Great article about the importance of understanding how pressure is affecting you – highlights the importance for constantly monitoring your emotional, physical and mental wellbeing to prevent burnout. The early signs of burnout often get overlooked. Employees and businesses need to recognise and unearth areas of undue stress. Austen Advisory is a launching a new tool called AURA which can help do just this.
Responsible Capitalism – the fundamentals of building a great business
I was fortunate to attend a thought provoking seminar by Professor Ed Freeman, a Business Ethics professor from Darden business school in the USA. He shared the concept of ‘responsible capitalism’ as the new narrative for how business should be done in the 21st century.
Developing careers with Hong Kong’s youth
I was honoured to work with KELY Support Group over the past several months in Hong Kong. This was a small, yet rewarding way of ‘giving back’ to the society that I have lived in for the past 6 years.
KELY is a non-government funded organisation which provides support to Hong Kong’s youth. They offer various programmes aiming to equip them with key life skills and resilience as they face various challenges growing up in Hong Kong. One such programme is a work placement programme targeting Ethnic Minority youth. Many of these individuals face inequalities and barriers which make it difficult for them to gain employment and build a successful career. Many of them believe this is out of their reach.
Bringing Colour & Dimension Workshop
I have stopped counting the number of times I have heard my clients complaining about the lack of ‘out of the box thinking’ from their teams or work colleagues. Managers ask me ‘why won’t my colleagues express their ideas or speak up when they can see something is not working?’ Have coached many managers and individuals in Asia, the crux of this seems to be tied to a combination of a lack of confidence in expressing and articulating ideas or concepts along with an ingrained habit of executing based on learning by rote.
Clearly there is no silver bullet to address this issue.… Read More»
Is measuring engagement enough?
So many organisations strive for highly engaged teams and invest massive amounts of money and time in measuring and managing it. However, it is common to find teams with excellent engagement scores yet major performance issues. This goes against the core premise that engagement surveys are built upon. So why do we see this happening?… Read More»
Taking control of careers at The Women’s Foundation
I felt honoured to be a presenter and facilitator at The Women’s Foundation’s first ever alumni reunion.
The session was attended by over 100 of Hong Kong’s smartest and most influential women and focused around the topic career transitions and transformations. Our session was called ‘The Future of Work – taking control of your career’.
Augmented Reality & Assessment
Personally, I am not into online gaming but continue to be amazed by its all power to absorb and grasp people’s full attention. Most recently, I read about two people who fell off a cliff in the USA whilst playing Pokemon Go. Just imagine if employees put this level of attention into their work!
Absorption or ‘flow’ is one component of employee engagement – where you are so focused on your work, you fail to notice things around you or time passing by. We all know that increasing engagement even by a small amount can have a massive impact on organisational success via increased productivity.
This brings me to think about how augmented reality can be used in the workplace. I see an exciting role for it in recruitment and development. This article shares how some companies are already using virtual reality in assessing candidates and an interesting vision for future augmented reality realistic job previews and assessments
Read full article here
Its not always the stereotypical personality traits that predict job performance…
An interesting piece of research highlighting that IT programming ability is most strongly predicted by ‘openness’ – a trait related to being creative and imaginative.
To what extent do hiring managers assess this when recruiting programmers? My guess is not much; this is easily done through an online personality questionnaire prior to interview. This should always be one input to the hiring decision but could be the insight that really uncovers hidden talent.
Read full article here
The official launch of the Austen Advisory website
I’m excited to launch Austen Advisory’s website.
This is not only a place to find out more about the company, services and people but also a go to place for interesting articles, resources and insights relating to our work. I have been fortunate enough to have worked on some fascinating and diverse projects in my career to date including profiling successful prison officers, providing personality feedback to natives in Papua New Guinea, devising an automated screening process to recruit over 8000 sales people in APAC and evaluating leadership potential of executives in South Korea via a translator! I want to use this blog to share some of my, and the wider Austen Advisory team’s insights and learnings from our experiences in the field.
Austen Advisory believes strongly in only delivering work of the utmost quality and we have set principles that will help us adhere to this. We work by the notion that we will only do successful projects and we are looking to work with great clients who are also committed to this. I am very excited to have formed partnerships with a range of businesses to provide industry leading tools and technology as well as have established a network of associates consisting of thought leaders and specialists to collaborate with on delivery, and draw upon our diverse experiences to come up with innovative and forward thinking solutions for our clients. I believe this model will enable us to deliver work that truly benefits our clients and their businesses.
I am always delighted to receive feedback, suggestions or discuss areas of interest so please get in touch!