by Nuture HR
The constant and evolving organisational landscape often sees organisations face a plethora of challenges to keep up, maintain relevance and competitive advantage. With Australia’s population ageing and facing retirement, a number of conflicts present themselves to the workplace including:
- Australian businesses are facing the task of retaining talent, maintaining knowledge, and key skills and subsequently performance and workplace productivity in a tight labour market and
- Age discrimination (unfortunately) is still evident, in particular during recruitment drives, with mature candidates often being overlooked for their younger counterparts.
It is an organisations best interest to ensure its leaders play a key role in retaining knowledge and skills from more mature employees, whilst recognising the benefits of hiring mature employees.
Some initiatives to do this include:
For further information on what your organisation could do to retain mature workers and reduce stereotypes, please contact Eva and her team via Email: eva@nurturehrconsulting.com.au or Phone: 02 43 125 120.
by Nuture HR
With the results of the recent American election, the transition of leadership appears to be on many individual’s minds and with it a bevy of emotions ranging from fear through to hope, internationally.
On another level, many of us throughout our careers have experienced a highly valued leader departing an organisation with mixed thoughts and feelings on what the oncoming leader may bring to our workplace and what this could mean for us as individuals.
Given what we are seeing playing out in international politics and based on previous experiences, what can we as individuals and organisations do, to foster the successful transition of leadership?
Successful transition of leadership appears to be based on:
- Planning the transition
- Positive, concise and continued communication about the transition – communication is vital in explaining the handover of leadership, what this will mean for a business and how its workforce will be supported throughout this change over
- Recognising the work of the previous leader and building on this
- The incoming leader being aware that not everyone is an early adopter of change and identifying those who are early adopters
- The incoming leader recognising the need to work together to mobilise those individuals whom may not be initial supporters by recognising and guiding them through the grief cycle i.e. moving individuals the stages of disbelief to acceptance, hope and commitment
- Celebrating early wins and
- Continuing to communicate across all levels of the workforce
For further information on transitioning leadership, please contact Eva & her team at Nurture HR Consulting.
by Nuture HR
All of us, whether we want to or not, carry biases with us into the workplace based upon the environment we grew up in, our education, our life experiences and our values.
Most importantly, it is a matter of how we deal with these biases by understanding what they are, how they are formed and how we deal with these on a day to day basis to understand why we make / support certain decisions in the workplace.
How are biases formed?
Psychological scholars posit that biases are evolutionary adaptions. Mental shortcuts that reduce cognitive processing and free up the mind to complete other tasks. They typically lead to fast paced judgments that are made priority, in order to maintain basic survival. Though some seem irrational at times and cannot even be explained rationally, they have often been passed down through our genetics as a form of adaption.
Some types of bias include:
- Belief perseverance: once a belief is formed and a rationale has been developed it is very difficult to demolish it (Ross and Anderson 1982).
- Confirmative Bias: the tendency to seek information that supports our beliefs while ignoring information that does not.
- Illusion of control: for example – lotto!
- Heuristics: mental shortcuts we all take to reduce complex judgements
What we can to do increase our self awareness around our biases?
- Recognise that we carry biases
- Define what these are
- Obtain all the facts before jumping to a conclusion regarding an individual or a matter and
- as the old saying goes don’t judge a book by its cover!
by Nuture HR
This year’s Melbourne Cup winner, “Almandin”, ridden by Jockey, Kerrin McEvoy was flawless in his race to the finish. His determination and dedication to be successful and do his utmost to be first over the line was apparent, right up until the very end when “Almandin” and fellow runner “Heartbreak City”, were neck and neck.
Kerrin McEvoy who 16 years’ prior was Melbourne Cup winner on a horse named “Brew”, has maintained his passion, drive and effervescence for the sport, so what keeps an individual motivated to keep striving for success?
For many organisations, employees much like the Kerrin McEvoy’s out there, they are relentless in their efforts, drive and devotion to continued success. In our ever-increasing changeable climate, organisations need to ensure that those employees are adequately rewarded and recognised so they are retained within the organisation and to ensure their motivation and engagement is preserved and retained.
An organisation with enthusiastic and engaged employees can be the difference between a successful organisation and a genuine industry leader. So how can organisations entice and motivate employees to go the extra mile. Some actions may include:
- Saying a simple thank you or well done
- Providing mentoring opportunities
- Asking employees what motivates them and rewarding them based on their responses
- Introduce a peer nomination scheme, where employees are encouraged to nominate their peers for recognition
- An employee recognition award – recognising an outstanding employee accomplishment
- A personal letter of thanks to the employee or team member from a senior manager for a significant contribution
- Celebrate achievements
- Formal reward and recognition programme
For further information on how to sustain success within your workforce, please contact Eva and her team via emailing eva@nurturehrconsulting.com.au
by Nuture HR
Listening to a radio interview recently, in relation to “VR” i.e. Virtual Reality in the music industry, it had me musing on what this could mean for the not so distant future of the workplace. That is, what benefits could be had and correspondingly what concerns should we have?
Some exciting opportunities of VR in the workplace could include:
- Meetings held in a virtual workspace, where all or a number of participants could be working from different locations across the globe however each will feel as though they are working in the same space as one another,
- The ability to virtually try new roles / work activities and even occupations from anywhere at anytime,
- Training utilising a virtual scenario or virtual workplace thereby reducing costs and mistakes in reality and improving opportunities to learn from this and
- Virtual interviewing enabling applicants to be interviewed from anywhere in the same virtual workplace.
An exciting time lies ahead for workplaces embracing “VR” technology, however let’s not forget the value of real human contact in our quest for workplace excellence!
