In this article, originally featured in Business Leader: James Thomas’s Azzuu sports platform has grown rapidly after initially focusing on honing its platform by working with just one team: Everton
In this article, originally featured in Elite Business: In a skills crisis, how can we find, train and retain talent, ensuring their contribution builds the business, not just their careers
To build your business into an Asset of Value that will generate income today and capital tomorrow, you need to build a team. Unless you have a purposeful team on board, you are up the creek without a paddle. Or rather, paddle you will, 24/7/365, which means you have a job.
In 2023, British businesses advertised upwards of 1.4m jobs. Put differently, businesses needed to fill almost 1.5m job vacancies to sustain and grow their companies. Without people, you cannot grow and sometimes sustain what you have worked so hard to build. Yet our country barely released 400,000 people into our working economy. We have a skills and labour crisis, and it’s driving several outcomes that are likely to stay, including inflation, upward delegation, slow/stuck/regressive growth and disillusionment. Plucky politicians, including our current PM, dodge the issue, for which all sensible resolutions would be politically fraught and risk an uproar from vested Brexit interest, tax legislators, anti-globalists, and nationalists. The current rhetoric is that A.I. will plug the gaps. It’s a useful position where everyone slings the acronym around as a catch-all to sound smart, activate investment interest, and even win over new friends and contacts. It’s of no value right now when you are trying to build a team to take on the daily, weekly, and monthly operational activities that anchor you in the daily operational grind of sustaining your business, never mind growing it. You need people and talent to get going and growing.
This invites a conundrum. How do we source, win, and onboard talent where business owners and employers must gain equally from the relationship?
Talent invites several risks, including competition to afford their hefty salaries, attitude and arrogance once talent is onboarded after the hard sell of winning their favour, and vulnerability when talent delivers value and holds you ransom. Of course, the risk of expensive talent failing to deliver is also ever-present and all too common.
If your intent remains building an Asset of Value, ensuring that you translate talent’s value into company value is vital. The greatest, unmeasured cost I’ve seen across business is the cost of winning talent and receiving value from it when the talent vacates takes the value with it. It is a horrible failure in leadership, too, and a mistake that should only ever be made once. Watch the session below to appreciate the true cost a business owner faces after 20 months of investing in unmeasured and unmanaged talent.
There are several approaches to guarding against this cost.
Should building an Asset of Value be your objective? Once you are clear on your company’s purpose, bring it to life by first creating a system of delivery. This requires you to translate your desired customer experience into sequential, measurable activities that can be taught, delegated and remunerated, including how you market, sell, deliver, service and administer customers. Once done, the value lies in your company. Alternatively, hiring talent to create this consistent client experience means that the value of that experience lies with your talent unless you can ‘decode’ your talent into a system that can be shared, used and taught to other team members. Grinding out the former option takes longer but is more sustainable and valuable. It’s also more affordable and ensures your time and attention invested in getting it right remains your company’s IP.
Perhaps winning the war for talent is less about the scarcity of able, capable employees and more about adopting a different approach to how you lead, build, and capitalise your company. Wear both hats: that of an operator who can build solutions to win customers and hold them through a consistent, dependable customer experience and that of an investor who ensures that all your investments in human talent translate into value that vests in your company.
In this article, originally featured in Business Leader: An early interest in diving led to Yvonne Whiteley moving into data and eventually buying RED Scientific, which combines scientific research, technical support and engineering
In this article, originally featured in Business Leader: RNB Group has weathered a series of storms, from GDPR to Covid, but has learned to invest for growth.
In this article, first published in Elite Business, Pavlo puts a question mark on remote working.
Businesses are about people. And people are about skills, thinking and action. If your people are less than that, you should be looking at technology to do that person’s job. It’s more reliable, dependable and far easier to manage. But it won’t create magic, innovation or culture across your business. People will and do. Remote working puts a question mark on that.
Here are some reasons why.
Troubleshooting
When a problem arises, the ability to immediately resolve it by pulling people into a room before it cannot be done remotely. And if the problem and its solution need a multidisciplinary approach, which most problems do, then the right people in the room can step out after and all do what needs doing to get the job done.
As your business grows, it is even more critical because the people in the room might have to coordinate and organise their teams to get the job done. It’s instant, and when it comes to retaining clients and building a brand (problem resolution builds a brand better than any marketing campaign), you need to get it done there and then.
Culture and value
Culture is nebulous, yet without one, your business creates a staccato experience for suppliers, customers, and employees. Values create the nous that enables your business and its employees to operate against an intuitive framework when needed. This intuition or unconscious response develops over time. It doesn’t build from the values stated in your website or reception wall but through living, breathing and observing the behaviour of all business employees, especially its leaders.
If values create the framework and culture of the behaviour about what a company stands for, the best way to learn it is in person. Imagine a scenario where an employee enters the office of a manager. The door closes. A few minutes later, the employee leaves the office, pale and slightly stressed. Your colleague sitting next to you asks what went down. You explain what that employee did, and through that, you learn the authentic culture and values of that company. A word indicating a value, be it integrity, honesty, etc. means very little until it is understood and witnessed in practice.
Learning and training
While aspects of employee training are best offered online and therefore accessible remotely, the context, the application and the improvement of an employee’s performance arguably cannot be. We learn by doing not online engagements and content. Observation and “show and tell” are far more impactful ways of developing capability in your employees. Imagine trying to learn kung fu remotely rather than in the ring. Only when a punch lands do you genuinely understand how to take the theory and put it into a useful practice suited to your inherent abilities. The same goes for riding a bicycle, managing a project, managing a team, collecting a debtor book or selling.
Growth
Beyond a job, why do people opt to work in your business? I’ll put it into context in a recent meeting with a global law firm specialising in tax. Their brand exciting and innovative brand operates across a federation of autonomous companies operating in 169 countries. In the past, they won recruits with their innovative approach to tax, assured learning and very quick exposure to exciting clients. Their vibrancy won them talent before bigger firms’ cold, hard salary packages. But, they have found that remote working has directly prevented the handover of relationships from senior partners to junior partners and associates. It has harmed the transfer of knowledge on the subject matter, the personalities making up a client, the industry, and it has stunted the ability of senior partners to pick junior partners effectively and for junior partners in return to compete to work with promising associates.
Remote working is a privilege, not a right. If you are attracting employees who demand it, consider moving on. They are there for their comfort rather than the well-being of the business as active, engaged, committed contributors who go beyond fulfilling a functional role.
When is there a case for remote work? It should be part of your business-building toolkit. How to use it, when and where and then how to manage it is a future article.
When Covid hit, the world shut down. Remote work became a necessity. Across all business, leaders are trying to evaluate the sustainability of it all.
Listen to the podcast of Pavlo Phitidis discussing this on The Money Show or read on…
In manufacturing it’s less sustainable as the means of production are plant and equipment. Unless its digital production like websites and software or even drafting and product design. The challenge there is the cost of technology to get the job done. Product and trade need people at site to lift, carry, make, pack, send their offerings to their customers. Hard to coordinate remotely with the business centred around a warehouse.
The service industry is where the greatest shift may lie. With people and rent being the biggest fixed operating costs, the motivation to shed the landlord is high. On paper it’s almost irresistible. But what is the cost?
Beyond a job, beyond a paycheck, why do we work? Hopefully, we find purpose, meaning if we are lucky and a sense of value in that we count and matter to our colleagues and peers.
This manifests in the social elements of the work environment. Laughing at joke, raising eyes or brows at the remark made by a colleague commenting on their kid’s behavior, gossip about the boss’s new shoes, sniggering at the hung-over manager who had a rough weekend. All subtle, all social cues that evolve the character of that company’s workplace, that shape the culture through a series of unspoken rules of engagement beyond functional work ethics and norms. Playing, humoring, charm, interference, irritation, and celebration add further to the social environment, mimicking the character of the boss or managers or outspoken characters that every business has.
How does it work in the cold hard stare of a screen, cameras off, staccato communications, tones unattached to facial expressions and body language? It’s hard to get right. What does it say when your employees don’t want to come back…or do? Might this be the truest reflection of your company’s culture.
Culture is vital to create meaning and value beyond function. Work is a social engagement and the extent to which it can happen, how it happens has a tremendous impact on the wellbeing, happiness, and engagement of your team. This in turn impacts productivity, performance, and innovation.
How, where, and when does it occur?
A sales rep or BD comes back from a client engagement and needs to talk about the meeting. They had an epiphany moment, and the client is asking for a service that needs discussion. Getting it right gets the deal and might open a new market or competitive edge.
Operations is struggling to service a client’s expectations. Scope creep, eroding profit and time is moving out of control. The client is important, so is the time and budget driven project plan. Who has the relationship with the client to sort it out and who can ask?
An insight to a workflow comes to mind. The opportunity to improve a system is real. Quickly gathering a few colleagues in front of a white board to map it out makes it happen.
The impromptu nature of these engagements is lost and with that comes a cost.
In the flow of work, a problem arises. Leaning over the workstation or stretching across the desk, asking a colleague how to resolve it or whether they too have it is lost. How do we quantify that cost? Is it a function of time or worse, will it be ignored and what then follows on from it?
How do you engage in a negotiation across a screen? Negotiation relies on cues, expressions, tone, body, and face language. Measuring its intent – taking a chance to being deathly serious – is normally understood through these human cues. How do you get it done with cameras off? And if the cameras are on, how much can you read beyond the words being spoken, losing out all the other cues. Getting it wrong comes at a cost and we have not yet begun to understand it.
How do figure out what’s right and what’s wrong in terms of behavior and practice. Would asking suggest you don’t know and what then would the company think of your question, answer or behavior. Especially if you are a new employee, who can you observe or ask casually at the coffee station or water cooler?
Securing and onboarding future talent is particularly hard. Whilst it is the norm in multidisciplinary software projects, it is not in the everyday functions of a services business. How do you induct new recruits into the social dynamic of a business and weave them through the fabric of how, who, what makes the business work…beyond the function of their job? The goal driven and focused screen engagements get them only so far!
Can you measure your team’s performance? What if you have a bigger team, can you still? How do you measure performance? The great majority do so through activity and action. Very few businesses have systems to measure through output metrics. Logging onto the ERP or CRM and then logging off 8 hours later does not mean 8 hours of work was done!
How do you build a cohesive team? Especially true in the age-old battle between sales and ops. Tensions arise as sales ‘over sell and promise’ when ops ‘underdelivers to the client expectation’. Teams form, battle lines are drawn, managers resolve, learnings are gained and the physical engagement around it matters deeply. A great client meeting from an enthusiastic BD cannot be shared as she triumphantly walks into the office; the ring of a bell on a deal done is heard by nobody, a problem solved in administration is respected by no one. Team is built through the multiple, small, seemingly insignificant actions that create alignment, coherence, and loyalty. Is there a cost to not, having it?
We don’t know until we do. Understanding and interpreting the interactions between people is a dark science. Hard to measure, hard to notice often, hard to put a value onto until one day, things are different and not for the better. Truth is found in action and already some of the biggest service companies in the world are telling their team to come back to the workplace – Apple and JPMorgan count in amongst them. Why? And especially because they have worked remotely for years, well before the pandemic. Already, hybrid models are forming. Services organizing and reshaping to accommodate hybrid models are burgeoning as the race to find what works best is still to be seen!