schneiderism

Despite whatever you believe to be our immediate economic reality, it is a good time to be young, smart, and focused. Companies struggle to navigate what is really a seller’s market for “human capital,” and attract the next wave of talent into their fold. The problem? There are several other companies fighting to recruit the same individual. A very successful public company in the consumer lawn care space that I know well admits actively raiding the talent pools of the medical technology companies in the area. Med tech to lawn care? Why not! The thing is, these talent pools are also targeted by financial services firms, retail giants, and others. They’re all competing openly for the same talent. This is a really good case study in supply and demand. You don’t have to look far to realize this is playing out everywhere. Often times, takeover bids between companies are as much about expanding talent as they are about increasing market share. Talent is perhaps the most important weapon in the battle for market success.

And this is nothing new. Look back ten years and business magazines were full of articles about the looming, and now pressing, “War for Talent.” McKinsey released a study back in 1998 that surveyed 6,000 executives in 77 companies which consistently identified that the single most important corporate resource over the next 20 years as talent, define in the study as “smart, sophisticated businesspeople who are technologically literate, globally astute, and operationally agile.” Sounds familiar. Not much has changed in ten years. What’s more, the study goes on to tell us that even as the demand for talent goes up, the supply of it will be going down. Supply and demand in action.

What’s a company to do? Get aggressive, really aggressive. Focus resources on talent acquisition that are commensurate with those focused on market expansion. The reality is that the former will ultimately beget the latter. As a best practice, companies need to be obsessed with ensuring that they are staffed by the best possible people, from the top on down. This is entirely a quality proposition, and it means always having your finger on the pulse of available talent, regardless of the real need for people. It means having an organized HR team that has an effective talent profile, and relentlessly tests for this profile. It means ensuring that your organization is a recruiting machine, that your people, your environment, and your package are not only competitive… they’re compelling. And relevant. And tailored to the people you seek to attract. Stop and think about your company for a moment, and think about your company in two years if a focused plan to attract talent was deployed. I suspect we are talking about two very different companies.

The McKinsey study also revealed ten years ago that only 60% of the corporate officers interviewed said that they were able to pursue most of their growth opportunities. These corporate leaders said that they had good ideas, and that they had the budgets to pursue these ideas, but they lacked the right people to execute. They reported that they did not have enough talented people to pursue their good ideas, regardless of budgetary abundance. They were “talent-constrained.” Ten years ago the implications of this were huge, and was a part of the feeding frenzy that became the .com debacle. Today these implications are staggering and I have yet to find a similar analysis regarding the relationship between growth and talent, but I would surmise that we are facing similar if not more critical deficiencies in growth as it relates to the talent needed to create that growth, and the lack thereof.

Bear with the shameless self-promotion for a moment while I make a point.

Yes, that is me on the cover of a local commercial real estate publication. It came out last month and something about the interview with me inspired them to put me on the cover. Good times. The point of the interview was a conversation about how the modern workplace has changed, and will continue to change, and how my firm is beginning to experiment on itself to navigate this change and determine those workplace innovations that work, and those that do not. This is as much about organizational dynamics and ergonomics as it is about technology and communications, and it is part of a much larger exercise we are undertaking to develop a comprehensive program and master plan for our office and studio environments. By 2010 my firm will be in a new environment, and ideally one that we own, and this programmatical exercise will inform the type of space we ultimately need to occupy. It is also the inception of a longer term plan to treat our entire office environment as a laboratory, to experiment on ourselves, and be able to model different workplace innovations for our clients by using our own environments as proof of concept. Currently, we have an experimental area of our office, featured in the magazine, that is a studio dedicated to one comprehensive project, and we have used this studio to co-locate the central project team of 8-10 individuals. The space is flexible, surrounded by collaborative tools, and emphasizes the immediacy of communication. It is not private, it is not perfect, but it is a valuable experiment and the quality of work from this team has greatly benefited as a result.

The point that I want to make is that without having experienced and experimented with workplace innovations and organizational concepts it is impossible to appropriately represent them to our clients. For lack of a better expression, this would be “walking the talk.” A significant focus on this blog has been the concept of “the workplace of the future”, but what does that really mean? It means an environment that is about the work to be done and not about place. It means that substantial thought goes into the way an organization works, into its culture and business strategy, and how a work environment can manifest in support of these key aspects. It means that the conservative notion of office organization and layout is not only increasingly irrelevant, but actually counterproductive to the longer term success of a company. At its core, this is the physical embodiment within the environments that we create of superior occupant quality, of environments that are supportive of work and task while also enhancing health, well-being, and ultimately productivity. We know that an environment that we create today may be challenged anywhere from one to five years from now, that is how fast organizations and the markets within which they operate can change. The challenge to us is how we build in flexibility and anticipate this change so that we create value on behalf of our clients that allows their work environments to grow and change in advance of the demands of their markets and their people, without sacrificing the occupant quality of the environment. This is workplace innovation, and at its core involves a thorough understanding of organizational dynamics, occupant quality, product design, communications, materials technology, cultural analysis, and of an organization’s long term business strategy. These are the catalysts to the creation of successful work environments, and it mandates a rethinking of legacy notions of office and a focus on innovations that begin with an individual person’s needs and experiences as they relate to the physical environment.