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Building a resilient workforce
Written by John Berry on 18th December 2019. Revised 23rd December 2019.
2 min read
Resilience has three elements: the ability to manage yourself and your learning, the ability to communicate and collaborate with others and the ability to successfully craft one’s own environment. As skills that are difficult to automate, those might be termed ‘skills for life’. No-one is going to make your firm resilient for you. It's your job as manager and the time to start is now.
The ongoing saga of training evaluation!
Written by John Berry on 27th November 2019.0
5 min read
There’s no doubt: ask any senior manager how he or she would evaluate training and the response will always be given in terms of how the business can now do something it previously couldn’t, or how productivity has been raised. It’s the effect on the business that matters. And yet so often, assessment about training success is made much earlier in the personal development process. Here's how to think about training to realise business outcomes.
New roles in product-based software solutions
Written by John Berry on 27th June 2018. Revised 25th October 2019.
5 min read
Many software development firms pride themselves in being able to tackle almost any software task. They elicit requirements, or build prototypes, and code databases, business logic, algorithms and user interfaces without any particular market or industry focus. Others productise. Over time they standardise and focus. But what new jobs are needed to make this happen?
This blog builds on our previous discussion on the EU Settlement Scheme. It highlights action managers need to take to enable staff to make short-duration visits to EU countries for academic, sales or technical activities. We point out that business trips will need to be planned in the future. It won't just be a case of booking a flight and putting equipment in a suitcase.
We hear bad things about the NHS. We are led to believe that all staff are stressed to blazes and unable to function properly in a broken system. But far from it. My conclusions from my brief period as voyeur are that these guys know how to make a system work. I think industry can learn a lot from the way that hospital staff interact. Here's the story that illustrates how.
There are three centres of interest. Firstly, managers want to control anything that heightens costs. Secondly, managers are interested in anything that affects productivity such as competence, behaviour and the exploitation of technology. Thirdly, managers focus on variables that reduce competitive advantage through low staff motivation. This covers variables like commitment, engagement and leadership. But reports produced must provide insight. Here's how.
