April 12, 2018
Poor company culture is costing the UK economy £23.6 billion per year
A new report claims that a third of people (34 percent) who leave their job, do so because of perceived poor company culture. The report, authored by breatheHR claims the associated cost of bad company culture is around £23.6 billion per year. The survey of 2,500 people analysed in The Culture Economy, also suggests that well over half of SME leaders (60 percent) consider company culture as a ‘nice to have’ in their business.This mindset has a number of knock-on effects. According to the Chartered Management Institute, effective leadership could improve Britain’s productivity by 23 percent. However, with over half (53 percent) of employees surveyed who distrust their senior management, thinking their bosses ‘didn’t appear to know what they were doing’, there is some work to be done.
It should come as little surprise that graduates who have undertaken an internship are more likely to have honed the skills businesses needs, one of the main findings of the Institute of Student Employers (ISE) annual Development Survey, which launches today (28 March 2018) at the ISE Student Development Conference. The report found that 63 percent of employers believed graduates who had undertaken work experience had the required soft skills, yet less than half (48 percent) thought this of graduates in general. According to the report the five most common graduate skills gaps are; managing up (5 percent of employers believed graduates had this skill); dealing with conflict (12 percent); negotiating/influencing (17 percent); commercial awareness (23 percent and resilience (31 percent). This is why closing skills gaps is a priority for businesses with 74 percent of employers taking specific actions to tackle the issue in 2017. Changes to recruitment and on-the-job training were the most common actions and 16 percent of organisations improved their internship development programmes specifically to close skills gaps.
There is a disparity between the causes of communications anxiety between men and women, claims new research conducted by RADA in business. Male employees are 45 percent more likely than women to feel anxious when socialising with their work colleagues, while women are most scared of giving a presentation. Team building events were also found to be more challenging for men, with almost a fifth (19 percent) reporting feelings of communications anxiety. Work social events followed, with 17 percent reporting the same feelings. In contrast, the report found that female employees experience greater levels of anxiety when giving presentations in front of a group, to colleagues, or to management. The evidence suggests that while men require more help with skills around spontaneous communication, for women it is about standing their ground and getting their voice heard when stepping into the spotlight – often in situations that may have a significant impact on their career path. Notably, the research shows that women are also 39 percent more likely to experience workplace anxiety than men when in a job interview, and 37 percent more likely when negotiating a pay rise.
Artificial intelligence systems need to be accountable for human bias at AI becomes more prevalent in recruitment and selection, attendees at the Employers Network for Equality & Inclusion’s annual conference have been warned. Hosted by NatWest, the conference, Diversity & Inclusion: The Changing Landscape heard from experts in ethics, psychology and computing. They explained that AIs learnt from existing data, and highlighted how information such as performance review scores and employee grading was being fed in to machines after being subjected to human unconscious bias. Dr David Snelling, the programme director for artificial intelligence at technology giant Fujitsu, illustrated how artificial intelligence is taught through human feedback. Describing how huge data sets were fed into the program, David explained that humans corrected the AI when it used that data to come to an incorrect conclusion, using this feedback to teach the AI to work correctly. However, as this feedback is subject to human error and bias, this can become embedded in the machine.
April 9, 2018
How the UK car industry is driving the future of workplace design
by Paul Dunn • Comment, Workplace design
(more…)