“Some of the key HR trends are not new, but they been solidifying over the past few years,” says Mark Hedley, vice president of talent recruiting with global employment platform G-P, formerly Globalization Partners, who will address the Talent Summit on a talk entitled; The Power of People and Place: Emerging trends in Global Hiring. “In many cases, progressive companies have been doing these things for a few years and they are now being adopted more broadly.”
One of the trends that is becoming firmly established is remote and flexible working. “Work is no longer a place we go. Now, work can be done anywhere.” he points out. “Remote is actually a place now. You can search for remote work opportunities in the same way as you can search for them in a particular city or country. Flexibility is also of key importance for top talent. Seventy per cent of the respondents to our last Global Employee Survey in 2022 said they would give up other benefits in return for flexibility. That trend is accelerating. Companies offering remote and flexible working now enjoy a competitive advantage in the recruitment market; that’s one of the reasons why we are seeing the trend spreading across all sectors and all sizes of companies.”
Increased workforce diversity is another trend. “The ability to attract diverse talent is becoming increasingly important,” Hedley points out. “In a volatile and changeable environment, having people with diverse opinions and perspectives in the room is very valuable. People can move faster than any changes to the business landscape and having a diverse workforce will help companies survive in times of volatility.”
Despite the downturn in the economy and high-profile downsizings in the tech and pharma sectors, talent shortages will remain a feature of the market, he believes. “Demand for talent is still going to outstrip supply and the equation will still be on the side of employees. It remains an employee-centric market. Although there have been some well publicised layoffs in certain sectors, most countries still have the lowest unemployment numbers in history. The balance is still in favour of employees and companies are still hiring.”
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Advances in technology, not least collaboration platforms, will play an increasingly important role in HR. “Zoom and Teams and so on will continue to play an essential role,” he notes. “We may use them differently, but they will remain critically important. HR automation platforms like ours will help companies to be more effective in workforce management.”
“The benefits of those platforms are growing all the time,” he adds. “Take payroll, for example, G-P has partnered with Wise, a fintech company which specialises in payments, to bring new capabilities to our customers. There is not just one way of getting paid. People want to get paid in different ways and in different currencies. By integrating the Wise software into our platform, we enable our customers to pay their employees around the world in the ways they want to be paid, quickly, ethically and transparently.”
These trends are having an impact on how employers recruit and retain talent. “Companies have to be a lot clearer about their value proposition,” he explains. “Are they remote or hybrid businesses? Do they offer flexible working? They need to be a little bit more precise in how they communicate if they want to attract the right people. If there is a disconnect between perception and reality you get attrition. You see people moving on quickly if the role is not what they thought it would be and employers are having to constantly hire for those roles. They need to communicate honestly and transparently if they want to avoid that situation.”
Job candidates are also looking beyond the standard salary and benefits packages. “They have career aspirations, and they are looking for roles that will help fulfil them. The move needn’t always be vertical, it can be sideways. Companies that can provide supports for people in their career journeys will have an advantage when it comes to attracting and retaining top talent.”
While the ability to offer remote and flexible working gives a company an edge when it comes to recruitment, new ways of working are not without their challenges. How do you foster and maintain a coherent workplace culture when there is no actual place of work and when people may never meet in person?
As a remote-first business, G-P has been addressing that question for quite some time, Hedley says. “We drink our own Kool Aid as they would say in America, as remote working has been at the heart of the business since we began in 2012. We declared ourselves a remote first company in January 2022, and we were very intentional in our approach, adopting guiding principles which support everything from more focussed and strategic meetings and impactful collaboration time to actively scheduling time off.”
Dealing with the cultural and other challenges requires careful planning. “We have our Remote First Playbook at G-P. Remote working isn’t natural to a lot of people and managers may not have encountered a remote working environment before. When developing processes, ways of working, workflows and so on we assume that everyone is working remotely. We don’t set up two-tier systems. That helps to deal with issues like proximity bias.”
Company culture also requires care and attention. “Culture permeates the whole of the business. I’ve got a team of 25 people in nine countries across the world from here in Ireland to The Philippines and Mexico. It’s a remote team with some of them working hybrid. Remote working doesn’t work without a good culture. I find that you need to be intentional and inclusive to foster that culture. You’ve got to have trust in people and give them autonomy to make decisions and manage themselves. You can’t micromanage people, you have to lead them and manage by outcomes and objectives.”
The culture is reinforced through the celebration of what he describes as defining moments. “They can be small; in fact, the small things can be most important. We have an internal platform called RISE (regular, immediate, specific, encouraging) where people can put up comments thanking colleagues for doing things like helping them with a small tech issue or setting up with a customer.”
He also points out that an organisation’s culture is organic and dynamic. “It’s a mistake to hire somebody to fit the culture. You need people whose values align with it and who will add to the culture as they grow into the team. As we grew from 300 people to 1,200 people in recent years, all of the new hires added to our culture. What works for us won’t necessarily work for everyone else. It’s a bit of a secret sauce. But we share what works for us with our customers and the HR community at conferences and other events. HR professionals have the ability to view business decisions through a people lens. Once you understand both those sides, it’s like having a sort of superpower.”
You can hear Mark Hedley, vice president of talent recruiting with leading global employment platform G-P’s fireside chat at the upcoming Talent Summit, which runs in Dublin’s Conference Centre on Thursday March 9th.