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Careers & workplace advice from Hays

You’ve only been back from leave for a week and on your PC are tabs upon tabs of emails, documents, and spread sheets. The emails you should’ve responded to days ago remain unanswered, the documents you were supposed to proofread remain riddled with grammatical errors, and the spread sheets lack critical updates. The panic sets in and you start to rush.

This situation is all too familiar to a lot of people; in our 24/7 culture overworking has become a way of life for many of us. However, rushing around will backfire – you and your team will become stressed and the quality of your work will suffer. Here are 6 tactics to help you finally stop rushing and ultimately be more productive at work:

 

1. Stop saying yes and start pushing back

It’s all too tempting to take on new projects or accept invites to unnecessary meetings, especially if you want to prove yourself. If this sounds like you, you must force yourself to take a step back and focus your energy into those activities which will deliver the most value for your career and for the business. Do you really need to go to that meeting or would your time be put to better use elsewhere?

2. Make prioritising a priority

At the beginning of each week and each day, write your to do list and concentrate on those tasks which will deliver the most value. Make a habit of blocking out time in your diary to get essential tasks completed. Stick to the timings you have allocated and you will feel calmer in the knowledge that, even if you are not due to action a task instantly, it will get done

3. Be ruthless with distractions

Don’t let valuable time get eaten up with distractions. Focus on one thing at a time. If necessary, shut down your emails and turn your phone off. Make sure you are tough when dealing with interruptions. Firmly tell your colleague who stops by your desk on the way to the coffee machine for a quick chat, that you are too busy.

4. Make every second count

Write a five-minute list – producing a list of low intensity tasks will enable you to make productive use of that spare five minutes before a meeting starts.

5. Don’t be afraid to delegate

You can’t do everything, sometimes you just need to let go of the control and trust others. Review your to do list and ask yourself ‘does this have to be done by me?’ Could you delegate the task to another member of your team? Don’t be afraid to delegate, your colleagues will most likely be pleased at the opportunity to develop their skills, whilst you save yourself valuable time.

6. Take breaks and get plenty of sleep

Try setting an alarm on your phone to remind you to get out of the office. Force yourself to take a break and get some fresh air – when you return you will feel refreshed and ultimately in a more productive and focused frame of mind. The same goes for sleep – get a full eight hours and you’ll arrive at work feeling invigorated and ready to take on the day.

I hope you have found the above advice useful. Here are some other Viewpoint blogs to help you effectively manage your career:

I’ve recently read that Stephen Hawking has warned that the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race. In the banking and finance industry, automation also conjures up Doomsday visions. Yet what I am seeing is that the increasing digitalisation of the industry is also creating many opportunities for forward-looking and highly skilled candidates. There are new roles emerging in automation engineering, banking IT and data analysis.

A shift in the labour market

Technology, automation and robotics will cause a significant shift in labour markets in the next twenty years, according to recent research carried out by Deloitte with Carl Benedikt Frey of the Oxford Martin School, and Michael Osborne of the Department of Engineering Science at the University of Oxford. They estimate that in the UK, 35% of existing roles are at risk of being replaced, while in the United States, 47% of roles are at risk. The research identified “high risk” jobs as those requiring repetitive processing, clerical and support and sales services, while “low or no risk” jobs are roles requiring digital, management and creative skills.

Banks investing in digital services are impacting on employment

We are now seeing that the banking and finance industry is mirroring the trend. In October 2014 Lloyds Banking Group, the UK’s largest retail bank, hit the headlines when it announced 9,000 job cuts and unveiled a new digital strategy backed by a significant £1.6bn investment in digital services and automation.

Far from being alone, Lloyds is one of many of the world’s largest banks that have announced shifts to digital technologies, as automation is helping solve many of the issues that have plagued the industry since the credit crunch in 2008. On top of dramatically reducing costs, automation can help address regulatory challenges by allowing transactions to be properly tracked and recorded through a digital process. This leaves less room for errors and contributes to delivering a faster, more efficient service.

“The banking business model is fundamentally changing. Digitalisation, self-service models (e.g. mobile or internet banking) and new competitors will further accelerate this trend. Cost efficiency is getting more important due to the higher costs of regulation and lower margins in the core business,” notes my colleague Gerald Fahnenbruck, Team Leader Contracting for Hays Finance in Germany.

Gerald believes that automation will continue to accelerate up during the next couple of years as the industry is still playing catch up. “Compared to other industries, such as the automotive sector, process efficiency in the finance departments in banks lags far behind. New IT tools and IT solutions will help to automate and rationalise simple tasks.”

His view is shared by consulting firm McKinsey, which wrote in a June 2012 report that a significant opportunity exists to increase the levels of automation in banks’ back offices. “IT-enabling operations encompass both automating processes (preventing customers from using paper, digitising work flows, and automating or supporting decision making) and using IT solutions to manage residual operations that must be carried out manually (for example, using software for resource planning). By taking full advantage of this approach, banks can often generate an improvement of more than 50% in productivity and customer service.”

New opportunities due to changing financial IT landscape

Job losses are inevitable in certain areas of banking, such as retail banking or those requiring simple tasks in the banks’ back offices. However, this transition will also lead to the creation of new jobs, especially for highly skilled candidates, Gerald argues. “I see opportunities for IT experts, regulatory and risk experts and process/lean experts. In particular, demand for banking IT experts will grow. New IT landscapes and systems will have to be implemented and administrated. Online IT experts will also benefit from this development,” he says.

Gerald believes increased automation will bring several benefits to the sector, such as an enhanced customer experience: “IT-enabled automated processes will lead to improved cost ratios and increased productivity. Moreover, customer satisfaction might grow too due to paperless and digital workflows, faster response times and lower error ratios. Cost savings can be invested in new online business models, such as cashless and mobile payments, realtime services and social media based services, alongside new products in order to be competitive.”

As McKinsey points out: “Banks cannot afford to miss the opportunity to automate now.” Candidates with the right set of skills cannot afford to miss this opportunity either.

I hope you have found the above advice useful. Here are some other Financial Markets Viewpoint blogs:

To share your thoughts on this article and to stay up to date with the latest business, employment and recruitment news in the financial markets sector, please join our LinkedIn group, Financial Markets Industry Insights with Hays.

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In the book Average is Over, economist Tyler Cowen offers a wake-up call for all workers, including those in high-tech professions. While employment is increasing, so are skill shortages, especially in IT. Within the American labour market, he argues, the “hollowing out” of mid-level white-collar roles is creating a polarisation between low and high-skilled workers. The key drivers of this trend? Automation and cloud services.

This creates opportunities for adaptable IT professionals, while presenting quite a challenge for employers. The Bureau of Labor Statistics forecasts a leap in demand for programmers in the US of 23 per cent between 2012 and 2022. In June 2014, a US survey by Dice of more than 700 technology-focused recruiters and managers indicated 70 per cent expected to hire more IT candidates in the short term, but 60 per cent noted difficulties filling roles for the salaries they were offering, indicating that the best candidates are to some extent already beginning to call the shots on pay.

As ever, companies need to attract the best talent, but they should also bear in mind the need to attract and engage with more than just cash. That means adapting to the behaviours and expectations of post-industrial Millennials, who expect investment into new technologies and approaches, as well as a workplace encouraging flexibility, particularly around the use of the mobile technologies and social tools they have grown up with.

Ready to recruit

The challenge for enterprise? To be more open and connected, sharing information between departments and corporate geographies through intranets and cloud resources. Automattic, the company behind content management and blogging platform WordPress, as well as a host of cloud-based social content services, is at the extreme end of this trend. Its workforce is distributed around the world, working from home using online collaborative communications tools.

Another emerging approach to secure the best IT talent is to bring IT itself to bear, through the use of social physics where big data on human behaviour influences corporate strategy. Xerox has been using this method for new hires and has seen a fall of 20 per cent in the staff attrition rate during its pilot period.

It seems that, with skilled workers at a premium, and technology on hand, attracting, engaging and retaining talent is swiftly becoming a science, rather than an art.

Future-proof learning

New talent is in the pipeline, of course. In the US, P21 (the Partnership for 21st Century Skills) is pushing policies that focus on educational readiness for the digital economy and something similar is happening north of the border with Digital Canada 150. The Confederation of British Industry is also recommending that the UK Government give free IT tuition and expand the provision of IT within all levels of education. Government initiatives like e-skills UK are beginning to address this.

Meanwhile, corporations are starting to take a hold of matters. IBM’s Academic Initiative is “building skills for a Smarter Planet” by providing in-house skills resources where employees can apply to mainframe and mobile-development applications. Employers are more attractive and retain more staff if they fully or part-fund these types of training events.

While these initiatives are admirable, they will take some time to come into effect. In the meantime, governments need to make it easier for talented IT professionals to gain work visas and allow the burgeoning tech workforces from emerging economies to engage in opportunities worldwide. The war for future talent will be fierce, and digital is a major front. Allowing businesses to access the best talent should be top of every government’s list.

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