Living systems where everything’s linked
“Learn how to see. Realise that everything connects to everything else.”
Leonardo da Vinci
The words of a truly great, artist and polymath who pushed countless boundaries in his time. Having drawn inspiration from the time of the Renaissance, let’s move our focus to a revolution: the significance of hyper-connectivity, here and now, in our fast-changing world. What does ‘hyper-connected’ mean? A dictionary might say something about the ‘widespread or habitual use of devices that have internet connectivity’.
We’re going to look at it from an HR perspective, however, and for me the starting point is to view organisations as living, biological systems with many intricate nuances. It’s about treating your company as a complex, conscious system and making use of data and technology to ensure a personalised experience for every individual within it. Why is this concept important? Companies that want to thrive no matter what happens need to bounce back quickly as the economy recovers, which means welcoming back employees and considering all their experiences - for the good of everyone.
- Topic:
- Human Resources
Once upon a crime…
Here’s a quick story. My eldest son is a pretty typical 17-year-old. He has his own bank account, with a card, and loves finding great deals online, mostly via the family’s tablet. Recently, an advert for a well-known retailer grabbed his attention. It was selling a favoured brand of trainers at an incredible price. He clicked on the link, was taken to a site he recognised, registered the usual information – including bank details – and placed an order. The trainers should have arrived within two days, but a week later nothing had appeared. It was around then that I noticed a ‘Thank You’ pop-up related to the order, which also promised more great deals on the website. It looked suspicious so I closed it down, asked my son about it and heard about the deal. I then checked the website of the retailer directly, only to find there was no such offer. We contacted the bank, cancelled the card, performed an antivirus scan on the device and changed the passwords for all its apps and accounts. Suffice to say, the trainers never arrived. We’d been defrauded.
The reason for recounting this tale is a belief that personal stories can play a really valuable role within training, giving people the confidence to talk about and share experiences with colleagues and managers – and that matters, because now more than ever employees have a vital role to play in businesses’ resilience against the ever-growing threat of cyber-attacks and data breaches.
Against a backdrop of major global upheaval and unprecedented change in the workplace, it’s perhaps unsurprising that the type of aptitudes and abilities people are seeking out is changing. In tandem with this, there’s an apparent move away from more task-orientated skills, such as time management, towards more people-orientated skills instead. Indeed, recent research by LinkedIn helped to identify the top five soft skills predicted to be particularly in demand during 2021.So, a quick quiz: how many of these do you think you can guess (we’ll confirm them for you further below)?
This development hints at just how important it is to look ahead and ensure the health and long-term success of your business: in essence, to future-proof your workforce. Invariably, it comes back to the people and making sure that you’re supporting individuals, nurturing talent and navigating as a team through the usual terrain and uncertainty alike. Closing any skills gaps that your employees might have, to enable the business to grow and prosper, is a crucial part of achieving those aims.
For many employers, there is no choice but to have staff physically at work rather than working from home. In some instances, it can be a significant proportion of the workforce. From construction and manufacturing to transport, logistics and food production – there are a variety of sectors having to make significant steps to stay on top of the workplace Covid-19 risk. The good news is that there is practical help available.
- Topic:
- Construction
Following a recent commission from the UK Government, HSE has announced they will be carrying out spot checks and inspections on organisations to make sure their day-to-day working environment is COVID-secure.
Whether staff are working from home or on-site from a central workspace, employers have a duty to provide clear safety and compliance guidelines around COVID-19 that all employees must comply with.
See how you can take a simple piece of learning and deliver it with the impact of Mike Tyson riding a bull on a turbo-powered treadmill…
Face to face training has long been an effective medium for workplace training, offering a classroom environment for staff to share ideas and interact one to one with the trainer. However, training delivery has evolved and now includes solutions such as virtual F2F as a credible method of training.
However, there has also been a considerable shift towards eLearning in the past decade and never more so than amidst the current global pandemic; necessitating major changes to workplace practices some of which may well be here to stay.
In this, the first of three blogs, we will explore how eLearning can turn the training typically delivered face to face, into an effective and valuable training resource.
In simple terms, Gamification is the practise of placing the principles of gameplay into a traditionally non-game scenario; there are many famously effective examples of distinctly different businesses employing this approach.
Having recently covered microlearning and some of the key benefits it brings to an increasingly digital world within a previous blog post, here we’ll be expanding further upon one of these benefits - learning in the flow of work.
