TALENT EDGE WEEKLY - Issue #11

April 18, 2020

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

Note: You can also access this and other content I post at my website, www.brianheger.com.

COVID-19

Similar to previous weeks, I continue to update special issue #6, COVID-19 Resources for HR, of this newsletter. So far, that issue has 100+ references that HR colleagues can leverage. Please continue to check that issue for related updates.

For the current issue, the following resources are covered:

  • CHRO 2025 | Spencer Stuart

  • The Future of Work in Technology: Reimagine Technology Work, Workforce, Workplace | Deloitte Insights

  • Are We Long or Short on Talent?: Building Creative Talent Strategy | McKinsey

  • Learning Technology Evolves: Integrated Platforms Are Arriving | Josh Bersin

  • The New Potential: Should You Look for Shy-pos? | Marc Effron | ERE

  • How to Make Pay Transparency Part of HR Strategy: Featuring Starbucks, BBC, Whole Foods, Etc. | HR Technologist

  • Geographic Mobility, Gender, and the Future of Work |Institute for Women's Policy Research

  • Employee Engagement and Loyalty Statistics: The Ultimate Collection | Access Perks Blog

WHAT IS YOUR HR CHALLENGE OR PRIORITY?

To ensure that I cover topics that are most important to you, please let me know if there is a certain strategic HR topic that you would like for me to address in a future issue of this newsletter. If so, you can send me an email at [email protected] . The email can be as simple as just including the topic in the subject line.

SUPPORTING THIS NEWSLETTER

If you enjoy this content, please share this newsletter with at least one of your team members or colleagues and share it on your social media networks. Doing so will help us to continue to advance strategic HR and learn together.

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Have a good and safe weekend everyone!

Brian

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Brian Heger leads Strategic Talent, Workforce Planning, and Analytics for a Fortune 150 organization. To connect with Brian on Linkedin, click here.

THIS WEEK'S EDGE

The role of the Chief Human Resource Officer (CHRO) continues to be one of the most important in many organizations. And while the role had already been gaining increased prominence prior to the coronavirus, this pandemic has thrust a greater spotlight on the impact and value of CHROs. In many cases, CHROs are currently navigating their organizations through remote work strategies, upskilling the workforce, employee wellness, and workforce planning amidst many uncertainties, to name a few. As the CHRO role continues to evolve in both times of crisis as well as business-as-usual, it is important for both current and prospective heads of HR to develop their skills in the areas that matter the most to their organizations. This article by Spencer Stuart outlines the CHRO capabilities that are important now and in the future. A few of the capabilities mentioned refer to combining 1) business, 2) technological, and 3) data and analytics skills to achieve the greatest impact. With respect to the latter, HR leaders will need to continue to go beyond raw pieces of information to infer critical insights that inform strategic direction and decisions. And while this article was written with CHROs in mind, these three areas are vital to HR professionals in general. The article covers other CHRO capabilities as well as 10 key characteristics of CHROs in 2025.

Topics such as the future of work and digital HR have been among the top priorities for many organizations well before the coronavirus. However, these topics have become even more acute during the past months and will endure once this pandemic is behind us. As many organizations are currently evaluating and making decisions about technology within the context of the future of work, it is important that they do so by taking a holistic approach that will enable better decisions in this area. This article by Deloitte provides one framework for evaluating technology needs through three interrelated dimensions: 1) Work - as we look at work activities that need to be performed, where are there opportunities to automate work or enable it through AI? 2) Workforce - given new talent platforms and required skills, how do we leverage the continuum of talent from full-time workers, contractors, gig workers, etc.? 3) Workplace - how are workplace and work practices (e.g., evolving from location-centric to relationship oriented) reshaping where and how work gets done? Organizations can use these three components to answer these and similar questions. Once they formulate answers, organizations can evaluate their current technology against these needs and determine and prioritize potential investments. By looking at these three areas holistically, it enables organizations to "zoom-out" and make more informed decisions rather than reacting quickly to only one component.

The rapidly changing nature of work coupled with unexpected external circumstances, such as the novel coronavirus pandemic, requires organizations to continuously relook and adjust talent strategies as needed. One component of this evaluation is trying to understand the supply and demand of skills within the workforce. In many respects, circumstances will result in a shortfall of skills that require talent decisions and questions such as 1) should we build on our existing skills? 2) Should we acquire them? 3) Or should we “rent” them? In other cases, it results in skill overages where we need to ask: 1) do we redeploy workers, 2 ) do we reskill or upskill workers, or 3) do we need to find thoughtful ways of exiting employees from the business. This article by McKinsey provides a few ideas on how to frame and answer some of these questions. A proactive approach such as this one can better enable organizations to take actions that prepare their talent strategy for tomorrow’s challenges.

As employees and workers of all types continue to be reskilled and upskilled due to the changing nature of work and business, organizational learning technologies continue to be a key priority across most HR organizations. Many organizations are continuing to find ways to leverage learning technologies to deliver relevant learning to workers, at the right time, and in an easily digestible format. However, as pointed out by Josh Bersin, there are over 200 Learning Management System (LMS) vendors such as Cornerstone, Saba, SumTotal, and SuccessFactors. Then, there are more than 30 LXP (Learning Experience Platform) vendors, such as Degreed and EdCst, that provide a personalized, social, online learning experience for users. To add to the mix, there are thousands of vendors who build various applications such as collaboration tools like WebEx and Skype. Faced with the overwhelming number of platforms and tools from which to choose, it is easy for learning leaders to become frustrated when making learning technology decisions. To overcome this challenge, organizations are opting for more integrated solutions that provide a more streamlined and effective learning experience. This article provides a nice primer on this topic and can help organizations understand the differences between these platforms and use it as a guide for making more discriminating decisions.

Most organizations conduct some form of a talent review where they discuss employees and their "potential" for taking on more responsibility or advancing in the organization. And despite many organizations conducting talent reviews, various sources indicate that fewer than 50% of organizations believe that they accurately identify those employees with the greatest potential. One factor contributing to this issue is when an organization MISTAKENLY identifies an employee as having higher potential (this problem is called a false-positive). The other problem is when an employee who DOES have greater potential is NOT identified (this is called a false-negative). As it relates to the issue of "false-negatives, " this article offers the notion of a "Shy-po" as one reason why organizations miss the mark in identifying employees who have greater potential. These Shy-pos have greater potential but are not detected for reasons such as being less vocal about career advancement or not being "showcased" to decision-makers. As talent leaders, we can challenge our organizations to dig beneath the surface and identify those "hidden gems". Doing so can enable a more robust leadership pipeline.

Pay transparency, in general, is the degree to which employers are open about what, why, how and how much employees are compensated, and the extent to which they allow employees to share pay‐related information with others. In recent years, several companies have taken measures to introduce pay transparency, either during recruitment or for internal compliance. The article provides a few insights on what five companies like Buffer, BBC, Whole Foods, Starbucks, and Stability Healthcare, are doing to adopt pay transparency. The tactics employed by these companies range from providing a list of its highest-paid employees to showing salaries and compensation for open jobs in order to minimize the need for negotiation or any risk of ambiguity. And while company size, culture, and other factors will determine an organization's degree of pay transparency, these insights provide a few ideas for making progress in this area. Some good questions to ask: 1) On a scale from 1 (little transparency) to 10 (total transparency), how transparent is your organization when it comes to pay? 2) How would becoming more transparent positively impact things like employer brand and recruiting effectiveness? 3) What is one step you can take to drive towards greater transparency?

As the geographic mobility of talent is a component of many organizations' talent strategy, it is important to understand the extent to which people are actually willing to move and are geographically flexible. This 42-page report by the Institute for Women's Policy Research explores the research literature and analyzes long-term trends in the data to describe patterns in women‘s and men‘s geographic mobility, particularly for work. The report includes several insights such as 1) geographic mobility has fallen for workers from all demographic groups and regions and 2) decline in mobility is not due to changes in the composition of the workforce, 3) changes in parental or marital status does not explain the decline in mobility. With declines in geographic mobility, organizations should look at their talent strategies to determine the extent to which these strategies should be modified due to this trend. The report also identifies responses that may help workers overcome mobility constraints, both by making it easier and more attractive for workers to move to good jobs and by reducing the need for geographic mobility through policies and the use of technological solutions.

As HR practitioners, we must often build business cases for pursuing a certain initiative and articulating its ROI. And over the years, I have received several requests for a variety of statistics that could help colleagues support that endeavor. One area for which a litany of statistics have been compiled during the past decade is employee engagement and retention. With that as the backdrop, I came across this resource that appears to have well over 200 stats on the topic and which may be useful to some practitioners. Each statistic has a link back to the original source and is broken out by 1) employee engagement and retention, 2) workplace satisfaction, 3) employee benefits and 4) miscellaneous. Even if there is no need to use this information in the near-term, it is interesting to see the variety of statistics, some of which are conflicting. It might also help to inform other important topics such as the employee experience and workforce preferences and values to name a few.

SHARE YOUR IDEAS

If you have an article, report, or resource that you recommend, please email me at [email protected]. I would love to review it and share it in a future newsletter.

FINAL COMMENTS

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I look forward to sharing more ideas in next week’s Edge!

Have a good and safe weekend everyone!

Brian