Jonas Altman - Shapers

Squarespace's headquarters is a destination to which employees flock to work, learn, share, create, and hangout. Because they love being there, employees commute to the office when they could just as easily work from home. Staff are not seen as resources to be managed, but as humans to be challenged.

When traditional labour‐oriented jobs gave way to knowledge‐based ones, most corporations failed to upgrade their recruitment incentives. Some started to individualise rewards, giving each employee an opportunity to tailor a benefits package. But few reoriented towards the seismic shift in the market. Today, shapers have learned that giving employees control and empowering them so that meaning might ensue is the name of the game. Third‐wave workers ‘Seek meaning along with financial reward’, declared Alvin Toffler over 40 years ago. Many HR departments are just slow to read the memo–still trying to lure employees with pay and perks (and that veil of security).

Trailblazing organisations like Squarespace and Patagonia have high retention rates because they inspire and challenge their people. While less pedantic about contractual distinctions, these companies appreciate that the competition for talent has merely evolved into an endless game of Tetris. They've abandoned mass synchronisation in favour of agility that caters better to the uniqueness of individuals. The winning talent strategy is to quickly assemble and reassemble the right building blocks so as to meet a business's emergent needs. Continual renewal and reinvention is the capability du jour which we explore further in Part II.

As we saw in the origins of work, our industrial‐age beliefs were formed on a false understanding of human motivation. ‘Adam Smith's ideas about human nature were much more invention than discovery. His argument for what people were like was false. But they gave rise to a process of industrialisation that made them true,’ writes psychologist Barry Schwartz. This regretfully has shaped the nature of today's workplace and has impoverished us instead of lifting us up.

In modelling our workplace on the thesis that people are inherently lazy and spurred solely by dangling carrots, we turned a myth into a reality. We removed the soul from the organisation and replaced it with ego.

Shapers seek to perform those activities that give them the chance to learn and grow. Purposeful work is a responsibility because it betters themselves and society.

This applies across the spectrum no matter what collar you wear. Happy workers perform better. When people are more satisfied with their jobs, they are happier with their lives. There's greater commitment, increased productivity, and more profitability.

A comprehensive study of retail companies has demonstrated that the low pay, poor benefits, wacky schedules, and dignity robbing that is typical of jobs in this sector can, and more to the point should, be avoided. A good jobs strategy is one that makes a long‐term investment in people through better pay, ongoing training, and the intrinsic motivation that comes with autonomy. This yields better financial performance for investors, morale for employees, and positive experiences for customers.

The irony is how many human resource departments fail to grasp this. It's all too common to hear of ill‐fated or repeatedly delayed performance reviews, inclusion programmes parading as PR stunts, shoddy benefit packages, and the wrong people (or certainly not all the right people) leading the hiring process. The broken function of the conventional HR trade is one of the main obstacles to securing talent for well‐suited positions.

The function of the talent manager is not to promote a job but to sell the company DNA to the most fitting candidate. HR is really a marketing initiative; the product is the company and the consumer is the future employee. ‘Good talent managers think like businesspeople and innovators first, and like HR people last,’ insists Patty Mccord, former Chief Talent Officer at Netflix. A successful campaign results in identifying and selecting applicants who have the potential to adapt and grow.

HR is really a marketing initiative; the product is the company and the consumer is the future employee.

So instead of hiring staff largely based on the boxes they check, talent managers must consider an alternative approach. They must seek out and lure candidates that are eager to create and skill up in categories yet to be defined. ‘Companies want misfits, yet they want to hire them the old‐fashioned way. They want revolutionaries, yet they want their most conservative leaders to identify them,’ says storyteller Jeff Wasiluk.

Progressive talent managers should ask themselves:

Can our employees galvanise around an authentic, clear, and compelling purpose?

Do we positively treat our people like adults?

What does our company culture say about us as a destination to work?

What specific functions do we need to perform and how can we resource them in the smartest and most ethical way?

Is the traditional 40‐hour week the optimum way for us to utilise all or part of our workforce and, more importantly, enable them up to do their best work? Is a shorter work week or job sharing an option for us?

How does a distributed workforce and remote work enable us to advance our mission and let our people do their best work?

Do dynamic external workforces (talent networks) provide a viable solution to meet our current and future needs? And if so, how do we build an inclusive culture that treats these workers right?

‘Employee Experience Design’ is the cheeky catch‐all answer. A relatively newish approach evolving over the past two decades, it is much more integrated: employer branding, interviewing, on‐boarding, 360 feedback, perks and rewards, wellness, events, mentorship, training, off‐boarding, and anything that will enhance the working environment and experience for an employee. The ushers of this modernised practice are no longer Chief Human Resource Officers, nor so much even talent managers, they are People and Culture Brokers .

Such brokers ensure that those destined to work most closely with the new candidates are involved in the hiring process. Some even ditch the resumé in favour of really getting to know a candidate through ‘try before you buy’ approaches like wine and cheese parties, day‐long workshops, or short work assignments. Indeed, when hiring managers have access to so much revealing data, it's increasingly challenging for anyone to fake it. Companies can gauge a candidate's potential fit, and the candidate can discern if a company is all it's cracked up to be.

Recruiters must tell a gripping story that attracts the new candidates they seek. The most effective way to do this is by inspiring existing staff so they do the bulk of the marketing. More than 30% of required skills on job specifications are rarely met, so recruiters need to be less picky about finding all the right skills in a single candidate. It's those candidates with an insatiable hunger to learn – rather than ones that just meet job descriptions – that are the true rock stars.

One of the most dynamic recruitment strategies hails from the pioneering Dutch healthcare company Buurtzorg . All nurses within a team (of up to 12) must unanimously agree on hiring any new member. The bond between nurses is so extraordinary because they ensure all new additions are 100% committed and reliable. When it comes to providing care to patients, it's imperative they have confidence with those they work alongside. Buurtzorg's unprecedented levels of care and massive cost savings are possible in part because of the entrepreneurial creativity granted to nurses. It's also the main reason why the model of neighbourhood care is going global.