Welcome to this week’s issue of Talent Edge Weekly - the weekly newsletter for human resources practitioners, bringing together talent and HR insights from various sources.

Welcome to this week’s issue of Talent Edge Weekly—the weekly newsletter for human resources practitioners, bringing together insights about work, the workplace, and the workforce from various sources.

If you find value in this issue or any of its resources, please share them with your network by using the social media icons at the top of the newsletter.

Have a great week, and I look forward to sharing more ideas in next week’s Edge!

Brian 

Brian Heger is a human resources practitioner with a Fortune 150 organization and has responsibilities for Strategic Talent and Workforce Planning. To connect with Brian on Linkedin, click here.

THIS WEEK'S CONTENT

• HR For Ukraine Resources | HR for Ukraine | Provides a curated list of resources that firms can use as they support employees and fellow humans impacted by the war unfolding in Ukraine. 

• The New Rules of Succession Planning | strategy + business | Offers a three-step plan to help firms overcome challenges encountered in succession planning.

• What Board Members of U.S Public-companies Think is Important in 2022 | Corporate Board Member |  Shares survey insights from 400 U.S. public-company board members on their ' top concerns, challenges, and agenda for the rest of 2022.

• Why ‘Meets Expectations’ Never Does: A Manager’s Guide for a Productive ‘Middle Rating’ Conversation | The Talent Strategy Group | Provides tips on delivering performance feedback, particularly to those employees meeting performance expectations—which is most of an organization.

• Some Companies Ditch Annual Raises and Review Worker Pay More Often | The Wall Street Journal | Addresses how the demand for workers has led some firms to forgo annual pay raises and adopt more frequent pay reviews. I share how the timing of performance and pay evaluations might be aligned with "project cycles."

THIS WEEK'S EDGE

HR For Ukraine Resources | HR for Ukraine 

As I write this week’s newsletter with a heavy heart for those affected by the war unfolding in Ukraine, I know many business leaders are seeking resources to support their employees, colleagues, friends, and families. The attached reference provides links to helpful resources, including those for HR. While you can use the attachment to view the complete list, a few to highlight include 1) Lars Schmidt has opened a thread on LinkedIn collecting internal memos on the crisis that many companies are issuing for managers and employees. 2) Ann Roberts, CHRO from Flo Health Inc., has listed the number of actions that her company put in place to support its Ukraine employees, including relocation support. 3) Oyster has an article on supporting employees in Ukraine, with tips such as making salary advancements, providing access to mental health resources, and covering lodging costs. 4) Remote has put together a comprehensive list of actions firms can take to support remote workers in Ukraine, such as providing a direct phone number, so firms can stay in contact with workers that lose internet access. If you are aware of other helpful resources, please send them to me at brian@brianheger.com, and I will share them on various platforms. Meanwhile, please share this post so we can crowdsource our resources to help those in need. 

The New Rules of Succession Planning | strategy + business 

As many firms rethink their approaches to succession planning (SP), this article provides a few ideas to consider. Although the article is on CEO succession, many insights apply to SP in general. The authors, David Reimer and Adam Bryant, point out how boards often fail to pick the best CEO candidate because they focus on the wrong criteria. They offer a three-step plan to overcome challenges encountered in SP. 1) Start with strategy and execution, not individual characteristics, 2) Build a shared framework for assessing and discussing candidates, and 3) Structure the process to mitigate bias. Regarding step one, the succession process begins by answering specific foundational questions about the business, such as What problems does our strategy call for us to solve? Questions like these, or those found in my 2016 article Identifying Leadership Capabilities that Drive Business Performance, can inform leadership capabilities critical to succession. I previously mentioned that one challenge to succession is underdeveloped successors—those identified as successors but whose development progress stalls or does not pace with succession timeframes. One reason this happens is that firms use general measures for determining readiness, such as "ready in 2 years," without critically evaluating successors' specific development needs. An alternative option for determining readiness could be the "number of development moves away" a successor is to assuming the targeted role. This approach emphasizes the critical experiences needed to accelerate the successor's readiness and is action-based. Where are there opportunities to speed up successor readiness in your organization in 2022?

What Board Members of U.S Public-Companies Think is Important in 2022 | Corporate Board Member 

Boards have expanded their oversight scope to include a range of new issues and challenges over the past two years. And with no shortage of topics to focus on in 2022, it is informative to understand board members’ top concerns, challenges, and agenda for the rest of the year. This article shares insights from Corporate Board Member’s annual survey of U.S. public-company board members. Based on survey results of 400 U.S. public company board members, a few findings include: 1) When asked to rank the issues the directors find most challenging to oversee, the top three are cybersecurity (41%), talent (38%), and culture (34%). 2) Regarding talent, board members cite lack of skilled labor, shifting of work policies, Covid-related mandates, rising wages, and increased preferences to work from home as issues affecting companies’ ability to execute growth strategies. 3) Although culture is among the top three most challenging to oversee, over three-quarters (77%) say they are ‘absolutely confident’ and ‘significantly confident’ their organizations have the right culture oversight tools and resources — with most relying on employee surveys. Right behind these top three issues is 4) Leadership succession/transition (26%) and 5) Social issues, including diversity and inclusion (26%). While these findings should come as no surprise, they provide CHROs and their teams with insights into the workplace and talent topics that are top of mind for board members across many organizations.

Why ‘Meets Expectations’ Never Does: A Manager’s Guide for a Productive ‘Middle Rating’ Conversation | The Talent Strategy Group 

Organizations continue to express concern about employee retention risk. However, firms’ tactics to mitigate these risks are discussed less often and sometimes limited to obvious retention approaches. But with many firms getting ready to deliver employee performance evaluations, the performance review discussion presents an untapped opportunity for influencing employee retention. To explain how performance reviews play into employee retention risk, I draw from a quote in Leigh Branham’s book, The 7 Hidden Reasons Employees Leave: “Employee turnover is not an event — it is a process of disengagement that can take days, weeks, months or even years until the actual decision to leave occurs.” Said differently, employee turnover is a deliberation process that occurs over time and is informed by various events or “triggers,” such as a change in manager, being passed over for a promotion, and even return-to-office dates, to name a few. These triggers culminate into a worker’s decision to stay with or leave an organization. The performance discussion is one of these triggers, so managers who deliver these reviews must be thoughtful about messaging and delivery. With this as the backdrop, I am sharing this article by Marc Effron that provides tips on delivering performance feedback, particularly to those employees meeting performance expectations—which is most of an organization.

Some Companies Ditch Annual Raises and Review Worker Pay More Often | The Wall Street Journal 

This article outlines how the demand for workers has led some organizations to forgo annual pay raises and adopt more frequent pay reviews. One example is CoorsTek Inc., a maker of industrial ceramics, who started doing quarterly pay reviews last year, primarily to ensure it could hire and retain workers for critical and hard-to-fill manufacturing roles. While not mentioned in this article, firms should also consider how the “type of work” being performed could inform the frequency of performance and pay review cycles. With work becoming more agile and project-based in many firms, there is an opportunity for a segment of organizations to align performance and pay evaluations with the duration of work project cycles. One benefit of this approach is that workers can regularly see an explicit link between performance feedback, evaluations, and rewards payouts for each project (e.g., a 2-month project). This approach can mitigate certain performance management biases associated with annual or longer performance cycles, such as recency bias, where managers rate an employee based on recent performance—forgetting or placing less emphasis on the entire year’s performance. Although aligning performance and pay cycles with project duration sounds good in theory, it can be challenging to implement and may not be feasible in some firms. Organizations should critically evaluate whether the benefits of shorter performance and pay cycles outweigh the complexity and risks.

MOST SHARED RESOURCE FROM LAST WEEK

First 100 Days: A Guide for New-to-Role Heads of HR | Gartner | Discusses nine steps for a quick, successful transition to a CHRO role. Includes advice from heads of HR.

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