Work should be the engine of social mobility – what can we learn from Covid-19?

Opportunity and inclusion have been driving forces for my career – and they tend to inform everything I do, from the Low Pay Commission to my work leading the REC, one of Britain’s biggest business voices. The power of the recruitment industry to help facilitate good and meaningful work has always been at the core of what the REC does, but the current crisis has supercharged the importance of our industry and what a successful recruitment and staffing sector can do to create real change.

In 2020, most businesses have been forced to dramatically pivot their business models – in many cases virtually overnight. Leaders have had to ask, “what are the most important skillsets for us right now?” and consider how best to nurture those skills internally through things like online learning and development, as well as externally via the hiring and on-boarding of new staff.

For recruiters, that is a different challenge. Increasingly the question is not about filling a role, it is about solving a client’s problem. A professional and advisory service, not just a transactional one. ­I’ve talked to many businesses about how they can use the crisis to reframe their offering to meet the needs of the moment instead of relying on their traditional model.

Change is inevitable – in many ways the Covid crisis just accelerates trends that were already moving. And while leaders are instrumental in navigating this change, is what our people deliver and how we support them that will make the real difference.

The future of the office, productivity and progression

The debate centred around the future of the office is emblematic of this challenge. Of all my conversations with industry professionals, this one seems to be the common denominator. We know we can work well at home – often more productively – and that in the future we will have a much more mixed workplace model. That will help with some key things – like improving the UK’s dreadful record on disability employment. But is the workplace itself dead?

No. Leaving aside the fact that there is much we do not yet know about – the long-term impact of permanent, non-voluntary homeworking on stress, health and productivity is going to be an object of study for years to come - our office spaces enable us in many ways. They are where we come together to work, build organisational culture, and – importantly – innovate. Innovation often happens around the edges of a business. At the water cooler, after hours or at the edges of meetings. We all know that – innovation happens bottom-up. Co-location also acts as a social boost and makes change and communication management easier.

But workplaces are also great engines of social mobility.  I’ve lost count of the number of articles I have seen praising the joys of working at home. That’s all very well when you have a nice garden and a spare room to work in – less so in a city flat share where working from home means a shared space or working on your bed.

Younger workers in particular are likely to feel that working from home these past few months hasn’t been peachy. Leaving aside the issues of workspaces, we know socialisation, progression and learning happens when more junior staff interact with more experienced colleagues – in the same ways that younger staff might repay this with new approaches and innovative thinking.

For these more inexperienced workers, the loss of social workspaces could be catastrophic for progression and development – and only a certain amount of that can be replaced by online learning. At the same time, young people leaving education this year face lower hiring, and fewer other opportunities – how can firms other than the very largest run socially distant internship programmes?

Likewise, there has been too little discussion of how embedded cultural expectations have made the experience of mothers working from home more challenging, especially during the school closure. After a decade of progress on participation and representation, avoiding that casting a shadow on inclusion for the next few months and years will need to be a priority.

So finding an effective new mixed model of home and office will matter. Our development plans will change – young workers will probably be working from home more, and will need the confidence to work outside of the traditional cocoon of a shared team space. And we’ll need to run the business in a more location-neutral way. We all know that an individual dialling in from home on a spider phone could be marginal in an office meeting. As we come back to the co-working space, we need to think about how we change that, so that people at home have the same level of input as everyone else.

I’ve touched on only a few of the risks we face. It’s essential companies acknowledge the different starting points staff have had over the past few months and will have in the months ahead. The mixed model of workspace will need to work for all to be effective.

To maintain a highly-diverse, inclusive talent-rich workforce, employers and their recruitment partners need to focus on workforce planning – making flexibility go hand in hand with inclusion. That strikes me as a really challenging agenda for HRDs across the whole of British business but one which my industry stands ready to apply their expertise to helping with.

Leading with humanity

One thing I know is true – we can’t leave all this to the bean counters. And I think the recruitment industry is powerfully positioned to drive change. Inequality of opportunity exists in labour markets as it exists in wider society – you just have to look at the salience of the Black Lives Matter movement to be reminded that we need to be challenging ourselves. Right now, it’s very easy (and right!) to be focused on the top and bottom line if you’re running a business, but we need to do more than this. People will remember how we behaved through these times, and the longer-term success of our businesses will rely on it.

For businesses and business leaders this last period has been a powerful experience. I spend most of my life now in my home office, and I invite almost everyone I work with into it on a regular basis. That has brought a humanity to our leadership conversations and my relations with our staff. Just the other day I was doing a webinar with a Chief Executive and her daughter wandered past in the background twice. That reminder of our humanity is something to grab hold of – a source of connection. The people who do the best work are people who are really engaged, and engagement comes with treating people with respect, understanding their motivations and their wider self.

All of the technology we now have can be used to enhance engagement or to disrupt it.  The worst thing I’ve seen is companies using the technology as a modern form of employee monitoring – that will only get you an uptick in performance for a bit. It won’t get you those lasting improvements in the long term. It’s important to trust, engage, support and nurture your teams – this is how you get people to be more organically productive. If you need convincing, I recommend reading The Joy of Work by Bruce Daisley for some examples of how this really makes a difference. The point of management is the effective engagement of workers who each have different goals and hopes and aspirations, and delivering on those goals as far as possible alongside the success of the business. More often than not – they can be aligned. But it requires us to make a conscious effort to do so, and for managers to acknowledge, again, the different starting points employees have.  

Get your change motivation right

In the social media age brands are much more fragile than they were 25 years ago. I think the ‘no red face’ test is a real thing – businesses don’t want to do something that could fundamentally embarrass them because the repercussions would be huge. But if that’s your only motivation to enact change, you’re already going wrong. Encouragingly, a lot of what we’ve seen from corporates’ reactions to issues like the Black Lives Matter campaign is about a growing understanding that reflecting the hopes and aspirations of the people that you employ is both good for business – and fundamentally the right thing to do. The cult of corporate social responsibility got things started, but now we need businesses to change because they want to do better by all their employees – existing and future talent.

The good news is that I don’t think there’s any real way back. The world is going to be different and our challenge is to embrace that change. We should start from resetting our view of the role of business. One of the most damaging bits of language I’ve come across is ‘businesses and society’ used as if they are separate things, as though businesses are not part of society, and run alongside the rest of the world in some different class, with different behaviours.

What nonsense. We need to acknowledge that businesses are society, and society’s challenges are our own. In this light, sustainable growth must be sustainable for all – or our own businesses’ growth will be open to challenge. Whether it is reducing carbon or supporting opportunities, as leaders, we have the capacity and the compulsion to set the practical decisions we are making every day in this crisis – workspaces, management approaches, training – in their wider, long-term context.

The free market economy is the greatest tool of human progress. But that market must be free for the progress to happen. It is up to all of us to take action that boosts economic and social inclusion as an essential component of successful 21st Century capitalism. 

I’d love to hear what you think about this. Please share your thoughts with the #TalentVoices hashtag.