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How do you hire for the future of work when customer demands, environments, and trends are changing so fast?
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Delivering Happiness has gone through some massive changes lately. Like many companies, we are experiencing the effects of COVID-19. All the strategies we planned in Q1 have to take a turn. On top of that, we are onboarding a group of new team members and going through systems and process changes all at the same time. Some might think that this is not the norm, and we are going to get back to normal. In my perspective, this is the new normal. This is the future of work that we, as a company, have been preparing for almost a decade. The future of work, where the rate of change accelerates, is here now
Hire to Your Company Values
We make 35000 decisions a day. Values are essential to a person and an organization alike when it comes to making critical business decisions and ones that we don’t even notice. With so many shiny objects in front of us every day, values help us align with our true north and execute effectively. When you are clear and living your values, you will have more time executing vs. trying to make decisions. We help our clients define their values and translate them into behaviors because the same value could mean different things to different people. Hiring people that already align with your company values and culture is much easier than trying to change someone or have them learn them.
Hire for Passions over Experience
While it’s important to hire people with a high level of expertise and technical skills, market trends are changing faster than ever before. A skill that is relevant today could be replaced quickly by another tomorrow. Hire people to their passions so they would be interested in learning the new trends in those fields. Especially with remote work, if your team loves what they do, they are going to be fully engaged. 85% of the current workforce worldwide is not engaged right now and finding that alignment with passions could improve that stat. Passion also helps with one key ingredient for mastery and success: Grit. One way to find out if they are genuinely passionate, find out their why they want to take on the position.
Hire Optimists
Positive Psychologist Martin Seligman has done decades of study on the benefits of optimism to find that it generates better results in health, relationship, academics, athletics, and business. One study in the book "Learned Optimism" has found that the most optimistic 10% of insurance salesmen sell 88% more than the most pessimistic 10% and are much less likely to quit. Optimism comes in handy in the face of failure and defeat. The opposite side of a problem is an opportunity. Optimistic explanatory style is the key to persistence and seeing these problems as opportunities. Optimists believe that their actions have an impact, while pessimists don’t believe there is much they can do. Hire people that have taken new ideas and apply them to problems to improve their roles or better yet improve your company’s bottom lines.
While it’s much easier to hire optimists than to change a pessimist to be one, optimism is a skill that can be learned. Delivering Happiness coaches have created a series of four free mini-sessions to help you and your team how to Adapt and Thrive through this challenging time.
