Talent Edge Weekly - Issue #111

Covers 25 types of people risks, a skills framework, how employee experience impacts the bottom line, toxic cultures, and voluntary turnover.

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

  • Report: The Five Pillars of People Risk | MercerMarsh Benefits | A 64-page report that groups 25 people-risks into five major categories. The framework can be used to help identify, prioritize and manage various forms of people risks. 

  • Skills Frameworks Fuel Skills-based Organizations | Deloitte Blog Capital H | Presents a useful Hub and Spoke model for drawing the connection between various talent "hub" components (e.g., talent philosophy, skills framework, etc.) and the "spoke" aspects (e.g., workforce planning, etc.)

  • Research: How Employee Experience (EX) Impacts Your Bottom Line | Harvard Business Review | Shares research from a large global retail brand on the causal impact of EX on business outcomes like revenue and profits. I include a few bonus resources.

  • Research: Why Every Leader Needs to Worry About Toxic Culture | MIT Sloan Management Review | Covers findings from a text analytics study of more than 1.3 million Glassdoor reviews on how employees describe five aspects of a toxic culture.

  • Gone for Now, or Gone for Good? How to Play the New Talent Game and Win Back Workers | Mckinsey | Explains why a segment of workers had voluntarily left their organizations during the pandemic. I share a few ideas on how firms can address their talent shortages by expanding their talent pools through "hidden workers."

THIS WEEK'S EDGE

The COVID-19 pandemic brought new, unforeseen risks to light for many organizations. And as firms continue to shift to a post-pandemic environment, they mustn’t let their guards down to the possibilities of these threats surfacing in the future. This 64-page report focuses on one element of risk in organizations: people risk. As shown on page 3, the research grouped 25 people-risks into five major categories. 1) Health and Safety (e.g., workforce exhaustion), 2) Governance and financial (e,g, increasing health, risk protection, and well-being benefit costs), 3) Accelerated digitization (cybersecurity, skills obsolescence), 4) Talent practices (e.g., succession and critical person risk), 5) Environmental and social (e.g., diversity, equity, and inclusion, social unrest). Based on feedback from a small sample (n=1,380) of global risks managers and HR professionals, Page 4 plots the 25 people risks on two dimensions: 1) likelihood of the risk occurring in the next three years and 2) the severity of its impact on the business if it were to happen. Accelerated digitization was the top category of risk, followed by talent practices and health and safety. While the survey was conducted in 2021 and based on a smaller sample, the framework provides organizations with a helpful approach for identifying, prioritizing, and managing various forms of risk. Strategies are offered to help firms manage their current and emerging people-related risks across the five major areas.

I have shared several articles highlighting how organizations are reimagining every talent practice to be based more on skills than jobs. As noted in this new article, a skills-based organization (SBO) provides an integrated system that ensures that the workforce is aligned, capable, effective, adaptable, efficient, and inspired by shifting from managing employment and supervising work done in jobs, to dynamically orchestrating and cultivating ever-evolving skills and work. Stated differently, an SBO uses the workforce’s skills at an atomic level–not by broad groups of jobs—to rapidly deploy talent to meet critical business needs. And while this article provides ideas on concepts such as skills taxonomies, ontologies, and clouds (the infrastructure of an SBO), I am mainly sharing it since the model shown in Figure 1 provides an effective way of drawing the connection between aspects of skills and various talent practices. This “Hub and Spoke” model shows how the Hub comprises 1) Talent Philosophy, 2) Skills Framework + Common Language, 3) Data + Technology Enablers, and 4) Governance (skills ownership, change management, etc.). The Spoke component consists of several integration points, ranging from workforce planning and job architectures, talent acquisition, opportunity marketplace, and rewards, to name a few. Firms can use this model as a starting point for integrating, simplifying, and communicating the various components of their talent ecosystem.

Few would dispute that a positive employee experience (EX) positively influences the success of an organization. And as HR leaders strive to show more of a direct link between EX and business outcomes within their firms, this article shares an approach for doing just that in a large global retail brand organization. The researchers obtained three years of in-depth employee and financial data from over 1,000 brick-and-mortar locations across the U.S. They researched the causal impact of EX (defined by four measures) on customer experience and business outcomes like revenue and profits. Results show that if an average store could move from the bottom quartile to the top quartile in each of the EX metrics studied, they would increase their revenue by over 50%, and profits by nearly as much. While this example is based on results from one organization, previous research by IBM Smarter Workforce Institute and Workhuman showed the positive impact of EX on return on sales and assets. One challenge of comparing various studies is that different indices are used to measure EX. Still, studies like these can help firms conduct studies of their own. Since it’s important to identify practices that drive a more positive EX, I am resharing this 116-page report, The Definitive Guide: Employee Experience, commissioned by Microsoft and prepared by Josh Bersin Academy. The report highlights EX trends, best practices, supporting technologies, and EX maturity across industry sectors.

As noted in a recent post, talent attraction and retention and organizational culture are areas of focus for many company boards and executives. And while these components are often shown as separate topics, it's important to acknowledge the relationship between company culture and the ability to attract and retain talent. In this article, the authors peel back findings shared in a previous article that show that a toxic culture was the single best predictor of attrition during the first six months of the Great Resignation. They explore the question more deeply: what specific elements of a toxic culture lead employees to disengage and quit? Using text analytics, the authors studied more than 1.3 million Glassdoor reviews from U.S. employees of a sample of large organizations from 40 industries. Five toxic culture attributes emerged as having a disproportionate impact on how employees rate their corporate culture and how these aspects drive employee attrition throughout the Great Resignation. The descriptors include: 1) disrespectful, 2) noninclusive, 3) unethical, 4) cutthroat, and 5) abusive. Each of the five is described in more detail. While these findings should not come as a surprise in terms of descriptors of a toxic culture, they provide one data-based source on what makes a culture toxic for many employees. 

This article explains why a segment of workers had voluntarily left their organizations and accepted job offers from other firms during the pandemic. As shown in Figure 1, uncaring leaders, unsustainable expectations of work performance, and lack of career advancement are among the factors that influenced this small surveyed population to leave their organizations voluntarily. A segment of that group cited workplace flexibility, adequate compensation, and reasonable expectations about performance as top factors in their decision to join other firms (Exhibit 2). And while understanding the reasons workers join or leave an organization is vital to creating a compelling employee value proposition, another talent lever firms can pull to attract and retain the talent they need is: expanding their talent pool by uncovering hidden talent—both internally and externally. Millions of workers and job candidates have skills and a desire to perform a role or line of work, but often go undetected. A few tactics firms can employ for discovering hidden talent include: 1) Expanding work requirements to focus more on skills versus a narrow set of requirements, such as requiring a college degree or industry experience, if it is not essential to success in the role. 2) Helping build hiring managers’ capability to be open to talking to non-obvious job candidates who otherwise have the skills to do a line of work. 3) Offer returnships that make it easier for workers — who took a career break for childcare or other personal reasons—to return to the workplace. Such a program helps remove the stigma that often comes with a break in one’s career. These are just a few of many tactics firms can implement to expand their talent pool. What are three ways your organization can uncover hidden talent? 

MOST SHARED RESOURCE FROM LAST WEEK

A newly released 44-page report that covers five trends business leaders need to know about hybrid work.

TWEET OF THE WEEK

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