Business is going social and the right people are key. Finding them is going to be a real headache, and money alone won’t cure anything.
There’s an adage I’ve referenced before in Futurenautics about those who know the cost of everything and the value of nothing. And when that comes to the evolving landscape of talent, recruitment, training, learning, and retention it’s a particularly apposite one.
The new and different attitudes of the Millennials or Gen Y—and the cohort coming up behind them, the Gen Z’s—are a matter of established fact now. Their expectations of work and reward and the technology which supports them both at work and at play have caused an astonishing and fundamental rethink in organisations globally—both large and small—about their approaches to the people who work for them. But what’s really astonishing is that, according to those who claim to speak on behalf of maritime employers, it doesn’t apply in maritime.
At the recent IMEC conference the outgoing head of the organisation made it clear to his audience that the way to ensure the industry attracts, successfully trains and retains the talent it needs comes down to just one thing. Money. Benefits. Exactly the same things that motivate all us Gen X’ers.
Maritime is already struggling to successfully recruit, train and retain across its ranks at sea and ashore, and this kind of attitude isn’t going to improve matters. The people that maritime needs aren’t just seafarers, we need people of all stripes to run our organisations and innovate our product and service offerings. And we are competing with other industries to get them.
All this talk about flexibility, pride in the organisation, CSR credentials and strong technology infrastructure is just hot air. The people who work in maritime are motivated by one thing and one thing only, and that’s the salary they can earn.
Whether this view is based on any research findings I’m not sure, but if it is then the results will contradict every available study undertaken in this area in the past few years, and they haven’t been shared with the industry.
It’s really very important, because maritime is already struggling to successfully recruit, train and retain across its ranks at sea and ashore, and this kind of attitude isn’t going to improve matters. The people that maritime needs aren’t just seafarers, we need people of all stripes to run our organisations and innovate our product and service offerings. And we are competing with other industries to get them.
Perhaps more importantly, if IMEC is correct and maritime people are uniquely disinterested in the kind of social support, and technology-based collaboration that the people being recruited by our suppliers and customers demand, then we’re going to struggle mightily to get anywhere in the new business environment.
Because back in the real world the attitudes are utterly different. In every corner of the enterprise technology is beginning to underpin and enable HR in what is a massive shift in emphasis and practice to that which has gone before. So it made perfect sense to me when I came across what claims to be the fastest growing HR event in Europe, and discovered it was called HR Tech.
I spent a really interesting day there last month, and would strongly encourage those in maritime and shipping HR to do the same when the event moves to Paris later this year. I say that for several key reasons.
The first is that here in maritime we are still very much bogged down in the silo approach to functions in the organisation. Between technology platforms and collaboration those silos are disappearing, and they need to. What HR Tech Europe demonstrates forcibly is that HR, learning and training—like the other ugly sisters IT and Procurement—is transitioning from its traditional role as a cost centre and support function to a strategic enabler of growth at the heart of the business.
SAPS stands for Status, Access, Power and Stuff—and it represents in descending order, the hierarchy of motivation. Something well understood at HR Tech Europe.
The second is that social networks and conversations are pivotal to the shift, and in that respect the conference and exhibition practices what it preaches. It has its own app which includes networking tools and feeds of real-time tweets from all the various seminars and presentations, seeking and incorporating feedback good and bad—but overwhelmingly good. In fact the whole atmosphere is almost aggressively collaborative in comparison to the sedate affairs we have in the maritime industry.
What the event is reflecting of course is the new planks of HR, training and development—and money isn’t a major one. Digital interaction has allowed us to evaluate human behaviour and motivations like never before and then take those insights and apply them.
Thanks to all those companies interacting online we’ve come to understand far better what motivates the Millennials and the cohort behind them. There’s an acronym for it and that’s SAPS. It stands for Status, Access, Power and Stuff—and it represents in descending order, the hierarchy of motivation.
That doesn’t mean that the salary you pay has no bearing on the talent you can attract, but it should indicate its place in the pecking order. What anyone in HR and training should already understand is that attracting an ideal candidate with a good salary is just the beginning.
Absorbing them into the company culture via the onboarding process and then providing an environment which allows them to thrive and contribute are ongoing and vital activities too. And technology platforms are demonstrating how we can optimise both of those things.
A few years ago I wrote about why companies should use the likes of Facebook and Twitter as marketing and content outposts but not use them as corporate platforms for employee engagement. Because it’s never a good idea to build your company around a platform it doesn’t own, and whose business model is to monetise all the data exchanged on it, namely yours. But the benefits of social networking and collaboration for organisations are too valuable to ignore. Hence the growing use of Enterprise Social Networks.
For anyone who isn’t sure about the term then in a nutshell think about a company Facebook, but geared to more corporate application. Of course it’s more complex than that, but you can find plenty more detail by googling the term (other search engines are available-Ed). Companies can create their own ESN but, as Paul Thomas, senior manager of digital communications and social media at Grant Thornton explained in his session, that didn’t work for him.
Grant Thornton finally settled on Jive software as the backbone of their ESN, which is called Jam, but as Thomas made clear the real beating heart of an ESN is team culture, and that comes from more than a technology platform. That culture is based around trusting employees to have direct conversations with everyone from the CEO to HR and also external people too. It’s also about appreciating that social media is not for everyone, but that it should be understood by everyone.
In a similar vein Joachim Heinz, Team Lead for social business at Robert Bosch GmbH described Bosch’s drive towards what he describes as Enterprise 2.0. Based around its ESN, Bosch is changing the way its 360,000 associates operate and collaborate in an attempt to make Bosch more flexible, more innovative and to counter the ‘trust me, I’m an engineer’, culture.
Heinz describes how the ESN defines transparency as the default principle, forcing siloed teams to stop hiding information from each other and driving the creation of open communities of which there are to date 22,000. And whilst money may not be a prime motivator it can be used to reinforce the importance of the social business activities.
Reverse mentoring (of which I have spoken in favour before) and community management are seen as key competencies by Bosch, so if you become a community manager, you not only get that status in your job title, you also get paid for the management of that community.
Peter Sheppard, Global Head of Learning Excellence at Ericsson, contextualised how the learning and training function fitted into the ESN describing how Ericsson had transformed itself to deliver training via video in response to the needs of its employees. Using the gamification principles of Status Access Power and Stuff, the learning path had been transformed. There were plenty more examples, but there’s a reason I wanted particularly to see these three presentations.
That’s because I knew the reaction of those whose attitudes reflect the outgoing IMEC chief will immediately point out that none of these are maritime companies. What they all are however, are suppliers or customers of shipping and maritime.
We need people comfortable and adept at collaborating, who have something to say about how important what they do is, and sufficient pride in their organisation to want business to be social. Not a bunch of people who are only in it for the cash.
The reason that’s so important is because of what Bosch and Grant Thornton told the audience about where they went next with their ESN’s. The collaboration which has to date mainly been aimed internally is already breaking down the organisational boundaries and heading out into the wild. Both Grant Thornton and Bosch have already experimented with collaborating with their customers and suppliers using the ESN. Bosch specifically is expecting a major roll out soon.
These are our customers and suppliers and the way they expect to do business with us is changing rapidly. For our organisations to be successful in the future we need to have people comfortable and adept at collaborating with their opposite numbers, who have something to say about how important what they do is, and who have sufficient pride in the organisation they work for to want business to be social.
A bunch of people who are in it for the money alone are not only unlikely to be very loyal, they aren’t likely to be particularly successful in maintaining these all-important business relationships.
I have to admit that I got really excited the other day, because I was sent a link to something called ‘The Liner Game’. Now anyone who’s had a conversation with me in the past year or so will know how passionate I am about someone creating a serious game based around shipping.
With game engine platforms comparatively cheap these days and the global, competitive complexity of shipping to model I am convinced that a shipping serious game could rival Siemens’ Plantville, driving engagement, awareness and creating a talent pipeline for whatever company or organisation is involved. So imagine my delight as I clicked through to the website.
It took me some time to realise that this wasn’t the serious game I’d been hoping for. To start with this isn’t a game for you and I or someone at school or college interested in shipping to have a go at. This game is firmly behind a paywall.
Disappointing, but perhaps understandable. When you’ve invested a lot of money in creating an online game you have to monetise it somehow—although the lesson is that building a user base is the way to do that down the line. But then I realised that I wasn’t looking at an online game at all. In fact to my astonishment I wasn’t even looking at a digital game. The picture I was looking at was of a bloke at a conference table pushing around a little toy ship. And it was made of LEGO.
I’m sure it’s a very good little training exercise, very competently produced. But it’s just another example of how spectacularly the maritime industry is failing to connect the dots when it comes to the Millennials and the technology they love. A chasm is opening up between the cutting-edge tools our customers, suppliers and our future workforce are using every day, and what we’re doing in shipping.
That’s the key reason why we need our HR people to go to events like HR Tech Europe, because this isn’t merely about a change in strategy, it is about a realignment of values and expectation.
And chucking money at people and giving them toy boats to play with just isn’t going to get us anywhere.
Images credit © K D Adamson/Getty Images
This article appeared in the April 2015 issue of Futurenautics
