5 Questions to Ask When Starting a New Job
The actions you take during your first few months in a new job have a major impact on your success or failure. The biggest challenge leaders face during these periods is staying focused on the right things. So it helps to have a set of questions to guide you. Here are the five most important ones to ask…and to keep on asking on a regular basis: How will I create value? How am I expected to behave? Whose support is critical? How will I get some early wins? What skills do I need to develop to excel in this role? Set aside 30 minutes at the end of each week to reflect on these questions and whether the answers are still clear or have changed in any way.
To read the complete article please click:
https://hbr.org/2019/04/5-questions-to-ask-when-starting-a-new-job
Staff wellbeing: ‘The important thing is how people work, not where they work’
“What the last two years have demonstrated is that there is no longer a clear roadmap, and every organisation must spend time understanding the needs of their workforce in a way they never had to do before.” These are the words of Lisa Stevens, an industry veteran of 30 years and now the global chief people officer and head of human capital solutions at professional services firm Aon.
“The more agile and flexible organisations are, the better they’ll be at winning the war for talent,” she says.
Aon employs 50,000 people across 120 countries, including more than 700 in Ireland. Stevens believes a holistic approach to employee wellbeing, which covers people’s emotional, physical and financial health, will play a critical role in helping organisations keep on top of their personnel needs in the future.
To read the complete article please click:
Hybrid and remote working require a shift from managing to leading
One of the things that drives employees crazy is a boss who micromanages them, yet it is still common practice from the C-suite down. Micromanagers parse their role in terms of two main functions, direction and control, and believe they add value by getting involved in everything.
Not so, says Frans Campher, CEO of Integral Leadership Dynamics, who has over 20 years’ experience in executive education, leadership development and as a business coach for senior blue-chip executives. In his view those who hang on to the direct and control model of people management are going to struggle to bring employees with them in a hybrid working environment.
Campher, who is also a visiting fellow and director of the executive education programme at Imperial College business school in London, says companies are only beginning to realise the scope of the challenges posed by hybrid working and that the consequences, good and bad, won’t really become apparent for another two years. In the meantime those that want to thrive will need to transform from organisations that manage people to organisations that lead them.
“What’s not going to work is managers who feel they have to control the heck out of everything, and who see hybrid as a loss of control,” he says.
“I actually find it scary that technology providers are saying we can build programmes so you can monitor your people. This completely misses the fundamental point that if you treat people as adults, they will show up as adults. If you set high expectations and ask for their input into those expectations, they will come to the party and give you discretionary effort.”
Side effect
Campher notes that one of the common side effects of climbing the corporate ladder is selective amnesia.
“Someone lands a promotion and suddenly thinks they have to control everything,” he says. “They forget that when they were being led, they appreciated their freedom and being seen and heard. They also appreciated knowing that their ideas mattered, as did the opportunity to grow and develop.
At its simplest leading is about being, whereas managing is about doing. The typical focus of managers is the nuts and bolts of daily tasks such as budgeting, planning and organising. By contrast, leaders deal more in strategy, developing the organisational culture and motivating and inspiring those around them to keep the show on the road.
However, the transition demands more than a change of job description. It’s about recognising that now more than ever companies need leadership and organisational agility that’s equal to the growing complexity of the business environment.
Types of leader
An agile leader is someone who can operate on more than one level. In Campher’s view, it demands the ability to operate on three and the skill to combine them. He describes these three levels as expert leader, achiever leader and catalytic leader.
“As an expert leader, I’m very good at command, control, directing, planning and organising. I have one-to-one relationships with the people I work with but I don’t create a cohesive team,” he says. “An achiever leader is one who starts to work through others and builds a team.
“An expert leader will look at the next two to three months and will deal with the urgent things in front of them. An achiever leader probably has a one year horizon, they use the team more effectively and have some organisational mission and purpose. The next level up is the catalytic leader, whose job is no longer to command and control in the short- term but to totally embrace the enterprise view of the business.”
The majority of leaders fall into the expert or achiever categories, with catalytic leaders, who know how to influence, work with stakeholders and lead change, much thinner on the ground. What Campher tries to do through coaching and executive education is help people lose their direct and control mentality and see the bigger picture.
He calls it filling the “expansion gap” and he doesn’t underestimate the shift in identity this requires, pointing out that when you ask someone who has spent their career micromanaging to stop doing so, they often panic because they don’t know what to do instead.
Catalyst
“It’s asking people to accept that they are no longer the expert driving their particular function, but someone who catalyses the whole culture of an organisation,” he says. “However, you often have leaders that don’t understand this third piece. It’s not that they only hang out there. Rather they have the range to be an expert, an achiever and a catalyst and can shift up and down depending on what’s required.”
To make it easier to understand the process of moving from managing to leading, Campher draws on the work of Benjamin Zander, orchestral conductor and author of the Art of Possibility.
“Zander has a TED talk on the transformative passion of music and he talks about leaders needing to make the shift from playing an instrument to becoming the conductor,” he says. “The job of the conductor is to create shiny eyes in the orchestra so that there are shiny eyes in the audience. That’s a wonderful metaphor to use for leaders too: I need to become a ‘conductor’ who creates shiny eyes in my people.”
(Source: The Irish Times)
Don’t Underestimate the Power of Self-Reflection
Research shows the habit of reflection can separate extraordinary professionals from mediocre ones. But how do you sort which experiences are most significant for your development?
- To answer this questions, the authors asked 442 executives to reflect on which experiences most advanced their professional development and had the most impact on making them better leaders.
- Three distinct themes arose through their analysis: surprise, frustration, and failure. Reflections that involved one or more or of these sentiments proved to be the most valuable in helping the leaders grow.
- Surprise, frustration, and failure. Cognitive, emotional, and behavioural. These parts of you are constantly in motion and if you don’t give them time to rest and reflect upon what you learned from them, you will surely fatigue.
To read the complete article please click:
https://hbr.org/2022/03/dont-underestimate-the-power-of-self-reflection
Congratulations Rebecca Aspell on your promotion to Recruitment Partner
The Great Resignation Didn’t Start with the Pandemic
Covid-19 spurred on the Great Resignation of 2021, during which record numbers of employees voluntarily quit their jobs. But what we are living through is not just short-term turbulence provoked by the pandemic. Instead, it’s the continuation of a trend of rising quit rates that began more than a decade ago. Five main factors are at play in this trend: retirement, relocation, reconsideration, reshuffling, and reluctance. All of these factors, the authors argue, are here to stay. They explore each in turn and encourage leaders to examine which of them are contributing most to turnover in their organisations, so that they can adapt appropriately as they move into the future.
To read the complete article please click:
https://hbr.org/2022/03/the-great-resignation-didnt-start-with-the-pandemic
Onboarding Can Make or Break a New Hire’s Experience
Poor onboarding can leave your employees with lower confidence in their new roles, worsened levels of engagement, and an increased risk of jumping ship when they see a new, more exciting position elsewhere. On the other hand, companies that implement a formal onboarding program could see 50% greater employee retention among new recruits and 62% greater productivity within the same group. Given that how you onboard your employees will determine their experience, managers can take the following steps to ensure they set their new hires up for success: 1) set clear goals and measures for success, 2) create a multi-departmental onboarding team, and 3) provide support throughout the onboarding journey.
To read the complete article please click:
https://hbr.org/2022/04/onboarding-can-make-or-break-a-new-hires-experience
Support for Ukraine
Ireland has joined other EU countries offering refuge to Ukrainian people fleeing the conflict in their country. Government ministers say they expect between 80,000 and 100,000 people to arrive here, with about a third likely to be children.
When you are ready to look for a job then we are here to help. You can search for the latest temporary and permanent jobs along the M7 corridor on our website www.clark.ie.
We will provide a complementary CV Service to help you begin your job hunt and we will help you identify the jobs that are a good fit for your skills and experience.
We’ve a complementary Job Seekers Toolkit section on our website, where you can download CV templates, Interview preparation guides, coaching information and more. You’ll find it at: https://clark.ie/downloads/
You can call our Recruitment team on 045 881888. We’re here to help.
Clark Workforce Survey 2022
SIGNIFICANT M7 CORRIDOR WORKFORCE SURVEY SHOWS OPTIMISM FOR INCREASED BUSINESS ACTIVITY THIS YEAR BUT SKILLS SHORTAGES WILL CONTINUE TO AFFECT PLANNED GROWTH AND PROJECT DELIVERY
Expectations and arrangements regarding how people work are changing. Hybrid work yields high employee engagement.
A significant workforce survey taken along five counties on the M7 corridor from a range of SMEs and multinationals has found that organisations are optimistic about future economic prospects. 93% of respondents were optimistic or neutral about the wider economic climate, and 76% reported that they expect some form of growth in their organisation.
Companies surveyed across Kildare, West Dublin, Carlow, Laois and Kilkenny are preparing for this growth on the back of existing skill shortages in their teams. 31% of respondents do not believe that their organisation has the talent needed to achieve their current objectives, and 63% described the skill shortages that they have experienced in the last year as extreme or moderate.
The impacts of these shortages are clearly called out in the survey findings, with 39% reporting that those skills shortages limit organisational productivity on an ongoing basis, directly impacting staff morale, increased stress for leaders, a reduced ability to deliver projects, and limiting the opportunities for productivity and innovation according to the survey by recruitment and HR consultancy firm Clark with the collaboration of Maynooth University, County Kildare Chamber and Grant Thornton. Companies surveyed ranged from small and large SMEs to multinationals across over 14 sectors including pharma, medtech, food/beverage, agri, IT, professional services, engineering, logistics, FMCG, manufacturing, construction, financial services and hotel-leisure.
Employers surveyed are concerned about the hiring challenges ahead, with a shortage of suitable candidates, competition from other employers, and rising salary costs quoted as their top three concerns. 63% of respondents reported that they intend to increase salaries in the next year, and this coupled with rising energy, transport, and material costs, will certainly raise some difficult challenges for organisations in managing their cost base.
Further findings from the survey which was conducted in January 2022 showed that expectations and arrangements regarding how people work are changing. The prolonged experience of remote and hybrid work has altered expectations. Individual preferences, along with the government’s commitment to legislate employees’ right to request remote work, means creating mutually productive and satisfying hybrid work arrangements will be a pertinent issue facing business leaders and HR professionals.
Interesting the scale of workplace change is captured very clearly in this year’s survey. 78% of organisations offer remote working and 81% of employees work remotely at least part of the time. Furthermore, only 26% of respondents report they would be satisfied with a full-time return to the office and 77% of organisations will offer some a form of remote working going forward. The momentum is certainly on the side of ongoing hybrid work arrangements.
The survey indicates that the most common longer-term, hybrid arrangements will facilitate remote working approximately 50% of the time. The positive experience of remote work, along with the potential to scale up the training and supports, points to potential of hybrid work to yield high employee engagement alongside time efficient, productive working arrangements.
Managing Director of Clark Deirdre Coghlan Murray said “With new models of working widely available, the increase in salary levels driven both by a rise in inflation and competition for a smaller pool of talent, the landscape for attracting and retaining people has certainly become a more complex one. Employers need to work very hard to both attract and retain their people.”
Andrew Webb, Director Advisory Chief Economist, Grant Thornton believes “While optimism indicators are displaying strong positive sentiment, new headwinds to the economic outlook are mounting. Labour market skills challenges have emerged as vacancies increased faster than expected. Supply chain bottlenecks have also emerged, causing volatility in the level and scale of consumer demand.”
Patrick Gallen, Partner, People & Change Consulting, Grant Thornton “Strongly articulated Employee Value Proposition (EVP) will be key in attracting and retaining talent. Aside from financial reward and other benefits, offering an employment proposition that includes training people in the skills they need to do their jobs well, offering evidence that your employees feel valued, are treated fairly for the job they do, and have opportunities to both work flexibly and to progress their careers, will be critical. This sounds simple, but getting it right can be very tricky, and done well it can provide a key competitive advantage for your organisation.”
Dr. Jean Cushen Associate Professor, HRM. Deputy Head of School, Accreditations, School of Business, Maynooth University highlights “The data points to hybrid work being both desirable and viable, and the positive experience of remote work occurred alongside reports of delivering an increased workload. Other studies indicate that the increased workload associated with remote work comes from the additional communications needed to gain clarity and drive remote collaborations. This opens up a wider, important discussion about the relationship between hybrid work and optimum time management and how we best utilise the time and energy we might have previously lost to commuting and other logistical demands.”
Allan Shine CEO of the County Kildare Chamber acknowledges that “skill shortages are a huge challenge for every sector. Most prevalent are the manufacturing, food, transportation, and tourism sectors. There is also a challenge for SME’s to retain staff with many leaving to join larger MNC’s attracted by better pay, work conditions, cultural diversity and a sustainable business model.”
If you would like further information or we can help you regarding the information provided in this survey, please contact hello@clark.ie or a member of our team on 045 881888. We’d be delighted to help you.
Happy St Patrick’s Day
The Clark offices will be closed Thursday 17th and Friday 18th of March.