Insights

Are you providing ESSENTIAL TRAINING for an inclusivefuture?

In a rapidly ageing society which will see dementia rates double over the next 30 years, understanding the challenges faced by people living with dementia will become a requirement in all walks of life. Here, Sandra Brown from Age Scotland urges employers to increase dementia awareness across their organisations to ensure they are as inclusive as possible in their people practices.

Parents, partners, neighbours, friends, colleagues and employees will be among the 200,000 people predicted to be living with dementia in Scotland by 2050 and it is everyone’s responsibility to make the world a more positive and dementia-inclusive place. Organisations of all kinds are taking this responsibility increasingly seriously and are beginning to invest in dementia awareness training for staff. Benefits for employees can be felt at home, in the community and in the workplace. Colleagues caring for family members with dementia can gain skills and knowledge to support them in this vital role. The reduction in stress this brings and the greater understanding on the part of employers gained through training can often mean less time off for carers and a more positive working experience. As people begin to retire later, there are also benefits for working people living with dementia and their employers. If signs and symptoms are recognised and colleagues know the appropriate support to offer, goals can be accomplished and fulfilment achieved, despite the challenges of dementia. Greater dementia awareness in workplaces can also lead to innovations in processes, practices and physical spaces, transforming the experience of customers and clients living with dementia and ensuring their contact with your organisation is a positive experience. Giving staff the opportunity to be more dementia aware enables them to develop the communication skills they need to build trust and confidence in conversations and interactions with clients. Depending on their role this can be face-to-face, on the phone or online. It can mainly be about speaking, or it can involve producing written resources or creating dementia-inclusive spaces or events. Dementia is becoming a bigger part of all our lives and the onus is on organisations to be as inclusive as possible. Systems, products, physical spaces and customer services need to be accessible, approachable and stress-free for clients and employees affected by dementia. This ultimately improves customer and employee satisfaction, contributes to meeting obligations under equalities and human rights legislation and builds a positive reputation for your business for inclusive service and practices. Dementia presents considerable challenges but learning how we can support people affected by it to live and work as they want to is a hopeful topic. Visit www.age.scot/dementia-awareness to find out more about how Age Scotland is helping organisations to be dementia-inclusive.

SAVING time, money,

and puppies

It’s not an easy time for HR and Recruitment. With a complex storm of furloughs, downsizing, apps and ZOOM calls, the pandemic has resulted in a complete reworking of the UK’s recruitment funnel. Here, Alica Melvin, Client Engagement Manager at Jobtrain describes some of the solutions they have been able to provide for Scottish care provider Cornerstone.

With so many people expected to look for new roles post lockdown, many organisations are anticipating huge increases in the volume of applications they currently manage. Nobody knows this better than the recruitment team at one of Scotland’s leading care providers, Cornerstone. Working with an outdated, in-house built recruitment system, Cornerstone found that many applicants would register interest with them, and then give up applying halfway through. When we consulted with Kerri Bellingham a recruitment coordinator at Cornerstone, she was able to provide us with a good account of how they wanted to improve the candidate journey. “One of the biggest challenges was the clunkiness of our system for both candidates and colleagues” said Kerri. “Our platform wasn’t mobile and tablet friendly, which proved to be a barrier for many potential candidates, and it would take our admin colleagues 11 clicks just to reject one candidate. We were looking for a system that would improve our candidate journey and make applying simple and straightforward with the added bonus of a reduction on time spent navigating and administering the recruitment process for our colleagues.” Kerri is a busy lady. Not only is she working as part of a small, dedicated recruitment team that’s been inundated with applications in the past year, but she also fosters dogs. Our chat was regularly coloured by the curious snout of a gorgeous puppy, eager to hear more about how Jobtrain and Cornerstone were going to work together. For such a busy recruitment team, automation and efficiency is key to dealing with these volumes and making sure that the application process is as streamlined as possible. Handling the volume is challenging, but the frustration is heightened when your chosen talent slips through your fingers! A 2018 Glass-door study found that 35% of applicants believed a company’s culture to be one of the most important factors in accepting an offer. 1 in 10 candidates pull out of the process mid-offer, and if an ATS can’t keep a candidate supported and excited about your company, what’s the point in investing in job board postings or online ads? With Cornerstone, the solution was in Green Room Onboarding; Jobtrain’s portal which the applicant is granted access to once they’ve accepted an offer. You can provide them with video content, information about your organisation, share LinkedIn profiles of people in the team, and essentially build a rapport and a bond with your new colleague before they walk through the door on day one. Cornerstone loved this feature so much that they’re looking to create a Green Room for each of their 200 plus teams to give new colleagues a real sense of belonging and welcome to Cornerstone. When the vaccines are in all our arms and the storm has cleared, it might be time to revisit your current technologies to ask that all-important question; does it save time, money, and puppies?

AMPLIFYING agile leadership to the C-SUITE

One continuing problem many of today’s business leaders face is that they rarely adopt Agile at the leadership level. Here Jay Rahman, founder of Fractal Systems believes it’s not that they are resistant to the idea of creating an Agile organisation but all too often they don’t see how it applies to them or feel that they are exempt.

For those that do recognise a need to change they tend to perceive Agile leadership as a set of tools that is limited to personal changes to their style of management, instead of grasping the real value of transforming loose groups of directors and executive managers into dynamic, collaborative teams. When bringing agility to business leaders they need to focus on the value of incrementally applying Agile principles and practices as a collaborative team at the most senior level of the organisation. Not just as a siloed individual (or a group of individuals) issuing one-way commands downwards to a project team (or to groups of project teams) elsewhere in the business. At the very top level of an organisation, an open environment is required where senior leaders work as a team and are able to raise problems and any potential business vulnerabilities with their peers, based on high levels of trust in each other and commitment to the same shared goals. The real value, in our experience, of shifting the leadership culture in this way, and gradually, pragmatically promoting structured team collaboration at the top level, is that it successfully enables leaders to overcome organisation-wide problems or impediments in a matter of hours, as opposed to weeks or months. By becoming team players, they magnify each other’s resources, support each other and the entire top team begins to grow together. They become force-multipliers, because when they eliminate impediments, they fix problems that affect many teams. An Agile team at the top rapidly resolving organisational problems and working collaboratively operates to make the entire business a fast and flexible learning organisation. Which also means that they can better manage risks along the way, they can amplify things that are working, and they can dampen the problems that are affecting the wider organisation. Collaboration doesn’t just happen by getting a team of directors and executive managers in the same room at the same time. That’s why you need to carefully structure the collaboration, and ensure that it is deliberate, intentional and purposeful. In this way, they understand that they are coming together to manage risk. And when put it in these terms, senior leaders not only understand the critical contribution they each have to make, they also understand the value of being involved in those events. Gone are the days when large firms beat smaller firms. Now, success goes to the faster firms. Fast, collaborative top teams create speed, embody pragmatic risk management and lead from the front. These leadership teams go first and inspire action from the delivery teams that see them collaborate every day for the good of their clients, their people and their firm.

AVOIDING the potholes of CONFLICT as you build your new ROADMAP

As we gradually get back to the office after a year of lockdown measures, are people managers prepared to manage the challenges that may emerge. Here, Ruth Gladwell, HR Business Partner at Navigator Employment Law and an ILM accredited Professional Workplace Mediator offers some insight in how to lead with empathy when dealing with the return of employees to the office environment after lockdown.

Employees have a newly established regime and routine of working for their new employer, whether they have joined the organisation remotely in the last year or whether moving back into working in the office and are looking to their leaders to create the new model of in-person working. There are a number of organisations sharing their plans – Heineken has a smart, agile, flexible model. Some entirely oppose remote working – Goldman Sachs who has stated boldly that in-person office working is what operates best for them!

Then you have what is touted by some as a radical offering from PWC, masquerading as a digital start up in Silicon Valley, with a ‘start and leave when you like’ model. Whatever model your organisation is operating, it is likely when everyone moved into crisis mode and concentrated on surviving the pandemic, conflict may have been parked. However it may be starting to reveal itself again. This may stem from new team members meeting in-person with established team members, with actual or perceived inequalities during the pandemic, topped off with the general heightened workload and domestic stress that everyone will be already coping with. People leaders will need to consider how they will look to orientate their teams, but employers must be aware of the signs of conflict and have a plan to address any issues. Some may look to optimise their social and emotional intelligence and engage with empathy. With a higher awareness of mindfulness than ever before, consider how you can increase your understanding of team members’ perspectives. Be prepared to ask questions to find out more, be curious and ask the “who, what, why, where and how” questions that, carefully tempered with “help me understand”, provides you with insight into a team members’ perspective, ultimately helping you to get a broader picture of their position, build quality relationships and make better decisions. Some conflict may not be obvious to spot. It may be that a relationship difficulty has been identified between team members and they’ve determined the way to close it down is to isolate themselves and minimise their communication as they work remotely. This is unlikely to have been noticed by anyone else. However, it will be increasing the stress between them as they won’t be collaborating, optimising each other’s resources and they’ll be spending unnecessary time working around the other. Anxiety from dealing with what may be now an entrenched situation will be building. Realising the increased chance of encountering their problematic colleague in person, is not going to be easy on Slack or Teams. It is at this point when sharing your knowledge on EQ will come in particularly useful and role modelling empathy in your regular one to ones will start to inform trust between you and your team members, enabling conversations on areas of conflict which can be brought to the surface so they can be addressed. Leading with empathy helps you to understand what’s important to the other person and guides you in how you may be coaching the other person in times of conflict with other team members.