Quarterly Essay 75: Men at Work by Annabel Crabb

Author:Annabel Crabb [Crabb, Annabel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Inc.

Having waded into the parental leave changes without a specific business model, does Medibank have evidence that the changes are good for business? “In retrospect, it will absolutely be around talent acquisition,” Bishop says. “We’ve already got the numbers around engagement. It’s 4 per cent higher among parental leave participants than it is among their counterparts. And we know that our retention rates are much, much higher. Plus, we’re attracting more people, because the advocacy is coming not just from our people, but from their families as well.”

This word “engagement” is a hugely significant one among big companies competing with each other for quality employees. Medibank – like its competitors – measures the “engagement” of their workforce by asking them regularly whether they feel supported, whether they would recommend their place of work to others, whether they see themselves still working there in two years’ time and so on. If your workforce is engaged, you save a whole lot of money training replacements, paying people who are bored or embittered, or throwing around huge bonuses to attract talent from competitors. The fact that parental leave boosts engagement is a serious commercial plus.

Professional services firm PwC introduced an All Roles Flex policy in 2015. The firm adopted the philosophy of “activity-based working.” This is a new HR buzz-phrase: essentially it means that the productivity of the employee is assessed on the quality and quantity of the work they produce, not the length of the hours they put in or the extent to which they’re physically available to the employer. The change involved a redesign to the workplace, introducing shared workspaces to allow for employees who were sometimes in the office and sometimes working from elsewhere. Now, there are plenty of drawbacks with hot-desking. Not everyone loves it. It suits highly mobile workers, but not people who like to have a plant and a sense of routine. You need to take careful steps to ensure that people who are expected to collaborate can actually find each other, and so on. But there’s no doubt that the physical act of moving chairs around can bring about quite significant psychological results, especially for parents.

I arranged to talk to Dorothy Hisgrove, who has the brilliant title “Chief People Officer” at PwC Australia. Dorothy has been a people person at a string of Australian institutions: she was at the AFL before this job, and Australia Post before that, and the National Australia Bank before that. When I call her, at 9.30 a.m. on a Tuesday, she is at home. “Almost everybody in PwC works flexibly,” she says, although: “Granted, I was on an international call at 1.30 a.m.” Discussing the firm’s transition to a flexible work model, Hisgrove speaks with a passion that is infectious. “Corporates play a damn big role in shaping generations,” she says. “It’s up to corporates to take the lead on that.” Everything that the firm has done is underpinned by a mammoth system of employee engagement and data collection.

PwC measures everything.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.