Each week I’m going to provide a round up of what I consider to be important and interesting articles on the future of work (not authored by me). These will include a variety of sources and topics ranging from workplace practices to robots and automation to leadership and everything in between. There’s a lot of information out there so I’m hoping that these weekly round ups will help make life a bit easier for you by giving you just the good stuff. Let’s get into it!
Want Your Best Employees to Never Leave You? Ask Them 5 Simple Questions
‘Stay interviews’ (as opposed to exit interviews) are seen as an opportunity to retain valued employees. This requires honest communication between manager and employee and is intended to provide opportunities for both sides to truly listen to each other.
To conduct these types of interviews there are 5 questions that are considered ‘must ask’.
1. What do you like about your job?
2. Describe a good day of work you had recently?
3. Do you feel your skills are being utilized to the fullest?
4. Do you feel you get properly recognized for doing good work?
5. Do you feel like you are treated with respect?
What Every Business Leader Gets Wrong About ‘the Workplace of the Future’
Rather than focus on creating ‘open workspaces’ and the like, business leaders should be focused on reconfiguring the traditional, hierarchical workplace model.
The future of work is about how colleagues interact with each other – especially those at different levels. By doing so, this provides the opportunity for all voices to be heard and can provide unfiltered ideas and points of view. A few points to keep in mind when thinking about the right culture for your organization:
– Focus on the whole team
– Encourage everyone to raise his or her hand
– Find new ways to give leadership and accountability at various levels
How Small Companies Are Keeping Global Giants on Top of Their Game’
The rise of tech growth has become a problem for some large organizations, leading them to shift their focus from company-wide modernization to sectors within the business that will explore how they can stay on the top of their game. They are also finding that small companies are becoming the driving factor behind innovation.
This has led to collaborations between the larger enterprises and the smaller companies. However, even with the desire to work together there are still challenges. For instance, it can be difficult for a smaller organization to get a meeting with a relevant person within the larger. At the same time, the larger company is inundated with many enterprises desiring to work with them and only some of those will be appropriate.
One company – prooV – is attempting to bridge this gap by operating a service platform between startups and enterprises. This allows the larger company to ‘taste’ many different startups before deciding which software to purchase.
The ‘cobots’ Are Coming. Is Your IT Team Ready?
Collaborative robots (cobots) work alongside human employees. The robot efficiently repeats a specific process over and over again, reducing errors and waste. Amazon relies upon 45,000 robots who work side-by-side with humans in their fulfillment centers.
The use of ‘cobots’ bring challenges to IT departments and its leaders. The learning curve for introducing robots to a workplace is steep, requiring training and education for all.
This can be offset by companies such as Hirebotics which is a staffing agency for cobots. They provide robots by the hour without any upfront expenditure. Additional factors to be considered are the space needed for the robots and how they share space with their human counterparts.
My new book, The Employee Experience Advantage (Wiley, March 2017) analyzes over 250 global organizations to understand how to create a place where people genuinely want to show up to work. Subscribe to the newsletter here.
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