Adapt to win the talent war
People want flexibility, and the onus is now on employers to adapt to that new norm, says Vice President and General Manager for Asia Pacific & Japan at GoTo, Lindsay Brown. More importantly, companies who do not adapt to the hybrid working environment are going to struggle, he warns.
11 July 2022
Companies who adapt to the new hybrid working environment will win the talent war, as more and more people now seek flexibility to balance between their work and lifestyles.
Vice President and General Manager for Asia Pacific & Japan at GoTo, Lindsay Brown, in a recent interview with WorkRemoteBetter said, it is clear now that people want flexibility, and they’re choosing to vote with their feet to get it.
As the world recovers from the COVID-19 pandemic-- which upended work and offices as we know it-- people want to get together face-to-face, but they just don’t want to do that all the time now because they want the flexibility, said Brown.
“We’re seeing that reflected in the research that’s being done, not just by us but by other IT companies, HR institutions and governments. Recent research in Singapore, for example, shows that 7 out of 10 employees are expecting to work-from-home at least 2-4 days a week, and that’s a real clear message to employers.”
“You can see by all the real estate data that people are moving out of cities and into other areas. That’s a fact. People are now thinking about their lifestyles and families in addition to their career. It is the norm. And so there is a big onus on employers to adapt to these hybrid expectations going forward,” said Brown.
“And those who do, they’re going to win the talent war. And those who don’t, I think they’re going to struggle. No matter which way you look at it, research is pointing to the same thing:
People want flexibility, and that’s a really loud voice now because people are voting with their feet.”
No easy task
But providing that flexibility is no easy task, and GoTo was not spared the challenges that so many companies faced in the pandemic.
Like so many other tech companies, technology solutions company GoTo had the snazzy office space, the free food, and the pool table as a way to attract and retain talent. The office was the place where work happened-- the camaraderie, the community, that buzz of being in a space with colleagues and sharing ideas.
“When the pandemic hit, obviously businesses had to adapt to remote working quickly, almost overnight. I remember when I was in the office-- this was probably in February 2020-- and we were thinking, “Next week, let's just do a ‘test’ work from home to make sure that we can do it and everything works okay.” And we had to lock down the next day. So, we couldn't even do our test,” recalled Brown.
“But what was interesting for us as an organisation at that time, even though we provided these types of tools, you know, collaboration, tools, remote support tools and so on… our value proposition to our employees was coming to the office,” he added.
“That's how we attracted and retained our talent. We spent a lot of money on prime real estate in Sydney, in Bangalore, in other capital cities across Asia Pacific, to attract and do what a lot of the other vendors in IT would do as well; make sure that we've got state-of-the-art premises where people can come in, they can build a community of friends, they can get together, they can have fun.”
“We've got the big open area and kitchen where people get all the food and soft drinks that they want, and they can spend time together. They can play pool, table tennis… whatever they can fit in doing their day jobs as well, and that was a big part of our proposition; but that was turned on its head overnight.”
So even for GoTo, going remote was a challenge. “We had to transition over the past two years from what was very much an office-focused culture to now, being a remote-centric organisation. It’s quite a bit different when you’re remote centric because it's a lot of other considerations. You really still have to start thinking about, “How do I expand my employee value proposition, now, beyond the office?”
Moreover, Brown said, questions now need to be asked on how companies can continue to build work culture outside the physical office space, and how would talent retention and development happen beyond the office?
“And so we, just as much as any other company, had to test and learn our way into what works and how we became remote-centric.”
Employee empathy is key
Initially, GoTo focused on the employee experience, like so many other companies did-- the virtual get-togethers, meetings, and activities.
So what we've done is that we really focused initially on --for GoTo-- the employee experience.
“We’d get together and we'd have GoTo meeting sessions; a bit of virtual wine tasting, a bit of virtual gin tasting, we did that with our customers, all that kind of stuff but everyone got sick of it as well,” he said.
There needed to be another way to build our culture and so first, what we thought of is: how do we build understanding and employee empathy?”
“So what we did is we decided to go ahead and we created what we called working personas for our employees,” he said.
Personas, explained Brown, are profiles of each individual employee, encompassing what their work and personal circumstances were.
These personas, which were broadly defined and mapped, described an employee’s situation.
“For example, is someone early in their career and maybe working from home in a small unit? Maybe they have just set up on the kitchen table, doing their work. Or are they more established? Do they maybe have young children, so they've got to worry about how they're going to do their homeschooling, or now they need to think about how they take their kids back and forth from school and various extracurricular type activities as well. Are they living or looking after someone who is sick, or have elderly parents needing their care?”
“Everyone’s got their situation and so we came up with these broad categories. Then, what we did was, we mapped their personal personas then against their working personas. So you know, are they in sales? Do they need to be customer-facing, or are they more of a back office role, so they might be working in finance or otherwise in IT, and there's less of that face-to-face engagement.”
By defining these personas, both work and personal, Brown said GoTo has enabled their people to choose which personas best described their circumstances, and then have a conversation with their managers to negotiate how they can work and interact flexibly.
“There is then an understanding between employee and manager, and then across employees, and teams and larger groups, what your working and personal personas are, then you've instantly got more of an understanding of how you can work with each other.
“So thinking about people's different working styles and codifying that in those personas was really key for us, because then it allowed us to have a collaboration and understanding of how we could work together. So once we did that, that would then allow us to reaffirm our purpose and value within the team.”
For Brown personally, he would not exchange the new norm for anything. Asked how the remote work experience has been for him, he said, laughing: “It’s been fantastic!”
Prior to the pandemic, he traveled often and extensively to Singapore, India and the US, spending a lot of time away from his family. “Now with things going the other way and not being able to travel, you could say that necessity is the mother or father of all invention! And that’s allowed us to really adapt and figure out how we’ve needed to navigate this remote work environment and make it successful.
“It comes down to balance, I still need to engage with people, we fly people in and have our all-hands meeting, and once a quarter we do an offsite with leaders for face-to-face planning, but it’s nowhere close to how much I was traveling before. It’s a much better balance now. And whichever way you put it, it has been much better for me and my family life.”
