A recent IT staff survey conducted across the world suggested that 50% of employees are expected to have a new employer within 24 months. Many CIOs are now talking about a hundred per cent salary uplifts, as well as offering all sorts of inducements to tackle the work-life balance to retain and attract IT talent.

So what do we mean by being employed today? Are we moving towards a Silicon Valley model of employment, where we see an average of 18-months in a job compared to a traditional 18 year contract in Europe? With individuals looking to pursue more creative and dynamic careers, does that lead many of us to look at the startups and the scaleups rather than the more traditional organisations?

On Wednesday, May 11, CIONET brought together almost 200 digital leaders from top companies, who shared their valuable insights on how to tackle the Great Resignation and how automation can bring joy back to work. The event, sponsored by UiPath, was moderated by Hendrik Deckers and Roger Camrass, and featured a panel of distinguished speakers:

Andreea Baciu, Chief Culture Officer at UiPath

Claudia Plattner, Director General for Information Systems at European Central Bank

Remco Brouwer, Senior Vice President Digital Transformation at Randstad

Ignacio Cea Fornies, Global General Manager at Prosegur Cash

Marcel Borlin, Group IT Director at Harvey Nichols

The Great Resignation or the Great Migration?

Andreea Baciu of UiPath started her speech by asking whether we are dealing with a resignation or it is rather a migration.

Is it people giving up work and then going and taking time for themselves or is it actually them going to places where they could find meaning at work, responsibility that feeds their desire, passion, skills and knowledge, where the environment is welcoming and where they have time to give back to society, she asked.

Remco Brouwer quoted Randstad’s latest survey, according to which 56% of the youngest generation said they'd quit a job if it prevented them from enjoying their life, and 33% would rather be unemployed than unhappy at work.

People want to work for a company that fits their needs and it has to fit their life, he said.

Building on that, Claudia Plattner said that „if we give people the freedom to arrange the job around their lives and not just the other way around, we can all relax a little bit”.

Watch the Leadership Deep Dive interview with Remco Brouwer

Bringing joy back to work

The speakers agreed that the other key reason for people leaving their jobs is that they don't want to be robots. They want to be creative or as Roger puts it: they want to become „digital artisans”.

Automating the most boring parts of work would definitely help retain and attract talent. Marcel Borlin admitted that his company coudn't get enough people to do low-value tasks and that's also becoming the driver for automation. 

Harvey Nichols' solution to attract and retain talent is simple: let people decide what they want to work on.

From a development point of view, people feel they can do something new every year and something different because they don't want to do the boring, repetitive things. But it is also helping with retention because they feel like they're being challenged and have something interesting to do, said Marcel.

The black hole of recruiting

One of the key conclusions of our conference is that managers cannot afford to lose great candidates in the ongoing war for talent just because their HR departments are overloaded with the work and are not able to respond to applications quickly. Yet, according to our survey conducted during the CIONEXT, only slightly above 30% of respondents use automation during the recruitment process.

Sometimes up to 60 or even 70% of people who applied for a job never hear anything back, because the company is focused on one specific candidate or the person in charge of recruitment is on vacation, etc. We call this a black hole of recruiting, said Remco.

Randstad, the largest recruitment agency in the world, has automated a lot of the recruitment process. The company sees that a lot of people apply for jobs in the middle of the night so the bots try to qualify these people at the moment they apply, asking if they have certain diplomas or skills. And if they do, the system immediately schedules an interview with them for the next day. Randstad also has thousands of bots logging on to thousands of clients' systems on a day-to-day basis to see if there's any new vacancy there. „Speed is of the essence because the first one to give them a CV of a fitting candidate is likely going to have the job,” said Remco.

Some companies have started to automate not only the recruitment process but also the onboarding. For example, Harvey Nichols  is automating at the moment the onboarding process for new starters and setting up one process for its eight stores.

Successful leadership

UiPath, a leader in Robotic Process Automation, has automated not only recruitment, onboarding, offboarding, payroll changes, etc. but also has bots that help its managers be reminded of key moments in the employee lifecycle. Andreea underlined that good management and leadership play a crucial role in attracting and retaining talent.

Ignacio Cea Fornies of Prosegur Cash agreed that companies have to invest in soft skills such as dependability, teamwork/collaboration, problem-solving and flexibility to retain talent.

Watch the Leadership Deep Dive interview with Ignacio Cea Fornies

We need to make sure that leadership happens on all levels. You don't always have to be the big boss and we need to get rid of the idea that it's only the big bosses who know what works. You can take different kinds of leadership. You could be for a topic, a small team, or a squad that takes on some kind of small task for a while.

Where we are with automation

Up to 30% of repetitive office work can be easily automated. As Remco said: most of the solutions are there. So what's holding us back from automation and bringing joy back to work? How to move it forward?

One answer to that is good leadership and a good relationship between CIOs and CEOs.

The core fraction here is to get automation up to the boardroom, have people understand what the possibilities genuinely are. And I think that the IT community can be highly instrumental in this. They'll provide the tooling, they'll provide the platform so they can provide the education, but they cannot mobilise a large organisation interaction, concluded Roger Camrass.

 

If you missed our CIONEXT live conference, you can still watch the recording: