By Juanita Lott, Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer, Epicor
As you begin building your business, the people you hire will be pivotal in shaping its culture and maintaining its success. But impressive talent doesn’t always make for impressive results. So the question is: How do you build a strong team?
Organizations of all types understand the value of entrepreneurial thinking and are moving fast to ensure it is made a core competency. These include:
1.Startups in growth mode who need to keep their entrepreneurial innovative edge and culture to attract top talent.
2.Large companies with a more traditional business culture who are acquiring or creating smaller, nimble entrepreneurial entities to gain a competitive and innovative advantage and need to re-envision their workplace so it doesn’t stifle entrepreneurial talent. We’ve all heard the stories of organizations that make strategic acquisitions of entrepreneurial DNA only to suffer “talent tissue rejection” – where the newly acquired talent assets that a company paid highly for start beating it for the door.
3.And finally, I would argue that due to the influx of Millennials in the workforce it’s even more paramount for organizations of all types and sizes to create workplace environments that nurture the free-thinker and their entrepreneurial spirit.
The need is pronounced, but the care and feeding of the entrepreneur in the workplace is highly nuanced. Where do organizations start? To begin, they need to understand the characteristics of entrepreneurial teams and what motivates them. Forget about traditional incentive plans; when dealing with entrepreneurial types, “challenge” trumps traditional notions of compensation/rewards.
In fact, you could say challenge is the currency of the entrepreneur. If the work environment isn’t challenging enough, they are likely to leave. Know what the entrepreneur works for (and what they live for): The vision, the dream, the challenge – it’s their oxygen. To fully engage, entrepreneurs must buy into the vision. After this, it’s important to create an ecosystem that clears away the physical, mental and political constraints that can be seen as impediments to the entrepreneur.
When creating entrepreneurial teams, larger organizations may need to rethink placing talent in the constraints of the traditional hierarchical organization. These teams may be more effective when they are free to look at projects holistically: to craft a vision and define how problems will be solved. Remove as much process, structure, and bureaucracy as is feasible; as they prefer working without walls, and that includes traditional “job description” boundaries.
This “unwalling” of the organization – a “decoupling from cubes and campuses” enabled by technology has also been eagerly adopted by Millennials. They are expected to comprise up 75% of the workforce by 2020, and their ideas of how and where work gets done is vastly different than previous generations; according to a recent survey by accounting firm Ernst & Young, Millennials highly value flexible work arrangements.
This has given rise to the so-called “gig economy” with individuals following the mantra of: “I will take my skills and knowledge where I choose to and work for the entity I choose on the projects I choose.” It is estimated that a full 50% of the U.S. workforce is expected to be freelancers by 2020. This has significant implications for teamwork and the notion of the organization itself. For example, how will companies manage a workforce that is a hybrid of a number of different types of worker – ranging from the 9-to-5 full time employee to the “gig economy” freelance producer? How will these changes impact data and information security?
This shift won’t happen overnight, but it’s something organizations need to begin thinking about and planning for now. Undoubtedly – and not unlike the move to offshore and globalize the workforce – challenges will arise and unintended consequences may bubble to the surface. For example, will companies find the “gig economy” places them at a disadvantage when they are faced with this new and potentially more short-term, mobile, project-based talent market? Without a crystal ball, it’s impossible to know what lies ahead, but perhaps today’s entrepreneurs will rise to meet this challenge as well.
Overall organizations must recognize this new fluidity of the organization necessitates a shift from “employee retention” to “worker engagement.” To this end, efforts to institutionalize knowledge to ensure virtual worldwide talent pools can effortlessly engage/collaborate is key. A technology tune-up to ensure the right platforms are in place to unite workers, information and execution can go a long way to plumbing the organization for success.