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The New Zealand Herald - November 2009

Upturn brings year of churn writes Andrea Milner

Employers should brace for an avalanche of staff turnover next year that could see them lose half their workforce, according to new surveys.

They face a year of "churn", when unhappy employees, held hostage during the recession, look for something better as the economy recovers.

A recent Hays survey showed more than 55 per cent of employees are looking for a new job, and a Hudson report found 47 per cent are seeking a new role.

More than half say they would consider roles they previously would not have considered (56 per cent).

These figures are in stark contrast with employers' perceptions of the current state of workplace morale. While 44 per cent of employees stated it had plummeted, only 26 per cent of employers acknowledged it had dropped.

Data gathered by the Seek job website showed two in every five workers, or 42 per cent, were looking to leave their employer within the next six months.

Of those surveyed, 64 per cent said they were keeping their eyes open for other options.

Forty-five per cent were unhappy in their job - only 8 per cent were very happy.

Hays managing director Jason Walker says all it will take is a little new job creation to ignite major market movement, making next year the year of churn for many unprepared organisations.

"It will only take one catalyst to get those disengaged workers to start moving in their droves."

Demand for staff has already started to increase, especially in Auckland.

New job advertisements on Seek are up 12.2 per cent in the four months from July to October. Auckland had a 14.6 per cent rise in job ads and Christchurch followed with 9.7 per cent growth, while Wellington lagged with 3 per cent.

The big churn will be driven by employees becoming less risk-averse as the market loosens. The recession kept attrition levels artificially low, says Hudson general manager Peter de Boer, but once demand for skills increases, it will start a chain reaction.

Those least satisfied will leave first. This will trigger the next rung of less-than-satisfied employees to ramp up job-hunting efforts, ultimately leading to a massive game of musical chairs being played out across the country.

Richard Manthel, of Robert Walters, says employees often return from Christmas holidays highly motivated to find new jobs in the New Year. He expects this to intensify this holiday season following a particularly tough year.

Churn is expensive for employers - Paul Weaver of HainesAttract says a conservative employee replacement cost is 1.5 times their salary.

With most companies already running fairly lean, Walker says losing a key staff member will damage productivity, morale and revenue generation. And companies will lose a disproportionately greater number of high performers than average ones.

Jo Kerridge of Kerridge and Partners says one in four high performers are unhappy, which is 2 times more than rank-and-file employees.

Penny Stonyer, general manager of Talent2, says high performers who don't think their organisations handled changes well during the recession will walk as soon as the market shifts.

The end of previous recessions has also seen a small trickle of new jobs cause a tidal wave of unexpected replacement hiring, and employers need to get ready now.

But recruitment experts say very few employers are prepared for this spike in staff turnover, which will be significant and will happen soon.

Aaron Dodd, operations director of the Mindset Group, says adding to this, the talent shortage hamstringing businesses before the global financial crisis is actually still there.

"It's like a wild beast hibernating, waiting for the thaw - which will be here sooner than most think.

"Many would argue that it's waking now as the cold metaphorical winter we've just experienced comes to an end."

When the market picks up, there's going to be an underlying talent shortage that's going to be more severe than ever before, Aquent chief executive Greg Savage says.

"Seventy per cent of middle management staff will be looking to move when they're confident the market has settled. That's going to cause a potential hiring frenzy."

Manthel says once churn kicks in, so does aggressive staff poaching, and salaries rise as a result.

Employers should be paranoid about their top talent being headhunted, he says.

The Sydney Morning Herald - My Career - February 2009

Writing on the Facebook Wall.

Mind your cyberspace manners, the boss may be watching writes Valerie Khoo

When business owner Michelle Wilson was catching up on reading through her regular list of blogs sgae was surprised to find one written by one of her staff about how much he hated his job.

The staff member (we'll call him Tom) had posted a missive on his personal blog about how he was underpaid and liked nothing about his job.

"I was shocked to read this" Wilson says "Tom never voiced any dissatisfaction to me in any of our conversations or formal reviews. I often asked him how he felt about the job and he was always positive about it".

Wilson says this revelation spurred her on to read previous posts. "When I interviewed Tom for the job he told me his personal blog address." Wilson says "I read his blog and was fairly impressed at the time but I hadn't monitored it for a couple of months. When I reviewed his recent posts I realised he'd been writing a flood of negative comments about the business and his role."

In a world where blogs, Facebook stsus updates, Twitter messages and other social media platforms are proliferating, people have the ability to broadcast their gripes at the click of a mouse.

Where rants about bosses or colleagues were once heard over a beer at the pub people can publish negative views in cyberspace about their employers and it's there to stay.

Human Resources consultant and managing partner of Odin Consulting (now The Mindset Group), Aaron Dodd notes that in traditional companies some managers may not even be aware of what social networking sites are.

"My view is that if your company is being written about in a blog, you should monitor it even if it does not have the same level of circulation as it would in mainstream media" Dodd says.

"Even if an employee is not mentioning the name of your company, it doesn't take much to work out where that person is working, especially with sites such as LinkedIn."

In the case of Michelle Wilson's disgruntled staff member, Dodd suggests counseling.

"Take this person aside and ask them what changes could be made in the workplace to make their job better," he says.

"And make it clear that if those things can't change because of the nature of the business, then perhaps they would be happier in another organisation."

Dodd points out that some employers are using social media to find out more about prospective employees. "We have been asked by clients to review social networking sites for potential candidates" he says. "We look for published data which doesn't match what's on the CV"


The Sydney Morning Herald - My Career - October 2008

Look carefully before you make that leap

Research and good planning can help you escape the pigeonhole, writes Valerie Khoo.


YOU'VE decided it's time for a change in your career. But how do you actually go about making the dream a reality?

Career experts say it's a two pronged approach. First, take some time to reflect on what your goals are. Then, with the support of friends and family, take actionto achieve them.

Career coach and business mentor Sophie Robertson of YouNique Coaching says the first thing you should do is clarify what you want. Often a moment that could be a career-changing junction is lost due to vagueness. For example, people might know they don't want to continue in their career but don't have an alternative career they'd like to pursue.

Robertson says a firm goal is your best friend when changing careers. If there are serious obstacles in your transition to a new job, such as taking a pay cut or facing significant retraining, being clear about what you want will help you weather the storm. Think about what you are good at and how that may fit in with what you'd like to do.

Don Holley, the managing director of recruitment firm Mindset Group (formerly Odin Consulting) says people may typically think they would have to take a drop in salary but this is not necessarily the case. "It depends on how dramatic the change is," Holley says.

Robertson sees a trend of people wanting to help others. "The people who come to career coaching want to give more back and be part of a community, not just a grey mass that work away anonymously," she says. "I know lawyers who want to do training, personal assistants who want to work in wellness, counselors who want to coach, admin people who want to teach. There is a shift in consciousness out there."

The Age (Reinvent Your Career - special lift out) July 2008

"By giving people insight into their personality and making it easier to understand why they behave the way they do, it makes it easier for them to understand why they need to change." Andrew Etherd reports


  

Aaron Dodd says executive coaching is about helping people develop the skills, confidence and attitude to better suit the job they're in or are being considered for.

Change and move up

Do you feel you have it in you to move up a peg? can you see yourself in your boss' seat or managing the team you are part of? Maybe you do have what it takes, just not the skills to apply that ability. Executive coaching is a growing field, says Aaron Dodd of the Mindset Group (formerly Odin Consulting). "A large part of that is driven by the skills shortage, employers are preferring to invest in their staff rather than let them move on, it is a way of retaining staff.

"A typical example is a sales rep moving into their first sales management role. The traits and skills that make an effective sales person are often the opposite to being a sales manager. We coach them through the transition process, into focusing less on themselves and more on getting the best out of their team, A year or so down the track, they are looking at the next step and they will come back to us to be coached again,

"Executive coaching makes up maybe 25% of our business," says Mr Dodd. "It is about getting more out of the people already in the business. We look at what the 'coachee' is trying to achieve. There is skills coaching, remedial coaching if there is a problem with that person's performance or management style. There is strategic coaching, which is about teaching people how to deal with a particular situation and transformational coaching which is about changing entire behaviours to suit a role."

Changing behaviour may sound scary, but it is logical and scientific, based on a century of research.

"We look the personality first" explains Mr Dodd, "and how it fits with the role they are trying to achieve or are being considered for. Everybody has a defined personality and different roles require different behaviours, so we look at where the mismatches might be and coach people to change their behaviours so that there is a better fit for the role."

Behaviour is not personality, says Mr Dodd. "The behaviour that you have is the result of your personality filtered through your attitudes, values and beliefs. It is easier to change people's behaviour if you can give them insight into their personality. A lot of psychologists will say that your core personality traits are set from about the age of four. But your attitudes, values and beliefs can change. Behaviour is what people see on the outside, by giving people insight into their personality and making it easier to understand why they behave the way they do, it makes it easier for them to understand why they need to change."

Coaching at this level is not a soft option. "Sometimes we have to be blunt," says Mr Dodd, "and it can be confronting. Sometimes it is more subtle. But it is face-to-face, showing people that we are not basing our information on hearsay, that there is actual science behind it."

The Age (Human resources in 2007 - special lift-out) September 2007

Software makes the hard stuff easier

Its root function is to eliminate many administrative and tedious tasks whilst providing secure and accessible employee data. This then allows companies to focus on more important areas of their jobs, such as their employees.

HR and Performance management software is a key offering of The Mindset Group (formerly Odin Consulting), one of Australia's leading management, people and performance consulting businesses. The Mindset Group provides advanced web-based applications for decision-support, performance management, and integrated administration tools, designed for Human Resources professionals.

The Mindset Group believes that people are the most important asset in any organisation. As the war for talent becomes a protracted global campaign, organisations have to work harder on their corporate culture to ensure that they have the sort of business where they can attract good people to join them and more importantly, retain their talented employees.

It is therefore imperative that HR professionals have leading edge tools to aid the selection, management, development and performance of employees, to effectively drive the organisation's competitive advantage.

HR Advantage is a simple to use yet powerful Human Resources software (HRIS/HRMS) program with the depth and functionality to handle a wide range of HR and Corporate objectives, starting with basic needs in small companies and fully scalable to address complex requirements in larger organisations.

HR Advantage was designed and crafted in conjunction with HR professionals right from the start. Its root function is to considerably eliminate many administrative and tedious tasks whilst providing secure and accessible employee data. This then allows clients to focus on more important areas of their jobs, such as employees.

Performance Advantage offers an innovative, cutting edge approach to administering employee performance appraisals, placing HR professionals at the technological forefront of this crucial human resources and managerial function.

Performance Advantage not only automates performance appraisal administration, it elevates it to a superb relationship, productivity and behaviour modification tool, effectively driving change, productivity, development of core competencies, and ultimately, bottom-line results for your company.

Prevue Personality Assessment provides businesses and HR Professionals with a suite of reports that assist in human resource decision-making. These reports compare the candidates' general abilities in terms of verbal, numerical and spatial skills to those of top performers.

The reports also provide an objective perspective of individual's interests and motivations in terms of the candidates' preferences for various types of work. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, Prevue provides feedback on an individual's personality traits and how they compare to the preferred traits for a specific job.

The importance of benchmarking personality traits to job requirements can be better understood by example. Consider how uncomfortable you would be if the pilot flying your next flight was a risk-taker and disliked following detailed plans? How concerned would you be if your child's school bus driver was extremely assertive and very competitive?

In addition to stipulating minimum experience and education prerequisites, the job requirements should identify the personal characteristics that are desired in a candidate.

Business Express (An American Express Magazine) September 2006

Reaching Out. Why outsourcing complex people management issues and focusing on your core business makes really good sense.

Shelley Dempsey

The moment of realisation came when the Melbourne company manager was forced to dismiss his second executive for non-performance and disciplinary issues. "I thought to myself, there must be something I'm not doing right," says Wilm Leibenstein, managing director of Fibrisol Service Australia - a niche food products manufacturer with 40 staff.

"I really felt I probably wasn't asking the right questions [when interviewing] and didn't have the organisational processes to find out whether these people would be suitable long-term."

Outsourcing the HR recruitment function to The Mindset Group (formerly Odin Consulting), which has offices in Sydney and Melbourne, proved to be the answer. The entry of psychometric testing and other high-level professional services into the equation means that the strike rate for recruits is now 100 per cent. "Mindset have recruited about six people for us over the years and they are still all with us," says Leibenstein. "They have also just found a new person for us in South Africa."

He adds: "Sometimes you may not like the results they come up with, but I think it has pretty much proven that these tests and processes are definitely worthwhile."

One day a fortnight, Mindset has a physical presence in the Fibrisol office, which has led to the firm outsourcing other HR functions to Mindset such as performance management, executive coaching and training courses. "It has all worked really well," says Liebenstein, who adds that the process has been far cheaper than hiring a full-time HR Manager. "We know what the money would be for a really super-class HR guy," says Liebenstein. "It would be more than $100,000 per year and we've spent far less than that."

Demand has risen amongst SMEs for outsourcing HR functions such as recruitment, payroll services, occupational health and safety, salary benchmarking, executive coaching and employee satisfaction surveys, according to Don Holley, Managing Director at the m\Mindset Group.

Motivated by a skills shortage that is forcing SMEs to compete harder for good staff, HR outsourcing is now becoming more accepted in the marketplace, he says. Companies also tend to hire on skills and fire on personality, so they are realising it is important to carry out personality testing when hiring.

"Companies have accepted that they can outsource IT - they've been doing that for some years now - and I think HR is now following," he says.

Those who have outsourced recruitment for a while are also tending to now demand other HR services. "I think some firms have found it a little frustrating and at times a little unsuccessful when dealing with pure recruitment firms. The feedback we're getting now is that they're looking for somebody who really understands their business and can help get the right people, but also make sure they keep them."

AGSM Magazine 13 April 2006

Inevitable path to becoming an entrepreneur

Lachlan Colquhoun

 

The Mindset Group (formerly Odin Consulting) is just the start of where Don Holley and his partners want to take it.

 

 

Don Holley

Don Holley says he treated every business he managed as if it was his own, so it was inevitable that one day he would turn his entrepreneurial talents to a start-up venture for himself.

Holley, who graduated with his MBA (Executive) in 1999, was included in the BRW Upstarts list of Australia’s fastest growing new businesses for his role as one of three partners in Odin Consulting (now The Mindset group), which came in ranked at number 57.

“I was very successful at managing other people’s businesses and made a lot of money for them, but there was always this desire to see what I could do on my own and it’s been very rewarding to be part of a successful company,” says Holley, whose earlier career was in the automotive accessories retail sector with management roles at the Beaurepaires and Midas chains.

The Mindset Group(formerly Odin Consulting) was formed in 2003 and has offices in Sydney and Melbourne and is concentrating on the burgeoning market for human resources outsourcing, with a capability to manage all facets of the HR function for businesses small or large.

Mindset also has distribution rights to a proprietary psychometric assessment called Prevue, which is essentially a risk management tool to screen prospective employees, and a performance management methodology called Performance Advantage.

While performance management is one of the current buzzwords in the HR industry, the 36 year old Holley says many organisations lack the expertise and the tools to implement an effective system.

“We have Performance Advantage now to a point where it is accessible to most companies. It is a hosted system with a user pay scenario and as such is accessible to small to midsized companies that need to have good practices in place. It’s such a competitive market for talent that effective performance management and development systems can give companies a real competitive edge.

“One thing about performance management is that you really need to give people regular feedback and make it clear what the expectations are and create development plans for them, that can be effectively managed. The software makes the management of the process far simpler and more efficient,.”

HR outsourcing, he says, is particularly attractive to small and medium sized organisations, and this is proving to be a market niche for Mindset.

“What we’ve done is find a good tool where employee’s role descriptions are linked to a performance management system that is managed online. Many companies, particularly those with around 60 to 100 employees, can’t justify an expensive full time high level HR resource,” says Holley.

“So we basically provide the tools, know how and people to go in there and create an effective HR function within their organisation, and there is a growing niche market for those services.”

Mindset is also involved in the recruitment function, where it pursues two models.

“Unlike many recruitment firms, Mindset looks at how it can help clients reduce the costs of recruitment, and in some instances provide them with the recruitment software to manage that process better, and we’ll use tools like the Prevue assessments to help them minimise the risk of making the wrong decision,” says Holley.

“Alternately, we can undertake the whole recruitment and selection process ourselves.”

Mindset is a long way from Holley’s early career in retailing and franchising, and he attributes the shift largely to the benefits of his AGSM education.

“I was with one company for many years, earned the accolade of Manager of the Year and was one of their youngest ever regional managers but as I was going through the MBA I started to question if this industry was the one I wanted to be in. I realised that I probably only stayed there because my roles were growing and I kept on being promoted,” he says.

“I did my MBA because I recognised there was a lot more to learn and I wanted to learn it."

I was also looking for a way to apply it and it has always been my desire to start my own business.”

The MBA, he says, taught him to critically evaluate what was on offer to the customer, and this perspective has been useful in building up Mindset.

“Consulting, HR and recruitment are very fragmented with thousands of players so we wanted to create a point of difference which was multi-faceted,” says Holley.

“So now we’ve got a flexible process where we do recruitment and selection, which is about 50 percent of our business, and the other half is organisational development related services.

“We find that our offering is very attractive because we have a whole end to end HR service that clients find valuable.”

Although it is three years old, Holley says Mindset is “just at the start” of where he and his partners want to take it.

“I’m really committed to growing this business and think there is great potential to achieve our goals with what we have to offer our clients,” he says.

“We want to grow this into a quality Australian consultancy and then take it offshore.”