Welcome to The RM Blog

Here you will find articles, blogs and discussion documents written by the employees and partners of Resource Management. It is designed to provide a forum for sharing facts, thoughts, theories and emotions about all things related to recruitment; as such we would encourage you to comment as often as possible. In addition to this, if you would like to use The RM Blog to share some of your own articles, please make contact with us here.

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Monday 24 November 2014

Wherever I lay my hat, that’s my home office

Marissa Mayer – appointed last year as President and CEO of Yahoo - received a lot of press coverage following her decision/ultimatum to come and work in the office or work for another company. The announcement provoked a debate on productivity and the merits or otherwise of working from home. From where I sat (in my office, at home of course) the discussion that followed mostly missed the more central issues of trust and indirect or intrinsic benefits.
I should declare that I am fortunate enough to enjoy the best of both worlds; an employer that trusts me to work at home as much as I want, and still generous enough to provide me with an office when I prefer (or when it’s half term, when the travelling is easier and the noise levels at home increase). This isn’t just an arrangement that significantly aids my productivity, it’s one I value strongly and see as a key benefit of working for Moog. So a couple of days a week I substitute most of the two and a half hours I would spend commuting for more time working, and benefit from a bit more sleep, and quite a lot less money spent on petrol.
As a reward person, I’ve always been an advocate for giving people what they value, if you can, rather than what you want them to have. To that end, I’ve argued for ‘light touch’ regulation on areas like job titles, working from home and dress code, and that we all end up better off sanctioning the occasional abuse by the minority rather than letting this fear of abuse define what we give.
It’s a philosophy that has more than once got me into trouble. I set up a switch to a smart casual dress code with one former employer who had a sizable call centre where it was proving difficult to find and then keep staff. I reasoned that a causal dress policy might make jobs there a little more appealing and a little less costly. It led to an email from the CEO that you could see had been typed with such venom the keyboard must have sunk about an inch into the desk. I was to be held personally responsible for the decline in productivity that was now inevitable, as well as the lost customers he thought would recoil at the sight of men in M&S chinos and polo shirts. I suppose I didn’t help by replying and speculating how much more successful Richard Branson or Bill Gates could have been had they invested in a tie. Branson’s take on the changes at Yahoo were pretty clear – you have to trust your staff.
Google’s CFO Patrick Pichette talks about there being “something magical about sharing meals” but for me there’s something difficult to swallow in Google’s anti-telecommuting stance given their products, and it makes me wonder if it’s really just about money and control. Alexandra Shulman, British editor of Vogue, laid out a defence of Meyer’s actions, but it’s worth noting how in the last two paragraphs it all comes down to her desire for her team to be accessible on her terms, as and when she wants them to be.
And what about the money? Well, it’s worth heeding what happened to Robert Propst, the man who designed the first work cubicles for Herman Miller. His Action Office designs aimed to increase efficiency, privacy, and create a better work environment. It didn’t take long for some companies to see that his designs could be modified to fit many more employees into the smallest possible space. It had the opposite effect to what Propst had intended, and he later described cubicle-based workplaces as a “monolithic insanity”. Clearly the relationship between proximity and productivity needs to be explored with care.

- Alan Measures, Director of Reward at Moog Inc.

Alan Measures is Global Director of Reward at Moog Inc, a worldwide designer, manufacturer, and integrator of precision control components and systems. He has over 20 years of reward experience from a variety of industries, and has worked for Boots The Chemists, Zurich Financial Services/Allied Dunbar, Bass Brewers, Hewitt Associates, Prudential and Marathon Oil.
Alan holds a B.Sc. degree in economics from the University of Wales. A member of the Chartered Institute of Personnel & Development (CIPD), he spent 8 years as a tutor on CIPD reward courses and is a member of the CIPD Reward Forum.
In his spare time Alan endures a life long affiliation to West Ham United, while his family and neighbours endure his passion for playing the guitar and the mistaken belief that volume is a substitute for talent.

Thursday 20 November 2014

Simply seeking superlatives? Try less and achieve better customer service.

What a customer wants is very simple; their query or issue resolved as quickly and easily as possible, with minimal effort on their part. But with 77% of organisations reporting that their customers’ issues are resolved in one go, and just 40% of their customers reporting the same, it is clear that something is missing. A CEB study entitled ‘Blinded by Delight; Why Service Fails and How to Fix It’ identified two key attitudes which, though unusual, ought to be prioritised over the status quo if businesses’ positive perceptions of good service and their customers’ actual experiences are to match:
1. Customers are far more likely to penalise a company for poor behaviour than praise it for good behaviour.
2. Customers are just as happy when their expectations are met as when they are exceeded.
What this tells us is that customers prefer prevention to cure, and that simply meeting their expectations is all the customer wants and needs to be happy. So is a rearrangement of our priorities what is needed? Should we focus not on customer satisfaction (a variable conclusion) but on efficiency (which will invariably result in a satisfactory conclusion)? As the CEB study suggests, managing and tracking how much effort an interaction costs a customer will tackle the issue at its source. In order to do this, we need to better understand these two attitudes:
1. Customers are far more likely to penalise a company for poor behaviour than praise it for good behaviour.
The CEB study found that ‘96% of customers who put forth high effort in service interactions are more disloyal, while only 9% of those with low-effort interactions are more disloyal’. The number of customer service horror stories massively outnumber the good stories, which proves that word-of-mouth is far more eager to penalise than to praise. This peculiar dynamic casts a bad light on society but is a powerful piece of knowledge which businesses can use to reimagine their customer service. So why this imbalance? When a customer has to re-contact a company, the context of the interaction is pre-emptively negative, as opposed to the neutral position they entered with when they first gave custom. Therefore, businesses do not have to outperform themselves and their competitors in order to serve their customers well; they have only to make no mistakes.
2. Customers are just as happy when their expectations are met as when they are exceeded.
Unfortunately, the CEB study found that ‘most companies underestimate the value of simply meeting customer expectations and overestimate the value of exceeding them’. This is unnecessary, as customers are in fact expecting no more than you can reasonably give. They expect no less either, but it should be easy enough to take advantage of small expectations. 
Customer service by its very nature is reactive’, but this is okay as long as the customer has to expend only minimal effort. They will be loyal to and promote a company that makes things easy over a company that manages customer service traditionally by apologising profusely, making other (often unwelcome) offers and affecting extreme politeness. Rather than meeting customers halfway with eager apologies, let’s go all the way with humility and simplicity. That’s really all they want.

Friday 14 November 2014

UK workers are ‘taking possession of their lives’ as unemployment falls and salaries rise

Despite ‘the spectre of economic stagnation’ haunting Europe, the UK now has one of the fastest growing and stable economies in the world. Unemployment rates have fallen to an almost six-year low, with a record 30.8 million Britons now in work; that’s 694,000 more than this time last year.
Salaries have continued to rise over the last few months, although the rate of salary growth has slowed to its lowest pace since records began in 2001. However, now that the growth in average pay for UK workers has overtaken inflation for the first time in five years, our economy has earned itself an enormous silver lining. Governor of The Bank of England Mark Carney said the UK was witnessing “the start of real pay growth”, and permanent and contract workers alike should be very encouraged by the recent figures.
At first, we attributed the labour market’s growth to the widespread increase in part-time and self-employed workers. However, since June 2013 full-time positions have grown rapidly, demonstrating the ‘highest hiring optimism in Europe’ as employers feel confident enough to grow their permanent headcount. A huge 13,000 people per week are going back into work, according to Work & Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith in a BBC News interview. He said that “if you’ve been in work for a year or so, the average rise is 3.7% in salaries, which hides a trend that once you’re in work, you start to rise much faster”. “Almost all” of the 694,000 new workers are full time as people seek security in their work, according to Duncan Smith, who said that these developments are about “human change”, giving people “a real sense of getting on again and beginning to take possession of their lives”.
Of course, salary reports vary between industries. The Accounting & Finance industry, for instance, has grown very competitive, giving employers room and time to be more discerning when hiring. However, many bonuses have been reported as unsatisfactory, encouraging workers to seek higher base salaries.
The IT industry is displaying a lot of hiring confidence, particularly with permanent hires across big data and analytics. For instance, contract IT roles earn £360 on average per day.
Salaries are rising across the board for permanent HR roles, especially in L&D, talent and OD. As regulations and strategies are reworked, there is a huge drive for development and change amongst HR departments, which is in turn pushing for more senior, experienced specialists, forcing salaries to become ever more competitive.

Thursday 6 November 2014

HR in 2020; the technological advantages and security challenges





As employees’ expectations change and workplaces become increasingly diverse, HR needs to be prepared to respond to the developments ahead. The HR World's upcoming round table debate, ‘HR in 2020; are we ready for emerging global, technological and demographic change?’, will explore these impacts on the workplace of tomorrow, which will have to ready itself for the challenges that organisational change brings. Among other things, the debate will cover:
How will talent attraction and employer brand change with technology?
Rapid expansion and improvements in technology, in conjunction with growing adoption rates, have led businesses to consider how this can be incorporated into certain processes. As video interviews and sourcing candidates via social media becomes more and more common, the hiring process has already begun to embrace technology, but is this just the beginning? Will candidates soon be expected to provide video CVs, for instance? Will this be a more effective means of finding the right candidates?
Another extraordinary development is the emergence of gamification (the use of ‘gaming mechanics’, such as rewarding employees with points,the filling of a progress baror virtual currency to engage employees in solving problems). This is an increasingly popular example of companies embracing technology in order to achieve business goals.
Perhaps the most successful technological development has been the widespread use of LinkedIn. Most individuals are now expected to have a profile, revolutionising self-promotion and recruitment, and engaging the tech-savvy Gen Y. However, it is widely acknowledged that more needs to be done to attract this demographic, and it will be interesting to see how this develops.
The IT and Legal issues surrounding flexible working via mobile and the ‘bring your own device’ approach
The traditional 9-5 office-based week steadily becoming an outdated concept, and how and when people work is constantly changing. Although this has many benefits in terms of work/life balance and job satisfaction, flexible working is tough for managers to get right. If you have a portable device which you can work from, can choose your hours and can work from home, then how can you keep up with where the line is drawn? With this approach, the boundaries required for a healthy work/life balance become harder to define.
HR’s latest buzzword ‘bring your own device’ (BYOD), that is, using your own personal laptop, mobile phone or tablet to work away from the office, may be the answer to a lot of problems, but it poses many security and policy risks. HR should take proactive steps to fully understand and monitor this approach. Using social media in the workplace, particularly on personal devices, is an issue The HR World debate will explore in depth, asking; should employees be accessing these at work? What happens if they are partaking in inappropriate activity in work time or on business accounts?
The cultural shift required as businesses develop globally
As the marketplace explores international relationships, HR will be very busy managing and integrating an increasingly diverse work force. Different work practices and organisational thinking will require some proactive, transformational thinking, and The HR World debate will aim to put a finger on specific approaches, perhaps even defining a new breed of HR.
To discuss these issues and more, The HR World will host a round table dinner on the 11th November led by Helen Norris, Head of HR Partners at Nationwide Building Society, and attended by a collection of senior HR thought leaders. If you would like more information about The HR World’s round table debates and would like to get involved in future events, then please contact Caroline Beer on caroline.beer@TheHRWorld.co.uk or 07772 136 284.