Nowadays, employability isn’t just determined by what you already know. How well you learn, apply and adapt is equally important. After all, individuals aren’t looking for a ‘job for life’ anymore. Instead, they focus on developing their overall skills, experience and expertise. Doing so will enable them to remain employable throughout their entire career.

Striving for more sustainable employment

Our Sustainability Plan is our commitment to help. It outlines how we’re creating meaningful, sustainable employment in all four corners of the world. Three pillars underpin it:

1. Ready For Work: ensuring young people are work ready when they leave education
2. Skilling Up: helping people nurture learnability throughout their career journey
3. Integrating and Including: enabling all people to participate in the workplace and achieve their potential

To achieve this, we partner with clients, NGOs and governments. Together, we help people become, and stay, employable throughout their entire career.

We believe meaningful and sustainable employment has the power to change the world. Watch the below video to find out more about the ManpowerGroup Sustainability Plan:For more information, read our full 2016 Sustainability Report.

All businesses have a responsibility to positively contribute to wider society. They need to ask questions such as: what can we do to help our local community? How can we invest in local talent pools? What learning opportunities can we provide them?

After all, we’re operating in a world of constant change. Faced with technological, political and structural upheavals, many communities feel disenfranchised and disconnected. As a result, too many individuals look ahead and cannot see how their circumstances will improve.

Businesses have an important role to play to enhance people’s lives. To drive long-term workforce sustainability and employability, organisations need to invest in upskilling programmes that align with business needs. It’s not a nice to have – it’s business critical.

ManpowerGroup: Improving Workforce Sustainability

This is exactly what ManpowerGroup was built on. For nearly 70 years, we’ve led the way in providing meaningful and sustainable employment for millions of people around the world.

We help individuals upskill and adapt to new ways of working, so they have broader employment opportunities and can choose paths that create a better life. To do this, we partner with governments, NGOs and our clients. We get people ready for work, help them upskill, and improve diversity in integrated and inclusive workforces.

This strong ethical foundation is at the core of all ManpowerGroup operations. It runs throughout every part of our organisation. Download our 2016 Sustainability Report to find out more about our commitment to doing well by doing good.

Related whitepapers:

Managed Service Programmes (MSPs) have historically been highly customised and resource intensive. As a result, they have been best suited to large organisations – but this is set to change.

Over the past few years there has been a significant uptick in lower-volume programmes seeking an MSP solution – due to the impact of evolving labour regulations, the availability of technology solutions, changing work models, and talent shortages.

With larger businesses, MSP initiatives are usually a significant undertaking that require sophisticated and highly customised solutions. They rely on hyper-consistent delivery, or the value of the engagement is lost. This consistency is often the result of face-to-face implementation and high-touch execution, which has proven impractical for smaller programmes.

For example, multi-country MSP programmes often featured significant amounts of technology, training and back-office integration. This is both on the part of the organisation and the MSP. Hiring managers are involved in most aspects of the day-to-day effort, and they develop and regularly utilise a large knowledge base associated with the technology and process.

Even if such a model were made to be cost-effective for lower-volume programmes, it would be difficult for the people involved to retain the necessary skillset. Essentially, it is a ‘use it or lose it’ situation.

A centralised MSP model

Nonetheless, at TAPFIN we’re seeing market shifts creating a pressing need for new kinds of MSP workforce solutions. These need to be viable for small and medium-sized programmes. These emerging needs of smaller programmes challenged us to design a new, centralised MSP model. This fresh approach delivers all of the same traditional MSP benefits. However it eliminates barriers that have made these solutions unsuitable for small and medium-sized initiatives until now.

With our new centralised model, technology and administration is moved into a single location, managed by the MSP. This delivers a more flexible model that balances quality with process efficiency.

It’s a streamlined approach, which ensures small and mid-sized organisations realise the same benefits as larger programmes. This includes risk mitigation, deeper supply chain strategy, and a consistent and reliable workforce visibility.

These types of outcomes are particularly important because smaller enterprises, subsidiaries and newer sites may not have the internal resources to respond to ever-changing opportunities and challenges related to strategy, talent acquisition, market intelligence and compliance.

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To learn more, download our whitepaper: Moving Beyond Big Business: Changing Market Dynamics Drive Emergence of MSP Solutions for Lower-Volume Programmes.

Traditional leadership models have failed. Most were developed for more stable business times. But nowadays, the world of work is changing at a pace and scale never seen before. Businesses need to become more agile. To do that, they need a new set of criteria to identify and prepare leaders.

This infographic shows the extent to which traditional leadership models have failed. It also shows the knock-on effect that’s having on business.  Click here to view the infographic as a PDF.

New leadership models are required

The challenges facing businesses today demand increased agility. As a result, businesses need a new way to identify and prepare leaders for future challenges, risks and opportunities.

So Right Management launched the P3 Leader Model. This stands for People, Purpose, and Performance. We believe these are the elements that organisations need to drive leader effectiveness in today’s world of work.

The model provides a systematic way for organisations to build strong leadership pipelines. It helps them identify talent with the greatest potential for success. It also means they can manage performance, by measuring and rewarding relevant outcomes.

We relentlessly refined our model to arrive at a highly focused set of components. This enables organisations to realise greatest business impact with a realistic investment of resources. We have distilled and simplified what leaders need to focus on to be effective.

We need more women in leadership. The business case has been broadcast time and time again, yet progress has been limited. We spoke with Jonas Prising, ManpowerGroup’s Chairman and CEO, regarding some of the issues preventing progress, the benefits that gender parity will realise for business, and why leading from the top is vital.

Earlier this year you participated at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting on a panel called ‘Progress to Parity’. Why is this subject so high on the agenda for ManpowerGroup?

The case for women’s participation in the workforce has been long discussed and evaluated, and the data is pretty clear. Having women participate to their full potential at all levels creates better business, better decision making, and better business results.

We’re still not making enough progress though. In a world of work challenged by demographic change and talent shortages, not tapping into that wealth of potential and capability to its fullest extent is going to be a huge problem for countries and it’s going to be a huge problem for organisations.

In relation to ManpowerGroup, it’s absolutely true for us as well. We want to have women at all levels fully participating and well represented. I strongly believe in the capabilities that can be added and that this will drive a much better business outcome. And of course, it’s also the right thing to do.

Here at ManpowerGroup we have been on our own journey of conscious inclusion and when you began as CEO is 2014, you made that a leadership and Group priority. Where would you ideally like to see our organisation in ten years’ time on this issue?

Starting with the end in mind is important, so I’ve laid out our journey in terms of talent development. I would like to see a continuation of our track record of internal succession and imagine two to three internal candidates will be part of our succession plan for my role at some point in the future. And at least one of those internal candidates has to be a woman.

So if that is the outcome that we’re looking for, working backwards, you can start to think about how many people you need at various levels of the organisation, what kind of experience they possess, and how many of these need to be women. We are building a pipeline of capabilities that is diverse and that will achieve our desired end outcome.

The case for women participating at all levels across an organisation seems to be a very simple one, so why do you think there is limited progress in a lot of organisations today with regards to gender parity?

The answer to that question is part of why I think leadership involvement is so important. First of all, the business case is clear; it’s not much up for debate. Most people would say it’s the right thing to do, and many companies already have development programmes in place.

But all these things combined haven’t really moved the needle. There’s only one possible other reason why we’re not making progress as fast as you’d think – and that’s culture. That is essentially a leadership issue – a culture of an unconscious bias. Addressing this as a cultural issue is why leadership from the top is so important. We have to make it clear within the organisation that not having a diverse workforce, including a diverse representation of genders, is not an acceptable situation.

You mentioned this being a leadership issue. Why would you really say it’s a leadership and a business issue, as opposed to maybe an HR issue?

Accessing and deploying talent within an organisation is the most important task that leaders have. For us at ManpowerGroup, we’re a people business. If we have great, well-trained, motivated and capable individuals within our organisation interfacing with candidates and clients, we will have a great business and great business success. It’s one of the most important levers for ManpowerGroup; but equally, this is true for many other organisations. There’s nothing more important that you can be working on as a leader than developing and motivating your people and preparing them for future growth.

And the fact that ManpowerGroup does take the issue of gender parity so seriously and we are really trying to make a difference within our own organisation – how can that really benefit our clients?

When we have great motivated and extremely capable people engaging with our clients, it will drive great business outcomes. They will benefit from our diversity of thought and our capabilities, as we have an organisation that is really representative of the population and the population’s talent potential as well.

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Click here to watch the full interview. And for a practical guide to accelerating more women into leadership download our report 7 Steps to Conscious Inclusion.

In part two of our interview with Patrick Flannighan, HR Operations Director at Sky, we discuss how the solutions delivered to Sky have developed to also encompass ManpowerGroup Solutions. To read part one of the interview, click here.

ManpowerGroup Solutions has delivered a fully outsourced RPO service to Sky Ireland since 2012. After focusing on retail sales advisors, they underwent a competitive tender process, winning the UK contact centre advisor and engineer volume recruitment in 2014.

Following a detailed review of the delivery solution in 2015, a new RPO contract went live on 1st May 2016. Over 55 individuals are dedicated to delivering the Sky RPO, the largest RPO for ManpowerGroup Solutions across Europe. The team is responsible for 50% of Sky hires, handling over 100,000 candidates and managing the placement of 4,000 hires per year across the UK and Ireland.

What were Sky’s primary objectives in relation to enhancing your RPO solution?

We make over 3,000 contact centre, engineer and retail hires a year. These are spread across the length and breadth of the UK and Ireland. We needed a ‘best in class’ for RPO – an experienced partner that could work with us, manage high volumes, and who would be an expert in these markets across all our locations. We also wanted to make Sky a destination of choice for skilled candidates and to enhance our candidate engagement experience.

Please could you talk us through some of the key initial enhancements made to the service since 2015 and what impact this has had?

We’ve moved full accountability for the end-to-end recruitment process into the RPO – this includes everything from talent attraction right up to offer. We have implemented a new, streamlined candidate-centric interview and assessment process (including the Sky experience day). We’ve also improved metrics and reporting, giving us better visibility of the candidate journey – this helps to inform our thinking about the end-to-end process and the candidate experience we’re delivering.

How successful has the new RPO model been?

We are attracting more candidates than ever, our fulfilment rates are higher than they’ve ever been and our candidate experience is improving. We’ve worked together on this model and we’re all reaping the benefits of this, including our candidates.

How have we partnered with Sky to help redesign your entire RPO solution and what advantages will this deliver?

The ManpowerGroup Solutions and Sky teams have worked very closely together to review and redesign the RPO solution. As a result, we have more detailed local market insights in all the locations where Sky is based. Our processes have become more streamlined and this has increased the number of applications, improved our conversion rates, reduced our costs and significantly reduced our time to hire. We’re also strengthening Sky’s employer brand both locally and nationally.

Importantly, we’ve got flexibility in the model which enables us to adjust our recruitment models up or down to meet business priorities.

How does the white-labelled RPO team operate as an extension to Sky’s recruitment team and what’s next?

Like the MSP team, the RPO team are embedded as part of the Sky recruitment team, working in partnership with both Sky hiring and recruitment managers. The team are seen as a crucial part of our organisation, are fully accountable and are delivering. It’s not a ‘them and us’ scenario but a fully integrated function.

Moving forward, we are continually reviewing how we work together in partnership. We are looking at the integration of our services, at embedding the subject-matter expertise in the team and at developing the relationship further to better meet the challenges together.

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Visit the ManpowerGroup Solutions website for more information about our Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) offering.

As supporters of Young Enterprise, ManpowerGroup UK is proud to be helping young people to become work-ready by developing fundamental skills necessary in today’s job market.

Young Enterprise are the UK’s leading charity empowering young people to harness their personal and business skills. They also form part of the Junior Achievement network, one of the world’s largest organisations that is dedicated to giving young people the knowledge and skills they need to own their economic success, plan for their future, and make smart academic and economic choices.

They offer practical programmes which help young people develop the skills, knowledge and attitudes they need to succeed, such as confidence, financial capability, problem solving and resilience. They work with young people, their teachers and parents, businesses and influencers, and provides hands on employability and financial education programmes, resources and teacher training.

Building Work-Ready Youth

As supporters of Young Enterprise in the UK, 2016 has seen a number of ManpowerGroup representatives get involved by judging the regional finals of their company programme, where young people in schools team up to create a business from scratch. Globally, our CEO Jonas Prising demonstrates his commitment to these programmes by volunteering in the classroom and serving as Vice Chairman of Junior Achievement worldwide.

Jeremy Hay-Campbell, Head of Corporate Affairs for ManpowerGroup UK, said: “Young Enterprise creates skill building opportunities that enable young people across the UK and around the world to find meaningful, productive careers. This, in turn, supports the business community, by equipping future members of the workforce with the skills needed to effectively compete.

“This year, representatives from across ManpowerGroup UK supported Young Enterprise by judging in a number of its UK regional finals. I’m proud of the key role we’re playing in inspiring and preparing young people to succeed in the future world of work, and look forward to supporting many more individuals in the years to come.”

Transforming Lives and Communities

At ManpowerGroup, what we do helps to change lives and communities for the better – providing people with training and job opportunities that help them to transform their lives.

Social responsibility is at our core; and our commitment to producing a positive impact on individuals and societies is also an extension of our values. We are consistently recognised for our commitment to ethical practises, responsible corporate governance and good citizenship.

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Find out more about our Corporate Social Responsibility initiatives.