Key Future of Work Perk
During mid-23 I've noted countless pieces in the feeds of the battle for talent.
Skilled labour is in short supply.
I have seen this for myself. Where those with a great Enterprise product feel the difficulty in recruiting the right calibre of sales-side people is dampening growth potential.
Not forgetting the soaring churn rate among white-collar roles across the board, through all generations.
In the race to get people in the door, and keep them in their seats, for a while now there's been a kind of front-of-house arms race. Where perks make the difference.
Chief among these, allowance to be flexible about from where you work.
Such terms do not appear among the nice-to-haves. Tales of repeated job hopping with under a year under the belt each time abound. Think of the cost. To all.
For a while now, there's been personal budgetary enticements. Free food, heavily discounted exercise activity, parental and carer contributions.
Yet now, cold hard cash enters the race.
Forget any attraction of mission, culture or advancement.
Eye-popping pay premiums are appearing to lure new hires.
I've never been keen on anyone moving for the money alone.
But I acknowledge the appeal.
It seems, around London at least, these rises in part follow interest-rate hikes with their knock-on effect on rents and homebuying, and inflation stubbornly staying high.
Maybe this is all a once-off leap. Sunlit uplands where B2B prices re-stabilise, soon(ish) to come. Or rather storm clouds of on-rushing headcount freezes. Who knows.
In any event, I feel that the issue of workplace conditions will remain paramount.
We've all seen the memes of the companies claiming they offer amazing, unique trend-setting environments. Only to see the reality contrasted, crashing down to earth. With cubicle dwelling, constant app monitoring and say over how work is done akin to that of a pre-internet data processing clerk.
Everyone, pretty much, trumpets the training they offer. On-the-job education is one thing, for sure, yet I see a glaring hole in the more formulised approaches to fresh skill improvement.
No matter the proportion of work conducted when Remote, the ability to effectively video call is for me, clearly, of utmost importance.
To remain so for as long as a salesperson wants to work at maximum productivity, in a way that aligns with how prospects prefer to work, and truly distinctively from competition.
Too many a time I lament to see a type of "unified comms" mindset prevail. Where the tech itself leads. Add-on apps, the buttons to click, and platform dexterity are their heart of the matter. Such priority is misplaced.
And best you don't wait for or rely on any of our HR colleagues to plug these gaps anytime soon either.
The most effective video calls I am privy to - predominantly selling in nature - do not achieve what they do because of using the likes of a digital whiteboard, a live transcription and subsequent summariser, or glitzy 'interactive' multimedia slidedeck.
They genuinely move things forward because of how they're set-up, run and boxed-off.
They feature someone who knows how to engage video participants, visualise ideas when on-screen, and take soundings of where everyone is at in the virtual setting.
They are focused on being memorable, enjoyable and fruitful for all concerned.
I am yet to encounter a Unified Comms session that in any way gets even close to these. For their domain is markedly different to ours.
In short, video call performance is painfully neglected.
Are you revealing to new hires how they can use video meetings to give themselves more hours in the selling calendar?
Do you offer guarantees that those in-post will enjoy on-going commitment to mastery of the most transformative of solution sales tools that is the video call?
Have you calculated with them the impact that raising the bar with this principal skill will bring to their career?
If maximising video meeting performance is not front and centre of your recruiting, on-boarding, or in-role development, then why would anyone join you, let alone stay?