Know thy job applicant!
How to leverage job references and social media to find the right fit for a vacant role
Recruiters go out of their way to gather information about job applicants beyond their jobseeker personas. The most obvious way to learn about them would be from their former line managers’ or colleagues’ references, which give the prospective employer an idea of how the candidate works within a team – whether they tend to be reconcilers or troublemakers, learn from criticism or resent it, embrace change or dread it, get ready ahead of schedule or well behind it.
References from previous employers, however, are not fit-for-the purpose for a couple of reasons. First of all, both chasing and writing them are time-consuming exercises, and – unlike the prospective new employer – the former employer doesn’t have a vested interest in providing one. Moreover, some employers have to comply with the basic reference policy of their company and aren’t licensed to provide any information on the candidate beyond employment dates and job roles.
Although the costs of repeating the recruitment procedure if a new employee underwhelms are well-known, HR departments often adopt a frugal approach to getting references – even if it would be money well spent. Carefully designed, GDPR-compliant questionnaires completed by former co-workers can provide a treasure-trove of relevant information about the candidate, especially if it’s completed by more than two referees (recruitment specialists recommend requesting five to seven references for senior roles).
What can turn references into an even more powerful recruitment tool is timing. Thanks to the cost-saving mindset mentioned above, references are typically provided following the job interview. After a successful interview, by that time – more often than not – the halo effect has kicked in and the references serve only as a confirmation of a decision that’s already done and dusted. Therefore, any disconcerting details from former employers at this stage are likely to be overlooked. Bringing reference checks forward in the selection process may give more weight to their findings and contribute to better choices.
How can social media inform recruitment decisions?
Although some statistics suggest that 94 per cent of recruiters use social media, the extent to which they rely on this channel ranges from informal checks on personal accounts, to hosting job boards on the brand’s Facebook site, to directly messaging talent in a sector-specific LinkedIn community.
Running social media checks on job applicants is a bit of a grey zone. For recruiters it’s a great opportunity to take a peek into the candidate’s informal self and natural habitat. Job seekers, on the other hand, are either blissfully unaware of the damage their personal social media activity can do to their career or play catch-up by changing visibility settings and removing dodgy pictures to make sure no future employer is deterred by their account.
As for the charge of businesses stalking prospective employees on Facebook, Instagram or Pinterest, although a clear-cut line could originally be drawn between private and professional social media sites, this distinction is getting increasingly fuzzy. For small businesses a social media account on Facebook is a great opportunity to build an online presence at low cost, while big brands use theirs as a marketing tool. Very often, individuals also set up a professional account on these so-called private websites to have better exposure.
From serendipity to an established HR practice
Social recruitment or the sourcing of candidates through social media platforms is a much more resource-intensive and strategic exercise than the screening of candidates on social media discussed previously. It involves building up a corporate hub on social media by providing online content, infographics, posts and videos of current employees and updates of company events.
The strategic purpose of this social media presence is to create a talent pool of individuals interested in the company’s values and activities, and who have skillsets that make them potential future candidates. Some businesses even grant special, insider status to these individuals, which enables them to participate in Q&As, chats with employees about the work culture, corporate values or even open positions. Company advocates, inspired employees who highlight the advantages of working for the company on various platforms, have a major role to play in making this social media community more robust.
Although social recruitment is regarded as rather resource-intensive and requires a separate social media-savvy recruiting team, there seems to be a consensus about its efficacy. Advanced search features of social media sites can help identify the right talent. By setting up or joining groups specific to a sector or industry, recruiters can approach and engage with potential recruits, who will be more comfortable about being solicited for jobs as it comes from someone in their online community.
The biggest potential of this emerging recruitment method lies precisely in the ability to reach out to passive candidates, who aren’t active jobseekers but may be ready to jump ship for an irresistible offer. This is more head-hunter territory than the remit of online job boards.
Currently, however, online jobsites are still the first port of call for corporate hiring teams. But if a study of Boston-based marketing company Aberdeen Group, which found that 73 per cent of millennials (those between 18 and 34) found their last position via a social media platform is anything to go by, this may change rather soon. As they, and the digital-native Generation Z cohort after them, are gradually becoming the backbone of the labour force, they will set the trends that the rest of us – including jobseekers and recruiters alike – will need to follow.
Zita Goldman
Zita Goldman covers digital transformation with a focus on demystifying digital technologies and showing how they fit into a broader sectoral, macroeconomic, legislative and societal context. She has a passion for connecting the dots of current business and financial news and explaining inconsistencies, for giving hype a reality check and looking behind buzzwords for fresh meaning.
Is simpler technology the key to successful hybrid working?
With 80 per cent of businesses keen for more straightforward collaboration, today’s video conferencing tools may be a barrier to effective team-working
The hybrid working debate provokes strong opinions. But the emerging consensus is that allowing people to work more frequently from home, while still regularly visiting the office, will offer the best balance for businesses and employees alike.
There’s also a consensus that video collaboration solutions will be critical to creating a hybrid-friendly working culture. After all, video kept the global economy turning during the pandemic, and experts predict that investment in video conferencing will grow significantly as businesses increasingly see hybrid working as an important strategic initiative. It can reduce both cost (office rent, desk space, business travel) and the carbon footprint of the organisation.
One solution fits all?
Outside the IT community, relatively little consideration is given to the differences between video collaboration platforms. Attention tends to focus on the (admittedly crucially important) areas of security, reliability and compliance. But what about the user experience? Can the choice of platform really exert a big impact on people’s job satisfaction and therefore an organisation’s productivity?
I passionately believe that it can. Why? Because people’s mental wellbeing has a big impact on their productivity, and I’m convinced that people are happiest and most productive at work when they are completely and effortlessly connected.
Collaboration frustration
To test if these beliefs are widely held, in May 2021, we commissioned a survey of over 1,000 business users1 of a leading video conferencing and collaboration platform. The respondents came from both SMEs and enterprises, and they used the platform as a primary tool for business communication with colleagues and external contacts – for messaging and audio calls as well as for video meetings.
Our survey focused on uncovering if users were happy with the platform provided to them and what they found lacking if not.
Asked to describe their productivity when using the platform, 27 per cent said their productivity had fallen, compared to working in the office pre-pandemic. While an overwhelming 92 per cent said the platform made them less collaborative than when they were in their regular workplace.
We were especially interested in whether the platform’s many intricate features were a barrier to effective team working and it seems that they overwhelmingly are. A full 80 per cent reported finding the platform complex and frustrating to use, and in fact, 20 per cent of all users are so frustrated that they are actively looking for an alternative provider. Imagine spending 20 hours a week feeling exasperated and unable to work because of a tech platform. That's too much time by anyone's standards.
No surprise, then, that 67 per cent of respondents said they would welcome a simpler, cleaner and easier to use tool for collaboration.
Simpler is smarter
These results prove that a sizable proportion of businesses want a more straightforward way to connect and collaborate.
We didn't dig more deeply into whether our survey respondents were using their platform at home or in the office, or both. But given that it's purposely designed to work in both environments, I firmly believe that the challenges our survey respondents are experiencing apply across the hybrid working spectrum.
There is a better way. At StarLeaf, we’ve consciously designed and built a more intuitive way for people to message, meet and call: at home on their computer, on the move on a smartphone or in an office meeting room. Meanwhile, our industry leading reliability and accreditation to the highest standards of data security mean ease of use comes with performance you can trust.
If you’re planning for a future of hybrid working in your business, I’d urge you to investigate choosing a simpler collaboration platform such as StarLeaf. It frees your people from the complex tools that frustrate creativity, productivity and innovation, allowing them to focus on what really matters: creating the human connection at work.
Try StarLeaf free
by Mark Richer, Founder and CEO, StarLeaf
Images provided by Starleaf
[1] Censuswide survey, May 2021. Results are based on responses from 1,010 business users in the UK, of a leading video collaboration platform.
NFTs hit the big league, but not everyone will win from this new sports craze
Some buy sporting memorabilia for love. Others for money.
The world record for most money paid for a sports-related item goes to the original Olympic manifesto written in 1892 by International Olympic Committee founder Pierre de Coubertin. It changed hands in 2019 for US$8.8 million. In second place is the New York Yankees jersey worn by legendary American baseball player Babe Ruth, sold in 2012 for USA$4.4 million.
As in all markets for collectibles, scarcity equals value.
Which is why sport organisations, memorabilia sellers and collectors are getting excited about non-fungible tokens – or NFTs – a blockchain-enabled technology that proves unique ownership of digital content.
NFTs open up a huge new market to sell limited-edition images, videos and artwork. They also enable the original licensees – be it sports organisations or individual athletes – to share in resale profits.
NFTs are already sweeping the art market. In March, auction house Christie’s sold an NFT of a work by American digital artist Mike Winkelmann, known as Beeple, for US$69 million. Auction house Sotheby’s last month sold a single pixel for $US1.36 million.
Could we see similar NFT values in the sports collectibles market? Quite possibly.
Though tangible items such as uniforms, balls and bats will likely continue to be prized collectibles, collectors are already paying big bucks for digital versions of old favourites such as trading cards.
Leading the game is the US National Basketball Association, which began selling limited-edition “Top Shots” – digitally packaged and NFT-authenticated video highlight clips – in October 2020. Like traditional trading cards, these are sold in “packs”. Some videos are common, others rare. One such rare “moment” – in reality about half a moment – of basketball superstar LeBron James dunking reportedly changed hands in April for US$387,000.
Who knows what someone might pay for that moment in decades to come?
It might be millions more. Or much much less. Because this market, for all its early promises of rich rewards, is not without its downsides, with potential for significant environmental and social costs.
What are non-fungible tokens (NFTs)?
Something is fungible when it has a standardised and interchangeable value. It is replaceable by something else just like it. Cash is the obvious example. Non-fungible essentially means something unique, non-replaceable.
So NFTs are essentially digital certificates, secured with blockchain technology, that authenticate an item’s provenance – that it is a limited edition or one of kind – and enable it to be bought and sold as such.
An NFT provides scarcity of digital content that can be relatively easily copied – a photo of Indian cricket great Sachin Tendulkar making a world-record score, for example, or a video of tennis No. 1 Ash Barty winning at Wimbledon.
There are big opportunities
The potential riches are evident from the NBA’s Top Shot sales, which accounted for US$500 million in transactions in the first three months of the year. This was a third of the total US$1.5 billion in NFT transactions, according to DappRadar, which tracks blockchain markets.
Last month San Francisco-based NBA team the Golden State Warriors was the first US professional sports team to issue its own NFT collection, which includes limited-edition digital versions of championship rings and ticket stubs.
Individual athletes are also selling their own branded items in NFT form. NFL quarterback Patrick Mahomes, for example, is selling signed digital artwork. Champion skateboarder Mariah Duran and paralympian Scout Bassett are among a group of elite women athletes who will release NFTs this month. Expect to see many more selling NFTs in the wake of the Toyko Olympics.
There are also risks
But there are some big downsides.
The first is environmental – because of the energy used in blockchain verification processes.
Of course, making and transporting physical goods has a range of environmental impacts, but by one calculation the carbon footprint of selling an NFT artwork is almost 100 times that of selling and transporting a print version. In February, French digital artist Joanie Lemercier cancelled the sale of six works, and urged others to do the same, after calculating those sales would use the same amount of electricity in ten seconds as his studio used in two years.
Eliminating this downside of NFTs will depend on more efficient technology and more renewable energy.
The second is social – of people only seeing NFTs as a way to make money.
As in any market where prices are rising rapidly, there is the danger of a speculative bubble. Here, the risk is that buyers spend big on virtual items that may end up being virtually worthless when the bubble bursts.
Last year also saw large and continuing market growth in traditional sport collectibles such as trading cards, along with retail investment in cryptocurrencies and stock markets more generally. So, while the value attached to NFTs may prove to be enduring, it is possible some part of the early interest in sport NFTs is driven by “irrational exuberance” and patterns of people spending more time and money online due to the COVID pandemic.
There are likely to be many more sport organisations and athletes peddling their digital wares in the near future. It is though, difficult to predict whether sales will continue this trajectory, how and when this trend might “normalise”, or if NFTs indeed represent a speculative bubble.
Particularly for fans playing in this market, care should be taken to not let emotions trump prudence and good judgment.
Adam Karg, Associate Professor, Business School, Swinburne University of Technology and Kathleen Wilson, Lecturer, Business School, Swinburne University of Technology
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Hybrid working is so much more than a choice between home and office
It’s a truth universally acknowledged that the world of work will be changed forever by the pandemic. But while no one expects a return to traditional ways of working, opinions are divided about what the workspace of the future will look like.
The conventional wisdom is that when restrictions lift, most people will choose to split their work time between home and office. But that betrays a lack of imagination and a failure to grasp the true impact of what we’re going through. The much-vaunted hybrid model of working will not be a binary choice; it will be something bigger, broader and altogether more profound.
The question is, what does this new future look like? One thing is certain – this topic will dominate the boardroom of all companies. The most progressive employers are taking action quickly to drive change.
Firstly, the concept of the physical office as a core part of an organisation’s brand and operating model will not disappear. In many respects the role of the office will grow, but it will become more intentional in its design and purpose. Progressive organisations will need to offer employees more. A model based on supervision and oversight is giving way to one based on autonomy and trust. The familiar patterns of office life are important, but they will sit alongside a new world of employee-centred choice.
The Office Group (TOG) was founded in 2003 with a mission to reinvent the office space market and improve the way people work. Today, TOG is the leading design-led provider of flexible workspaces, with more than 50 buildings across the UK and Germany. Nearly 20,000 members call TOG home.
What is different about TOG is that unlike the majority of real estate providers, we are not simply a portfolio of individual office buildings. We are a cohesively designed platform of over 2.2 million sq ft of workspace – some of which is office space, but also gyms, yoga studios, meeting rooms, lounges, screening rooms, meditation rooms, cafés, bars, roof gardens and event spaces. If you are one of our members, you can have an office in one of our buildings, access multiple locations within the TOG platform, or use a mixture of the two. Having a workspace at TOG gives you access to so much more than just an office.
So how does this translate? In London, we have more than 40 buildings, in locations from Canary Wharf to Hammersmith. Whether your office is part of TOG or not, we think it will be critical for employers to provide access to a wider platform of spaces for employees to work. Team meetings, creative problem-solving, client presentations, one-to-ones, site visits, quality thinking time, content generation, relaxing and unwinding… each of these tasks may be best performed in a different setting and a different location depending on the needs of the employee, the client or the team. Employers that offer this kind of dynamic working model will have a big head start in the future battle for talent.
We designed our platform to offer this choice, as we fundamentally believe – even before COVID – that the future of work is flexible. Underpinning this is choice and ease.
A shift like this requires companies to look long and hard at their employee value proposition, to evolve their approach to real estate and select the right partners to work with to drive this shift. Traditionally, larger corporates have used flexible office space to solve short-term tactical problems, rather than as part of the strategic management of people and assets. The pandemic is forcing a reappraisal and accelerating the need for the flexible office market to evolve so that it can serve the needs of larger corporates.
That requires a service culture rooted in deep real estate expertise – a ‘best of both worlds’ proposition that marries sophisticated account management capability with a modern, agile approach to structuring solutions and service agreements. The sophistication required by the flexible sector must be matched with maturity and understanding of the needs of its customers in a way it hasn’t before.
At TOG, we are already trialling this new approach with a number of corporates, from providing a new model for key offices through to the creation of a dispersed campus of locations across London that augments a large HQ. These pilots are allowing these companies to gather the data they need to best define their working practices.
The scale and agility of the TOG platform are steadily attracting more and more big employers, including BP. The energy giant has leased Douglas House, a 50,000 sq ft property that will provide a new hub for the company’s venturing, digital and mobility futures teams, providing 700 desks for 1,000 employees and including a barista bar operated by Caravan and a state-of-the-art gym operated by Manor, as well as a roof garden and event space.
The hub will bring together technology- and innovation-focused teams who are currently spread across different London locations. It will provide adaptable and digitally enabled workspaces and allow teams either to work flexibly or collaborate in the same location to encourage creativity and innovation. As part of their TOG membership, BP staff will have access to the entire TOG platform, including coworking spaces, video conferencing booths, tech-enabled meeting rooms and event spaces.
Companies such as BP, Ocado, GSK and a slew of high-profile tech firms are working with TOG to lead the charge towards a more progressive way of working. Even before the pandemic struck, these businesses were embracing a future that offers much more than a binary choice between home and office, adapting their employer proposition to meet the evolving needs of their people.
Change in working practices is not new, and different companies have been exploring different strategies for decades. The pandemic, however, has changed the paradigm of what is expected from the employer by the employee. Companies that don’t pick up the pace and embrace this shift in ways of working will be left behind.
Toby Ogden is Chief Commercial Officer at The Office Group
Employee monitoring: a useful tool but not a modus operandi
Why establishing and observing red lines are key
Employers have traditionally been opposed to remote work, as the absence of physical proximity significantly diminishes opportunities to contain employees’ tendency to slack off, with the double deterrent of monitoring and group pressure. The pandemic, however, left companies with no choice but to allow their staff to work from the comfort or, occasionally, turmoil of their homes.
Anxious that their workers would take advantage of staying under the company radar, CEOs and HR departments, especially those in large companies, resorted to monitoring software, which, in certain cases, borders on surveillance. The technology was readily available and mature and there were practically no legal hindrances.
The scope and types of employee monitoring
Monitoring employees’ activities is legal in the UK and Europe, although theoretically, a balance needs to be struck between business interests and employee expectations of privacy in line with data protection and privacy legislation such as the Data Protection Act, the GDPR and the Employment Practices Data Protection Code.
Although it’s a requirement that subjects are notified if they are being monitored, their consent is not necessary in most cases – and even if it was, its genuineness couldn’t be guaranteed due to the employee’s interest to conform to keep their job.
The right of the employer to track, on the other hand, is not limited to company devices. Private laptops and mobiles can also be monitored, as long as they hold work-related information.
There are various forms and degrees of employee monitoring. Soft-touch types will search for keywords in emails or social media posts and send alerts if red-listed items come up. So-called network monitoring tools focus on general activity and flag up patterns that may pose serious security threats.
Others, meanwhile, are much more intrusive, providing granular, personal data on browser activity, recording computer idle time or the hours the employee spends offline and triggering nudges if toilet breaks, for example, exceed the pre-set amount.
The software that resembles surveillance tools will even take regular screenshots, use webcams for making videos of employee activity and keep logs of every keystroke made on the device.
Moreover, the GPS in mobiles can serve as a handy tool to alert employers when their workers leave the perimeters of their home office for no apparent work-related reason.
Legitimate reasons and the surveillance arms race
For banks, insurers and investment funds, no one can underestimate the security challenges of the home office. A rising tide of hacking, phishing and insider threat incidents during the pandemic makes a compelling case for the heightened monitoring of employees working with sensitive data in confidential sectors.
Those working in these areas already have a higher tolerance of being monitored for compliance, in both physical and online settings. No one doubts that intellectual property, trade secrets and sensitive personal data need to be protected from rogue or negligent colleagues, although effective identity and access management can go a long way to achieve that.
The deployment of excessive and intrusive surveillance technology to track employee productivity, however, sounds like overkill and may prove to be rather counterproductive.
It wasn’t just sales of employee monitoring software that soared in the first months of the pandemic – sales of anti-surveillance solutions also rose. Until a coding loophole was closed, software that set your Slack status as permanently active – a digital version of leaving your coat and briefcase in the office while popping out for a lunch date – was a major hit.
In a phantom employee engagement award ceremony, the second prize would probably go to another solution that can convincingly imitate mouse movements while the actual employee is busy being entirely unproductive, at least from a work perspective.
How close a tab should bosses keep on their staff?
Businesses should ideally play these sorts of technological catch-up games with their cyber attackers, while their relationships with employees should, according to management gurus, be built on trust – something which surveillance can easily undermine.
Also, an approach that assesses performance based on the hours that workers are glued to their screens is a relapse to the old days when employees were sometimes just twiddling their thumbs at their desks until the time to clock out arrived – and which output-oriented flexi-work was meant to replace.
In order to have it both ways – spurring on employees to be more productive without eroding trust – employee monitoring can be turned into a wonderful self-assessment tool. After all, each of us, for example, is susceptible to cyber-loafing or, in other words, procrastination by roaming the internet, to a certain degree.
Learning how many productive hours we spend on our computers while convinced we are working our socks off – the score for the average UK office worker is just three out of eight hours – can be sobering.
Digital self-monitoring can also be a useful means to prove to demanding bosses that a task genuinely takes more time to accomplish than they would like to think – or the other way round – as well as settling all kinds of disputes that require hard evidence.
Intrusive and disproportionate employee monitoring can also increasingly backfire. The red lines into the no man’s land that digitalisation created in this area are being drawn in front of our eyes.
Microsoft has recently watered down its productivity score and decided to reframe it as a measure of an organisation’s adoption of digital technology rather than a way to monitor employee behaviour. Barclays, which already had a track record of trying to push boundaries, scrapped its monitoring system in response to employee feedback in February and the H&M Group was fined a record €35.3 million (£32.1 million) in Germany in October 2020 for an employment-related privacy breach of the GDPR while collecting and analysing work behaviour data of hundreds of its employees.
There is a pressing need to create hard and clear rules about the dos and don’ts of employee tracking. It could both prevent workers from getting disengaged under the prying eyes of their employers and save companies from learning the hard way where the red lines are supposed to be.
Zita Goldman
Zita Goldman covers digital transformation with a focus on demystifying digital technologies and showing how they fit into a broader sectoral, macroeconomic, legislative and societal context. She has a passion for connecting the dots of current business and financial news and explaining inconsistencies, for giving hype a reality check and looking behind buzzwords for fresh meaning.
The new-age contact centre: a post-Covid workplace fit for a king
Living and working through the first lockdown was a challenge for many – including those toiling in traditional, mill-style contact centres. Fast-forward to spring 2021, though, and conditions in that sector have undergone a quiet revolution. The change has been driven by the need to clear packed buildings of their battery-hen-style seating.
These workplaces are often now unrecognisable from before Covid, with staff emboldened by a new-found sense of their importance to extract concessions from employers. Chief among their demands has been flexibility of location and hours – long seen as a no-go area in this most controlled of environments – as call handlers and webchat responders lay out their post-Covid workers’ paradise.
Alongside emerging employee expectations, consumer habits have also transformed. Businesses need to meet both workers’ and customers’ demands in order to survive and thrive in a time of fickle loyalties and easy switching, where customer experience (CX) has the power to make or break a business.
As vaccination programmes ramp up, and lockdown exit plans take shape, organisations are turning to cutting-edge technology to establish and maintain a competitive advantage.
Distributed working models will be the new norm
As we entered the pandemic, research showed that only 27 per cent of contact centres had systems in place to utilise home-based agents as part of their workforce mix. Meanwhile, 82 per cent of contact centres said they anticipated having some form of remote-workforce model in place by 2029. These long-term plans were brought forward as worldwide lockdowns hit.
Organisations that already had the latest cloud-based contact centre as a service (CCaaS) technology in place were able to shift to homeworking with ease, while the rest scrambled to move to the cloud as quickly as possible. Now, whether out of choice or necessity, businesses and public sector organisations are rolling out cloud technology at record pace, with the benefits of a flexibly located workforce becoming obvious to employers.
Distributed working is also beneficial to employees who have experienced a more flexible working model and may insist upon this option in a post-Covid world. A recent study by Stanford University found that 55 per cent of workers would like a mix of remote- and office-working. With drive from both employees and their employers, then, distributed working models are here to stay.
Employee experience and customer experience: a match made in heaven
If reduced churn and lower staff sickness levels weren’t enough of a reason to invest in the technology to enable flexible working, the impact of improved employee satisfaction on customer engagement will convince any laggards to move to the cloud. Employee and customer experience are intrinsically linked – one drives the other.
Industry analyst Gartner’s big trend prediction for 2021 is the idea of ‘total experience’ – the combination of CX, employee experience and user experience to transform business operations. The value of tightly linking these, rather than improving each as an individual objective, is fundamental to overall business success.
This is especially relevant in the contact centre, where customer experience is king and consumers can defect to a competitor after just one poor interaction with an organisation, whether on the phone or via a digital channel such as webchat. To survive in today’s marketplace, it is essential for businesses to recognise that a happy worker is more likely to deliver a best-in-class CX.
The logical next step is AI
Moving to the cloud is the first step in many organisations’ digital transformations. With cutting-edge contact centre solutions comes the opportunity to deploy advanced artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. Organisations in every sector are now implementing AI to optimise performance, streamline processes, deliver personalised services to customers and uncover insights to inform strategic decisions.
Research shows early adopters of AI report around a 25 per cent improvement in CX, increased margins and enhanced competitiveness. The most successful highlighted the importance of striking a balance between deploying advanced AI tools and leveraging the skills of human agents – using intelligent automation technologies to boost performance.
Utilising AI-powered chatbots, for example, enables organisations to rapidly handle basic customer FAQs, offer self-service options and direct people to the resources and information they need. This frees up agents for more complex queries or to assist vulnerable customers while reducing the monotony of dealing with repetitive enquiries.
The past 12 months have presented contact centres with an unprecedented opportunity to accelerate digital transformation and change the way they work. In a post-Covid landscape, organisations should continue to evolve their old-style contact centres into value-driven customer engagement hubs, orchestrating a best-in-class customer experience. Implementing cutting-edge CCaaS technology that enables flexible working, improves employee satisfaction and has AI capabilities is a sure-fire way to create a contact centre fit for a king.
Martin Taylor
Deputy CEO and Co-Founder of Content Guru
The future home office is global
We used to have offices because we defined work within constraints of both time and place. We had set working hours and locations that shaped how we worked.
But in recent years tools have become available to enable us to work differently, and the concept of the office is rapidly becoming dated. Start-ups and innovators were already finding new paths, but it took Covid-19 to accelerate change more widely across the board.
So as we look forward to the end of lockdown, what will the office become? Will there be a permanent change in our concept of where, when and how work happens?
Where you are is less important than making things happen
Covid has taught people to work in a distributed way. And if you can work with your team anywhere, why not employ people globally? Distributed working makes national boundaries irrelevant, and legal and financial compliance is not the headache many fear. Adaptavist was founded in the UK, but now more than half of our people are based in other countries. We benefit from the best of global talent, diversity in thinking and a follow-the-sun operating model. There’s no reason this thinking can’t apply to knowledge-based business, leading ultimately to global campuses of home offices.
Working when you want makes time zones irrelevant
Say you worked nine-to-five in the UK because those were the company rules. This means you could never work with someone based in California because your day finished as theirs began. When you can work when you want, as long as the job gets done you can organise your time to get the best results for your tasks and your life.
Unlocking the workflow constraint
Digitally transformed businesses have cultures that allow them to adapt to threats and opportunities. Adaptive organisations do not need change to always come from the top down – ideas can come from anywhere when people can collaborate with each other. For this to happen, information needs to flow freely and across business functions. A DevOps approach to business will help organisations with continual experimentation and learning so they can adapt to thrive, whatever the future holds.
To find out more about agile business transformation visit www.adaptavist.com
Your employees will guide you on hybrid working – if you listen
When the pandemic struck in early 2020 and workplaces around the world emptied, the immediate conversation drifted to how to get employees back into their offices safely. But as it became clearer that this was not a short-term thing and homeworking was going to be the prominent feature for the foreseeable, the conversation has gently drifted to why employees would go back to their offices.
This debate seems to flit between a global tech firm announcing that they are “digital by default” (whatever that means) and stuffy financial institutions demanding employees report for duty in the office as soon as it’s deemed safe to do so. Everyone else is falling somewhere in between the two.
The risk is that organisations end up making the same mistake that has always been made when it comes to supporting work: ignoring the needs of their employees.
Outside of the occasional question on an employee engagement survey or a specialist survey as part of a workplace restack, how often do we take the time to get to understand how our people work and how we can best support them in that endeavour? All too often that conversation is infrequent and one-way.
Over the past 12 months, the team at the Institute of Workplace and Facilities Management (IWFM) has been keen to see how employee attitudes to work are shifting through a series of surveys in spring and summer 2020, and again in spring this year. Any change would result in different approaches to how workplaces are managed and employee experience supported. The data has helped us map that evolving picture.
Firstly, there were some obvious bits, including people missing face-to-face interaction with colleagues (72 per cent), collaboration on work (61 per cent) and a clear separation between work and life (62 per cent). But there were lots of things we had started to enjoy when working from home, such as no commute (77 per cent), saving money travelling to work (67 per cent), more time for personal activities (53 per cent) and spending more time with family (37 per cent).
Balance that up against 75 per cent of people saying they can work from home effectively, and you’ll start to understand why there hasn’t been a stampede to return to overcrowded, salary-draining commutes.
But people do want something from their offices and many have said they are looking to do between three and four days in the office (42 per cent). Most of us would have guessed that, but what’s interesting is the shift this represents from pre-pandemic work patterns. Prior to Covid-19, two-thirds of people worked in the office five days a week; post-covid-19, that is looking to be less than one-third – a seismic change.
So that big concrete box we’ve been accustomed to trekking into day in, day out is likely to look a lot different in the future. Some days it will be very crowded (probably Tuesdays) and some days it will be ghostville (definitely Fridays). That is something organisations will have to wrestle with.
Getting to know their employees better and reviewing their own cultural approach to work will be crucial to help companies. Why? Because our data shows us that the choice to enjoy some of the aforementioned benefits of home working does not appear to be in everyone’s reach. For instance, women are twice as likely as men to say that they have no choice on their future work pattern. The data showed a link with childcare (underlining the persistence of “traditional” arrangements) and also that women with children only made up 20 per cent of those in senior positions in our study. Senior management in general were significantly more likely to be presented with a choice, just as they were more likely to have had money spent on them by their employer (for IT equipment and office furniture, for example) and to have spent money themselves while working from home.
Even with the right culture in place, some may have the choice taken away by their own home-working set-up, with those working on sofas much more likely to want to get back into the office.
The overall picture is that the only certainty is uncertainty and the best way to navigate that is to experiment, speak to your employees and build a workplace experience around them that extends beyond the corporate concrete block. It will be a mix of locations and you need to provide the glue to keep it all together. Don’t worry, your employees will guide you – but only if you listen.
Chris Moriarty
Director of Insight and Engagement at the Institute of Workplace and Facilities Management.
Square foot in a round hole? Why office space may need a new valuation model
It is widely accepted that the pandemic will forever change the way we think about work and what people expect of their employer.
Much is made of hybrid working but there are already signs that the future will be more than a binary choice between two desks. We believe that businesses will increasingly need to adopt a dynamic model – one that rewards people with the freedom and choice to operate at their best and be at their happiest.
Team meetings, creative problem solving, client presentations, one-to-ones, quality thinking time, content generation, relaxing and unwinding… each of these may be best performed in a different setting and in a different location depending on the personal and professional needs of the employee, the client or the team.
Traditionally, the cost of office space has been more or less calculated on the basis of price per square foot for conventional space, or per person per desk in the world of flexible offices. But in this evolving world of work, putting a price tag on physical office space will become more complex than just dividing x by y.
“While the conventional pricing model has served the real estate industry well, the pandemic has accelerated a shift in power – with the needs of employees becoming the primary focus,” says Charlie Green, co-founder and co-CEO of flexible workspace provider TOG (The Office Group). “We believe this demands a new value-based pricing model that incorporates a multitude of previously hard to measure factors.”
The increasing popularity of flexible office space has caused many to question the status quo because the cost-per-square-foot model that has underpinned conventional leases for decades does not translate well to the flexible office space market.
An occupier transitioning from a conventional to a flexible lease will typically see what appears to be a higher price for the same space, but this doesn’t capture the benefits of what the flex sector has to offer. It’s only when they factor in access to shared space and amenities and the costs associated with service charges and legal fees that the real value becomes apparent. And, of course, given the rapid changes in market conditions we’ve seen recently, not being locked into a five- or 10-year lease has a value in itself.
It could be said that buying space by the square foot or by the desk is like buying art by the yard – you know how much you’re getting but not a lot about the value. So the question is, what would a new value-based pricing model look like, what factors should be considered and how should they be weighted? Is there a new formula that captures the true value of office space?
“There needs to be a more enlightened way of assessing the value of working space – one that is tenant-centric and fit for purpose in the fast-emerging world of dynamic working,” said Olly Olsen, co-founder and co-CEO. “Being able to determine the importance of ‘hard to measure’ factors is at the heart of a new value-based pricing model.”
The pandemic has elevated the duty of care that employers have to their people. Almost every chief executive says that, alongside the battle for talent, the mental wellbeing of their people has become a top priority.
As the world of work continues to evolve, we believe employers will increasingly have to offer a choice of locations and amenities in order to attract and retain the best people and ensure they are happy, healthy and productive.
How do we go about assigning value to these ‘experience metrics’?
Companies such as Ocado, GSK and a slew of high-profile tech firms are already embracing the value of these seemingly intangible benefits. Even before the pandemic struck these businesses were looking to a future that offers much more than a binary choice between home and office. They have been working in partnerships with TOG to adapt their employer proposition, knowing only too well that when their people thrive, their business thrives too.
Recognising these benefits, energy giant bp has leased Douglas House, a 50,000 ft2 property in Fitzrovia that will provide a new hub for the company’s digital and mobility futures teams. The building is unbranded, allowing the client to incorporate its own identity into the workspace.
The hub will provide adaptable and digitally enabled spaces that allow teams to work flexibly or collaborate on site. As part of their membership, bp staff will also have access to the entire TOG platform, including coworking spaces, soundproofed focus and video conferencing booths, tech-enabled meeting rooms and collaboration and event spaces at locations across London and Germany.
The conversation about occupancy costs has already moved beyond the basics such as rent, fitout, service charges, insurance and maintenance. It now includes sick days and travel time, for example. The opportunity now is to consider factors such as natural light, air quality, outside space, meditation and wellness facilities, location and aesthetics. All of these have an impact on employee happiness, productivity and loyalty and so should become part of the value equation.
Employers already measure engagement and satisfaction, of course, but the idea of incorporating these and related metrics into the way office space is valued is long overdue.
Building such a model may not be as hard as it seems. In an increasingly data-rich world it may be possible to calculate with considerable accuracy the impact of employment practices and working environment on staff turnover, productivity and even creativity.
At TOG we are investing in research to help provide some of the solutions to a new office valuation model, but the picture is evolving constantly, and we will need input from a wide range of stakeholders. We look forward to continuing the discussion in the coming months at industry events and forums.
For more information, please visit our website.
Putting workers first: technology and the workplace of the future
Innovative technologies are set to create a new workplace approach, with improved flexibility, digitalisation, performance and efficiency
A year of global pandemic has transformed many lives, both in the long and short term. With any complex change such as this, there are positive and negative factors at hand. As the pandemic has progressed, society has had the opportunity to learn and advance.
When restrictions were initially implemented a year ago, few could have predicted what the outcome would be. It is important to recognise what individuals have learned about working since social distancing became necessary, as well as how ready they were to digitalise daily tasks and trust a completely virtual environment. The urgency to adapt has altered our working habits at an unbelievable speed – and it is unlikely that anything can be done to reverse this.
Technology as an ally
Pre-pandemic, there was a lot of competition between technologies, particularly with artificial intelligence (AI)-based robotisation. The workplace has become increasingly shaped around humans, as opposed to the specific tasks those humans had to perform, as in the past. How technology affects and improves the experience is an essential part – offices are a combination of physical and virtual elements, integrated and seamless environments in which daily tasks are performed. The co-operation between humans and AIs is central to the new workplace concept, one that can take advantage of wearable and implantable devices.
The physical portion
For some jobs, the physical presence of employees is unavoidable. That said, the pandemic has proven that there are a huge number of roles which have transportable physical elements. Among these elements, the role of AI-based robots will become increasingly important. Human and robot co-operation enables employees to be technologically and psychologically supported during the working activity, and enhances effectiveness, efficiency and the digitalisation of tasks. The worker and the robot can be either located in the same place, or organised to cover the fixed physical portion of the workplace, according to the needs of the specific activity.
Connectivity is key
The most impactful element of the new workplace approach is the virtual domain. This enables vastly increased data-storage capability, five-sense-based interactions and augmented presence of co-workers and experts, thanks to cloud, hyper-connectivity and hologram technologies. Connectivity is a major enabler here, as it allows the integration between fixed physical, transportable physical and virtual components in a distributed workspace concept. It is based on the availability of broad coverage, low latency, high speed, capacity, security and reliable and flexible connectivity infrastructures. Software-defined paradigms are allies to both networking and storage and data centres in achieving this.
The new workplace approach puts humans at the core of each job by using the most advanced technologies to shape the workplace around the worker. This evolutionary pattern will create a workplace with improved flexibility, digitalisation, performance and efficiency of daily tasks, resulting in a society able to take full advantage of the continuous progress of both connectivity and robotisation technologies.
The article was written by Marina Ruggieri on behalf of IEEE
Marina Ruggieri
Full Professor of Telecommunications Engineering at the University of Rome Tor Vergata. She is co-founder and Chair of the Steering Board of the university’s interdisciplinary Centre for Teleinfrastructures (CTIF). The centre focuses on the use of information and communications technology (ICT) for vertical applications (health, energy, cultural heritage, economics and law) by integrating terrestrial, air and space communications, computing, positioning and sensing.
INDUSTRY VIEW FROM INSTITUTE OF ELECTRICAL AND ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS
Introducing the Superagent – the future of customer support
When it comes to customer services, there’s a new normal in town…
The hurdles we’ve all had to clear during the global pandemic are gradually coming to an end. But while the shock for businesses has subsided, what’s interesting is the way it’s accelerated the deployment of online-only customer services.
Practically, this change has meant many businesses have invested even more in their web-based support functions, spinning up browser-based customer services where there previously were none. It’s hard to see them ever going back.
Many brands, however, were already making this move, and the necessity triggered by Covid-19 has accelerated this shift. At Upscope we’ve already been working with “online only” customer service teams for the past six years, so this comes as no surprise to us.
Things are far different to the call centres of the past. Long gone are the huge office buildings filled with rows and rows of desks, manned by stressed support operatives. In today's world, the above description couldn’t be further from the truth.
The modern-day support Superagent has a lot more responsibility than the customer support agents of old. Thanks to the influence of AI and automation, 'super agents' are only becoming more helpful and specialised than ever before.
What do superagents look like?
We’re quickly becoming used to chatbots and automated responses that have been deployed by businesses to tackle the majority of simple (and time-sapping) issues customers tend to call about. This means that the only issues which reach a human tend to be more specialised and nuanced, or require a more bespoke solution.
This change in job requirements has propelled the traditional role of the customer service operative or customer support agent upmarket – with the term “superagent” quickly becoming a more apt term for these new multi-skilled workers.
Superagents need a larger variety of technical product knowledge, and an understanding of the various options and solutions that can aid their customers. They are also not adverse to deploying sales skills, because in order to successfully solve their problem the customer may at times need to spend more money – upgrading to bigger software plans, or changing hardware for example.
A good example of what a superagent might look like is the Apple Genius – rebranded support workers who can solve problems and offer solutions, as well as delight customers and sell effectively.
The tools of the future
With the shift to online-only services, and the increased usage of AI and automation, superagents will soon become the norm. The tools these new workers will require will need to match their wider skillset.
Here at Upscope, we’re working on building a full-stack context machine which will allow superagents to understand customers' needs and problems fast. Our main tool, co-browsing, helps superagents see exactly what their customers see on their screen in just a few clicks. This is massively useful for onboarding new customers, troubleshooting issues, or helping customers make the right buying decisions.
However, to work effectively, superagents will need full-context data on the customer in front of them. They’ll need to know what the customer was doing right before they hit a roadblock or error, and they’ll need predictive algorithms which foresee the issues the customer may incur later down the line.
by Cameron James, Head of Marketing, Upscope
If you want to see how Upscope customers such as Square and Moo give their agents superpowers, click here.
The Klarna conundrum: why treating buy-now-pay-later apps like banks will not protect consumers
Whether you use Klarna all the time or have barely heard of it, it’s time to start paying attention: the buy-now-pay-later app has just become the biggest private fintech company in Europe. Klarna has completed a new round of fundraising, valuing it at US$46 billion (£33 billion). That’s four times what it was worth last September, and on a par with fellow Swedish tech giant Spotify.
Klarna offers interest-free credit on purchases with participating retailers, including Decathlon, Desigual, JD Sports and Oasis. It allows shoppers to delay payment, or split larger purchases into manageable sums, and does not perform traditional credit checks, opting for a more permissive “soft search”. Retailers cover the cost of the interest as if it was a sales discount.
Klarna operates in western Europe, Australia and the US, and has exploded in popularity during the pandemic. It claims to have 90 million customers, including 13 million in the UK, and has numerous rivals such as Clearpay/Afterpay, Affirm and Sezzle. Traditional retailers such as M&S and John Lewis are also reported to be looking at entering the fray.
Such offerings are controversial, however. Critics allege such schemes encourage overspending and can potentially ruin customers’ credit histories if they fail to keep up on payments. Many see parallels between these schemes and notorious “payday lenders” from years gone by such as Wonga.com.
Four in ten customers in the UK who have used these apps in the last 12 months are reportedly struggling to repay. A quarter of consumers reported that they regretted using these platforms, with many saying they cannot afford repayments or are spending more than they expected. Similarly, Comparethemarket.com reported earlier this year that one fifth of users couldn’t repay Christmas spending without taking on more debt.
In the UK, the concerns prompted a review published in February by Christopher Woolard, formerly of the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). As a result, the FCA is now subjecting these operators to the same regulations as more traditional creditors, requiring things like affordability checks and making sure customers are treated fairly.
Some might argue that this solves the problem, but I disagree. Insights from behavioural psychology can shed light on this, and seemingly dusty debates from ancient Greek philosophy reveal why it’s wrong.
The psychological risks
Klarna claims to offer a “healthier, simpler and smarter alternative to credit cards”. It primarily targets millennials, with an average customer age of 33. Marketing material presents the app as the choice of the savvy shopper, with a clean wholesome aesthetic, reminiscent of a Scandi-style ad agency or hipster café menu.
Under FCA regulation, such lenders will be treated like other financial services targeting millennials such as Starling Bank or Monzo. So why isn’t it a case of problem solved?
By offering goods immediately, and delaying the pain of parting with any money, buy-now-pay-later lenders exploit the human tendency to undervalue future losses and overvalue present satisfaction – known as present bias. Research shows that this bias increases in response to instability and stress, raising the worry that such services disproportionately target consumers who are already vulnerable.
You could argue that credit cards also do this, but buy-now-pay-later lenders operate without hard credit checks, and go about this in an especially concerning manner. The service is offered at the online checkout, and often set by the retail partner as the default payment option. As Nobel prize-winning economists Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein argue in their influential book Nudge, altering defaults is particularly effective at changing behaviour.
Lenders primarily focus on consumer goods such as clothing and cosmetics, which are typically the subject of impulse buys. Focusing on products related to physical appearance, and targeting a particular age group, could shift social norms regarding consumption within the demographic, making higher value clothing items the norm. Once established, such norms are difficult to avoid.
These lenders also take advantage of “loss aversion” – the universal human tendency to prefer avoiding losses to acquiring equivalent gains. They do this by promoting their services as a way for online shoppers to order multiple items and then return those they don’t like. Because of the bias, shoppers may not return products once they have them at home – even if that was their original intention.
Thank you, Aristotle
One might say these strategies manipulate customers. Yet one person’s manipulation is another’s persuasion, and all commercial businesses employ persuasive strategies to encourage customers to spend.
Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle and his followers can help us draw a meaningful distinction between persuasion and manipulation. In a debate with the Sophists (specialists in the art of persuasion), the Aristotelians argued that the difference between manipulation and other persuasive strategies is that it bypasses or subverts the target’s rational capacities.
On that rationale, buy-now-pay-later apps are arguably manipulative as they rely on our irrational psychological biases. The concern is therefore less that they encourage us to spend, but how they do it. Some might argue that manipulation is everywhere, especially in advertising, but that doesn’t make it right. This is an ethical issue that simply classifying Klarna as a bank won’t solve.
What, then, is to be done? An outright ban would unfairly impact responsible users of the service. What is needed is regulation sensitive to the unique nature of these lenders, their service and the risks. It needs to include a duty to inform customers of the psychological biases that these services take advantage of (unwittingly or otherwise), to help consumers to make rational financial decisions. Apps would therefore need to point, for example, to the risks of consumers being tempted to keep more items once they have been bought, and the risks of default payment options.
Alongside this, we need a new professional body dedicated to overseeing this form of lending. It would need regulatory powers, and a commitment to act in the public interest enshrined in a code of conduct reflecting the unique ethical risks involved.
Joshua Hobbs, Lecturer and Consultant in Applied Ethics, University of Leeds
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.