As we continue on our exhilarating journey of building RoleMapper, one of our priorities is to ensure that we take everyone’s health and wellbeing seriously. Growing a start-up takes a lot of dedication and hard work, all at an extremely fast pace.
At RoleMapper, we have an incredible team who are passionate and committed to our mission and growth. But intertwined in this crazy journey of growth, we have to remember that life still happens outside of work: children get sick, people move house, have birthdays, support friends and family, keep the house running….deal with the fall-out from covid….It can be exhausting.
As grateful and humbled as I am for the long hours and hard work from all the team, I am also really mindful that we need to look after ourselves and keep mentally and physically healthy on this journey. And to look after ourselves, sometimes we just need a bit of time. We just need a bit of time to pause. So, next week we’ve decided to halt the train for a moment. To stop and create some space for us all to breathe.
Next week, 23rd May, we are going to have a week of headspace, a moment of pause across the whole business. No calls, no demos, no emails, no meetings. A week where we just stop and have a chance to breathe. We will obviously all still be here for our customers to provide any support they might need on the platform.
But as for the rest of the time, we will be taking some well-deserved headspace to do things we have wanted to do but haven’t had time: develop code, solve those problems that we’d love to have the headspace to think about, do some geeky creative stuff or big picture thinking, do the exercise we’ve been wanting to do, have the long lunch we’ve been wanting to have, or simply spending the time in the moment without work distractions.
So, I wish you all a happy Breathe week and we’ll see you all recharged and raring to go on the 30th May!
The pandemic has forced people to re-evaluate how they engage with work and there’s no turning back. 60% of employees say they want increased flexibility post lockdown, 80% of candidates will turn down a role with no flexible working options.
Right now, we are at a crunch point in the future of flexible and hybrid working. This is a great opportunity for People Leaders to focus on taking a more holistic approach to flexible working practices and diverse and inclusive working.
According to latest research, 60% of Black employees who are not happy with the amount of flexibility they have at their current jobs, will look for a new one in the coming year.
In addition, the results from the latest Future Forum Pulse Survey has also shown a very significant shift in attitudes since lockdown restrictions were lifted.
Mandated return-to-work policies are seriously impacting morale with knowledge workers who have little to no ability to set their own work hours; they are nearly three times more likely to look for a new job in the coming year, compared to those with scheduled flexible working.
For those organisations that are looking to take a flex and/or hybrid approach, we are seeing organisations experimenting with the 4-day working week and looking at job sharing to enable part-time working and career progression.
However, organisations do need to take a longer term and structured view to flex, in order to make this a long-term success, which means adopting a more strategic focus on flex and future of work strategies. This will give People Leaders a unique opportunity to fast track their flex and inclusion agenda.
In order to do this, we need to rethink ways of working. Jobs sit at the heart of how we manage talent, but how does an organisation achieve this as part of its diversity strategy?
Creating a more inclusive culture means looking beyond traditional 9 – 5 working patterns. According to research from Harvard Business School and Accenture, in the US alone there are more than 27million ‘hidden’ workers who are unable to get a foothold due to disability or personal circumstance. The survey also highlighted the majority were in middle to senior-level positions.
This is a significantly untapped talent pool, but flexible working has shown to remove barriers to work and gives those locked out of the job market more opportunity.
Good job design is simply good practice. It’s an opportunity to capitalise on future work planning and re-think job design
People leaders have a window of opportunity to integrate a holistic view of flex – not just location flex but also time flex – and accelerate their diversity and inclusion agenda.
We talk about top-down strategies, but we also need to recognise the increase in demand from bottom up. With the surge in flexible working requests, people are rethinking how they engage with work.
At the same time, it is important to highlight that not all flexible working patterns work for all jobs. For example, there’s a lot of talk around the four-day week as a win-win solution for both the business and its people, but leaders do fear that flex patterns will be imposed and consequently have a negative impact on the ability to get the job done.
In order to combat this, leaders need to consider the following:
Establish the business case for re-thinking how jobs are designed and encourage experimentation. We have seen companies map out KPIs that track:
Re-imagine jobs
Organisations need to reimagine jobs at the point of role design. Jobs sit at the heart of how we manage talent and it’s the job that determines what flexible working options will work. I think we can all agree that the need to work flexibly is not a pandemic focused ‘one-off’.
To ensure a more sustainable approach, it’s important that flex is built into the core of a job, which means re-designing work to focus on outcomes. As we mentioned earlier, not all flex options work for all roles, so it’s important to design-in what flex will and won’t work. As a result, organisations will need to build-in processes to operationalise flex consistently, and fairly, across the business.
Wellbeing and future-proofed flexibility
Sustainable high performance and wellbeing are now at the core of many organisations. By re-designing jobs and creating the conditions and foundations that allow employees to choose how they can work, can be key drivers to keeping your people engaged, present and in a better place when it comes to wellbeing.
Now is the time for action. HR professionals have a huge opportunity to use the strategic focus and momentum on flex in order to re-imagine work at the point of job design.
RoleMapper has launched FlexApply, a first-of-its-kind platform that helps organisations automate and manage flexible working requests and applications.
With many organisations still figuring out how they are going to make flex a success in the long-term, as well as the type of flex to offer, FlexApply removes that pain by ensuring a fairer and more business-driven approach that works for both employee and business.
Key features of FlexApply include:
· AI-powered algorithms that provide bias-free flex assessments for every role
· Flexible working outcomes that work for the team and the business
· Dashboards providing visibility of all applications across roles and teams
· Workflows and reporting to ensure compliance and legislation
· Ability to customise to policies and work modes
Sara Hill, Founder and CEO, RoleMapper says: “Since the pandemic, there has been a seismic shift in how people want to engage with work. To attract and retain talent employers are having to be more open to increased flexible working - the days of traditional office-based 9-5 working is a thing of the past.
The challenge for many organisations is that the process of requesting and managing flexible working is manual, inconsistent and fraughtwith bias. FlexApply helps organisations automate the process of managing flexible working application requests, ensuring a consistent, visible and biasfree approach, focusing on the right flex that works for a particular organisation.”
FlexApply offers comprehensive reporting tools for HR and leadership teams. It also gives organisations the ability to analyse by team or department, as well as take a more strategic approach with reporting views across the enterprise.
FlexApply is part of a suite of solutions from RoleMapper: RoleFlex, FlexAssess, RoleShare, all supporting the design, automation, application and large-scale roll-out of flexible working.
Support for a four-day week was gaining momentum before the pandemic. Pre-2020, a range of organisations were trialling versions of this work pattern and recognising impressive benefits, especially when it came to productivity and wellbeing.
However, recent events have put flexible working front and centre of every major company's thinking. One flex working option that often includes serious consideration is asking employees to only work four days each week instead of five.
There are a number of drivers around this approach:
When you read between the headlines, you’ll notice that a four-day week means different things to different companies.
In 2018, all 240 employees at Perpetual Guardian, a New Zealand Financial Services company, were offered the opportunity to try working four, eight-hour days each week but get paid for five days. Some employees didn't work on Fridays, others didn't work on Wednesdays. Following the two-month trial, the main benefits reported by employees were a better work-life balance and decreased stress levels.
Before the trial, just over half of employees felt they could effectively balance their work and home commitments, which increased to 78% of employees. Employee stress levels decreased by 7 percentage points, while measures of “stimulation, commitment and a sense of empowerment at work” also all showed significant increases.
The assumption that might be made is that this reduction in working hours would have led to a corresponding drop in productivity. However, despite the reduced hours, productivity actually increased by 20%. Following the trial, the decision was taken to make this change permanent.
Microsoft Japan also tested out a four-day week with 2,300 employees over five weeks in 2019. They reported that employees were not only happier but 40% more productive, whilst electricity and paper consumption also decreased (23% and 59% respectively).
Understandably, four-day week trial reports tend to focus on the positives. However, as with any way of working, there are potential downsides.
Whilst this approach would work for some roles, it can be more difficult to implement for others (e.g. employees in back office and support functions, such as IT, finance and human resources). There are also concerns about the potential negative impacts on employee wellbeing and productivity.
So, what is this telling us?
To be effective, rolling-out a four-day week strategy across an organisation needs to be designed well. As we’ve seen from those less successful examples, there are elements that need to be considered. Spending time properly designing a role will inform what flexible working options will work and which won’t.
Our Future of Work modules allow you to design, integrate and implement sustainable, consistent and fair hybrid and flexible working practices, at scale.
Automating and operationalising flexible working policies into every role ensures they are business-led, eliminate bias and give your organisation total visibility of flexibility and work patterns across the enterprise.
To learn more about the pros and cons of the four-day week, download our latest guide.
We’re excited to announce that we are key sponsors of theCIPD’s inaugural Hybrid Working Conference.
The aim of the event is to support HRD’s, CPOs, D&I specialists and senior level execs on ensuring inclusion, wellbeing and engagement is embedded in new flexible working models.
With the in-person event taking place on 5th April 2022 in Central London, in a true hybrid approach it will also be streamed live online.
RoleMapper helps organisations design and embed flexible working that is sustainable and fit for the future of work. Our flexible working modules enables enterprises to automate and embed flexible working models at scale.
For any organization working with the U.S federal government, compliance with the OFCCP guidelines around workforce and hiring practices is essential. Non-compliance can result in significant fines.
Discriminatory practices could cost you up to $9 million in fines
The OFCCP has issued over $200m in violation fines to over 430 companies and this is increasing. $45 million in fines were issued in 2020 alone, up over 30% on 2019 and a 110% increase from 2018 - with an average fine of $460,000 and larger fines reaching over
$9 million.
Desk Audits cost over $23 million in time and resourcing
It’s not just the financial burden of a violation fine, however, there are also the ‘hidden costs’ of administering an OFCCP audit. In addition to investigating complaints, the OFCCP conducts audits to determine whether the Federal contractor (the employer) is fulfilling the obligation to maintain non-discriminatory employment practices.
As a result, the OFCCP can issue a request to conduct a desk audit at any time, where they will review your data, policies and practices to determine whether you are fulfilling the obligation to maintain non-discriminatory employment practices.
Over the course of 2021, the OFCCP expects to conduct over 3,000 audits annually. According to industry experts, the average audit lasts 720 days and costs US companies a total of $23,910,884 in time and resources.
In summary, organizations are paying a heavy price for poor practices and non-compliance. To further this point, the OFCCP keeps a record of these violations, and they are retained on the organization’s procurement record for all prospective federal government customers to see.
The average OFCCP audit lasts 720 days and cost US companies a total of $23,910,884 in time and resources
How you design, manage and report on the inclusivity of your jobs has a huge impact on ensuring OCCCP compliance and plays a vital role in the data provided in an OFCCP compliance audit. If you are not prepared, it can cost you millions in unnecessary time and resources.
Achieving OFCCP compliant Job Descriptions
STEP 1: Integrate a systematic review of Job Qualifications into your recruitment process
STEP 2: Ensure candidates are selected and hired based on valid job qualifications
STEP 3: Put an equality statement on all job postings
STEP 4: Ensure gender neutral job descriptions
STEP 5: Job Family diversity analysis and reporting
STEP 6: Quick access to accurate job descriptions for desk audits
The RoleMapper platform has a range of modules that adhere to all requirements and enables you to, not just standardize and digitize your library, but also debias roles, job ads and descriptions, access data-led insights and practice good governance with a range of reporting features.
With RoleMapper, businesses are able to Digitize, Standardize, Optimize, Connect and Manage job families, libraries, ads and recruitment practices.
If you’re looking to improve compliance across the enterprise, why not book a demo and find out how we can help your organization.
Inclusive job design is more than just re-working the language and copy on a page, it is the sequence of key steps you go through to design a job to create job descriptions and job ads that truly make an impact.
This is the process of job design, which sits at the heart of your ability to attract, retain and progress talent across your organisation and create more inclusive cultures.
The importance of inclusive job design can’t be underestimated, as it can:
· Increase hiring diversity by 125%+
· Increase quality of hires by 80%+
· Achieve 30% women in senior roles
· Reduce employee turnover 80%+.
We highlight the key elements of the job design process to show what conscious consideration actually means, and what debiasing and breaking down barriers looks like in the job design process.
Step one: Simplify and segment responsibilities
Make sure responsibilities are concise enough to be easy to read, but detailed enough to make responsibilities clear
Step two: Design inclusive requirements
What would a person need to have, day one, to be successful in the role that they can’t learn in the first 90 days of the job?
Step three: Use inclusive copy
Scientists have found that when you write more, people understand less. Make sure you watch the language you use, avoid gender-coded words and be mindful of the way sentences are crafted.
Step four: Design inclusion into all aspects of a job
Inclusive job design is not just about what you do in the role, it’s about the whole package.
Step five: Design hybrid and flexible working strategies
87% of candidates now want hybrid or flexible working. This is no longer a nice to have. It also has the potential to widen the talent pool, enabling around 4million candidates to enter a jobs market that previously locked them out.
Step six: Drive systemic change
Embed systemic change around how you design job and create job descriptions. As we said at the beginning, true inclusion has to start at the beginning at be at the core of the job design process. This is more than simply re-working the language and copy on a page
Want to learn more about inclusive job design?
Download our guide, Six Steps to Debiasing Job Descriptions or book a live demo of the RoleMapper platform.
Instead of a more linear approach to recruiting – education, degree by proxy and specific industry experience – organisations are now focusing more on transferable skills and capabilities to widen the talent pool and make hiring more inclusive.
We're delighted to say that we're not alone when we say you need to throw out the hiring conventions rule book, Linkedin has recently launched its Skills Path programme and has seen a 21% increase in skills-based job ads. The team at Gusto also believe unconventional hiring is the key to driving inclusion.
Instead of a more linear approach to recruiting, organisations are now focusing more on transferable skills and capabilities
The main point in all of this is to challenge the old-school ways of designing jobs based on qualifications, years of experience, industry experience.
Instead, we believe the way to filling critical roles with the best talent is to break these entrenched biases and be positively disruptive in how you define talent.
We have another trophy to add to the cabinet, Best Tech Startup from the Global Business Tech Awards.
This is another great win on the back of a really successful year so far. We were awarded Best Tech Startup at the UK Business Tech awards, selected as a Rising Star by Tech Nation and made it to the final of the Think Global awards.
The Global Business Tech Awards judging panel described the RoleMapper platform as a ‘really innovative piece of technology’ and felt that, as a startup, we were ‘impressive and gutsy’ to deliver such a technically advanced platform at such an early stage of our journey.
Sara Hill, CEO and Founder, RoleMapper says: “Winning this award really highlights our position as a truly global organisation. Working with scaleups and large organisations, RoleMapper has the ability to create inclusive workplaces regardless of where you are located or where you plan to be in the future as you scaleup.”
If you’re an organisation looking to hire more inclusively, why not take a look at our resources and learn more about debiasing job descriptions and creating inclusive job adverts.
We frequently come across organisations who are trying to solve the job description conundrum. Those organisations who know, or have heard, that job descriptions have the potential to unlock talent and diversity.
However, when we ask them; “tell me about how job descriptions are created in your organisation? Who owns this process” We are often met with a laugh and a comment along the lines of “Ha, well now that’s a question!”
More often than not, the process of creating job descriptions is a bit all over the place with no one clear owner. In many organisations it is a process that crosses multiple functions - with each group wanting different outcomes from the job description.
For example, some companies have a reward function who use job descriptions for grading and benchmarking. Managers create job descriptions to help them define and build out their teams.
At the end of the process is recruitment who try to do their best at translating hundreds of different versions of job descriptions into content that will be appealing to the outside world.
Understanding definitions is the first step to making the change
So, these organisations are correct in thinking that job descriptions are important. We at RoleMapper say that they sit at the epicentre of an organisations ability to attract, recruit and retain talent. But if you attempt to embed and scale a change to your job descriptions, without systematically changing how the process works, you will be left chasing your tail.
The start of any change initiative, no matter how big or small, should always starts with a vision of the future, defining the change and a view of the current state.
We thought it would be helpful to clarify a few definitions around the whole area of job descriptions. We hope these will help you articulate and identify the change you need to make in your organisation to write great job descriptions.
The process of designing a role
Job design is the process of actually designing a role. It is the process by which organisations define and divide the tasks that need to be done to carry out the work or service that needs to be delivered.
The job design process helps determine responsibilities, accountabilities, deliverables, and decision-making within the role. It also helps define inputs, outputs and interactions of the role, the key factors that influence the role, as well as how, where and when it must be performed.
Job design brings all these elements together to configure and create roles that motivate an employee to deliver the job successfully. It also helps attract the best candidates to the role.
The output of the job design process
A job description is a document that provides all the detail about a role. It is a critical tool that describes the purpose, responsibilities and outputs of a role. It helps us define the knowledge, skills, experience, and capabilities that a person will need to enable successful delivery. It might also include reporting lines, where the role sits in the hierarchy, grading etc.
To create an effective job description, it’s important to go through the ‘job design’ process. You might not know it – you might just think you are putting your ideas down on a page - but that’s what it is, you are designing a job.
A job description is a feeder into a job advert. It is where we define the content that can be translated into a job advert for the external marketplace. It also helps define the screening and assessment criteria for prospective candidates.
A job description describes what the candidate does for you; a job advert should focus on what you can do for them.
A job description tells, a job advert sells!
A job advert is another output of the job design process. It is a re-scripted shorter, copy-written sales version of the job description to sell the role and company to prospective candidates.
A job advert translates the essential elements of a job description, along with any additional unique selling points that can be used to sell the role through various advertising channels.
The objective of a job advert is to be a sales tool to attract the widest possible pool of appropriate candidates. A job advert needs to market the organisation and the position in a positive way. It must grab a potential candidate’s interest to encourage them to find out more.
Many organisations struggle to translate their job descriptions into job adverts. Failing to distinguish between a job description and a job advert can cause all sorts of challenges because the aim of each is different.
A consistent approach to job design is the key to creating great job descriptions and job adverts.
A high-level summary of a role
A job profile is an outline or a high-level overview of a role. It provides general information about the role as a starting point and is sometimes used as the first step when creating a job description.
Sometimes the terms job profile and job description are used inter-changeably, but a job profile is actually a summary document of a role whereas a job description is a translation of that role into a specific job or team. For each job profile, there may be multiple versions of job descriptions that align to variations within teams.
A group of job roles
A job family is a group of job roles involving similar types of work and/or requiring comparable training, skills, knowledge, and expertise. The concept can establish a robust framework within an organisation and is particularly useful when job titles for similar roles vary.
The concept of job families allows organisations to treat occupational groups differently from each other in terms of reward, career paths or development needs.
Job families may be linked to:
There will typically be 5-10 job profiles sitting within a job family.
The term “job architecture” encompasses the whole eco-system for jobs and provides the basic organising construct for aligning jobs in an organisation based on the type of work performed.
A job architecture will include job levels, job titling conventions, grades, career paths, spans of control, the criteria for career movement and can be used for ensuring equitable pay.
In summary, job design is the process; job descriptions, job adverts and job profiles are the outputs; and job families and a job architecture provide the structure.
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