We’ve had to adapt how we lead and grow our teams for the new era of work. Here’s what some businesses are doing to keep up.
What trends are leaders embracing as we continue working remotely? How are teams hiring from home? This week on Careers, we got some insights.
On Monday, our editor Elaine Burke wrote about something we’ve all been building over the past year of working from home; resilience. This will stay an important part of our toolkit as we move along in 2021.
But what else will we need? According to Jonathan Keenan, head of engineering for customer profiles and personalisation at Zalando in Dublin, empathy is important. Keenan joined Zalando at the start of the pandemic and was onboarded remotely. Since then, he has had to lead and grow a team of tech professionals without ever meeting them in person. He wrote about his experiences for us, highlighting how much he has relied on emotional intelligence.
Kenny White, chief creativity architect at creative agency Funworks, wants us to consider a different kind of leadership tactic: fun. He explained to us how harnessing fun and creative energy in the workplace can fuel new ways of thinking, collaborating and developing products.
Many leaders are also responsible for market expansion. Patreon product manager Colin Aherne told us about the company’s internationalisation goals and why much of his job is planning for the future.
Hiring from home
If you’re recruiting at the moment, Hays’ Travis O’Rourke took us through some of the things that make for a great job advert. Read his advice to learn more about how much detail you should be including and what will make your ad stand out from the rest.
A big part of recruitment that has had to change in response to the pandemic is onboarding. In this interview, Liberty IT’s Jonathan White talks about some of the measures his team has taken to make new joiners feel welcome. The company onboarded more than a hundred new employees remotely in 2020 and 40 so far in 2021, and it has extensive hiring plans for the rest of the year.
It’s also worth considering two important resources that have launched this month. Both were created to help employers in Ireland hire more inclusively. The first, Employers for Change, is a new information service to help make hiring practices more inclusive of people with disabilities. The second is DCU’s new Race Equality Guide, launched by the college’s Centre of Excellence for Diversity and Inclusion.
Want stories like this and more direct to your inbox? Sign up for Tech Trends, Silicon Republic’s weekly digest of need-to-know tech news.
