The pandemic has seen employees across the world re-evaluating their personal and professional priorities. Today’s workforce is now far more determined to align their purpose and values with those of their working environment and organization. This shift in priority has renewed the role workplace culture has to play in improving teamwork, raising morale and enhancing talent retention.
Promoting a positive and engaging workplace culture isn’t just about installing the latest coffee machine. Skills retention for a modern workforce involves a network of inter-connecting benefits and career mapping initiatives, alongside an awareness that a diverse, equitable and inclusive workplace supports individuals to thrive and realise their ambitions.
Understanding where skills lie within an organization and aligning against future business goals means HR teams can give better career advice to talent; promoting internal pathways which not only enable business success but enable career success. Career mobility can be the difference between retaining and losing talent and with that loss often goes the positive culture organization’s have invested so heavily in. Technology increasingly has a role to play in this area, supporting teams to easily and accurately identify and align adjacent skills, helping to broaden talent pools far more quickly than more conventional approaches.
Going hand in hand with this critically important skills mapping is the requirement to understand the needs of the talent you have and the talent you are trying to attract. Flexibility is increasingly valued in today’s workforce, delivered either through remote or hybrid working practises and with it comes a new challenge to organizations to think deeply about how they convey culture and employer brand initiatives to that remote population.
These are not necessarily easy initiatives to get right but organization’s who focus on building an authentic workplace culture will reap the rewards in an increasingly competitive talent climate.
