Companies with a purpose in pursuit of the best talent

Beside digitalization, human teams are the fundamental asset of any knowledge-society corporation. People truly make the difference and can secure success. Therefore, the main challenge for companies is to retain and attract the best talent, and offer them the methodological, cultural and technological tools to give their best, following the purpose set and shared.

The purpose, more so than economic gain, glues together the vital interests of the corporate community and represents their values, enabling personal and business growth in an ecosystem of shared purpose, as pointed out by the expert Daniel Truran, general manager at ebbf and B Corp ambassador to B Lab Europe.

 According to expert Tammy Erickson, considered one of the 50 most influential management and leadership thinkers worldwide, the right approach to this challenge is mobilizing intelligence.

How can you mobilize intelligence?

• Innovate: combine several types of knowledge and expertise to create something better.
• Perceive: detect and anticipate the market and social and economic changes.
• Organize: collect and utilize small units of knowledge.
• Customize: create profound relations with clients, suppliers and otherstakeholders.
• Collaborate: structure processes to create strength through the contributions of different groups of professionals.
• Adapt: structure assets to create options; respond flexibly and swiftly.
• Learn: experience with new approaches; select and blend in the best of on-going activities.

You can watch Tammy’s speech at the Future Trends Forum here:

Regarding people management, we find that:

1.- Professional collaborative platforms make specialist resources and freelance talent widely available.

2.- There is an urgent need to empower all employees with digital skills, and to upskill some profiles.

We should add the increasingly significant soft skills to this: in an increasingly digitalized and interconnected world, companies are giving priority to their employee’s soft skill training, advanced emotional and cognitive skills.

What are HR departments doing in the face of these challenges and opportunities?

First, they must align with the organization’s strategic aim if they had not done so already. Corporations need to position themselves as responsible organizations, part of an ecosystem with a lofty purpose, geared towards the common good of society and planet Earth. As pointed out in our last report, Trust in the digital era, a company’s purpose is critical to retain and attract talent.

Besides, they should follow some recommendations made in a recent paper by Deloitte:

1.- Design workplace wellbeing: blending workers’ physical, mental, financial and social health into the workplace.

2.- Empowering employees: beyond re-designing workstations and upskilling, the goal is to leverage workers’ capacity to act and choose as a means to drive learning, adaptability and impact in an organization.

3.- Super teams: creating teams that leverage technology to work better. From collaboration tools that enhance team work, such as Microsoft Teams or Slack, to artificial intelligence solutions and data science to support more agile decision making.

4.- Governing workforce strategies: using data science to enable decision making in people management.

5.- Changing the People Manager role: redesigning the way the whole company works.

In short, it is about creating a diverse, inclusive and fair workforce, where everyone can give their best to the company. Diversity is more than a nice to have: 74% of employees expect their employer to engage actively in current social debates. When the lack of diversity becomes evident, workers become distrustful.

Finally, technology-driven innovations will enable a diverse, fair workforce to work and perform better, be more productive and enjoy greater wellbeing.