hello everyone and welcome to this recap from last night's campfire conversation with the f-con team my name's Laura and so pleasure to take you through what will be a quick and energizing recap or introduction to what we covered yesterday so let me share my screen with you so you can have a look at what we covered okay so the title of our campfire discussion was workplace culture that's fit for the 2020s how might we attract and retain the best talent in our industry for sustainable performance and creating a great place to work so the main sort of body of content of discussion really came from looking at what does it mean to create a fantastic place to work as we see the dawning of a new age in terms of the technologies and what it means to work just from there social changes etc and the purpose of a campfire is to honor really for hundreds of thousands of years the tradition of human sitting in circles having some uninterrupted time where we can have a safe space to talk discuss and share and see where there might be some commonalities and inspirations we can take from each other and we had a really good quality meeting last night so thoroughly recommend it for anyone who is looking to find a safe space to learn and share ideas with peers etcetera etcetera so how it kicked off was just thinking about the what it means to be in the world of work and running a business and contributions business right now in just three pay days time we're at the start of a brand new decade and who knows what the key trends are going to be over the next decade what we probably know is that for most industries yourselves I'm sure no exception the next decade is not going to be easier karma smooth with more money walking around then there's then there has been so how do we then get our teams ready for a workout rather than a burnout what does that then mean says of creating a great place to work that people want to come and join you so the campfire discussion really revolves around three core sections really first a chance to catch our breath on the brink of one decade into the other woods it meaning to have a great workplace culture and we also asked the question about what are some current hot topics for yourselves so I'll share those in a moment a chance to learn from each other what do you think will be the most important aspects on the track top talent into businesses and next decades and what is it we can do right now to leverage and ensure our businesses and by creating space where people want to stay the best people want to stay so in a fascinating conversation right at the start where I ask people what is a current hot topic that you're experiencing with reference to your people in your culture that maybe would have surprised you 5 10 years ago and one of the first things that came up was the impact of having different generations at work and entering into the workplace and different expectations and how many people now joining businesses let's say in graduate roles are not prepared to work for 3-4 years making the tea and doing all the kind of lower-level stuff they want to come in and hit the ground running and start to develop and be promoted much quicker than maybe then older generate previous generations and one of those sort of things that came up that utterly fascinated me was them could it be that that's the chain the shift in their dynamic around education so for those of us who were reared on free education then the expectations go into our first job maybe they'll be different from someone that is invested 30 to 40 grand of their own money and their own debt into receiving a degree and so the expectations when they're getting to their first job might not be to make tea for the first two years so we had a fascinating conversation around that I'll share with you the top 10 10 takeaways and towards the end but it really we had a conversation around how the pace of work and what is it that we're seeing in terms of key key challenges and I think most of us are feeling that work has definitely become more pace yeah expectations have changed so the way with your clients service level agreements etc and what people expect from you when they join your business and and this little unicorn sky and lion here spike here just shows how much things have increase in fact Moore's processing law as followed true which is each year we are doubling the amount of information that can be processed and having the cost to do that so what we're seeing is this incremental exponential growth of technology where some of us depending on how long we've been in the world of work completely transformed even just how our desks look compared to maybe and you know a few years ago and in fact in November 2017 there was a silent moment that happened in there around the globe it was the moment there were more devices with SIM cards connected than there were humans on the planet the most extraordinary thing about that is that between November 2016 and November 2017 there's a 30% increase about 3.6 billion new devices became live on the internet so that's just a practical example of just how much has kind of changed and how a need to evolve in the way that we work and the way the organization's work has that caught up at the same pace one of the key things that came out and you'll see the copies of the flip charts here is this kind of how do senior level teams senior leadership chains SL T's interact with people and I mentioned this idea of rather than using phrases like a top-down communication plan for example which to me just sounds so old-fashioned and so parent/child and actually we are raising people are now being raised in it have different expectations around hierarchy and maybe in previous generations if want to be treated as responsible accountable adults not just told what to do and told off if they don't do it right but to be talked at at the same level so someone who's new in to be sitting next to senior leadership team in their strategy discussion meetings and getting their opinions etc and focusing people on the shared way ahead to get a bit of hope and energy which of course is such a unique human aspects of it there's a lot of drama going on or a lot of conflict or a lot of uncertainty then actually to spend the majority of your language as an organization focusing on the future it's gonna only be comforting for people that want a bit of certainty but it also galvanizes a bit more energy because everyone is pointing in that same direction and in fact in the old days hierarchy would works in an organization of the person top was paid the most money to tell the next rung down what to do we tell the next rung down what to do who tell the frontline people what to do so your board would tell the heads of would tell the frontline leaders supervisors would tell the frontline people what to do actually what sort of slowly dawning really is that they're the tail of the organization the money of the organization comes in at the frontline so if the frontline aren't doing what they need to be doing then that is going to impact the revenue the profit service levels of an organization the CEO could have a day off and my not impacts customer experience but if everyone on that front line were to have a day off all at the same time and that's going to seriously impact business so it's not that the see a CEOs role is not important but the nature of how an organization communicates maybe needs to catch up with these new ways that society is working the internet has democratized my voice is as valid as your voice in terms of you know to communicate so actually those organizations that have a CEO who is there to ensure that the next level in so let's say the their heads off have what they need to be able to do their role and the only reason you have the heads of role is to be able to enable the frontline supervisors to have what they need and the only reason the frontline supervisors are there is to enable the frontline people to have what they need to it perform an Excel and sustain success within their role so rather than a top-down approach which I winced whenever I hear that now so so old-fashioned it's more actually a front to back so how do we communicate frontwards and backwards and in the organization's just sure everyone in the line in front has what they need to do their role in recognition that the till if the organization is only frontline teams so personally life is involving we're living for far longer than any previous generation if you're in your forties now you got 50% chance a limb to a hundred if you're in your 20s you've got an 80% chance and living to 100 so even the thought of mapping our aspirational career paths is a little bit different now compared to how it was a number of years it might be quite normal for someone to have a 60 or 70 year long career which means that to predict with a hole-in-one what you're going to be doing in 2070 for your people you could drive yourself crazy much more empowering actually to think about what it is that I can do to ensure that I am bringing as much energy and passion or an interest into your current role because it's difficult to predict exactly where everything's going to go so at least let's do what we can to keep people happy and engaged and comfortable to be flexible in where the organization needs to go and as Darwin remind us you don't have to be the strongest or the fastest person within an ecosystem to be able to handle change your rate of internal change needs to match the rate of external change and then you'll still fit for your environment for example a panda is famously really poor adapting and surviving they're back from the brink of extinction but only because we've conserved them because they think about how panda is it's really cute and love them but it's fixed and Static as a mono diet of bamboo which is really low in calorie food value which and because it reaches for its food rather than runs for its food it's the last for know that there's something going on over there that's going to impact its ability to look after itself so pandas then find rapid environmental change hugely stressful and really negative for their opportunity to survive so actually a panda mindset is one where we've got ourselves so busy chomping through business as usual that we've reduced all capacity to bring a bit of peripheral vision and see what's going on elsewhere where is a fox is constantly aware of what's going on in this environment over there four humans are looking at they're going to move on they learn to hunt again if the prey is going to to deforestation it will learn to forage and work around humans to control and influence their own habitat so love or more hate them you've got to give foxes respect for the fact that they are flexible dynamic and so resilient and just like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis it started off life as a caterpillar but it looks absolutely transformed when it started but it's still the same DNA so how do ensure that people still feel like they're true to themselves but the nature of what they might do might change how we encourage this fox mindset so part of being a fox of course is reminding ourselves that mental health and social skills are probably the core skills that underpin everything so what can we do to create a work environment where people feel okay to be themselves they feel okay to be with others and then unable to fill out what I'm doing now is going to be good for me in all areas of life in my future because as we've seen from that unicorn spike is getting life is really busy right now a lot of us are dealing with lots of different competing pressures so how do we work together as a team and what does that then mean the benefit of human thinking is when you get an opportunity for that team to sit together and have time and space to come up with ideas for example the Cephalon team looking at how do we reduce the impact of childhood waterborne disease so Savin on antiseptic soap is a life changer in for example in villages in India but if you are short on water you can't expect every school child to have the facility to be able to wash their hands all the time for eating so what they realized is that if they impregnated the chalk with salve LOM because chalk was in supply and that breaks the difference between writing on the chalkboard and then eating and then toileting they realized that if they M put the sava on within the chalk then actually that would be a way of delivering that life-saving bit of chemical without the need for water Wow I mean that's an example of a problem that you cannot Google because it's an emerging urgent difficult unprecedented problem that requires lots of discretionary and flexible thinking now that doesn't happen that happened by a team sitting around having time and space to think so what are the key questions I think an organization should be asking now is how much time do we give our leaders to think and how much space do we give for our teams to be able to actually sit and have a conversation whether that is our connected virtually or physically within a room so those cultures that are set up to maximize the human elements of something are probably going to be the ones that and see benefits and I called this the full-si moments so the 4c moments of care collaboration curiosity and creativity are difficult to outperform a human via an algorithm they're almost the uncodable unscripted moments in work and the more space we can give a team the time to care with each other to work together collaboratively to learn what each other's doing so bring that curiosity to come up with something new probably the more rich and energized that team is going to be because we're giving their conditions for being able to perform in a way that deep down we know that machine is unable to do so could it be that questions like how could I demonstrate as a leader my genuine care and determination to do the right thing in my next blog post my people how do I encourage the teams to work collaboratively and just explore every opportunity even with teams that don't necessarily work together what would happen if you partnered up the finance team with the operations team to work on a new brainstorm pitch together who knows what new generating thought might come from having those normally and separated teams working together a different way what could be worth a rethink or a radical relook or fresh perspective to spark a bit of energy even in its own right and when is an exchange to try something brand new how do I create an environment where people feel safe to take risks so the benefits that diversity and difference we covered a lot about this about the the this idea and I added this honors it as an extra flow to you with us last night it's almost like being the prism in an increasingly binary world but in order to unlock that diversity in that difference and bringing people who typically or traditionally would have been attracted into a certain industry there's got to be given light and energy like any light source we've got to be given some light and energy so the main takeaways we had was top 10 takeaways what can we do to get the management layers thinking about having a Fox gross mindset so being a Fox to unlock the benefits and new generations joining our teams the more we can do our working out loud the more involved engaged people will be and confident about the future so rather than saving everything until shiny glossy PDF document it's evolving people right from the start in terms of code collaborate how we work stuff out moving away from this top-down servant culture which just sounds so 80s where orders are sent down the chain but till is at the front so asking the team in front what can we do for you and that being the most courageous act a leader could do with their team's giving the precious currency of time to people from regular one-to-ones to time as a team to share connect energize and learn I've been working at nnd now for over 20 years and actually what I'm realizing as time goes on is is even just giving people space to learn and a room to sit in as a team might be the number one benefit of having some formal structured learning put into people's Diaries there are some radical ideas out there in terms of attracting and retaining emerging talent I mentioned about Facebook's policy of offering egg freezing to attract more women into their tech positions a real game-changer and very controversial that was about two years ago they launched that and even just this week virgin launched the fact that they are no longer going to ask people about their education and qualifications when they join the business as part of the recruitment criteria and Richard Branson is you know famously dyslexic and talks about the benefits of having that different type of brain one in which the one in which the education system might not kind of and they were people to thrive so there's a frequency of monthly reviews came up quite a bit so a number of the guys were already running six monthly reviews but maybe how to speed that up and have more the value in having planned culture building events but as well as the more spontaneous stuff didn't feel like forced fun and this idea of learning and development being the Khan of the passport people to be able to develop within the safety net of a long term position so as well as the beer fridge is the culture bit the fun bit offering lndeed to keep talented people so you can stay and move on in your career and it doesn't have to be laying on a load of expensive training it can be just even giving people time and space to say watch a TED talk as a team and then discuss it after anything to keep people's brains ticking over and curious and energized getting different cities involved in bigger wider strategy because sometimes the freshest ideas are from the newest in and the value I've been able to share listen and connect with others in the industry I think people really enjoyed that yesterday evening so the enduring power of the campfire so my name is Laura and I hope you found this as a useful wrap-up I'd only plan for it to be 10 mohm at 10 minutes but you can see my alarm has gone off a couple of times so I hope that was useful for you and with three pay days to go into the start with brand new decade what can you do to smash it out of the park in 2019 and get set up with the best possible and platform for the decade ahead I wish you well keep foxy