My 2022 in Review

2022 was my first full year working for myself and my second year of self employment. The big focus of the year was growth - I wanted to scale my successful solo consultancy into a fully-fledged business. The name Open Velocity came from my desire to speed up the rate of change for myself and other businesses.

I remember talking to my therapist in the middle of the pandemic, a few months before I left my job. We were specifically talking about my goals for 2021 and I expressed the thought that success, in my eyes, would be to start a business and stay self employed with control over my own destiny. This desire for autonomy was undoubtedly a hangover from a year of various lockdowns and restrictions.

The funny thing about working for yourself is that your hopes of total freedom turn out to be extremely naive. Yes, you have greater flexibility and control over your schedule and work, but you also go from having one boss to having multiple as you become answerable to all your clients or customers who (rightfully) demand your best work and attention.

Burnout was a state I skirted around throughout the year, especially the latter half where 6 day weeks became the default. While this weekend working was sometimes driven by deadlines, hustle mentality also played its part in driving me to sit at my computer every Sunday without fail.

"Successful people work at weekends, right?"

"If I put in every piece of effort I have, I can't fail"

"This is what you have to do in the early days of running a business"

My internal monologue was directly lifted out of a badly written business book. The truth is that working harder only guarantees exhaustion. As the classic marketing idiom goes, you can't out-market a bad product. It's the same for hustle - you can't outwork a bad idea. Even if you work every hour of the day, you can't guarantee success.

Another outcome of pursuing growth meant that Open Velocity expanded into a business with employees. These are people who, rightfully, expect me to lead the business and deliver on my promises. Leaders have to lead, you can't sit back and wait for the path to unfold before you or for someone to tell you what to do. You have to take action, even when you're unsure or tired.

It's easy to glamorise entrepreneurship and the idea of being your own boss, but the reality is that it can be a very isolating and demanding experience. As an entrepreneur, you are responsible for every single aspect of your business. This can be overwhelming, especially if you are a solopreneur or freelancer that doesn't have a team to share the workload.

The demands of running a business are also all-consuming and will take over your life. As a classic Type A person, I am prone to lying bed at night worrying about every single issue. My night brain also tends towards severe pessimism as small issues become unassailable mountains in the small hours. It really is true, for me at least, that things look better in the morning. I'm slowly learning to ignore any negative thoughts after 10pm.

If freedom is your primary motivation for becoming an entrepreneur, it may be worth considering other options such as freelancing or finding an employer who offers flexibility in terms of how, when, and where you work. While these options still come with their own set of challenges and responsibilities, they may offer more balance and support than starting and growing a business on your own. At least in my experience.

Outside of work, one of the dominant forces that shaped my 2022 was my ongoing struggle with chronic Achilles Tendonopathy, which crept up on me in Dec 2019 due to overtraining. I'd like to give the excuse that lockdown stymied my rehab attempts, but if I'm honest I just ignored the pain and the lump on my ankle in the hope that it would all go away.

As 2022 progressed, I found myself waking up in pain every single day and the 10 minute walk to our local train station would leave me in agony. The pain got so bad that coming back from a trip to Dublin, Des had to push me through the airport on a wheelchair as I couldn't physically manage the walk through the terminal. That was a bit of a wake up call if I'm honest.

So I went to see a physio. Consistently did my rehab exercises. Took the right supplements. Slowly but surely things have improved and at the very least, I can walk to the station now mostly pain free. My hope is that this improvement continues and I can start running again properly in 2023.

The lesson here is that small issues, when ignored, can become big issues, but also that big issues, when tackled consistently and thoughtfully, can be broken down and overcome.

For me, 2022 was really a year that highlighted the importance of prioritising both physical and emotional health. I've learned that neglecting either significantly impacts my quality of life, and that it takes consistent and dedicated action to maintain a positive trajectory.

If velocity was my word of 2022, trajectory is my word for 2023. There's no point applying effort if you're treading the wrong path.

Should you hire an ex-FAANG marketer?

Ex-tech giant employees come with fantastic pedigree, but are they the right hire for a start-up or scale-up?

The challenges of identifying top talent

In November 2021 I gave a talk at Turing Fest in Edinburgh which explained how leaders should approach building their first marketing team from scratch.

Typically the first marketing hire for any start-up is an experienced generalist. You want someone who can get stuck into both the tactical and strategic layer (they need to be able to do the big thinking but also do the doing).

Alongside a T-shaped understanding of the marketing landscape, I also believe top marketing generalists have the following three traits:

• They need to be able to understand data, turn this into insight and connect this with action. It’s not enough to say conversions have decreased over the last month, they need to be able to diagnose (or at least present a credible theory for) why this has happened and what you need to do to turn the ship around.

• They need to be an exceptional people operator. Much of the role of the first marketing hire is focused on stakeholder management, which requires extremely good emotional intelligence and people management skills. There is also the expectation that this first marketing hire will build out a full marketing team as the company grows, for that they also require mastery of core communication skills and people leadership.

• They need to have a bias for action. It’s not enough to come up with fancy plans, presentations or roadmaps. You need them to execute quickly and ruthlessly to build traction. (This is the hardest trait to identify in the hiring process, but the most important to identify.)

The limitations of big brand marketers

Many start-ups and scale-ups consider hiring a marketing leader who comes fresh from a role within a wildly successful billion-dollar business (think large consultancy or FAANG).

While I don’t deny that many of these people a hugely talented and good at their jobs, are they the right fit for a start-up or scale-up? I’d argue in most cases, no.

Firstly, if you have worked in a large organisation you have had a LOT of resource to play with - people, budget and other teams to lean on. If you have a data problem, you can throw it over the fence to your data team. The same with a design issue, website issue etc.

Marketers from this background are not used to solving problems by themselves or with minimal input from other subject matter experts. They have not had to deal with extreme constraints or operated in an environment where throwing money at the problem is not an option.

Secondly, it is unlikely you can afford to bring in someone who has truly owned strategy development in a billion-dollar business.

There is a difference between being handed a top-level strategy to build upon and working with a founding team to develop a strategy out of a general mission and vision.

Personally, I’d bet on someone who has previously experienced and thrived in a start-up/scale-up environment.

Why marketing asks you to invest in uncertainty

Why good marketing feeds off of uncertainty

How can you predict the outcome of something you haven’t tried before?

This is the major challenge most marketers face - we often operate in the realm of the new and untested. Launching a new product to market. Trying out new creative or messaging. Developing a new brand concept.

Even with solid strategies, insight and reasoning behind us, sometimes we simply can not predict outcomes because we have no historical reference data. Or what we are trying is so different that we can’t even use competitor performance as a benchmark.

On the flip side, if we constrain ourselves to the world of the known (selling to the same audience year in year out or reusing the same messaging), we never have the opportunity to experiment. We remain locked in a recursive box which stifles the opportunity to innovate and create new competitive opportunities.

I’ve worked with businesses that have relied on the same old marketing formula for the past decade, all while the world changes around them. You can clearly see the year-on-year decrease in their marketing performance.

Their competitors are taking the risk of trying out new channels and strategies and are reaping the rewards of greater market share and improved ROI.

How to ask for clarity from your marketing team

Firstly, you need to ask the marketing team to be upfront about what they know and what they don’t know. This may be difficult for marketing teams to do in low trust environments, so you need to be clear that they will not be penalised for not having all of the answers.

It’s also important to ask for their level of confidence and certainty when assessing multiple strategies or tactical options - this way both sides can be absolutely clear on the levels of risk involved and prioritise effectively

How to balance uncertainty and risk

I’ve come across numerous methods of managing the risk when it comes to launching new ideas and campaigns. The one that will work for your business will depend on your unique environment and constraints, but the important thing is to have a way of allowing innovation.

As a bare minimum, I would urge you to:

Set experimentation budgets

This is where a pot of money is defined for use in experimentation. It is usually separate from the main marketing budget and is typically not included when calculating overall marketing ROI.

Defining leading and lagging indicators

When running an experiment, it’s important to have metrics that allow you to determine success or failure, ideally at speed. Leading indicators are usually indicative marketing metrics (impressions, likes) that “influence” lagging indicators (marketing outcomes - e.g. signups).

Defined leading indicators will allow your teams to report a measure of performance in the short term. However, you will need to do the work to define the leading indicators that are the clearest predictors of your lagging indicators.

Develop a shared hypothesis document

A hypothesis document is a shared list of marketing hypotheses that the team believes can be tested to see if they improve performance.

The beauty of having these hypotheses in one place is that they can be ranked by the team to produce an experimentation order that takes into account risk and impact. This document is also a very useful way of feeding risk scores directly into marketing priorities.

I typically rank experiments against the following criteria:

• Feasibility - how easy/time consuming will it be to develop and run the experiment (1-5)

• Risk - what is the risk the experiment will fail (low, medium, high)

• Potential impact - what is the potential impact on business outcomes if the experiment succeeds (low, medium, high)

Evolving from a company of one

As I type this, I can’t quite believe it has been a year since I hung up my employment shoes to start my own solo consulting business. The old adage is that time flies when you’re having fun, but I think it would be more accurate to say that time flies when you’ve jumped off a cliff and you’re trying to build a parachute on the way down. 

Starting a business in the middle of a global pandemic was a slightly nerve racking experience, truth be told. I spent the first few months trying to build relationships remotely and while I’m a big advocate for remote work, nothing beats inviting someone for coffee and meeting face to face. Especially when you’re trying to transcend transactional relationships and build new, meaningful  connections. I’ve also had to confront lurking imposter syndrome, the infuriating British tax system and running my own sales operation. 

It’s been successful by many measures. Counting my Google Drive folders, over the last 11 months I have worked with 25 clients, some on a retained basis and some on a project-by-project basis. I’ve built up my revenue to over £10K a month and delivered work I’m genuinely proud of. Work that has had a tangible impact on the businesses who put their trust in me to deliver. There have been sleepless nights and working weekends, but overall I’ve enjoyed the challenge.

At the beginning, I made a conscious decision to trade under my own moniker. After all, I had some “personal brand equity” after years of speaking, tweeting and writing online. My very obvious initial strategy was to leverage this to gain early traction and provide a wrapper around my services while I figured out my longer term ambitions and offering. I’m glad I took this route as it allowed me to build revenue and test a few concepts quickly. 

As I move out of this learning phase, It feels weird to say it, but I’ve now outgrown my own name. 

So what’s next?

The downsides of solo consultancy are well known. If you sell your own time, there’s a maximum limit to your earnings, even if you forgo normal things like sleep and recreation time (not that I advocate for, or have done this, but the temptation is there). 

I realised fairly early on that while consulting could provide a very nice income and interesting work, I wanted more. 

I want to build something that scales beyond myself and become a true business. I want to help more organisations define clear strategies for growth, deliver results faster and scale best in class marketing functions.

I realised I needed a bigger boat.

Introducing Open Velocity

Anyone who has worked with me will have probably heard my rant about how marketers are overly obsessed with brand names. What matters, in my humble opinion, is the value a brand delivers and how this is articulated. As long as the name isn’t offensive, confusing or competitive, you’re probably barking up the right tree. After all, Apple by many measures is one of the biggest brands in the world but the name is hardly complex. 

Basically, I think people often overthink naming companies. So in naming Open Velocity, I had a simple criteria. I wanted to evoke speed. After all, one of my favourite quotes from the tech world is:

 “Cycle time compression may be the most underestimated force in determining winners & losers in tech.” 

While Marc Andreessen was speaking about engineering velocity, the concept can be equally applied to marketing.  Action applied strategically in the right direction gets you traction. Action applied strategically in the right direction faster than your competitors ensures you win.

Open Velocity was born.

What value does Open Velocity deliver then?

We provide experienced CMO-Level Support 

We help companies achieve their goals by providing fractional CMO and marketing strategy support. Our team is comprised of experienced marketers who have held senior marketing roles at leading technology companies. 

We create clear strategy backed up with a plan of action

We work closely with clients to define their marketing strategy by exploring their positioning, customer opportunities and competitive landscape. Building from first principles, we translate business objectives and customer requirements into a clear marketing direction. We don’t just focus on strategy presentations, we help you actually translate direction into action on the ground.

We help organisations build better marketing functions

From defining digital strategy and technology stacks to advising on team design and marketing operations, we consult across the marketing function to help businesses build sustainable growth engines and high performing marketing departments.

Tl:DR: We're the Marketing Consultancy chosen by high-growth technology companies looking to drive growth faster, raise their next round and deliver impact at speed.

Join us

I’m still going to be working closely with clients, but it’s time to bring additional expertise to the team and open our books to working with even more businesses. 

This means I’m actively looking to work with more Associate and Principal Consultants (Associate = we bring you in on projects where you’re an amazing fit. Principal = you’re part of OV with all the benefits of being in a fast-growing business, with skin in the game to boot).

Alongside building a business that raises the standards of strategic consultancy, I’m also trying to create somewhere I actually want to work.

This means:

• Treating people like adults (flexible/remote working etc. is a given in a high trust environment) 

• Rejecting industry orthodoxy and examine the facts to come to our own conclusions (we don’t do things because everyone else does them, we do them because they are the right thing to do).

• Challenging constructively and accepting disagreement is a natural part of doing great work (empowering people to raise concerns at any level and input better ideas)

• Respecting everyone who contributes, no matter their skill set or department (no “they’re only a XYZ, why should we listen to them?”)

• Winning fairly and always looking for opportunities to create win-win scenarios 

If you’d like to have a conversation about what joining us looks like, I’d love to hear from you. You can email me directly at bethan@bethanvincent.com. 

Unlocking potential and growing junior digital talent

Do you remember your lucky break?

N.B. This content was originally delivered as a talk at BrightonSEO in September 2021.

Do you remember your first day at your first job and the sense of anticipation, trepidation, worry even, as you walked into a group of strangers with no idea what you were doing. 

It’s easy to forget how vulnerable people can feel early on in their careers, but everyone has to start somewhere. Even Steve Jobs had a first day on the job after all. 

I suspect most of us had colleagues who took us under their wing while we built up our skills and confidence, or mentors supported our growth and ambitions throughout our working lives. 

I certainly did and wouldn’t be doing what I did today without the support and guidance of a variety of people throughout my career.

The digital talent divide

The UK in particular is heading towards a digital skills disaster, as demand outstrips supply. Anecdotal evidence from my network seems to back this up. A number of my clients report that they are struggling to fill entry level, mid-weight and senior roles.

This skills shortage comes in sharp contrast with the employment landscape experienced by young people, who have been especially hard hit by shifting pandemic workforce patterns. 

This comes on top of entrenched systemic issues in hiring such as “needing experience to gain experience” and the unwillingness of some companies to invest in junior staff.

We have a duty as an industry to nurture the next generation of talent. Not just because we altruistically owe it to young people, but because it is the right commercial decision to make for companies chasing a limited talent pool.

In this article, I’m going to be doing a mixture of mythbusting and setting out some best practices that companies can use to maximise the potential of their junior staff and ensure their staff have the best possible start to their careers.

House of Commons Youth Unemployment statistics

 Remote Working

A selection of industry myths

We worry juniors can’t learn on their own

Companies worry that unsupervised in a remote setting, junior staff will be twiddling their thumbs, sat behind screens in their houses.

This is interesting to me because when you think about the latest cohort of higher education leavers, these are people who have spent the last 18 months learning remotely. Most of them have performed exceptionally well in their exams under extremely challenging circumstances.

We simply aren’t giving our young people enough credit. If they're not the group best equipped with the ability to learn in a remote setting, who is at this point.

We worry we will harm the start of people’s career

Over the last year, I’ve overheard conversations with hiring managers who are putting off bringing onboard junior staff until the “situation becomes more stable and we can give them what they need.”

This is erroneous again, in my opinion, because our current pandemic situation is not going to get less unstable in the short to medium term. Yes, there are signs we may be leaving the worst of the restrictions behind, but can any of us accurately predict what will happen this winter and beyond? 

If the pandemic has taught us anything, it's that uncertainty is the certainty in life. All we can do is act as best we can with the current information we have. There’s no point waiting for a mythical day where everything will suddenly be set in stone to act.

We are damaging people’s careers by not giving them a chance to start one.

We worry about preserving our existing culture

While it is absolutely right to be concerned about whether people are actually happy at work, I do think that when companies talk about “preserving culture” they are often using it as a proxy to talk about being non-inclusive in a supposedly acceptable way.

If your culture can not handle the addition of multiple age ranges, I suggest the problem lies with your cultural expectations, not with your candidates.

The truth is, it wasn’t working before

In an office setting, it’s often expected that junior staff will learn through osmosis. I certainly had roles early on in my career where I was expected to learn the ropes by overhearing office conversations, but I should never ask questions or interrupt the “adults” while they were working.

I was lucky to get 5 minutes for a water cooler discussion, but that was the limit of my structured training. Needless to say, this was an extremely piecemeal and demoralising way to learn.

While I’m hopeful mine is an extreme example, we have relied on this type of ambient learning for far too long as an industry. While I am a big believer in the serendipity of the office and the importance of human connections in person, I don’t believe we should go back to the old ways, which are both unstructured and inefficient.

We can do better.

Ed Zitron, Why Managers Fear a Remote-Work Future, The Atlantic

Remote Work Best Practices

So what does better look like? Here are some of my suggestions on how we can improve remote learning for everyone (not just juniors!)

We need to invest time into training and L&D

The fundamental thing is we need to do as an industry is invest clearly defined and designated time into training and ongoing L&D. It can’t be an afterthought.

A lot of businesses expect people to pick things up as they go, either on the job or slotted ad-hoc around client work (in-house generally is a bit better with allocating clear time to training I have found).

If you want people to dedicate time to training you have to reflect this in your team’s workloads and your overall utilisation rates.

We need to encourage everyone to take collective responsibility for training

Training is not just a manager’s responsibility, the whole team should be helping to train junior employees, including the junior employees themselves! After all, one of the best ways to verify if someone knows a topic is to have them explain it to someone else.

Not only does this spread the load, but it also helps to create a culture of shared knowledge and continuous development for everyone.

We need to treat people as individuals

A lot of companies now offer personal development plans (PDPs), but in some places, there is still a persistent tickbox attitude when it comes to training programmes, especially in larger corporates.

There are of course subjects that require universal/standardised training procedures (first aid, fire safety etc.), however, in a field like digital marketing where there are so many career paths and specialisms to follow, it’s important to tailor training programmes to your organisation’s needs, the career ambitions of your staff and your skills gaps.

We need to give regular, consistent feedback

Six month or yearly performance reviews just don’t cut it.

By the time they roll around it’s often either too late to give positive feedback or too late to resolve performance issues (nobody likes a surprise after all).

Managers should be providing feedback on a weekly basis, monthly at a minimum. This doesn’t have to be an onerous, time-intensive or formal process though.

I stole the following format from Scrum retrospectives and have been using it with my team ever since to run check-ins. I like to do these collaboratively, asking team members to reflect on each point themselves before I provide my feedback. It’s also a great framework for self-reflection and assessing your own performance and even though I now I run my business, I tend to run my own mini-retro on a Friday using the structure.

Start - what should they start doing

Stop - what could they stop doing

Continue - what is working well and should be continued

Increase - what they should increase the amount/velocity of

Decrease - what they should decrease the amount/velocity of

Building Sustainable Skills

Another selection of industry myths

We say that graduates don’t come out of education with “soft skills”

Again, much like discourse around “culture”, I believe soft skills (which will be referred to as core skills henceforth) is another example of how language is used in our sector to marginalise.

While core communication and people skills are undoubtedly important, often people are using the term as a synonym for extroversion. This is especially prevalent in client-facing roles where there is an expectation that people will adhere to a certain personality type.

As a cohort, graduates are not lacking communication skills, it’s just that the communication landscape has changed and diverse people communicate in different ways.

I’ve worked in organisations with introverts who aren’t necessarily the most vocal in meetings but will send a blinder of an email after that clearly articulates a fantastic idea provoked by the wider discussion. Their strength was in written communication, not verbal, but that didn’t make them any less valuable as a team member.

We say that higher education doesn’t teach the “right” digital skills

I’m going to push back on this one with the question of whether it’s even higher education’s responsibility to teach cutting-edge digital skills?

In an industry where technology and methodologies move at a lightning pace, can we realistically expect higher education to keep pace when we struggle to as practitioners on the front line.

I firmly believe that the role of higher education is to teach people how to learn. It’s up to us as companies to invest in the right training to ensure our people stay ahead of the curve.

We say that young people are “lazy” and “special snowflakes”

Firstly young people aren’t lazy, they are questioning the merits of 24/7 work culture and advocating for better work practices. This isn’t limited to younger generations either, I think the majority of us have realised during the pandemic that we don’t want to go back to cultures of overwork and presenteeism.

Secondly, the connotations special snowflake and the supposed fragility of young people is particularly galling when we think of the resilience and fortitude they have shown throughout the pandemic. It’s not that younger generations are weaker, they are simply more comfortable talking about their mental health. Which can only be a good thing.

(Just because your staff never talked about anxiety and depression in “the old days” doesn’t mean they weren’t affected by it.)

The power of mentoring

Alongside more formalised training programmes, I believe one of the most powerful ways of building skills and capabilities is through offering mentoring. Throughout my career, I have had several mentors, all of whom provided vital support in building my technical and core communication competencies. I genuinely wouldn’t be where I am without them.

The best thing is that companies of any size can set up mentoring programmes, even if it initially takes the form of informal 1-2-1 catch-ups. There are also wider industry programmes which are well worth investigating. I recently took part in the WTS Mentorship Programme as a mentor and found it an extremely reciprocal experience. My mentee Jasmine was incredibly generous with her knowledge and expertise - so the mentor/mentee relationship can definitely support people both ways.

In terms of practically building a mentoring programme in your organisation, I have a few tips:

Try and find mutually good fits

Arbitrarily assigning people to a mentor can lead to poor matches. It’s important to have a process that allows both mentors and mentees to feedback on what they are hoping to get out of sessions (WTS did this really well through an online application process).

It should also be made clear that any party can choose to end the mentoring arrangement at any time if it doesn’t work for them.

Remember mentors need mentoring

There is a real difference between managing someone and mentoring them. In mentoring, the mentee drives the agenda.

It’s therefore important to ensure your mentors understand their role and how it differs from management responsibilities. Ideally, mentors should have an induction process to provide them with the right information and on-going support through their time as a mentor.

Again this was something the WTS programme did really well, as they held weekly drop-in sessions for mentors throughout the programme’s duration.

CIM: . According to Sage.com, of those with a mentor 97% say they are valuable

Providing real progression

A final selection of industry myths

We argue  some people aren’t suited to becoming managers

It’s true, management really isn’t the best or most desirable path for everyone. Some people prefer building their careers as Individual Contributors (ICs), where they focus on becoming a technical expert.

The issue comes when management is the only track for progression. If your organisation only promotes people on the basis of taking on people management responsibilities, then you’re again marginalising people who don’t conform to a narrow standard of what career progression can look like.

Engineering departments have typically been leading the way in offering IC progression routes and have a number of formats and best practices that wider digital departments can borrow from. GitLab offer some excellent details on their Engineering Career Development process and even offer people ways of trying out the people management track before they commit long term.

We argue we’re a small company and that means there’s no room to progress

This is an argument often heard at agencies, who often solve the problem by giving out inflated titles in an attempt to keep staff, usually without the corresponding pay rise….

Offering progression opportunities doesn’t have to always mean offering pay rises or better titles (though my caveat is that people should be paid fairly for their expertise and skill level and that title changes without pay increases often feel VERY hollow).

Progression can also mean giving people opportunities to work on bigger accounts, or investing in training that will boost someone’s long term skills and career opportunities. Junior employees in particular can gain a huge amount of value from being exposed to multiple areas of the business - could you offer some kind of secondment programme that allows people to spend a day or two in different departments each month?

You also need to accept that if you can’t offer people meaningful progression, at some point they are going to leave.

How to develop an inclusive promotion process

How do we ensure we engage employees in progression opportunities in a fair and transparent manner? These are my top tips on building an inclusive promotion process.

1. The process should have defined, transparent and published timescales

The promotion process can be extremely stressful and obscure for employees in organisations where decisions are made behind closed doors, with little information on how and when people can progress.

As with salary information, a lack of transparency also particularly affects minorities who may be less likely to self-advocate or be affected by the unconscious (or conscious) bias of decision-makers.

It’s therefore vital that organisations have a standardised promotion process that includes clear policies, procedures and milestones which are transparently communicated throughout the entire workforce.

Typically this takes the form of an internal document that can live on your internal wiki or knowledge base. Some companies, like GitLab again, have made their promotions documentation public-facing, which can be a great tool for recruitment (and very informative for anyone looking to develop their own documentation!)

1. The process should include diverse decision-makers

This is really about removing single gatekeepers and lessening the opportunity for biases to influence the process. Developing a promotions panel is also a great opportunity to bring in the viewpoints of multiple departments into the promotions processes and ensures that decisions are made with an appropriate level of scrutiny.

1. Candidates should be assessed against consistent and relevant criteria

This is again about standardising things and ensuring a fair process.

(Also if it’s not in their job description, why are you assessing them on it?)

1. People should be able to self nominate for a progression opportunity

All employees should feel empowered to put themselves forward for internal opportunities (this should be made explicit when new job roles are posted).

However, it’s important to note that some groups are again less likely to self-advocate and put themselves forward. This is why it’s important that every employee is regularly reviewed and assessed so that amazing people aren’t overlooked simply because they don’t shout the loudest.

Microsoft Work Trend Index Report 2021

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Unlocking potential and growing junior staff sustainably | Bethan Vincent | Brighton SEO Sep 2021 from Bethan Vincent