Steve Jobs, the Co-Founder of Apple, once said: "The secret of my success is that we have gone to exceptional lengths to hire the best people in the world." 

Apple then changed that world by hiring those people. 

Yeah, I know. It’s a little hackneyed to quote Steve Jobs. But that quote is eight years old. And the ethos that inspired it must be almost fifty. And, given the current circumstances, it has never felt so relevant. Life begins, and all that. 

But the past six months have changed who that talent is; how they think, how they work, where they work and, more importantly, why they work. 

Working culture has changed more than at any time in recent history, certainly since the digital revolution. And businesses will need to adapt their working and hiring policies and practices to accommodate this new way of thinking and the new needs of the workforce.  

Here are three ways that can be done.

Inspiring creative missions, not lining shareholder pockets 

In 2016 a study found that 75% of Millennials would take a pay cut to work for a socially responsible company. While the events of 2020 may have made job security a higher priority, the impact of a global pandemic, Black Lives Matter and climate protests have further raised the importance of social issues in people’s employment choices.

Indeed, the recruiters I speak to now regularly report two questions being asked far more frequently: how is the company making a positive impact on society and how can individual employees make their own social impact at the company?

With a rising generation of socially aware talent working at distributed organisations in the midst of so many acute social crises, the most successful companies will be those who are able to demonstrate they are more than vehicles to drive shareholder returns. 

The new work culture: Freedom of movement and empowerment of thought 

Even when there is no threat from the virus, people are already looking for ways to want to continue to work from home. The rise of the distributed organisation is transforming what we use offices for and offering opportunities for companies to hire the best talent regardless of where those people are located.

As Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter said: “We want employees to be able to work where they feel most creative and productive. Moving forward, [our employees] will be able to work from home permanently, even once offices begin to reopen.”

Alongside this freedom of where we work, a new culture of empowerment about who works on what is rising. People are becoming increasingly managed by objectives rather than presence, and organisations are focusing on helping their people to work better together, from anywhere, with tools they can trust. This is a more meritocratic approach to work with ideas considered regardless of where they come from in the org chart.

It’s important to note that this depends heavily on technology, and the businesses leading the way here are investing in tools. Today’s employees have high expectations of the tech they use at work. For them, it should be as intuitive and effective as the tech tools they use outside of work. 

It should also be remembered that many businesses now how four generations of people working for them, Boomers, Gen X, Gen Y and Gen Z, all of whom want different things from their employers. There is a war for talent in many industries today. Your employer brand is critical as well as the experience potential recruits have. You need to make the experience easy for them while being efficient for you by improving selectivity and leveraging social media. 

Freedom to dream

The final piece of the new talent equation is to give people the freedom to think those big ideas. Organisations need to recognise that if their people spend 100% of their time delivering on projects, then they spend 0% of their time on the big ideas that will give the customer what they really need and have a far broader social impact. 

And remember, ideas can come from anywhere, independent of title, role and function. 

Businesses will need to make it easy for their staff to be able to collaborate across businesses and categories to find new solutions that effect genuine change. They will need to not only share information but also explain it. They will need to innovate how they behave, adopt the enabling tech, and reduce consumption. These are major changes, but they are the key to inspiring the top talent.

For many businesses, these are radical, scary steps. Not everyone will be willing to take them. But some will, many are already, and those will be the firms that attract talent, and that devise those big ideas we need so much. Those will be the firms of the future.