Changing
Requirements of Staff
Managing
staff more smartly is also more important because the expectations of the
workforce in many areas of the world have changed. People want and increasingly
demand a sense of purpose and meaning from their employment as well as
connection with others in the workforce. Employers in all sectors already need
to respond to this demand and this will become an absolute requirement if we
ever see the widespread introduction of something like universal basic income.
This will mean that people have a more realistic opportunity to take on work
that they want to, rather than have to do and will potentially provide a
significant opportunity for employers like museums working in the creative
economy.
People
also want more flexibility, often including the need to work part vs full time,
to work at home, and increasingly to work for multiple organisations as
freelancers, or by developing ‘side hussles’ on top of their main employment.
Importantly, these expectations are not limited to generation Y / Z or their
global equivalents, eg China’s post-80’s, but are increasingly expressed by
people of any age.
Organisations
therefore need to focus on meeting these workforce needs as well as their
business and customer ones. Sometimes this can be quite easy. For example
museums often need project based staff to design exhibitions and this short-term
focus often fits the aspirations of people who want to work in this role.
Similarly,
museums’ increasing need for flexibility often means they need to get work done
by temporary employees, contract or ‘gig’ workers, and consultants. This
contingent workforce is an increasingly common addition to the traditional
organisation. For example, as shown in the above figure, Charles Handy’s shamrock
organisation model (Handy, 1995) now needs to be considered to have four
constituent parts (or leaves):
• A core workforce with specific skills and a
high alignment with a museum’s mission and
domain who want a long-term relationship with the museum. The core workforce
may include curators, conservators etc, but also front of house / visitor
experience staff where excellent as opposed to average performance, for example
by offering and personalising explanations on exhibits, can make a huge
difference to customer experience.
• A contract workforce of key talent who do not
fit the above profile but are still really important for the museum’s future.
Handy suggests this may include people who have previously been employed by the
organisation. Web designers and other digital staff may also fall within this
category.
• A peripheral workforce who will probably be
employees rather than gig workers, but who may bring a ‘gig mindset’
(McConnell, 2018) to their work, meaning that they are more focused on their
own development and career rather than loyalty to their current and short-term
employment. This workforce segment will include staff working in generic
functions such as Finance and Marketing as well as areas like security and food
and beverage if these are not outsourced.
• The additional leaf provided by the contingent
workforce of gig workers and other short-term contributors. This group could
include people working in a range of different areas but where it is easier and
more effective to rent rather than own capability. As opposed to the contract
group, these staff will not generally provide a strategic differentiation and
this means they may need to be managed with rather more focus on efficiency.
Each
of these different workforce segments have different requirements and
expectations and will need to be treated differently, though to the same extent
in terms of the relative quality of the approach.
Meeting
each of these segment’s needs can also be fairly easy as the flexibility
required by an organisation often relates to the flexibility desired by
individual staff. However, the challenge is often in matching the two. For
example Glassdoor reviews from staff on UK’s zero hour contracts, show a
significant difference in perspective depending on whether these arrangements have
been designed to meet employees’ as well as the employer’s needs (Ingham, 2015).
In addition, staff need to be participants in the design of the flexibility to
ensure it really does meet their needs.
Organisations
also need to focus on providing suitable integration between these workforce
categories in order to avoid tensions between them (McIlvane, 2019), as has
been reported recently at Google (Wong, 2018).
Other
ways of meeting the workforce’s new expectations include providing more
involvement in the core domain of the museum. For many staff, this will be a
core reason that they work in the sector and most museums could make much more
out of this alignment than they do, maximising the opportunities for intrinsic
as well as just extrinsic motivation. For example, museums could develop
internal communities enabling staff to contribute outside of their specific job
areas.
The
role of volunteers in many museums shows the potential provided by people who
want to contribute to a museum’s cause, separate to any financial compensation
for doing so. A good example here is the London Transport Museum which has a
large volunteer workforce, including roles which might usually be standard paid
positions, including research, IT, helpdesk analyst, curators, and event
stewards. The museum even takes this approach a stage further forward by using
volunteering as a means to meet the museum’s broader mission, providing
volunteering experience as a means for people to develop into transport
engineering careers with other employers through the museum’s Enjoyment to
Employment programme.
However,
it is also important that this opportunity is not taken too far. Providing
broader and more altruistic benefits can never be a good excuse not to pay
people appropriately!
The
above strategies should also help museums improve their diversity as moving
towards more personalised approaches also makes it easier to meet an
increasingly varied range of requirements and hence appeal to non-traditional
recruitment pools. However, making this approach work also requires an
effective approach to inclusion, ensuring a more diverse range of people are
able to contribute and work together effectively.
I'll be posting parts 2 and 3 of the chapter over the next couple of weeks.
Jon Ingham,
Top 100 HR Tech Influencer - Human Resources Executive
Mover and Shaker - HR magazine
info@joningham.com, +44 7904 185134
