Rethinking Employee Experience: Challenges Connecting With Talent In The New Decade

Last 5th November 2019, took place at the LLYC office in Madrid the co-creation workshop “The challenges of talent in the 2020s”, where many HR professionals could participate to identify the challenges for the the 2020s related to the connection with talent. The result? The list of challenges and solutions given below. 

“Time seems to flow calmly in these lands, marked by the pace of a landscape of arid beauty and an immovable social order, at the top of which is the landholding aristocracy. But things are about to be shaken up with the arrival of Garibaldi. Don Fabrizio, prince of Salina, an imposing, proud, sensual, lucid man, patriarch of one of the most powerful families on the island, contemplates undaunted these troubled times, which could sink his world, or could bring changes that in fact will allow everything to go on the same...”  

So goes the story of Il Gattopardo, Giuseppe 

Tomasi di Lampedusa’s first and only novel. He died before he could see it published. At the time, the novel was deemed so controversial that it was hard to find anyone willing to risk publishing it. Il Gattopardo has since become a classic, even getting a movie adaptation and a new Spanish edition, released by the Anagrama publishing house earlier this year.  

This novel, which takes place amid the upheaval of the end of the 19th century when the aristocracy lost power to the new bourgeoisie, gave its name to a sociopolitical effect that comes about during uncertain times: The need for an appearance of great change to ensure nothing changes. 

As companies work to connect with talent, it seems many are experiencing a “gattopardo effect,” judging by the conclusions sector professionals came to during LLYC’s Nov. 5 workshop in Madrid. We gathered with the goal of getting back to the basics and leaving aside periphery issues that may have distracted us in the past. We wanted to focus on people again. 

This reflects the concerns of the professionals responsible for companies’ human capital. Little more than a month before the beginning of the new decade, we have to ask ourselves what challenges we will we face. Will the rules of the game change, or remain similar to how they are now? 

In this volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) environment, it is getting harder to make accurate predictions. The futures of unstable contexts are especially uncertain, making actions based on predictions risky. Given this premise, we gathered executives from Allen Overy, Amadeus, Gonvarri, Indra, ING, Just Eat, LLYC, Multiópticas, Schindler y VitalDent to reflect on the major challenges that lie ahead when it comes to connecting with talent.  

The process starts with understanding today’s employee experience and the concerns that already exist, then using these to analyze the future. Understanding what preoccupies us today allows us to think ahead to what we will need tomorrow. We did this by analyzing the various phases we have seen in companies’ relationships with their professionals. Below are the main conclusions of this analysis, ordered according to an employee’s timeline at a company. 

TALENT SEARCH: STOP WAITING FOR THEM TO FIND YOU 

The complexity involved in capturing talent has only grown over the years, and it takes up a great deal of HR’s time and focus. Today’s market is characterized by a lack of differentiation between competitors, low number of professionals qualified for hyper-specialized positions, competition from other big-spending companies and a new generation of workers in search of new challenges. How will we approach finding talent in the future? 

Employer brand will play a fundamental role in the next decade. Companies will continue to allocate resources to gain a foothold in the war over talent, and some key aspects in this process 

The effort, dedication, and passion put into caring for employees is often lost when they leave. But when an employee departs for a new project, it should be a time of joy in which we acknowledge each other as facilitators of a complete professional career. To do this successfully, companies will consider the following: 

• Cultivating an alumni pool. Former employees, if treated properly, make very good ambassadors. They can feed the funnel of incoming staff through their recommendations, which attract new talent to the company. This makes it vital to continue their relationships with the company even after their contracts end. 

• Outboarding optimized company processes. Exit interviews are proving to be ideal for improving the employee’s outgoing experience. They are a key tool companies can use to encourage feedback, which can then be used to continuously improve employee experience. 

• Humanization. Empathy is key throughout the process, and this is especially true when employees leave. We must stop viewing rotation as a purely negative thing and begin approach the process with transparency and an open-door policy. 

When we first organized the IDEAS workshop, we believed that, in talking about the future, we would largely be talking about technology. Instead, we spent three hours talking about people and how to improve their experiences. In short, we believe the greatest challenge in connecting with talent lies in involving the whole organization in especially sensitive processes, such as recruiting, onboarding and offboarding. We must focus on the  individual and offer personalized experiences that suit our diverse workforces and people’s changing needs. We must make our corporate values tangible an  strengthen company branding. In the coming decade, technology will be both omnipresent and mundane. We will return to talking more about people and less about technology.