As a parent, you’re only too aware of a shifting landscape. Your role evolves from that of omniscient protector to vaguely embarrassing taxi driver, personal chef and credit line. It might not be something you are terribly enthusiastic about, but you adapt, move on and ask who the cheque needs to be made out to. Our own geographic and cultural landscape is changing as we speak – whether Scotland opts for independence or not, relationships either side of Hadrian’s Wall will never be the same.
A report this month from Deutsche Bank paints a picture of the UK retail banking landscape which bears little or no resemblance to that of today. The whole of the UK could be served by as few as 500 branches over the next decade – a net loss of very nearly 5,000 as telephone and particularly online banking cater more readily for customers with little time but lots of bandwidth. Much of that access will come via mobile technology – another field that saw a brutal shift this week. Phones4U, with 550 stores across the country, a turnover of £2bn at its peak and a healthy £100m in the bank was forced into administration. There are a number of reasons behind this – and a clumsy dividend extracted by its venture capital partner probably didn’t help – but the desire of the network operators to forge direct relationships with consumers was front and central. (In contrast to Phones4U, Carphone Warehouse’s merger with Dixons/Currys is a contrasting example of an organisation being only too aware of the shifting tectonic plates and responding appropriately).
And the employee/employer relationship is anything but immune from such evolving parameters. Earlier this month saw an interesting piece of research conducted on behalf of SAP by Oxford Economics. When asked by the researchers what were their key workplace concerns, issues such as potential layoffs, economic uncertainty and wage stagnation certainly featured. However, the most pressing workplace fear was that of an employee’s position changing or becoming obsolete – the employment world changing and them being left behind, if you like. And a side question suggested that just 50% of employees feel the skills they currently possess will be the same as those needed in the workplace in 2017.
So if employees are all too aware that expectations, colleagues, technologies, competition, globalisation et al are changing around them, is that sense of insight as acutely demonstrated by employers?
I’m not so sure.
The last four to five years have created what I’m calling comfortable disengagement. The economic pressures since 2008 have, in many cases, meant that people have been unable or unwilling to change jobs. They have stayed with their current employer, not because they love what they’re doing or feel absolute alignment with the employer brand. They have stayed because they feel comfortable there. They and their colleagues have experienced challenging times together, there is camaraderie. More tellingly, their personal infrastructure has become embedded with their employer – they are given the space and flexibility (because of their tenure) to attend sports days, to go to pilates classes, to attend training. Health niggles mean they have concerns about changing employers and therefore private health providers. They have also got out of the habit of looking for a new employer. One of the implications of recruitment messaging going online is that passive (or comfortably disengaged) candidates no longer have chunky recruitment supplements of press advertising to remind them of high profile recruiters/employer brands or indeed the strength of the employment market.
The last 15 months have seen a major shift in the economic and employment landscape. And although the Scottish Referendum is likely to have distracted the economy, the latest labour market figures from the ONS continue to suggest a strong economy, with the quarter to July showing 74,000 more people in work and 146,000 fewer people unemployed. This was echoed by the latest KPMG Report on Jobs, which suggested ‘Monthly vacancy growth has reached its highest figure since the survey began’.
TMP is lucky enough to spend much time with candidate audiences throughout the country. One of the key themes to emerge is the growing contrast between their own optimism and awareness that there are more jobs around, and any realisation from employers that they are no longer recruiting in a soft market. Great people have a great deal of employment choice, but many recruiters through their messaging and the candidate experience they offer appear not to be aware of this shifting landscape. They are failing to grasp – and perhaps this is no surprise given that we have not witnessed an employee-driven jobs market since early 2008 – that they have to work harder, smarter and more empathetically to both attract and convert.
This applies equally to active candidates who know they have more choice than at any time over the last decade and for the comfortably disengaged, who feel many recruiters are simply not doing enough to lure them from jobs and employers they no longer love but are happy to put up with.
Getting to the heart of your employee mindset 