When sport and work collide

Look around your office, can you tell me three things you know about each person working there? Often times, the further the person sits from you the less you know about them. It is only natural, the people you interact with most during the day are the ones you work closest with, figuratively and physically.

Muhammad Ali once said, “It’s just a job. Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand. I beat people up.” I’m rarely one to disagree with The Greatest, but when it comes to MY job it IS much more than that.

So, how is it that I enjoy coming into work in the morning? How is it I am happy enough to stay later if needs be or work the odd weekend? A lot of it is down to the people I work with, who I have come to know and have since become friends. And they don’t just sit beside me.

How did they get there? As much of it is linked to what goes on outside the day to day work. When I first arrived at Hays, over a year ago, we enjoyed a Thanksgiving feast together, organised by our American colleague Kelly, to raise money for Barretstown. This was quickly followed by the usual Christmas fare like Secret Santa and the Christmas party. Then with the new year upon us - and a desire to get more active - a group of us signed up for the Great Ireland run, then there was tag rugby, zip lining and most recently a 5 a side football team.

The basketball player Bob Cousy said, “Sports create a bond between contemporaries that lasts a lifetime. It also gives your life structure, discipline and a genuine, sincere, pure fulfilment that few other areas of endeavour provide.”

No stronger was that bond felt than when the Hays tag rugby team took to the field. Almost to a player we had very little idea what we were doing, why we were doing it or who we were doing it with. But as the games went by one thing remained constant - we kept turning up. Thankfully, what changed were our fortunes, we started to grasp the rules and the ball and suddenly we were scoring tries and defending our own line like a team. Regardless of our status within the workplace, from MD to new starter, we created a talking point for the office, one we could all participate in.

The sense of achievement that we all experience during our workday, is often only shared with our immediate teams. Tag rugby – and the other activities we took part in – allowed a relationship to build that went much further than our closest colleagues. In its simplest form it allowed imaginary boundaries to be broken down and conversation to flow that may have previously been stifled.

It is hard to disagree with Martina Navaratilova when she says, “Whoever said, ‘it is not whether you win or lose that counts’, probably lost”, we may not have won as much as we would have liked but it definitely counted for something.

Philip Bourke

Marketing Executive
Ireland

HAYS Recruiting experts worldwide
16 Upper Fitzwilliam St
Dublin 2

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Is Returning to Work After Maternity Leave a Trick or a Treat?

Anne-Marie's son Harry the Dinosaur

Anne-Marie Walsh shares her experience of maternity leave and coming back to work in Hays as an IT Business Intelligence Consultant.

Almost a year ago, I went on maternity leave from Hays. I was like a kid leaving school for a very long mid-term break.  I was ready to go. Although planning a business intelligence event to coincide with my last day of work, (while being approximately 36 weeks pregnant) was not in fact one of my more einsteinien ideas!

I looked forward to maternity leave, my mind conjured up idyllic scenes of baby massaging, long lazy lunches with other mummies and general bonding bliss with my baby.   I did have some appreciation at that point of the nappies, feeds and late nights but I preferred not to dwell on that. 

Eleven months later and maternity leave is now a distant memory.  What was a bump is now a healthy hearty boy, a little man in the making.  Six months went by in what felt like four weeks.  I remember getting asked if I had to go back to work. I did, but I also wanted to. 

I love my new little man unconditionally.  Weekends are a newfound treasure where all I want to do is chill out with him (sometimes he gets annoyed and insists I let him go to bed). But the working week is great, my head needed it and I needed it. 

You'll be seeing plenty of Halloween masks tonight. But I think we all use masks on a daily basis to differentiate work from our personal lives.  The thing with going on maternity leave and then returning to work is that, for a while, it is confusing as to which mask you should be wearing. 

I wear the work mask and get motivated by getting the right people for the right job.  I also get energy from my client and candidate interaction and finding out about the market changes in the last six months.  They hadn’t changed too much - Oracle and Microsoft business intelligence experts were still highly in demand.

I also get to actually drink a warm coffee (new mums understand a sup of warm coffee while handling a new baby is the Holy Grail) and socialise with colleagues once more.  But in the evenings there is a change.  It is no longer ‘Oh I have worked a very long day I deserve to put my feet up…or do yoga…or some such thing’. Now it’s like a military operation… pick up your baby, make a gazillion bottles for your baby, make other food for your baby, clean up after your baby, bath your baby and try and play with your baby.

A discourse on ‘mindfulness’ is pervasive in health and psychology media at the moment.  It comes from eastern traditions and involves paying conscious attention to experiences as they unfold, so your head is neither caught in the past, or the future, but in the present.  Having a baby taught me to be more mindful.  Instead of wondering what I should be doing now or what I would be doing in ten years I had to be present and attending to a hungry, sleepy and at times, smelly little creature.  This was no time for daydreaming.  Equally, with the return to work it has struck me that one way to negotiate the work life balance is to be more mindful.  So when you are at work focus fully on that and when you are with your little person, give that your full attention. I suspect this may be more difficult than it sounds but a good thing to strive for nonetheless. 

I also figure this can’t be all bad for my little man.  He has a relatively competitive mum.  If I wasn’t chipping away at my own monthly plans I would be monitoring his developmental milestone and putting in some performance improvement measures. I suspect Crèche may be a breather for this baby! Some people choose to be working mums, some choose to be stay-at-home mums, others don’t have a choice.  I want to be a happy mum and for me that involves trying to balance home and work life.  It helps to be working in Hays, an organisation that supports that. 

Coming back to work has had its challenges, yes I am super busy and yes I have had the odd maternal pang of guilt, wanting to extend the weekends….  But I like being busy and I think it makes you value the time you have with your little one all the more.  I also value work more. Being a stay-at-home mum would actually have been a very bad career choice for me.   I always was a nerdy child so I identify with those kids that enjoy leaving school for the mid term break but really are secretly ready to go back next Monday morning.  

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Anne-Marie Walsh

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IT Recruitment Consultant
HAYS Recruiting experts in Information Technology

2 Dawson Street Dublin 2
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E: anne-marie.walsh@hays.com

No flights of fancy - we are airborne!

Back in late 2007 and 2008 the talk was of a soft landing. Evidence abounded of the impending downturn, but very few people called it as it was - a disaster of grotesque proportions just around the corner. Just why we thought the landing would be soft, is hard to recall. Looking back at the numbers from leading edge industries and sectors, the picture was abundantly clear – we weren’t so much heading for a soft landing as hitting a brick wall, falling off a cliff – choose your metaphor, the clear signs were there that the trip was over. However, after five years of mass unemployment, sectors destroyed and beatings from our EU and IMF colleagues, I believe we've finally come out the other side. To explain my reasoning I need to take us back to where it all began.  

In early 2007 the streets were full of BMWs and Mercedes and regular people were deciding on whether to go for that third or fourth property. In the Hays offices, we were flying around the world trying to find architects and engineers from the Far East and Africa to import into Ireland. Our offices were packed with Eastern Europeans flooding over to fill the labour void on the huge development sites of the South Docklands and elsewhere.

By July it had stopped dead in its tracks. The phone was still ringing, but it was Irish architects looking for a move as their firm’s prospects suddenly looked bleak. Anyone in housing was getting out quick, and then, in October activity froze in a recession that hit the entire construction sector like a tsunami. Eighteen months into the recession a sector that accounted for over 10% of GDP and employed over a quarter of a million people had halved in output and lost half its employees. Some soft landing!

Looking back is instructive whilst trying to figure out what might be happening now in the economy, and, more importantly, what might happen next. The recruitment sector is often overlooked as a key indicator of changes in the economy, but I would argue it’s the first place to look. Staff numbers are the mercury in the economic barometer because they are directly linked to business confidence.  We see defined stages in the economic cycle. In a downturn businesses see a reduction in workload, hiring activity goes on hold, new enquires for permanent staff dry up. Then, as the situation worsens, temporary staff are let go, followed by non-core permanent staff and then, perhaps finally, wholesale redundancies.

All this played out throughout 2007 and 2008, with the recruitment market bottoming out in spring 2009. Since 2010 the sector has been growing, quietly, but steadily and significantly. Now, in 2013, something is happening to that growth that is more significant and, I believe, portends the start of a significant shift in the wider economy.

If we take the graph of hiring activity as an accurate portrait of an economy in decline, then the same can be done for an economy in recovery. The very first thing we would expect to see would be a pick-up in temporary hiring activity, as companies cautiously add numbers. Temporary staff are used to circumvent corporate headcount quotas or to simply cover skills gaps on specific projects. They also provide a tentative re-entry into the labour market when prospects pick up. We have already seen this happen in the IT and finance sectors, both of which are characteristically ‘employment resilient’ in a recession. But now we are seeing it elsewhere, crucially in construction. There is a spring in the step of the partners of those surviving firms of architects and engineers in Dublin. They have work on the drawing board, and their response is evident in the calls we’re getting for short term staff and fixed terms contractors.

This summer two things happened which give me the confidence to state that the economy is undergoing a significant shift in momentum. Overall, cross-sector numbers of temporary workers are almost back to pre-recession levels. Secondly, and most significantly, the source of this momentum comes from the construction sector.  Temporary workers in construction are up 40% compared to this time last year, the biggest growth rate of any sector in which we recruit. It was also reported recently that the large cranes that were once synonymous with the Dublin cityscape have seen an increase in hires by 10%. This only happens at the start of an upturn, and the pace at which it is happening tells me that we are at the critical point of the recovery where, having been parked on the apron for three years, we’re motoring down the runway and primed for take-off.

Talk to the right people, in the right businesses, and they will tell you the same thing. Property recovers first at the top end and in South Dublin property is moving, and moving rapidly; prices are up, sharply. There is an absolute dearth of high quality commercial space in the City and foreign money is acting on this opportunity. The buzz of international financiers hovering around Ireland has turned into a frenzy of activity.

The service sector is growing at its fastest rate in six years and new export orders grow for the 25th successive month. PwC's 2013 CEO Pulse Survey showed business confidence in the Irish economy at its highest level since 2007. Add this to the sustained recovery in employment numbers on a base of three years uninterrupted economic growth, and the start of a recovery is undeniable.

Yet, just as no-one diverted from the ‘soft-landing’ script in 2008, no-one is calling the recovery now. Caution is the watchword, and we’re quick still to fasten to the grimmer aspects of our immediate situation than to focus on the brightening light on the horizon. But it’s clear to me that the recovery has started to take off and we are airborne again.

Hays are hosting a breakfast panel discussion entitled “2013 growth, are you seeing it?” Liam Diamond, the International Tax & Inward Investment expert at PricewaterhouseCoopers will join Goodbody’s Chief Economist Dermot O'Leary and other panellists to give their views and answer questions on where the economic growth is coming from and how businesses can take advantage of the green shoots. For more information and to register go to hays.ie/2013growth

For further information about Hays visit www.hays.ie