is improving the internal labor market, and what the Japanese used to do in the eighties, which was a horizontal fast-track: making sure that you’re always learning and experiencing different aspects of the business. The second is reorganizing into relatively small, multi-functional teams that are responsible for performance levels, because people prefer to work at that level — it’s more motivating.
There’s also a lot of people — we’ve done a lot of hiring in the last two or three years, particularly in our industry — and there’s a lot of people out there who want exorbitantly high salaries, don’t like the idea of working for a disruptor, and want to go work for some buttoned-up corporate where they don’t have to work very hard. I’m sorry to say this, but it’s a big trait right now. I know three or four people I’d love to hire — they’ve got the skill set, but they just don’t want to roll their sleeves up.
So I’m going to take a specific example — and I’ll take 30 seconds. The only way you crack this problem is by expanding. Often what companies do is they hire to spec: you want a certain skill set, you hire it. The big question is, how do you help other people get to that? So I’ll give you an example. We work on the D&I agenda. There are lots of women especially who’ve taken breaks from the workforce and try to come back. The big question is that their skills are dated — they’ve not been in the mix. So you create bridge programs. Now, they’ve often taken a break because of childbirth or other such aspects — I shouldn’t call them issues, that was a slip of the tongue — and they want to come back. The question is, ‘I can only do these things evenings and weekends.’ We’ve built that. They don’t want to learn from books, so you’ve got to give them high-touch mentorship. And then the employer says, ‘We want to make sure these people are certified, and only then will we take the bet — we’re not going to invest in them.’ So we’ve built programs like that with a couple of the SIs, and what we’re finding is that it’s a fascinating way to expand the marketplace of available talent, as opposed to traditional recruitment sources. So those are ways in which you’ve got to break the problem out.
Look, fascinating conversation — we could go on and on and on. But another big topic is sustainability, which I think is next, and Elina will guide us on that. Thank you so much for joining us — really good discussion. Thank you very much.
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