Insights

"Two feet on the ground, getting people moving. Not waiting for the mandate. Daring to look in the mirror every day. Not the leadership but the effect."

These are some testimonies about leadership from the participants of the AMS Masterclass Leadership for the public and social profit sector. Throughout the course, they took the step from "socialized" to "self-authoring": from using social leadership benchmarks to developing their own definition about what is needed and appropriate. A crucial step toward the leaders the public sector needs to properly address today's many challenges.

In essence, a career is the pattern of work-related experiences a person has during his professional life. It is a complex mosaic of objective situations and events and their subjective interpretations. In short, the work we do every day and how that makes us feel. This turns a career into an individual and highly complex matter.

The theme of 'employee participation' is more topical today than ever in management discourse. Organizations are becoming flatter, hierarchical bureaucracies are being phased out, leadership is being more 'shared' and included outside the hierarchy. This also creates expectations towards employees: they need to make their voices heard more and more. Employee participation is thus no longer something purely 'desired', but rather something that is 'required' (Knoll et al., 2016).

In this white paper (in Dutch) we outline the results and analysis, based on a survey of 1598 employees.

Due to the unpredictable and rapidly changing context, a flexible labor market is more important today than ever. For example, the corona crisis has shown that flexibility was needed to keep employees employed and organizations running. Our employer surveys show that in just about one in five organizations, employees were hired in other departments.

Over the last seven years, the role of Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) has gained significant importance within local governments, because local governments that want to be in line with the Baseline Information Security Government urgently need such a CISO. About 50% of the job vacancies on LinkedIn are meant for local governments. But the role of CISO has drastically changed in recent years. The latest figures indicate that an astonishing 22% of the IT budget is allocated to cyber and information security. Our own experience is that dialogues with C-level executives nowadays revolve around questions such as: Are we doing the right thing, and are we doing this right? How do we measure and monitor our return on security investments (ROSI)? And where do we get the ‘biggest bang for the buck’?

Organizations today must look for talent in a tight labor market. In June 2021, the VDAB received a record number of job openings: 33,760. That's more than twice as many as in June 2020 and 2019. The increase is greatest for jobs with experience, permanent contracts and highly skilled workers. With the outflow of a large generation of baby boomers, tightness in the labor market will only increase in the coming years. At the same time, in the first half of this year, more than 60,000 start-ups are already taking the plunge into entrepreneurship. A quarter more than last year, despite the corona crisis and despite all the corona restrictions that were also in effect for much of 2021. A significant number of those startups are freelancers.

Investors are currently obliged to take ESG (Environment, Social, Governance) issues into consideration as part of their fiduciary duty. As such, it becomes increasingly important to identify sustainable investments that hold financial value as well. Moreover, the Covid-19 pandemic proved that real estate has a crucial role to play in societal sustainability. In the real estate sector, not much is known about ESG so far. This has a lot to do with the obfuscated conceptualization and diverging measurement of ESG.

In this white paper, we discuss the value of ESG for real estate, both for investors and real estate professionals.

Industry 4.0 is advancing the adoption of radically new technologies, business models and profit pools across industries. For logistics, securing a share of these new profit pools will be crucial, as its commoditized business is under pressure from increasing price competition and new entry from e-commerce giants. Consolidation in the middle of the chain has extended the lifespan of the old transactional business models for the large players, while it threatens the profit potential for 99% of the actors in the chain.

In April 2020, in the midst of a coronary crisis, we launched a survey with organizations on the impact of COVID-19 on their human capital. Nothing led us to believe that, more than a year and 5 surveys later, we would still be researching the impact of the pandemic on work and careers - not only among employers, but also among employees. In this research report, you can read more about our main findings. (in Dutch)