Talent Edge Weekly - Issue #108

Covers redesigning jobs, organizations, and work; deconstructing jobs, 100 questions you can answer with people analytics, enabling belonging, and gender diversity programs.

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

  • Redesigning Jobs, Organizations, and Work | Josh Bersin | A 15-page paper on how firms can redesign aspects of work to recruit, develop, and retain the talent they need. I expand on a section referencing skill adjacencies.

  • Can’t Fill Jobs? Deconstruct Them | MIT Sloan Management Review | Ravin Jesuthasan and John Boudreau share ideas from their forthcoming book--Work Without Jobs--on how decomposing jobs into tasks can help firms reframe talent problems they are trying to solve.

  • 100 Questions You Can Answer With HR Analytics | McBassi & Company | A list of 100 questions that CHROs and their teams can use when identifying which people analytics and metrics might provide the most value.

  • Report: The Fabric of Belonging: How to Weave an Inclusive Culture | Bain & Co. | A 24-page report that covers ideas on how to enable feelings of belonging in an organization. I provide a bonus reference that helps firms measure aspects of inclusion.

  • Reinventing Gender Diversity Programs for a Post-Pandemic World | BCG | Explores changes in many women's work preferences and values in a post-pandemic world.

THIS WEEK'S EDGE

Many organizations continue to face challenges in attracting and retaining top talent. Simultaneously, workers still rank lack of career development opportunities as a primary reason for leaving their organizations. One untapped opportunity for opening up new career opportunities for workers and helping firms expand their talent pool for open jobs is skills adjacencies. Skills adjacencies are linkages between an employee’s existing abilities and those that enable success in another role. These linkages are often not apparent, which is why they inhibit recruiters’ and hiring managers’ ability to consider nontraditional candidates for open jobs. It also leads workers to stop short of exploring and considering non-obvious career opportunities. This 15-page paper provides a section on tapping the potential of skills adjacencies through career pathways. Career pathways are not a traditional career path through which someone may move from “junior engineer” to “engineer” to “senior engineer” to “engineering manager.” Instead, it’s a series of developmental steps that help employees progress from one career to another; for example, a financial audit manager might become a cybersecurity specialist and go on to manage a cybersecurity team. Figure 6. on page 10 provides an example of mapping roles where adjacent skills can help workers discover new careers. And with various AI platforms making it easier to identify skills adjacencies, firms have the potential to unlock this capability at scale.

As firms continue to address labor shortages and resignations, many are finding opportunities to enhance aspects of their employee value proposition (EVP), such as flexible work, wellbeing, and compensation. And while a competitive and differentiated EVP is an essential component of a talent strategy, another viable tactic for addressing talent challenges is rethinking how work gets organized. In this article, Ravin Jesuthasan and John Boudreau share ideas from their forthcoming book—Work Without Jobs (due out on March 29, 2022)—on how deconstructing jobs into tasks — and identifying underlying skills/capabilities—enables firms to overcome the constraints of fixed traditional jobs. Using this approach, "organizations now think beyond jobs and jobholders, and talent sourcing moves beyond matching the "right" candidate to a job. The correct question is not "Is this worker fully qualified for this job?" but "What tasks are bundled together into this job, which workers are qualified to perform which of those tasks, and how could the tasks be unbundled and reconstructed?" This approach to organizing and assigning work is increasingly viable and opens up many possibilities for a firm's internal talent marketplace—another highly discussed component of talent strategy.

Last week I made a post showing that 400 surveyed U.S. public company board members cite talent as one of the most challenging topics they face. Also, virtually every survey on CEO and C-Suite priorities—such as The Conference Board C-suite Outlook 2022 Report and PWC’s Executive Views on Business Challenges and Opportunities in 2022 — shows talent as a critical issue. However, it is interesting that many organizations continue to lag when reporting meaningful metrics and measures that reflect their talent efforts, particularly in their SEC filings. For example, one post I made last year on an analysis of 427 Annual Reports on Form 10-K filed by companies in the S&P 500 showed a significant variation in what firms share, with many of them publishing basic measures (e.g., headcount, stats on training, etc.). As talent metrics become both an expectation and requirement for various purposes and audiences, CHROs and their teams will need to develop, track, and report key metrics that explain a firm’s talent narrative. A good starting point is identifying a firm's most important talent and workforce questions and, then, determining the metrics that can provide the answers. With that goal in mind, this reference provides a list of 100 questions to stimulate ideas. As a bonus resource, I am resharing this SAP paper, which includes another 100 questions spanning eight talent categories, ranging from recruiting, onboarding, and employee experience.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) continue to be a priority for many organizations. However, DEI efforts often fall short of their desired outcomes. As firms seek to make meaningful progress in their DEI initiatives, many are turning to the (I)nclusion component of DEI and creating and fostering an inclusive culture. Inclusive cultures are often described as one where people feel they belong, are treated with dignity, and are encouraged to participate as themselves fully. But as noted in this 24-page report, helping everyone feel included is deceptively difficult, especially given the various factors that drive feelings of belonging. Still, the report notes there is overlap in people’s description of what being included looks and feels like. As noted in Figure 8 on page 12, when looking at 72 enablers of inclusion across 18 populations spanning seven countries, one common denominator boosts inclusion for virtually everyone: opportunities for growth and transparent feedback. The report also looked at how various enablers might influence feelings of inclusion differently based on geography, demographics, and seniority. If you missed it, you could check out ADP Research Institute’s report, Measuring the “I” in DEI. This 63-page report provides a metric for measuring employees’ sentiment of inclusion via a 12-item index comprising three distinct feelings of connection. 

I have posted extensively over the past two years about the pandemic’s impact on various worker segments, including women in the workplace. One post that received much attention is LeanIn.org’s 2021 Women in the Workplace Report—a report produced annually since 2015 and the most extensive study on the state of women in corporate America. The 2021 report outlined various challenges many women have faced during the pandemic, such as having to drop out of the workforce because of work and home demands, especially those women who are primary caregivers in their families. But as noted in the BCG article, traditional approaches to DEI gender initiatives need to be reimagined to reflect the new-found priorities and values of many working women. To shed light on this topic, the authors analyzed women’s motivations and how they make decisions about jobs and careers in a post-pandemic world. One finding shown in Exhibit 5 is that while a great deal of DEI work is unsurprisingly focused on addressing women’s functional needs—including compensation, benefits, and work-life balance, the analysis shows the fulfillment of emotional needs—such as feeling valued, supported, and respected—correlates more strongly with women’s happiness at work and in shaping positive employee outcomes. As firms reinvent their DEI efforts, these and other insights in the report provide helpful ideas.

MOST SHARED RESOURCE FROM LAST WEEK

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

TWEET OF THE WEEK

BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS

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