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ESSENTIALS FOR LEADERS AND THOSE THEY LEAD
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Edited by Rama Ramaswami Senior Editor, New York
If you were marketing a brand, you’d spend considerable time and money on identifying and segmenting your customers and creating personas for various categories of buyers. The changing nature of today’s workforce demands a similar approach to “selling” potential candidates on your organization. People’s expectations of their employers, jobs, and career prospects are higher than ever before, but understanding the new talent pool is about more than offering flexible hours or personalized benefits. A better approach is to take a tip from successful marketers and segment your target audience—your employees—carefully. Defining the needs of different groups of people makes it easier to hire the right talent as well as ward off attrition. Here are some strategies to get started.
AN IDEA
The pandemic has led many people to reassess their priorities and deal with employers on their own terms, turning the Great Attrition into the Great Renegotiation. But organizational talent strategies haven’t caught up—employers still rely on outdated compensation, titles, and advancement opportunities to lure candidates. In this article based on a McKinsey global survey, our experts identify five critical employee personas that leaders must understand to meet the challenge of hiring and retaining talent. For example, “traditionalists” are career-oriented people who are mostly satisfied with attractive pay, perks, and career advancement prospects, whereas “do-it-yourselfers” value autonomy, flexibility, and meaningful work as much as or more than compensation. Evaluating employee personas enables you to analyze what different segments of workers want and figure out how best to engage them.
A BIG NUMBER
46%
That’s the average percentage of skills that come from work experience, which adds to the value of human capital—the collective knowledge, attributes, skills, experience, and health of the workforce. A McKinsey study of more than a million workers in the US, the UK, Germany, and India shows that the best organizations help individuals continuously upgrade their skills, earn more, and build track records that translate into value. The most effective way for workers to maximize the “experience effect” is to join an organization that recognizes their potential, embraces mobility—internal and external—and offers opportunities to learn.
A QUOTE
That’s from a survey of 12 countries that shows the world becoming mostly “flat” for people who wish to work across borders. Some nations still have immigration restrictions, but many have introduced visas to attract skilled talent to their shores. In the next ten years, more than 260 million university graduates are expected to hit global labor markets. Increasing numbers of workers seek global mobility as a lifestyle choice, and the popularity of remote work means that leaders have ample flexibility to hire people from anywhere in the world. “Try before you buy” is an increasingly popular strategy: one firm begins onboarding workers remotely and then decides whether to transfer them to larger hubs to work in hybrid setups.
A SPOTLIGHT INTERVIEW
“It’s the boldness of role moves that’s a really important part of the story of possibility,” says McKinsey partner Anu Madgavkar in this podcast on encouraging employees to try new things. “It’s important to enable more workers to break out of what they might have thought was their destiny simply because of the level of education that they had.” Employees who make bold role changes by taking on stretch jobs or assignments tend to have had exposure to healthy and supportive organizations early in their careers, enabling them to become upwardly mobile. While individual initiative is an important factor, the onus is “equally on employers to create the conditions that help and enable the whole process of learning through work experience,” Madgavkar says.
USE AND CARE
No time to create worker personas? Try writing a “user manual” about yourself, and encourage your team to do the same. The concept of a personal user manual—a document outlining the best way for others to work with you—caught on in the early 2000s when executives found that providing a quick-start guide to themselves, and encouraging their coworkers to follow suit, helped colleagues adapt to one another quickly and avoid conflicts on the job. Popularized in the media and adopted by some organizations, personal user manuals reveal individual quirks, habits, preferences, and working styles. For example, you might indicate that you favor early-morning meetings or prefer face-to-face contact rather than email. Beware, though, of revealing too much information, as oversharing in the workplace is never a good idea.
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