TALENT EDGE WEEKLY - Issue #12

April 25, 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. That issue currently has 110+ references that HR colleagues can leverage. I will continue to update that issue until needed, so please bookmark it so that you can check it for frequent updates.

For the current issue, I cover the following resources:

  • 2020 Global Talent Trends | Mercer

  • Strategic Failure Is Not an Option - Workforce Planning| Talent Quarterly 

  • How Can Workforce Planning Help in Times of Uncertainty? | myHRfuture

  • Now Is the Time to Revisit Your Emergency Succession Plan | Spencer Stuart

  • Research Study: Recruiting and Onboarding From a Distance | Doodle

  • The Transformer Chief Learning Officer | Harvard Business Review

  • Webinar - HR Cost Optimization | Gartner

  • Book: What I am Reading: Performance Management Transformation: Lessons Learned and Next Steps | Edited by Elaine Pulakos and Mariangela Battista | Amazon | Published March 27, 2020.

Although a few of the above-mentioned topics have contextual relevance to COVID-19, I am covering them in this regular issue since they transcend this pandemic. In other words, these topics inform how HR strategies, technology, processes, and tools will need to evolve in order to meet the challenges and opportunities driven by the future of work, the workplace, and workforce.

If you enjoy any of the articles and commentary in this issue, you can CLICK THE SHARE BUTTON under each reference and post it on Linked In, Twitter, or Facebook. Sharing this information is one way to continue the advancement of strategic HR and learn together.

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Have a good weekend everyone and please be safe.

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

Mercer’s 2020 Global Talent Trends Study, which includes survey responses of 7,300+ c-suite executives, HR leaders, and employees in 34 countries, identifies 4 trends leaders can harness to “win with empathy” now and post-pandemic. The 4 themes include 1) Focus on futures, 2) Race to reskill, 3) Sense with science, 4) Energize the experience. There are several insights across each of the themes in this 50+ page report. Section 3 speaks to the topic of people analytics and shows that HR has moved data up the value chain and has quadrupled its use of predictive analytics in the last five years — from 10% in 2016 to 39% in 2020 (see figure 25 on p. 38). Among the top 10 analytic questions (p.39) requested from the C-suite is 1) Why is one team high performing and another struggling? 2) What are the key drivers of engagement in our organization? 3) To what extent are there pay inequities by gender and race/ethnicity? This report will take some time to comb through, but each section can provide a few insights as HR organizations continue to plan and prioritize efforts during the pandemic and beyond.

Well before the coronavirus, many organizations were increasingly recognizing the importance of strategic workforce planning (SWP) to business success. And now that we are in the midst of COVID-19 and feeling the impact it has on businesses and their people, the importance of SWP and planning, in general, has been thrust into the spotlight. As organizations continue to evaluate their SWP capabilities or think through how they can get their SWP efforts off the ground, this article provides suggestions for doing so. Figure 2 can be used by organizations to understand the level of SWP maturity at which they’re operating including 1) headcount planning /budgeting, 2) workforce analytics focused on supply, 3) SWP for a subset of the business, 4) fully integrated enterprise SWP. A good starting point is to evaluate where your organization is on the SWP continuum and then determine how you can evolve your SWP to the desired capability. One thing to reinforce is that SWP should incorporate scenario planning where multiple possible futures are envisioned and plans developed. Envisioning and planning for multiple scenarios will enable organizations to be prepared if and when those scenarios unfold.

Whether they realize it or not, most organizations are doing some form of strategic workforce planning (SWP) as they continue to address and plan for the impacts of the coronavirus to their businesses and workforces. What makes SWP especially challenging during this time is that there are many "unknowns" about how aspects of this pandemic will play out. Further complicating the matter is that organizations are trying to develop responses that will address both short and long-term needs--which can conflict. In my last few posts, I mentioned how scenario planning can be used as a component of SWP to identify/ plan for possible (but uncertain) future scenarios amidst the unknowns. This article can help organizations think through this topic by using 6 questions, such as 1) Which of our core business drivers/activities are increasing or decreasing, and what is the resultant impact on our workforce? 2) What step changes – starting a new facility, ceasing a part of our operations, transitioning to new technology delivery for our customers – will mean for our organization? These and other questions can help organizations think through scenarios, determine talent implications, and come up with responses that can, as best possible, address short and long-term needs during the pandemic and beyond.

Few would dispute the importance of succession planning (SP) to leadership continuity and safeguarding organizations from retention risk and turnover in key roles. And similar to other important HR-driven capabilities such as workforce planning, both the impact and criticality of SP is most often felt during times of crisis or emergencies--when organizations are upended from business-as-usual. It is during those times that the strength of these capabilities is tested. In this article, Spencer Stuart highlights a few best practices for developing an emergency succession plan and offers additional considerations for SP during the current crisis, including 1) planning for multiple back-up successors, 2) providing greater transparency about short-term succession plans, 3) taking a team approach to knowledge-sharing and supporting one another throughout the crisis. Page 7 provides an “emergency succession planning checklist” that summarizes the information in the article –ranging from defining the criteria for the interim successor to considering the "domino effect" that interim decisions will have the organization. As organizations emerge from the current crisis, it is highly likely that SP will become even a greater priority for many Boards who will want to reset both long-term succession plans in a new business context and short-term term emergency successions plans that can be quickly executed when needed.

In spite of the growing prevalence of remote work and technology in the last decade, a new report by Doodle shows that HR teams are still heavily reliant on face-to-face interactions when it comes to recruiting and onboarding employees. A few of the key findings from the study include: 1) Despite a surge in virtual meetings, remote meeting tools are the lowest priority in HR budgets. 2) Virtual recruitment is a delicate balancing act of tools, people, and processes. Said differently, a major recruitment hurdle is scheduling meetings with multiple team members (across time zones) in addition to having to toggle between multiple tools to schedule and conduct interviews. 3) Virtual onboarding is a struggle since it is difficult to make remote workers feel like part of the team in addition to integrating remote workers into the company culture. 4) The future of remote work (productivity) hinges primarily on technology, not training, environment, and attitude. In other words, getting the technology right is the primary driver of a virtual recruiting and onboarding environment. As HR leaders and their teams continue to find ways to simplify, automate, and accelerate aspects of virtual recruitment and onboarding processes, they can use these data points to determine a) the extent to which these findings are a gap within their organization 2) generate possible solutions that can be implemented in phases--with phase one being about gaining a few "quick-wins" in this area. Such a critical review is a starting point for establishing virtual recruiting and onboarding capabilities that will be required both during and after the pandemic.

It is no surprise that workplace learning continues to evolve at a breakneck speed. Business practices change frequently, new technologies seem to emerge weekly, and industries continue to undergo rapid transformation. And with the current coronavirus pandemic, organizations are being required to transform, practically overnight, how and where they work--both of which require upskilling and reskilling at speed and scale. Each of these factors continues to evolve the role of the Chief Learning Officer (CLO). In this HBR article, the notion of the Transformer CLO is presented and is shorthand for "one who reshapes capabilities and organizational culture." These CLOs are driving three primary types of change in their organizations. 1)  Learning Goals - shifting the focus from the development of skills to the development of mindsets and capabilities that will help workers perform well now and adapt smoothly in the future. 2) Learning Methods - making them more experiential and immediate, and making content delivery more bite-sized and delivered when needed, 3) Learning Teams and Department - making them leaner, more agile, and more strategic. For each of these three areas, the article offers practical tactics. The current landscape presents an enormous opportunity for CLOs and their teams to reimagine workplace learning and position their employees, and organizations, to successfully meet the demands of their current jobs and more easily adapt to future changes.

THE SOUND OF INSIGHT

Prior to the current coronavirus pandemic, HR leaders and their functions were, in many cases, facing pressure to reduce costs without comprising value. Undoubtedly, that pressure continues to intensify during the pandemic and will persist well beyond the crisis. As many HR functions are already operating on lean budgets, it is a challenge to make cost-cutting decisions without diminishing value. And in some cases, these decisions are made from a short-term perspective which can be detrimental to the long-term business priorities and strategy of an organization. In this one hour Gartner webinar, they review a more strategic approach to cost management that balances tactical cost-cutting with optimizing HR value to the organization. At about the 21:30 mark of the webinar, they begin to present a framework for making such decisions. Please note that when you open up the link, you will be asked by Gartner to provide an email address. This is necessary in order to view the webinar and download a PDF of the presentation.

WHAT I AM READING

Over the past several years performance management (PM ) has been one of the most debated HR business-related practices across many organizations. During this time, organizations began to increasingly modify and revamp their PM practices due to growing discontent with traditional PM practices being time-consuming, demotivating, overly administrative, rigid, low value, and out of touch with the needs of a rapidly changing workplace and workforce. Organizations that have implemented changes to their PM, such as dropping ratings, implementing continuous feedback, and separating performance evaluation and compensation discussions--to name a few--have reported improvements in engagement, quality of conversations between employees and managers, and process simplification. Despite these positive reports, Mercer's 2019 Global Performance Management Survey found that only two percent of HR executives believe that their PM approach delivers exceptional value-- unchanged from 5 years ago. Given these results, there is more work to do for PM to realize its full potential as an enabler of business performance. And this is why I was especially looking forward to reading this new book that explores PM practices with 9 case studies from organizations such as Toyota, Patagonia, Medtronic, GoGo Inflight, and AbbVie, alongside research and commentary by thought leaders in the field. It is the most current and comprehensive collection of ideas that I have come across on PM, so those who have responsibility for PM in their organizations or are talent management and HR professionals, or simply have interest in this topic--will find value in this book and will walk away with some actionable practices for leveraging PM as a driver of business performance. The book is available in hardcover and Kindle. For more information on the book, click here.

SHARE YOUR IDEAS

If you have an article, report, or resource that you recommend, please it to 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 nice weekend everyone and, again, be safe.

Brian