5 Workplace Trends Advisory Firm Leaders Need to Harness Now
Businesses are restructuring benefits to be more supportive of employee well-being, considering policies like personal time off and mental health days. They are also setting boundaries around work schedules so that employees can consistently relax and recharge.
Reining in work schedules can be tricky for advisory firms — after all, it’s a service-based business, and clients’ needs extend beyond the hours of 9 to 5. But we have found that many of the organizations that are attracting the best talent are focusing on health at the global level within workforce policies.
4. The Gig Economy
Advisory firms are embracing the gig economy, in which workers are available for temporary employment, freelance contributions or other types of non-permanent arrangements. This trend is showing up quite heavily in both the client service and business functions.
Firms might, for example, hire a temporary digital marketing person to work full time for nine months to set up a digital marketing program. Or they might use gig workers to input financial planning data during busy, high-growth periods. They might even turn to the gig-worker marketplace for client service help during periods of market turbulence.
Advisory businesses are learning that tapping into this nontraditional source of human capital can boost their profitability by allowing them to focus on temporary talent at specific pain points.
5. Reskilling Workers
The final trend is one that the leading firms are leaning into: reskilling. Reskilling, of course, refers to learning a new skill. In this case, firm leadership is investing heavily in training on what we call the power skills: efficiency, communication and organization. People with these skills are trained to manage time and stress, communicate with empathy, and are well organized in their daily working routines.
The pandemic has changed the way firms must look at efficiency, communication and organization, and reskilling training programs.
Let’s look at efficiency. When an organization’s people work in a decentralized arrangement, oversight diminishes, and a great deal of unnecessary work tends to take place. That’s why a focus on efficiency has become paramount.
The bar for communication skills has risen as well. Firm leaders have had to express extra empathy and compassion for their clients for more than two years now. Unfortunately, empathy and compassion are finite commodities: Leaders are giving all they have to their clients, with none left over for their employees, who need it most.
So reskilling and training programs are focusing on helping all employees speak to their clients and colleagues with empathy and compassion. And, most important, when patience runs out, teaching advisors how to recharge themselves has become even more critical to firm success.
Reskilling to learn and strengthen power skills translates into better communication skills and filters into a firm’s culture. When leaders model empathy and compassion, employees follow suit. And that’s a precondition for a culture in which employees throughout the organization think creatively, solve problems independently, and help the business reach its growth potential.
In every industry, change is a constant. And employee management best practices are changing fast right now. While some leaders find these changes to be inconvenient and even aggravating, those who are open to them are, I believe, are much more likely to win the growth race.
