5 Ways HR & TA Teams Can Contribute To A Work Revolution

If you don't treat your people well, you will lose out to companies that do. End of story.

And no one knows this better than Anessa Fike, CEO & Founder at Fike + Co, a multi-million-dollar HR and people/talent leadership consulting firm. In her recently released book, The Revolution of Work: F*ck the Patriarchy and the Workplace It Built, Anessa calls attention to how work isn't working for most people today.

During our April webinar, we sat down with Anessa to dig into the 5 ways she believes HR and TA teams can contribute to a work revolution.

Check out the full 1-hour webinar below or read on for a brief synopsis of the 5 topic areas discussed.
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1.) Compensation

Anessa mentions that compensation is an after thought for too many organizations. In fact, a lot of the tools that hiring teams are using now to run compensation are 7-9 years old, however, we operate in a very different world now. The bottom line is compensation doesn’t need to be complicated. You just need to decide what you want to be in the space - whether you want to pay a lot of money and get top talent or maybe you’re simply not able to pay as much because you’re a nonprofit.

If you don’t get compensation right, you can basically throw everything else that you’re trying to do in the trash, so if you don’t know how to do compensation, you need to find someone that does. Because we operate in the interview space, we had to ask Anessa about compensation during the interview process. She strongly believes that pay ranges need to be listed in the job description. If they’re not, you’re sending a signal to candidates that you’re guarded and not transparent as an organization.  

2.) Feedback 

We all know it - feedback is tough. While most people say they are comfortable with receiving feedback, they actually aren’t. And the biggest thing is - we don’t ever stop to think about how we should give feedback. We usually only give feedback when someone isn’t doing well at work and most of it comes down to a misalignment of expectations.   

When it comes to giving feedback, Anessa recommends that feedback cannot just come from a manager. Managers need to seek feedback from more than one source to share with their employees. Secondly, ensure there’s trust between you and your employees because there has to be an element of trust before you can give feedback well.

3.) Professionalism

If you were to ask someone: “what does professional look like?”, 90% of people would say a white man in a suit holding a briefcase. Anessa walks through how being professional isn’t about how many tattoos you have, what you wear, or what color hair you have. It’s about what’s in your brain and if you can do your job well. Bottom line - organizations need to stop focusing on the wrong things related to professionalism.

4.) Flexibility

As humans, choice and options are key. Forcing employees to come back to the office is a perfect example of employees’ desire to have a choice. The solution is simple. Anessa believes organizations need to think about what they can do to make their employees’ lives better and easier while they’re at work.

5.) Personalization

Where do we have personalization at work? Anessa mentions that there is a massive need to have personalization at work. Organizations focus too much on control instead of what makes people happy and productive. Ultimately companies will run better when people are happier, and they’ll have fewer issues to deal with and fewer backfills. We just have to get creative around how we personalize work - whether that’s around where people work, when they work, etc. 

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To conclude, Anessa mentioned what work could look like in and after this Revolution of Work. She said to imagine a world where people don’t hate Mondays! Mic drop… 

And with that, we wrapped things up!

Huge thanks to Anessa for joining us! Don't forget to check out the entire webinar linked above, and we’d highly encourage you to check out Anessa’s book for a ton more takeaways that we didn’t even scratch the surface on during the webinar. You can find it on Amazon here.

And see you on May 15th for our next webinar! We’ll be joined by Matt Alder, host of The Recruiting Future Podcast. We’ll be talking through his thoughts on if AI is the end of talent acquisition as we know it. You can register for this live conversation here. 

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