The importance of remaining relevant and connective as a brand applies equally from a customer perspective, as it does from the employment relationship. Economic landscapes and consumer sentiment evolve constantly and few organisations are able to retain an active relationship with those customers who fuelled their initial success. Across the pond, just 12% of organisations that made up the Fortune 500 in 1950 remain in it today. So, a little under 450 companies have either gone to the wall, been acquired or faded from prominence. And the story is no less striking in the UK. Since the last stock market peak of 1999, just 49 organisations that made up the FTSE100 remain there. Names such as ICI, Norwich Union and Abbey National simply do not exist.
A piece in City AM this week articulates clearly this challenge. The retailer Gap has struggled to retain an active relationship, connection or relevance particularly with younger consumers. From a net positive brand index of 11 in 2012, that figure declined sharply to 4 just two years ago, before recovering slightly, according to YouGov. A hugely anecdotal survey, lacking anything in the way of robustness, across the millennial element of the Harrison household, provoked a distinctly under-whelming reaction to the Gap name.
As a brand, it has not maintained its relevance or its relationship with such potential consumers.
On the surface of it, Matthew Taylor’s hugely anticipated report – Good Work, The Taylor Review of Modern Working Practices, doesn’t actively reference brand. However, look more closely and there is evidence of what employers should be offering employees and what the latter crave in the former.
Much to the fore are important debates around dependent contractors, employees not getting stuck on the National Living Wage, workplace health, employee protection and the development of skills.
Equally interesting, however, for me, is the focus on quality of work. The UK labour market has been criticised much of late for focusing on the quantity of jobs – and, in this regard, there is much to praise. ONS statistics from earlier in the month suggested that there were 324,000 more jobs across the UK compared to a year ago, with employment up to 74.9%, the highest figure ever recorded since records began in 1971 and there were 152,000 fewer people registered as unemployed, on a year by year comparison.
For Taylor, however, the UK is not creating enough employment of a high enough calibre. His report recommends that good and plentiful work should go together and not be mutually exclusive.
In his various descriptions as to what makes up quality work, there are some important recurring themes. People should have a meaningful say at work for Taylor. He goes further and suggests that good work is about security, about communications, and with employees having both discretion and a say in what they are doing and being involved in securing organisational improvements.
There is much echoing of Taylor’s sentiments from other key labour market commentators. For example, Adam Grant from Wharton School of Management goes further along such lines – ‘Workers who know how their work has a meaningful, positive impact on others are not just happier but vastly more productive’.
Laszlo Bock, Google’s erstwhile SVP of People Operations for several years, spoke recently at the US SHRM conference on the subject Work Sucks. His first suggestion as to how such work might be improved is around giving it more meaning. ‘You need to craft a goal that inspires people’.
For me, the key construct emerging from such commentators focuses on the extent to which people feel ownership within their employment environment. Do they feel as though the work they do makes a tangible contribution to what their organisation is doing and where it is going?
Or is work something that simply happens to them? Is work something with which they have an active or passive relationship? Are they a passenger or a driver in their engagement with work?
The Lions’ rugby tour to New Zealand has now concluded, however for six or so weeks it was hard to move as much for business analogies as it was for sporting coverage.
Since their relative resurgence from a disappointing 2007 World Cup, the employment and motivational practices of the All Blacks have been much discussed. I’ve spoken in the past about their desire to leave the jersey in a better place than when they first put it on. And the fact that everyone – even the global superstars – take it in turns to sweep the dressing room floor after training and matches.
Another interesting aspect of the relationship the All Black players have with their team is embodied in the Maori construct of whanau or family. For the All Blacks, this means a focus on connection, contribution and clarity of action. It is the answer to the question ‘Why am I doing this and what difference will it make?’
Their assistant coach, Wayne Smith expresses it in a way that suffers nothing in comparison to the likes of Bock and Grant – ‘People will rise to a challenge if it is their challenge’.
The ONS figures hint at the difficulties facing recruiters and the REC clarified this further this week. Its CEO, Kevin Green, suggested that one in three UK organisations have no spare capacity as a result of talent shortages and that 45% were expecting to face a shortage of suitable candidates this year. Further research from Office Genie also hints at the challenges recruiting organisations have in prising talent out of an existing workplace – job insecurity, since the Brexit decision of last year, has risen from 5% to 13%.
For me, this is the reason a people strategy has to have a clear and tangible alignment with organisational strategy. In this way, employees should experience both an ownership and a realisation that when they succeed, so does their organisation. That what they do has intrinsic value and intrinsic impact. That their relationship with their employer is active and not passive.
Getting to the heart of your employee mindset 