An office building in London, UK on Tuesday, October 25 2022. Picture: BLOOMBERG/JOSE SARMENTO
This modern-day battle for talent has many of the same sources — finding the right skills, competition from high-paying regions, bottlenecks in skills development, restrictions on the mobility of labour, changes in technology, and ageing skills of the workforce. the actual practices and behaviours. The artefacts are the visible embodiments in the look and feel of an organisation — the rites, rituals, stories, myths, heroes, symbols, and use of language.
Three key trends are forcing us to stand back, explore our assumptions and look at that elephant differently: the pandemic working changes, the way men and women work and generational gaps. Building an organisational culture when we only know each other in two dimensions or even simply by a thumbnail on the screen, needs a new approach and new tools. Organisations need to rethink how they create those attractive, high-performance, high-trust cultures.
Organisational cultures based on more traditional career models risk losing talent as individuals vote with their feet. Organisations need to consider how they retain and attract women and men who have expectations of career flexibility within supportive organisational cultures.