In this 60-min talent webinar, the Fintech Times bought together an expert panel of talent leads from leading Fintech companies to discuss how they are adapting their business workforce operations to progress through the Coronavirus lockdown to remain innovative and productive.
#ridingthecoronaviruswave
The webinar held on 21st April was hosted by Sian Morris, Head of Talent at The Fintech Power 50 & The Fintech Times with a panel that featured:
Rebecca Wright, VP People, Token
Sean Hynan, Talent Lead, Form3
Dan Russon, Global Recruitment Director, Jumio
The zoom webinar covered how businesses and employees are adapting to remote working, and how business are ensuring their employees still remain engaged and safe during this times. This includes a discussion on what the new working norm may look like, and how they foresee future workforce practises when we come out of this pandemic.
Points raised on the discussion highlighted how Fintechs are:
Adapting business operations:
• Fintechs generally embrace remote working as part of their culture so it has been more of a seamless transition as they are geared up to it using cloud based technologies and with operations over different geographies
• Adapting more to realities of juggling a life and work balance especially with homeworking which has been the only challenge, but realising that they are not expecting everything to be the same as if they were operating in the office
• Offering support to colleagues who are new to remote working and usually office based helping them to adapt.
• For some Fintechs, it has enabled them to increase their roadmap of automation and working through a backlog of activities.
Keeping employees engaged and safe:
• Fintech are agile by nature and are set up to be flexible.
• Giving people permission and high levels of trust and empowerment allows people to just get on with it.
• There’s been a real opportunity to further kind of tighten that emotional connection with the organisation, as how companies are treating their employees during this time will really shine through.
• Higher levels of engagement include; more focus on making sure that everyone else is happy and well, running virtual team quizzes hosted by a different people, running virtual excercise sessions, lunch time drop ins for anyone in the business so they can come in every whenever their lunch period and have a chat with people, more check in phone calls, slack team check ins, Sales Teams recording short thank you videos to the engineers
• Improving collaboration and an appreciation between teams has had a positive upside
Current priorities:
• Employer Branding: big focus will be how to build an amazing brand so that fintech companies are front of mind for any talented amazing engineers marketing, sales people they are trying to attract into their organization
• Building recruitment pipelines; how to ramp up and improve the pipeline of diverse candidates in all locations
• Improving the candidate experience and onboarding: recruiting the same whether you’re recruiting for a role which is remote or an office based role. Give every candidate, the same experience and focus on culture
• Treat employees with respect as there will be people that have lost their confidence as a result of this
Biggest current challenges:
• Balancing culture and employee value proposition; an aspiration of having one global culture and being able to tailor that local if you have an engineering team in Bangalore versus a sales team in Singapore versus a HR team in Colombia. Ensuring there is some commonality that we can put in place with the messaging and the branding.
• What’s happening in the wider world and thinking as a business can we do anything to support from a charitable or Corporate Social Responsibility perspective
The future workforce:
• People join the fintech market because of the advancement in remote working and the culture it presents are two of the big pull factors.
• Environmental benefits of having an increased remote working capacity is huge, more time on your hands, less office costs, less commute and travel time, business reduced travel as we have the technology to facilitate virtual video meetings
• Increase in job adverts with remote or home working, which at the moment seems to be minimal on some of the job sites as companies will become more flexible in their operations.
• More businesses will look to operate remotely which may make it harder for fintechs to attract the right talent.
• Bigger talent pools, which is exciting about what talent will be available in the future, given the geographical boundaries have just fallen away.
The fintech times has now launched a free job posting section for fintech companies to upload their jobs here to help fintechs recruit top talent directly, and to help talented individuals find jobs.