Cash won't cut it: Time to get creative in attracting skilled workers

Talented staff are not as hard to find as you may think, says Jim Mortleman. But you will have to think unconventionally to attract them.

If you thought the credit crunch was bad for business, wait until you hit the talent crunch.

Corporate boards continually avow their commitment to finding, nurturing and retaining the right people to secure their future success. So-called 'talent management' programmes pervade the strategy of most leading organisations, yet few have truly grasped the magnitude of the task ahead.

Because although there's an army of talent out there, most firms are either looking in the wrong places or pursuing policies that actively repel those they most urgently need to woo.

Many leading companies understand they must transform their organisations fundamentally if they hope to succeed in future. Their goal is to move away from rigid hierarchical structures and change-resistant cultures to become more open, experimental, fluid and dynamic.

In the fast-moving, globally networked era, the most successful players will be those best able to foster an entrepreneurial spirit among staff and manage a multitude of long-term and ad hoc relationships with suppliers, partners, customers and employees. Only then will they have any hope of attaining the high levels of market responsiveness and innovation needed to take on younger, nimbler competitors.

This means firms need more people willing to confront entrenched thinking and champion change. They need more people who approach problems creatively. They need more effective listeners, communicators, relationship-builders and negotiators. They need more skilled, diverse business (and social) networkers with their fingers on the pulse. They need more people they can trust to act autonomously. And they need more people who combine a range of these and other qualities.

So where are these people found? Everywhere and anywhere. You probably have some in your organisation, although invariably not enough.

More often than not, the kind of folk you need aren't following a traditional corporate career path, don't move in the same networks as yours and are unlikely to read or hear about opportunities in your business. They are more plentiful among self-employed professionals, portfolio workers, freelance entrepreneurs, forward-thinking start-ups, self-organising online communities and skilled people overseas with valuable new perspectives, ideas and contacts.

Offering ever higher financial rewards or fast-track career progression will do nothing to broaden your access to such talents. As career analyst and author Dan Pink pointed out at July's TED Global conference in Oxford, economists as far afield as MIT and the London School of Economics have shown increased financial rewards actually make people less likely to succeed at creative tasks.

Pink argues in order to attract the right kind of talent, businesses need to offer people not just money but freedom and satisfaction. Motivation, he says, is based on three key elements: autonomy (the urge to direct our own lives), mastery (the desire to get better and better at something that matters) and purpose (the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves).

What does this mean for your business?

It means IT systems and policies should support people working odd hours, remotely and (as far as possible) on the technologies they want to use. It means allowing people to build and nurture diverse external networks to reach out to a wider pool of potential talent and partners. It means your commitment to values like sustainability must be more than a glib statement in the annual report.

It means you should move away from defining prescribed job roles, hours, etc and adopt a more flexible, discursive approach to hiring talent based on people's individual needs and preferences. And it means your senior management must be committed to driving through these changes.

Part of the answer, thinks Pink, could be the Results Oriented Work Environment (Rowe), a system pioneered by US retailer Best Buy and now being used successfully by around a dozen organisations across the pond. Essentially, Rowe puts the kind of employment practices already common among many small online start-ups into a more formal framework that can be applied in traditional businesses.

"In a Rowe people don't have schedules. They show up when they want. They don't have to be in the office at a certain time, or any time. They just have to get their work done. How they do it, when they do it and where they do it is up to them," says Pink. "What happens? Almost across the board, productivity goes up, worker engagement goes up, worker satisfaction goes up and staff turnover goes down."

Getting there won't be easy but it could be worth it. As Pink concludes: "If we bring our notions of motivation into the 21st century... we can strengthen our businesses, solve a lot problems and maybe, just maybe, we can change the world."

Jim Mortleman is a business and technology writer, commentator, consultant and speaker. He writes a blog, The New Game.