Why Create an Employment Excellence Group?

Whilst continuing to develop and build Position Ignition, we created the idea of Employment Excellence. To us it is an area of huge potential where we believe there could be many opportunities for development and enhancement into the future.

We have, therefore, created our Position Ignition – Employment Excellence Group, inside which we will be inviting selected people to join build a community, encourage debate, share and learn about what we believe to be an important challenge.

As we write, the economy is static – some would say stagnant. We have 2.5 M unemployed. There is nearly 1M unemployed under 24 years old and 25% of graduates who left university in the last 4 years are yet to find full-time work. As redundancies spread across most sectors, anyone over 50 years old worries that if they lose their job, they may not get another. We could go on ad infinitum, but one last point; many people complain that their job is not what they want to be doing. It is too restricting, it’s boring, and the employer could get so much more “out of me”. Boredom is the primary reason for job change in individuals over 50 in our experience of the transition field.

Meantime, the opportunity for us is huge. The economy needs a lift, we have terrific resources available for work and we have neither the agenda nor leadership to shift from what looks like a difficult environment – for many years to come.

We came to the Employment Excellence idea because of the prevailing conditions highlighted above. There is also an increasing sense of there being two worlds; sometimes described as the “haves and have nots”. It is not necessary in a capitalist economy for there to be such a gap. Indeed in the view of some, it is a fatal mistake for leaders to “feather their own nests”. Their relationships will never recover from these types of behaviours as being seen to behave in this way does not go down well with customers or with those who are paid to follow.

In our LinkedIn group we hope to encourage discussions around Employment Excellence from both a commercial and a strategic people angle. We believe that there is a way to create new and different approaches, which look after the organisation’s agenda for profit, service excellence and more, whilst at the same time supporting every employee through their employment cycle. Identifying how we might be able to do this is what this Group seeks to do.

The employment cycle encompasses the recruitment and selection, the on boarding, training and development, the reward processes, the performance management and feedback processes, the talent management and succession processes and the employment contract – both legal and psychological. We look forward to exploring each of these elements and more, where they impact on Employment Excellence as they all do in their own way.

You may be wondering what we are aiming to achieve from this Group or how might it (and you could) make a difference?  We believe that there are better ways of creating organisations that perform brilliantly. We also know that there are cost effective ways to achieve this and that, when the right people get to see that greater returns are possible with relatively minimal investments, they may decide to change how they operate and choose to build longer-term Employment Excellence into their organisations.

Excellence in employment is only possible if employees and employers desire it and then commit to moving towards it. It is most likely if:

• The climate of the organisation is right


• There is good leadership


• There is open, regular and honest communication at all levels


• There is fairness and reasonableness in all dealings


• There is support to employees throughout the employment cycle.

By working together we have the opportunity to achieve all of the above and more, which is why we have created this Group.

To initiate some initial thoughts it would be great to know:

• If you could change how your organisation operates, what would you change or do?


• If you were to think about Employment Excellence, what is the biggest challenge in your view?

Author:

Simon North, co-founder of Position Ignition, a leading career consulting and career management business for individuals and organisations

www.positionignition.com