Simon Koolwijk

Within organizations, the responsibility for talent development is increasingly shifting from the HR department to managers. To date, the HR department had an important task in the field of talent development. She focused on the recruitment and development of talented people. These were often promising highly educated young people. Due to shrinking HR departments, managers are increasingly responsible for talent development. They are expected to take care of the talent development of their employees themselves. The expectation is that they not only focus on the high potentials, but that they also focus on developing the talents of all their employees. Recently, I conducted a workshop on talent and diversity for a big enginering company, on how talent and diversity can be promoted and further developed in multi-displinary teams in an agile working environment. During the workshop each participant defined their talents and also received feedback, where colleagues observed hidden ...

In December 2018, Saskia Ivens and I (Simon Koolwijk) conducted a workshop about the win-win of diversity and inclusion at the workplace by applying participatory video . The workshop organised by Agile on the Fly, at Capgemini, discussed the challenges and opportunities of agile working at an agile work place. Participants did some creative video interviews during our workshop, which gained some useful insight about the challenges, opportunities and way forward on how to work on diversity and inclusion. Challenges: Tight deadlines and high performance demands and limited time make it for many companies with an agile workplace a challenge to get to know each other and understand each other’s differences. Understanding each other with having different ethnic and cultural backgrounds, different mother tongues, different terminologies and different perceptions make it a great challenge on how to transfer consumer demands into a service or product in a diverse team.  Another ch...