Workforce dynamics are changing.  Almost 90% of employers questioned in a recent survey say mature workers have been good for their business.

The research released by employment law firm Peninsula also showed 77% of bosses find mature workers to be more loyal and reliable than their younger colleagues.

Companies have found hiring older employees to have other benefits too: almost 80% of employers are keen to recruit older workers who are able to mentor their less experienced counterparts.

Furthermore, mature workers are less likely to be absent from work claiming bogus sickness, claimed Peninsula, "Older employees are less likely to be absent from work claiming bogus sickness when in fact the time off is needed to cure a hangover from the night before which is often the case within a younger age bracket," commented Peter Done, Peninsula's managing director.

However, it seems that companies are only just catching on to the perceived benefits of hiring mature workers with 62% of bosses saying they have seen an increase in the number of mature workers they have employed. People are now finally beginning to see through the "stereotypical views associated with age," said Done. "Mature workers are now viewed as a credit to the workplace rather than a hindrance," he continued.

But there is still more to be done, according to Done. "Employers are now realising just how beneficial a diverse workforce can be, but more needs to be done to abolish myths about older workers," he concluded.

Recrion is a talent management specialist.  We help companies to hire and retain the right people for their business and diversity is key to success.  For more information visit www.recrion.co.uk.

Off shoring is no longer as fashionable as it was.  Consumers in the UK are voting with their feet and more and more financial and retail institutions are bringing their customer service operations back to the UK.  But what are the risks?  High recruitment and salary costs? Unacceptable levels of staff turnover?

I don't believe that retention in call centres can be tackled on a one dimensional level.  This leads to a silo mentality where the customer services manager is focusing on call queues, contact rates and by default reduces the frontline agent to a mere number.  HR deals with the fallout as employees feel marginalized and powerless to do the job they were employed to do in the time they are allocated.  And where does that leave the customer - not exactly feeling like a king!

It is essential to discover and address the root causes leading to high staff turnover in call centres. It requires all the stakeholders within a business to understand those issues and then create effective processes to engage staff effectively.  With innovative approaches to coaching, development and management the attrition battle can be won.

 At Recrion we believe that you need to keep focusing on your employees, especially when things are difficult.  They are your brand ambassadors to the outside world.  Customers will notice the change in customer service right away!

Visit www.recrion.co.uk to find out how we can help you engage your workforce effectively.

I had the privilege recently of visiting the state-of-the-art contact centre that Cabot Financial (Europe) recently constructed in Kings Hill, Kent.  There was something different about it compared to the call centre palaces I had visited.  I soon realised that it was the management and leadership at a senior level.

"An inspirational leader is somebody who focuses more on their personal power to win the hearts and minds of the workforce, rather than relying on their positional power," remarked Dan Archer, a senior researcher at the Leadership Trust.

John McCluskey, HR Director at Cabot, embodies that sentiment.  And together with the senior management team has turned the business into the leader in consumer debt purchase in the UK.  They have done it by giving their employees the one thing that a job normally takes away - control over their destiny. 

Cabot has broken the "sweatshop" image of call centres by giving their people clear boundaries to work within, but they don't necessarily dictate how people are going to go about their business. Instead, they make it absolutely clear where they want to be, what the outcomes are and what the vision is, but then trust people to get on with it.  By encouraging their employees to do more than just a competent job, they are getting significantly extra performance out of the individual. And collectively that has had a positive affect on the bottom line. 

McCluskey intuitively understands that HR has got to influence managers in terms of realising that there is a business case for employee engagement and the managers then have to enact that.  He believes that HR also has to scrutinise the recruitment, selection and promotion criteria, rewards, and appraisal processes, to make sure that everything the organisation does is done in a way which is consistent with the values of the business.

As the Director of a retention and talent management consultancy, I know that HR has a key role to play in contributing to leadership development and continuous cultural improvement. It is wonderful to once in while find someone like John McCluskey who is effectively working with senior management to develop an engaging culture at all levels within the organisation.

Visit www.recrion.co.uk to find out how you can gauge whether your people management policies are having a positive impact on the bottom line.

At a recent meeting a senior HR Director said to me: "Real engagement is when one of your people says to a friend: 'I'm working for a great firm – why don't you come and join me there?'"

Over years, and years, of consultancy I have worked with businesses where 'engagement' was high and others where it was low. My story is of one firm which achieved high engagement.

A husband and wife team decided to go into the broadband business just as it was taking off in the UK. I got to know them when there were 8 people in the business and helped them grow to 120 people. Even during that rapid growth the staff found:

• It was fun
• There was a fresh challenge every week, sometimes every day
• We knew what was happening, we could see where we were going
• The owners were open with us, and told us the problems before we found them
• We all saw the progress figures, and the profits, and could see how we were doing
• They knew us all and our families
• As our company grew, so did we, and our jobs.

It was a happy, friendly, productive, engaged business, under the influence of the owners, who did very well out of it. It became a major company; the owners were very active in building it up, and they eventually sold to a bigger company.

It was not a small company when it made that change; it had settled down, become mature, the office roof did not leak, but the spirit was still there. Their people were still 'engaged', under the enthusiasm of the founders and the culture they had developed.

It changed a bit when it became a plc, and even more when the founders left and 'more professional' managers came in. Its decline continued and they became merged, perhaps I should say submerged, in a bigger organisation with plenty of policies they had never seemed to need before. But it still retained much of the enthusiasm it had in the early years.

I often use this company as an example when talking to organisations (big and small) that are trying to find the magic formula to retaining their staff. Sometimes all it takes is the attitude and enthusiasm of a manager in some department with an output which is clearly of value, and to which the staff can relate personally.

It is a matter of the way managers at all levels show that they care strongly about the results their teams get, about their people and their progress, about the attitude of their people to the work, the way they behave to each-other – in short all those aspects of the job which together lead to high performance.

Recrion is a specialist in talent management and staff retention. Visit www.recrion.co.uk for more information.

A new survey adds to HR's worries about keeping employees' personal details under lock and key.

One third of IT staff has admitted they snoop on fellow employees' salary details and personal emails, according to a new survey. Cyber-Ark polled 300 senior IT professionals from companies employing around 1,000 people, and the results revealed nearly 3% use their admin passwords to sneak a peek at confidential information, including mergers and acquisition reports, and meeting minutes.

According to the authors of the report, the blame for these transgressions lies squarely with the companies and their sloppy security practices. It reveals few companies limit access to confidential files and rarely change passwords to privileged areas, with 30% only changing once a quarter, and 9% never changing at all.

Despite the government's recent spate of embarrassing data losses, the results also show companies continue to distribute sensitive information in unsafe ways. 35% said they frequently emailed sensitive data, or sent it via courier services, while 12% confessed to sending cash in the post.

Recrion is an HR consultancy that focuses on best practice and can advise on these issues.

A lot has been written about what employers need to do to keep their staff interested and motivated in the company. If you want to look at how to improve engagement with development among staff, you should start by considering how development is seen culturally within your organisation. Is it encouraged, or is it something that is only necessary if something is going wrong or someone is underachieving? If it is encouraged, there are tactics you can use to build on this to increase receptivity to development and engagement with it even further.

In his book 'Influence: Science and Practise', social psychologist Robert B. Cialdini outlines six 'weapons of influence'.

1. Social proof – People are more likely to take part in a development event or programme if other people they respect have already taken part. In this way you can use the success of previous participants as an example to encourage others.

2. Scarcity – People want things that are hard to come by more than things that are easily available. Therefore if the development has limited places and is difficult to get on to (or over-subscribed), they will be more likely to want to do it. If the programme is open to all, the same effect can be achieved by staging who can go when.

3. Reciprocity – People are more likely to do something for you if you have already done something for them, and they therefore feel a debt or obligation. This won’t always apply to development, but it may in some cases and you should always think about whether there is a key person that you can get to sign up for the development who owes you a favour that will in turn encourage other people to be receptive.

4. Authority – If those who run the development have a good reputation or the programme has been endorsed or sponsored by a member of senior management, it is more likely to be successful as it will seem more credible. It can therefore be a very good idea to ask a member of the senior management team to sponsor, champion or even speak at your development event or programme.

5. Liking and likeness – People have strong recognition for people in their network, or who they feel are similar. If there are others attending the development, or who have already attended, who they like or feel that they are like, they are more likely to take part.

6. Commitment and consistency – If someone has agreed publicly, in front of others, that they will take part, they are more likely to stick to it as people like to be seen as consistent!

Building these six tactics into the positioning of development will increase receptivity to and engagement with the programme.

Recrion is a retention and talent management specialist and devises bespoke solutions for a wide range of organisations. Visit www.recrion.co.uk for more information.

Lack of talent is hitting the SME market in the Midlands hard.

According to a recent report, commissioned by BT Business, three quarters (74 per cent) of small businesses in the Midlands are trying to overcome the skills shortage by offering their employees some form of flexible working.

However the adoption of “third generation” flexible working, which combines flexible hours, flexible locations, flexible tasks and the addition of ‘location independence’ and brings the biggest business benefits, is still slow.Researched by independent forecasting think tank, The Centre for Future Studies, the IT Skills for Flexible Working report, for the first time introduces definitions for different types of flexible working.

• The first generation involves time flexibility – offering part time or short term working to employees.
• The second generation involves both time and location flexibility; so in addition to offering flexi-hours to staff, technology is provided for employees to work whilst on the move. 
• The third generation of flexible working involves the emergence of the “virtual office”, which has total location independence and gives employees greater autonomy in the way they manage and plan their work.

While many small businesses in the Midlands have successfully adopted first and second generation practices, 62 per cent still say that they lack the appropriate IT skills and training to properly exploit their existing technology and therefore third generation flexible working.

Gary McLean, BT Local Business Regional Director for the East Midlands, said: “We are witnessing the emergence of flexible hours, flexible tasks and flexible locations. The technology to support this is available to businesses of all sizes and sectors in the Midlands and is delivering tangible business benefits.  Small businesses need to embrace third generation flexible working to compete in attracting talented staff and to serve their customers to a high standard.”

Recrion is based in the Midlands and advises companies on how to manage and retain their staff effectively.  For advice on how we can help you overcome staff shortages, contact Katherine Wiid on 01780 484910 or www.recrion.co.uk

Recrion has just released 5 new pages focusing on solving the problems of attrition and improving retention in medium sized business. The following give links to them:-

• Could You Be Putting Your Recruitment Budget To Better Use?
• Employee Engagement Barometer
• How Many Hours Are In YOUR Day?
• Just What Is It That Makes Your Employees Tick?
• What’s Your Top Performing Employee Worth To You?

There is much talk about whether employers should and can legally Google candidates prior to interview. Jo Jordan, a work psychologist whose specialty is personnel psychology, asks the question differently. What are we hoping to gain?

“Yes, before I meet someone, I look them up on the internet. Before I go to a job interview, I know more about the interviewers than they realise. But if I were the interviewer, would I look up the candidate? I am afraid not”.

In selection, we stick to variables that we know are relevant to job performance and that we can measure reliably. If it cannot be done, then it cannot be done. That is the professional and ethical position.

“Collecting information on people ad nauseum just clutters the process. If you want to use Google and Facebook in selection, you need to show me that what you are looking at is reliable and relevant”.

So, what are we really worried about?

Organisations take people and make them live in closer proximity than if they were married. Anxiety goes up. Is this going to be heaven, or is it going to be hell? And if I am the manager, will I be held accountable for the outcome?

The answer is not to make the selection process more complicated. There is nothing to gain. We should rather put our energy into managing the relationship once the candidate is on board to ensure the investment is maximised.  HR needs to understand job performance and what variations are manageable.
 
Look at doing the following well:

• Improve the working conditions
• Improve the job design to set clear boundaries
• Set up communication systems
• Train
• And coach ‘on demand’ (be on call)
 
Above all, attend to why the manager is so anxious. Why do they believe they will be blamed? Most likely because there is no common ethos on what performance it is reasonable to expect. It would be better to work on the collective understanding of what is reasonable and to lower tension all round.

For advice on retaining and managing talent call Recrion on +44 1780 484910 or visit www.recrion.co.uk.

Recrion was recently approached by Dr Al James (University of London Lecturer in Human Geography) and Dr Bhaskar Vira (University of Cambridge) to be part of a research project into the UK call centre industry.  Dr Al James is Programme Convenor in Globalisation and Development and is carrying out a comparative study of the UK call centre industry with that in India where, strikingly, call centres are increasingly regarded as offering potential career development and social progression.

Dr James approached Recrion as a leader in retention and talent management solutions to share our views in relation to the reasons for attrition in UK call centres.  A stimulating debate regarding workers' experiences of different forms of call centre training, career progression, and the different institutions which shape call centre labour markets ensued. 

The joint research project adopts a broad social economy approach and examines:

the experiences of call centre workers across the work-home boundary in different national contexts;

labour mobility patterns of call centre workers during and subsequent to leaving the call centre industry; and the role of labour market intermediaries such as training agencies, recruitment agencies, management consultants, call centre unions, and online job placement networks in mediating work and training practices, brokering employment relationships, and improving labour market outcomes.

The research should be published by the end of 2008 and will form an invaluable comparison between the UK and Indian call centre industry.

Recrion advises a broad spectrum of organisations on the vital importance of retaining their best people and effectively managing both their performance and expectations.  For more information visit www.recrion.co.uk