The coronavirus pandemic has accelerated the rate of digital and business transformation, and capitalising on every ounce of employee potential is non-negotiable. The crisis may be a catalyst for restructures and talent challenges, but nurturing the potential of every employee is the key to unlocking the benefits of these extraordinary times.

With so much uncertainty facing people, the coming year is an opportunity to grow employee engagement, ensuring they want to be part of the journey through the pandemic and beyond. 

And while traditional views of an organisation’s top talent might exclude vast swathes of employees, there is a surge in thinking that empowering staff to take ownership of their career development can reap rewards for them and the business.

Evidence suggests that “allowing employees agency over their careers can result in more engaged and motivated employees”, leading to positive impacts on levels of performance, says Emma Parry, professor of human resource management and head of the Changing World of Work Group at Cranfield School of Management.

“What is happening in the pandemic is that organisations are learning the importance of open and ongoing communications,” says Parry. “For me this is key to democratising talent development.”

This emphasis on transparent career paths and skills requirements means “identifying leadership potential can become a conversation between employers and employees rather than something done with smoke and mirrors”, she adds.

Organisations are learning the importance of open and ongoing communications… this is key to democratising talent development.

Encouragingly, research shows many employers are promoting more democratic approaches to talent management.

The Top Employers Institute analysed the practices of 1,500 leading employers in attracting, retaining and developing employee potential to drive change in their organisations.

It found 89 per cent of employers designed leadership development programmes for different roles and levels, with the same percentage focusing on the competencies and behaviours needed.

Meanwhile, there is a “clear trend towards a more broad-minded approach to career development”, says Phil Sproston, Top Employers Institute UK and Ireland manager, with 97 per cent of organisations consistently expecting managers to promote development of team members.

The results suggest these employers are focusing more on specific traits and attitudes, rather than identifying high-potential employees by looking at certain departments or seniority levels.

Considering skillsets, rather than simply an employee’s ability to do the specific role they were hired for, can be transformational in workforces, especially as businesses adapt to current market conditions.

It is an exciting time to explore these fundamentals of skills and strengths, which can pull out untapped employee potential, rather than using subjective criteria reflecting current leadership.

Traditionally structured hierarchies are not excluded from democratic approaches to maximising employee potential though. Parry points out: “This is not about structure per se, but more about enabling open conversations around talent management decisions.”

This might mean the end of the classic nine-box matrix to identify talent. “Developing a culture of transparency in relation to people’s talent and aspirations allows a more inclusive and effective approach to identifying employee potential,” she explains.

Dan Lucy, principal research fellow at the Institute for Employment Studies (IES), agrees more rigour is needed in developing employee potential.

“The pandemic has exposed so many inequalities and organisations have to be much more rigorous in identifying talent objectively,” he acknowledges.

Strength-based development plans can lead to 29 per cent increased profits and up to 72 per cent reduced staff churn for organisations, according to a Gallup study.

Allowing employees to identify, develop and use their core strengths fosters accountability and a more democratic approach to talent management.

“As well as understanding what skills employees have, widening access to learning and development adds to the flexibility of the entire workforce, which is really valuable right now,” adds Lucy.

Marketing business MVF topped the Sunday Times Best Companies to Work For 2020 index and its chief people officer Andrea Pattico says ensuring employees can develop their strengths and are aware of opportunities is critical to its success.

“Employee potential is not static so it’s important to keep talking about what is right for the individual, their career and the business over a reasonable period such as 12 months, rather than assume nothing changes over a three to five-year period,” she says.

An individual annual training budget for every employee, yearly cross-department learning festival and advanced academies open to anyone in the business, regardless of department, means MVF is “finding ways to help our people to reach their career goals as well as keeping great people in the business for longer”, says Pattico.

At digital services provider Foundation SP, which led the rankings in the annual 2020 UK’s Best Workplaces for medium-sized businesses, a commitment to empowering employees to drive their own career paths is part of the talent management blueprint.

“We actively encourage employees to strive towards developmental progression and self-fulfilment,” says Foundation SP chief executive Simon Grosse. “Continuous two-way feedback is important, ensuring it is a regular dialogue that is heard and actioned, rather than a one-time event.”

Peer-to-peer mentoring and coaching help spark innovation, along with “cross-pollination of roles and responsibilities”, an approach Grosse says has led to an uplift in profit in the past 12 months, along with low levels of employee turnover.

For firms that have not previously had a digital-led approach, physical changes to workplaces brought about by the pandemic and multiple lockdowns could have a huge impact on traditional notions of career development, talent management and leadership.

Technology is proving an equaliser through collaborative working practices and internal mobility tools, while the spike in online meetings means opportunities for employees to showcase ideas in ways that may not have existed before.

“Progression might not always be upwards, but there still needs to be a sense of development for employees,” Lucy at IES concludes. “Transparency and support are fundamental to democratising employee potential."

The coronavirus pandemic has brought about unprecedented change for thousands of businesses and their employees. With the dramatic shift for many organisations from physical workplaces to almost fully virtual working, traditional notions of what it means to “manage” someone are being challenged at a scale and in a timeframe never before imagined.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the human resources department. Charged with the general welfare of a workforce they cannot physically meet and whose behaviour they cannot easily observe, HR finds itself unprepared to perform many of its strategic services.

These include recruitment, workforce optimisation and retention, along with supporting career development for employees and supporting performance management for managers, and tackling thorny people problems that lower productivity and feed turnover.

Meanwhile, COVID-19 has driven morale to an all-time low and the C-suite is looking for more impact, not less, from HR’s strategic services.

While for some this is a perfect storm, for others it might be a perfect opportunity. Navigating the sea-change in how people work and what it means to be employed, we may see a sorting of winners and losers. Innovators in the new paradigm are likely to achieve breakout performance and dominance with others unable to make the evolutionary leap to manage their workforce in a new way.

“Companies have lost their home-court advantage,” says Dimitri Boylan, chief executive of Avature, a software company that supports strategic HR programmes in 110 of the Fortune 500 and 23 of the FTSE 100 companies, including Siemens, Metro Bank and Deloitte.

Anecdotal evidence indicates that the knowledge worker is ambivalent at best about returning to the office after COVID. Companies including Twitter have confirmed that employees don’t ever have to go back to the office, unless they want to. Even staunchly traditional fund management firm Schroders is allowing employees to continue working from home beyond the pandemic, marking a huge shift in the way the City works.

This is a rejection of the office experience, where power, status, and privilege are hard-wired into the corner office, explains Boylan. But at the same time, we see employees have not mastered the work-from-home model with its short-term increases in productivity quickly followed by a combination of burnout, low productivity and disorientation. 

Will a new engagement model arise out of this turmoil? Boylan says: “Progressive companies have begun implementing strategic HR transformations based on better engagement models and new technology, but I don’t have a single customer that feels its mission accomplished.

“Building on a new paradigm of engagement based on influence requires innovation: creation, destruction and recreation to find out what works.”

This type of agility will be the hallmark of success for strategic HR going forward. And it’s pretty clear existing core HR technology is not fit for this purpose.

The overturning of traditional workplace structures means you will see the emergence of social networking features and even advertising systems embedded within HR technology

Now is the time to really leverage technology as an enabler of business. An engaged workforce is the lynchpin of success and companies that invested in creating cool offices to help facilitate collaboration, communication and productivity must rethink how they nurture a positive and productive culture.

The new challenge for HR and business leaders is how to create engagement in virtual spaces that doesn’t just feel like the physical workspace, but a better workplace.

A solution that can respond to challenges beyond working from home, think diversity and inclusion and generational shifts in attitude.

What tools can be used to create these important intangibles in a remote setting? “It is a huge challenge,” acknowledges Boylan. “HR leaders need to be able to create experiences over the internet that support real HR strategies.”

Now that employment is untethered from commuting, do we see dramatic changes in how recruiting is done? “Recruiting has been transitioning to an engagement model for some time now. Agility in the form of advanced campaign design and automated personalisation is built in to modern customer relationship management systems,” he explains.

But recruiting without retention is wasted effort. “True. If you are not looking at refining your retention models, while you are engaging employees, then from a HR perspective you are lost,” says Boylan.

Engagement starts before an employee’s official first day, he says. Branded, relevant and personalised communications, such as a welcome email from a senior leader, a virtual agenda for the first week, job-specific training opportunities and even a virtual mentor, can help reduce churn and ramp up productivity.

Then what about those difficult conversations? Without the informal daily interactions and feedback of a physical workplace, getting a tough review in an online space can become a beacon of negativity.

The solution, says Boylan, is continuous review in the flow of work: a steady stream of honest and timely feedback, a form of engagement that is paramount for remote workers. 

Engagement with purpose certainly seems like a good antidote for the current situation. And if the HR approach to the post-pandemic workforce is agile and adaptable, the opportunities for HR to redesign the workplace are limitless.

Making the right technology choices through which you interact with employees will greatly impact the way forward. These are choices that facilitate an agile game plan and creation of adaptable programmes, which leverage new technology to create the modern work experience.

The overturning of traditional workplace structures means you will see the emergence of social networking features and even advertising systems embedded within HR technology, says Boylan, opening the door to big data and new insights.

Those organisations that pull together a modern technology platform for the design of innovative practices have the best chance of adjusting their culture, hiring across global markets, boosting internal mobility, improving performance and expanding the diversity of their workforce in 2021.

To find out more about how Avature can help your business please visit www.avature.net

Productivity and employee-monitoring software is becoming increasingly popular, especially with so many staff now working from home. These packages enable management to monitor staff performance by recording clicks and keystrokes, time spent on websites, emails sent and more. But they have been criticised for invading workers' privacy.

For

"Since the start of the pandemic, we have seen three times the usual business from both direct customers and our partners," says Eli Sutton, vice president of global operations for productivity software supplier Teramind.

With record numbers of people working from home, employers are more than ever looking to keep track of their staff. Indeed, according to data from Top10VPN, global demand for employee-monitoring software increased by 87 per cent in April, compared with the monthly average before the pandemic.

Productivity software can give managers a clear view of exactly what workers are doing, from the times they log in and out, to their active and idle periods during the day, and the websites and social networks they use. 

"Anyone that has worked at home before knows it is very easy to become distracted for various reasons and it takes a certain level of discipline to work at home," says Stephen Morrow, co-owner of monitoring software supplier SentryPC. 

"Businesses are paying their employees to perform specific tasks and they want to make sure their time is focused on those tasks."

Monitoring also enables managers to assess the effectiveness of processes, as well as individuals, and to reassess targets or teams.

The advantages don't end there. There are clear security risks associated with home working, for example, and monitoring staff activity helps with both prevention and detection of security breaches and risky behaviour. 

It can also help avoid micro-management and allow employers to demonstrate their objectivity when evaluating staff performance.

Tyler Sellhorn, director of customer experience at productivity software supplier Hubstaff, points out that employees can benefit from access to their own productivity data.

"Because work is tracked more easily, employees don’t need to stop what they’re doing to report back on progress. They can avoid the daily status calls or frequent check-ins with their manager," she says. "This allows for more focused work time.”

With the information provided, employees can make smarter decisions and focus more time on critical work, while a dashboard gives employees a clear overview of their working week.

And, says Sutton, monitoring software can actually help employers keep staff on board through the pandemic.

Businesses are paying their employees to perform specific tasks and they want to make sure their time is focused

"Not only are we seeing a dramatic uptick from new customers, but most of our active clients are adding licences as opposed to removing them, hiring rather than firing," he says.

"Apart from this, we're also getting reports from our customers that not only are their employees happier working from home, but they are also completing tasks at an accelerated rate. So employees are grateful for the opportunity to work from home."

Against

Earlier this year, Barclays was forced to scrap a system that tracked the time employees spent at their desks, with the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) launching an investigation.

"People expect they can keep their personal lives private and that they are also entitled to a degree of privacy in the workplace," the ICO commented at the time. "If organisations wish to monitor their employees, they should be clear about its purpose and that it brings real benefits."

And many believe that it doesn't, with research from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) revealing that nearly half of workers believe they're being monitored at work and three-quarters saying the use of such technologies damages trust within the workplace.

Only one in eight thinks the benefits of workplace monitoring outweigh the downsides from a worker perspective and 43 per cent are concerned introduction of these technologies could make it easier for their privacy to be violated.

New technologies are spun with a pandemic-related aspect, but then you find out they are truly being used for other things

Monitoring on a smaller scale, such as using timesheets and aligning to sales targets, was seen as more acceptable.

"CIPD research shows that intrusive monitoring at work can damage trust and morale, and can cause stress and anxiety," says Hayfa Mohdzaini, CIPD’s senior research adviser for data, technology and artificial intelligence.

"Moreover, employers can get into trouble if monitoring breaches an individual’s right to respect for their private and family life."

Research from the Prospect Union reveals that employees are most uneasy about camera monitoring, with four in five saying it made them uncomfortable. Two-thirds were uncomfortable with keystroke monitoring and three-quarters with the use of wearables. 

And this translates to real issues with trust between employer and employee, with around half of workers saying they thought introducing monitoring software would damage their relationship with their manager. This figure rose to 62 per cent among younger workers.

As the pandemic continues, there's also a real danger of mission creep, says Professor J.S. Nelson, an expert on business law and ethics at Villanova University.

"New technologies come out and are spun with a pandemic-related aspect to them, but then you find out they are truly being used for other things after the initial rollout," she says.

"Once tracking software is installed in a building or on a device, even a personal cell phone, there is not much impetus for an employer to remove it and there is no check on what the employer can record."

One of the many things the Black Lives Matter movement has done this year is to shine a bright light on diversity and inclusion (D&I) in the workplace. And when you consider 66 per cent of FTSE 100 companies have all-white management teams and just 3.5 per cent of senior executives come from a BAME – black, Asian and minority ethnic – background, you can start to see why.

It doesn’t just stop at a lack of diverse representation either. It’s also the lack of a safe and inclusive workplace culture. According to Glassdoor, 55 per cent of employed adults have witnessed or experienced discrimination in the workplace. Employees should expect to feel safe and comfortable in their working environment and not alienated or isolated by their organisation.

Renewed discussion around D&I in working environments has exposed wide cracks and revealed five common mistakes companies make.

1 Using the same recruitment and hiring process to find diverse talent

A common mistake when it comes to embracing D&I in the workplace is approaching the hiring and recruitment process in the same way as before. Sonya Barlow, a D&I expert and founder of Like Minded Females, says “companies are not expanding their reach when it comes to looking for a talent pool”, while also attempting to attract diverse talent through the same old recruiters. Companies are simply not diversifying their efforts to find the available talent.

Mac Alonge, founder of The Equal Group, says companies need to be looking at the “big picture” when hiring new employees. Where is the vacancy being advertised? Are the ads accessible to the people you’re trying to reach? Which recruitment agencies are being used? These are just some of the questions employers need to be asking themselves.

To bridge this gap and successfully bring on new and diverse employees, Barlow suggests working with community groups and consultants to ensure all parts of the hiring process are diverse and inclusive. A new focus on remote and online working has shown companies can consider “new talent without borders”, reducing the need to approach the same recruitment agencies again and again, she says.

2 Hiring a D&I lead to fix the issues

There is an assumption that hiring a D&I lead will fix everything. Glassdoor recently reported that June saw a huge 50 per cent increase in D&I job openings. But bringing in a D&I lead can be just another form of tokenistic hiring, says Leyya Sattar, co-founder of The Other Box. She says that unless the D&I lead has “buy-in from senior leadership, budget and influence, it will be a superficial, surface-level action and ultimately a waste of money”.

The Black Lives Matter movement has exposed companies that use diverse employees as token hires and ultimately approach D&I as a tick-box exercise. That’s not to say companies shouldn’t hire a D&I lead. An employee dedicated to D&I in the workplace is a good thing.

It cannot fall to the most marginalised to do the work, or for them to do it without compensation, when D&I isn’t part of their job description

But, as Sattar says, this role must become an integral part of the company and not just viewed as an add-on, if companies want to see real benefits. They must be given adequate budgets, staff and the freedom to implement effective policies. 

3 Depending on diverse employees to organise D&I initiatives

As well as token hires, some companies decide to look inwards to their diverse employees. These employees may have no specific skills and experience when it comes to D&I, but have simply been approached because of their personal characteristics. 

Sattar points out that The Other Box has had hundreds of conversations with people from diverse backgrounds who’ve had to take on the responsibility of their company’s D&I efforts. She says: "It cannot fall to the most marginalised to do the work, or for them to do it without compensation, when D&I isn’t part of their job description.” D&I should not be viewed as something that only affects those from marginalised backgrounds.

Instead, companies need to be properly prioritising and investing in D&I efforts. Training programmes, such as unconscious bias training, should be put in place and regularly maintained. Experts should be consulted on how to establish D&I policies and practices in the workplace, and be paid for their work. This way, extra responsibility isn’t passed off to employees, while also creating an inclusive working environment.

4 Classing D&I as one and the same

Another crucial mistake that companies make is grouping D&I together, without distinction. This assumption couldn’t be further from the truth. Liz Johnson, founder of The Ability People and Podium, explains that “diverse hiring doesn’t automatically translate into an inclusive culture”. If a company has only thought about the diverse representation of employees, without giving proper thought to the working environment and culture these employees are walking into, that’s a failure on the inclusion front, she says.

The differences that impact individuals and their needs at work must be recognised, if companies want real change. Johnson uses the example of how disabled employees can be treated. She says: “Even with all the talent in the world, if workers with disabilities are parachuted into roles without the appropriate resources, equipment and support, they cannot be expected to do their jobs to the best of their ability.”

People need to feel safe and supported at work. Alonge says employers can do this by taking the time to have genuine conversations with their employees, to give them a voice and to also see if additional support is needed. Because, as Jess Mally, writer and co-founder of Belovd Agency, explains, organisations that fail to look beyond the issue of access and hiring tend to find there is a high turnover among the diverse talent coming in.

5 Fixating on signing pledges and commitments 

The final mistake is one that has become much more common in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement: the signing of company pledges and commitments. “Human resources departments have become public relations departments, where the way a company is perceived is more important than the reality,” says Jack Mizel, founder and chief executive of Pride 365.

There is a fixation on wanting to appear a diverse company with an inclusive environment, without doing any of the work. It’s an attempt by companies to cut corners and avoid investing in the long, and sometimes uncomfortable, D&I process.

Signing public pledges is an empty gesture if it isn’t backed by action. So instead of making grand statements, companies should focus on work behind the scenes. D&I in the workplace shouldn’t be viewed as a potential PR opportunity, but something that will benefit the company as a whole. D&I is for everyone. As Mally concludes: “A shift in perspective to an understanding that a fair, equitable and diverse workplace will ultimately benefit all of us is absolutely essential for D&I work to be fruitful.”