New work order
Jeffrey Joerres - Manpower
 
Jeffrey Joerres

Leading a $20 billion plus employment services company that has 400,000 clients and operates in 82 countries worldwide is a unique position from which to view trends in the modern work force.  Manpower CEO Jeffrey Joerres shares his insights.

ceoforum.com.au:  What do you see as the major trends affecting work forces around the world that CEOs need to be aware of?

Companies have become hyper-specific in the type of skills they require in employees.


Jeffrey Joerres: We’ve identified four major forces that are impacting on almost all companies.  These trends are the Demographics-talent Mismatch, technological revolutions, individual choice and the rise of customer sophistication.

The Demographics-Talent mismatch can be attributed largely to the aging of the workforce in many OECD countries.  This is causing companies to think more strategically about where they will put certain kind of facilities globally, as they need to ensure they have the workforce they need.  They also need to think about creating strategies around facilitating a multi-generational workforce, as aging workers who are returning to work in large numbers often have different work habits and attitudes than their younger counterparts.  This issue has been exacerbated by the fact that companies have also become hyper-specific in the type of skills they require in employees.  This specificity of desired talent makes it even harder to fill certain positions

Technologies like social networking are having an enormous impact on the industry. Facebook, for instance, has turned into one of the most important ways for our recruiters to find people, our Right Management division has forged a partnership with LinkedIn and we have developed MyPath, a career-focused social networking platform of our own for individuals.   Beyond recruiting implications, social networking has become a critical part of company branding.  Companies need to ask themselves, ‘How am I perceived by potential employees?’ and shape their online presence accordingly.

The other two important, and related, trends are individual choice and customer sophistication. Employees with relatively rare skills, for instance, are enormously informed about what different employers can offer: if I am a resources engineer, for instance, I can look at what is being offered by employers in Australia, South America or anywhere else.  As a result they have a far wider range of choices than ever before.

Customers; too, can access similar information, so as a result competition has become more intense and the time frames in which you can command premium prices have been reduced.  There is a tremendous transparency across value chains and business generally.

While the specific impact of these trends will vary depending on a number of factors, including a company’s industry, geographic location and developmental stage, you will see them driving how you do business every day.  Plan and execute around them when preparing your workforce for the future.

Every employee has to perform more functions than ever before


ceoforum.com.au:   Why over recent years have companies become so much more specific in their skill ‘wish lists’ when filling positions?

JJ:  That is really a by-product of zealous Y2K contingency planning in the late 1990s. Many companies implemented comprehensive enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems during that time. As a result, they have far more data and analytics available to them today.

The net effect of the availability of this new wealth of data is that companies now understand their customers, their products, their employees and their total value proposition in more detail than they ever did before.  Thus, they also have a keener understanding of the kind of people they need to create value for the company, and the particular skills those people need to have. 

I predict that we will continue to see analytics used more and more in this fashion to drive the work force planning process, particularly in larger companies that can afford to be very specific in the type of people they recruit.  Smaller companies will be slower to catch up, because they need people with generalist skill sets who can perform several functions as they grow.

ceoforum.com.au:  How is the way employers and employees understand their respective responsibilities on career development changing?

JJ:  Individuals generally are recognising that they need to take more responsibility for acquiring new skills.  Companies now see their role as complementing that, by offering employees experiential learning in the form of project assignments, promotions and so on.  The employee is becoming more responsible for developing generic skills, while good companies build on those basics to give employees experience and exposure necessary to develop advanced specialties and expertise.

One notable trend is that companies are offering their employees more meaningful experience and exposure at a younger age.  Expat assignments, for instance, are often being given to younger employees than in the past, and are often shorter in duration. The thinking is that, through these assignments, companies can give employees a broader perspective as their foundation, building specific skills and competencies along the way.

ceoforum.com.au:  You often hear CEOs and other senior executives saying we need to ‘over-invest in people’.  How do you see that issue?

JJ:  One reality of business today is that organisations are a lot leaner, and, as a result, there is more pressure on all the individuals involved.  Every employee has to perform more functions than ever before, so every investment becomes that much more important.

The dynamism of many markets these days – including shorter product life cycles and changing customer needs – makes it harder to project what skill sets will be needed in the future.  The only way companies can thrive in this fluid environment is to create a learning organisation that can quickly adapt.  Strictly speaking, that means you can expect to over-invest in certain skills part of the time.

ceoforum.com.au: How can CEOs and HR Directors work better together on people issues?

JJ:  I think this particular relationship has a long way to go in many cases.  Too many CEOs, for instance, are looking to their HR Directors purely for managing compensation and benefits, and/or helping them sell cost reductions.  This reduces the HR role to a purely technical one.

HR Directors need to more proactive, and even provocative at times.  They need to work much more closely with the CEO on people issues within the organisation.

As CEO, I have a finance director on one hand, and an HR Director on the other, and these are the two executives I can work with most closely to drive the organisation forward.

ceoforum.com.au:  Traditionally, the relative prestige a particular executive role is measured by compensation.  Are you seeing any trends in the US with the remuneration of HR directors relative to other executive roles like CFOs?

JJ:  HR Director compensation has increased in the US in the last five years, and low HR Director remuneration is usually a good indication that the HR role in the company is relatively limited in scope.

Manpower’s most senior HR person is Mara Swan, who is an Executive Vice President (EVP), and therefore equal in seniority to our operating managers and our CFO.  Her actual job title is EVP – Global Strategy and Talent, which gives you an idea of the breadth and importance of her role. 

I cannot emphasize enough the critical connection between workforce planning and the achievement of your business strategy. Work force planning is a critical gap analysis projecting the talent and capability you will need to meet your goals. Yet, at most companies, work force planning is a superficial employee ranking exercise.

ceoforum.com.au:  Where businesses do recognise that they need significant new capabilities in employee skills, they will often get this though acquisitions.  Do you have a view on when this works and when it does not?

JJ: Acquisitions certainly have a role to play and are often made when the gap is large and/or the company wants to gain the capabilities quickly.  Yet acquisitions come with some risk, and a key part of the work force planning needs to be determining how to successfully integrate this new talent into your overall work force.  This question illuminates the importance of strong ‘on-boarding’ processes within the organisation.  So if you spend the time to talk to new employees about how their role relates to the overall strategy of the company, you will see better engagement and productivity.

ceoforum.com.au:  You have been in your CEO position for 10 years now.  What do you know now that you wish you knew when you first started in the role?

JJ: Managing a global team is an art, rather than a science, and you really need to understand a multitude of subtleties in depth to do this job effectively.  This is particularly true in our case, as 90% of our revenues come from outside our local US market.

A key part of my role is reading the culture and state of the organisation, and timing our moves accordingly.  This has nothing to do with intellect, or motivation to change – it is both more nuanced and more complex than I anticipated.  So the first thing someone in a role like mine should do is to look at each region and ask, ‘Where is the organisation now?’ 

I should emphasize that getting the timing right is just as important as coming up with the right strategy – the two have to come together.  If you get the timing wrong, you may not get another chance on that particular initiative.

ceoforum.com.au:  How do you get that sense of where the organisation is at to determine that issue of strategic timing?

JJ: It sounds simplistic, but you have to keep very close to the business to understand the issues it faces.  It would be naïve to believe that since you had a good grasp of the company, say, three years ago, that you understand it now.  A healthy business is fluid and fleeting, thus a successful leader’s knowledge needs to be constantly refreshed accordingly.  An organisation is a living organism – continually evolving.  If you can’t keep up, you will end up killing it.
 


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