Strong Culture Needed to Attract Qualified Talent

The job market is changing, qualified employees are growing scarce and it is no longer enough for employers to simply offer their staff the bare minimum, Michelle Ferrari, CEO of Great Place to Work Mexico told Mexico Talent Forum on Wednesday at the Sheraton Maria Isabel hotel in Mexico City.

In her keynote presentation, Ferrari explained that organizations are now experiencing constant change. “Today, companies are experiencing real issues in talent recruitment, especially given the increased importance of IoT and industry 4.0,” she said. “We are making very interesting changes in the way we operate but it also very difficult to adapt staff to those changes.”

Ferrari said it is ever more important to seek staff that are aligned to the Industry 4.0 revolution and the increasing focus on automation. “We must understand the impact of Industry 4.0 in talent displacement. Today, talent profiles are not ready to adapt to this revolution,” she warned. “Artificial intelligence threatens to eliminate the human factor and as leaders at the forefront of this revolution, we need to understand how human talent fits in.”

According to Ferrari, a Great Place to Work certification has tangible benefits for organizations. “Being rated as a Great Place to Work is directly related to a company’s return on investment,” she said, displaying a graph trending Great Place to Work companies on the FTSE Russel index, which showed a 1,034 percent increase in ROI.

Being a Great Place to Work also creates greater loyalty and reduces staff turnover, Ferrari added. Among companies allied with the program, 84 percent of employees are aligned with their company’s strategy, 81 percent trust the company and 85 percent are committed to the company. She explained that these factors impact outcomes in a tangible way. “People who feel loyal to their organizations are 13 times more likely to make an extra effort to get the job done, 14 times more likely to recommend their friends work in the company and 18 times more likely to adapt well to change.”

As the job market grows more competitive, employers must think about the kind of culture they want to create to attract more and better talent. While these cultures can differ among companies, Ferrari said there are three main pillars: fairness and egalitarianism, strong training programs and a profound sense of purpose.

While all are important, Ferrari said the most important pillar was fairness and a sense of justice. To illustrate her point, Ferrari played a short video that showed a Norwegian social experiment in which two children, one boy and one girl, tasked with sorting and separating pink and blue balls. The children worked together to complete the task. In the end, the reward for the girl was fewer candies than the boy. Both children were confused by this, since they both did the same job. The video concluded with the question: “Unequal pay is unacceptable in the eyes of children. Why should we accept this as adults?”

Ferrari closed by saying that for companies, new generations are now increasingly demanding clearly drawn lines and expectations. “They want to see that 2 + 2 = 4,” she explained. To attract the best talent, she stressed the fundamental need to offer gender equity and fairness. “We cannot talk about self-driving technology while there are still issues related to gender inequality,” she said.