Trends to keep on top of to boost engagement

Staying on top of emerging trends in the workforce is a great way to prepare your team for any potential hiccups.

Lauren Karan, director at Karan and Co, discussed a few of the top trends we’re currently experiencing and how staying on top of them can help boost engagement.

HR Leader: “What engagement trends are leaders focusing on at the moment?”

Ms Karan: “I’m seeing a real focus on commercial and finance. So, if you think about the current economy and where companies are, there’s definitely a real focus now on narrowing down on the commerciality of the business.”

“Are we running at the maximum profit margins that we can? Are there tweaks we can make to improve our end-to-end financial processes and procedures and systems? Have we got the right people in the right role to take us to the next phase of growth and through some potentially challenging economic times?”

“Individuals at the moment are also looking at transferable skills. I get asked this at least three times a week; I’ll have someone reaching out to me through my network wanting advice on changing industries or transferable skills, because what we’re seeing with the changing economic conditions as well is people start to cross-skill and start to look at if the economy shifts, or if there is a recession or something changes, am I in an industry that has growth, has profit, has a good, strong trajectory for me?”

HR Leader: “Why should organisations take advantage of talent pipelines?”

Ms Karan: “If you’re looking at everything around going into a new market or a new industry, I think finding the right talent or the right people in that market tends to sometimes in workforce planning be an afterthought. But it needs to be forward-thinking, and it needs to be something that’s front of mind when you’re looking to go into that market.”

“I’ll give an example. Say you’re an engineering firm and you want to target more water projects. So, you maybe would have done your research around what water projects are coming up or being awarded, what’s the future pipeline of growth for water in different regions, as an example, and you want to target that market.”

“The second thing, and the thing you need to be thinking about at this point, is where’s the talent situated and who would I need? So, if I need to engage in this growth for my business, what are the key people that are going to bring the work in? What are the key people that are going to do the work? And where is that talent situated?”

HR Leader: “What are some of the challenges businesses are dealing with at the moment?”

Ms Karan: “The first is outdated recruitment processes. And what I mean by that is just because you’ve done a recruitment process in the past and it served you well, now you’ve got a tighter candidate market. It’s about tweaking things a little bit up.”

“So, if you’ve [relied on] interviews in the past and been able to do that without a face-to-face catch-up, good for you, but it’s probably not going to cut it right now. People are wanting a lot more engagement with you when they sign the contract.”

“The other common mistake that we see companies make and we work with them on is pre-onboarding. Once you’ve hired somebody, scheduling in the diary that you give them a call the week before they start, have them come along and do a team morning tea before they commence as well. Then when you get into the onboarding, have lunch with them on the first week. These are all little touch points that make a huge difference to the candidate experience.”

The transcript of this podcast episode was slightly edited for publishing purposes. To listen to the full conversation with Lauren Karan, click below: