Talent Edge Weekly - Issue #126

Covers Gartner's HR Leaders Monthly on the culture in hybrid work, talent hoarding, courageous behaviors at work, implications of "work from anywhere," and front-line workers.

July 10, 2022

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

  • July Issue of Gartner's HR Leaders Monthly: The Importance of Culture In Hybrid Work | Gartner | A 41-page issue with seven articles on tactics for realizing the benefits of hybrid work while preserving aspects of organizational culture.

  • A Few Tactics for Reducing Talent Hoarding in Organizations | Multiple Resources | Provides three tactics for minimizing talent hoarding behaviors and promoting talent sharing in organizations.

  • Courageous Behaviors at Work: The Courage to Be Candid | MIT Sloan Management Review | Includes a Workplace Courage Acts Index—35 behaviors described as being courageous. I also share 6 questions that can be used to measure psychological safety in organizations.

  • Implications of "Work from Anywhere" - When Remote Workers Cross State Lines | ADP | Shares insights into a few of the under-discussed implications of remote work, such as its impact on tax withholdings, workers’ compensation, and paid leave, to name a few.

  • Meet the Psychological Needs of Your People--All Your People | McKinsey | Provides ideas on what business leaders can do to address the needs of their front-line employees.

THIS WEEK'S EDGE

Many organizations continue to adjust their practices, processes, and business operations to support permanent hybrid work models. However, a segment of leaders remains skeptical about the effectiveness of hybrid working. One reason for this skepticism is leaders’ belief that hybrid work will erode aspects of the organizational cultures they have spent years building. According to a Conference Board report on 2022 CEO and C-Suite priorities, 46 percent of surveyed CEOs expect that hybrid work models will decrease the strength of their organizational culture. As HR leaders and their teams help their organizations realize the benefits of hybrid work while preserving aspects of their culture, this 41-page July edition of HR Leaders Monthly includes seven articles with ideas. The articles range from 1) The Importance of Culture Connectedness In Hybrid Work 2) You Don’t Need to Return to the Office for Your Culture, 3) Radical Flexibility Unlocks Culture Connectedness 4) Why Microcultures Win in the Hybrid World, 5) Fortify Your Learning Culture for the Hybrid World, 6) How to Build a Supportive Work Culture for a Multi-Generational Workforce. Another article that begins on p.12, The Moments That Matter for Culture in the Hybrid World, provides five moments in the hybrid and remote workplace where employees felt the strongest cultural connection, regardless of their physical proximity to the office. Other ideas are discussed.

Last week, I made a post about talent hoarding — managers’ tendency to prevent or discourage employees from pursuing internal opportunities. In that post, I shared new research that shows when managers temporarily stop hoarding talent, workers’ applications for pursuing new internal opportunities increase by 123 percent. In another research paper in the Journal of Management (provided by newsletter subscriber Sergei Gorbatov of AbbVie), the researchers found that managers often engage in several “guarding tactics” when hoarding talent. As leaders find ways to reduce talent hoarding behaviors in their organizations, I am resharing this HBR article, Let Your Top Performers Move Around the Company, by Kevin Oakes, CEO of The Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp), that provides a few tactics: 1) Have managers develop a performance goal of consistently rotating internal talent (especially top talent) out of their team and into other internal groups. 2) Reduce bureaucracy that has “hiring managers to go through significantly more steps if they want to bring an internal employee into their group or department instead of hiring someone from the outside. One other tactic I have found helpful is to use talent review discussions to challenge managers on the reasons they often provide for not sharing talent, such as “the employee is in critical role or working on a critical project,” or “the employee is not quite ready for their next opportunity.” These discussions can sometimes identify hidden opportunities for sharing talent and promoting internal mobility.  

Many leaders want to create a culture of transparency and candor—where employees and workers can openly share ideas, sentiments, and mistakes, to name a few. But fostering a culture of transparency must go beyond rhetoric and requires leaders to foster an environment where people feel courageous enough to share their views. This MIT Sloan Management Review article includes a Workplace Courage Acts Index—35 behaviors described as being at least moderately courageous. The behaviors are grouped into six categories according to who is primarily targeted by the behaviors. For example, two of the categories and their sample behaviors include 1) Stand up to authority figures (e.g., pushing back on leaders’ strategic or operating principles or practices when they don’t serve the organization well). 2) Confront peers. While I am not fond of the term "confront," one of the behaviors outlined is: expressing concerns about the quality, quantity, or timeliness of a teammate’s work. The index can help determine the extent to which courageous behaviors are demonstrated in organizations. As a bonus, here is an article on psychological safety (PS) from MIT Sloan Review's 2022 Summer edition. One of the co-authors is Amy Edmondson, who shares a newly modified version (page 23) of her original 1999 PS scale. The questions (e.g., I tend to think about how raising a concern will reflect on me before speaking up) can be used to measure the level of psychological safety within an organization.

Employers continue to adjust work practices and policies to enable remote and hybrid work. And while much of the attention has focused on workers’ preferences for remote work and organizational policies on the topic (e.g., expectations of the number of days in a physical work location), greater attention is now being paid to other implications of remote work. This ADP article outlines a few of the under-discussed implications of remote work, such as its impact on tax withholdings, Workers’ Compensation, Unemployment Insurance, benefits, Wage and Hour laws, and emerging laws such as privacy and paid leave. For example, regarding tax witholding in the US, employers withhold applicable state and local income taxes based primarily on where an employee performs services—meaning their physical location—and sometimes, secondarily, where the employee lives. Some states have reciprocity agreements that permit withholding in a single state. These might be relevant and helpful – but less than half the states have them. However, as noted in a previously shared JDSupra article,  in the U.K., an employee’s tax position will generally not change if they are working from home and move within the U.K., unless they move to or from Scotland. In France, remote working will, in principle, have no impact on the employee’s tax position. As more workers move to a new geographic location because of remote work, organizations will need to be aware of these implications, which can vary significantly depending on the country. And as stated in a Gallup article, it’s important to remember that “although physically and theoretically people can work anywhere, they can’t be employed everywhere.”

I recently shared an 86-page report by Harvard Business School, Building From the Bottom Up, that explored retention strategies for organizations’ frontline workers. These workers, which represent 44 percent or 53 million workers in America alone, are often the foundation of many firms’ operating models, yet they receive less attention in terms of retention efforts. Instead, many firms accept that lower-wage and frontline jobs will always have high turnover and that this reality is just the cost of doing business. But as more frontline workers leave their organizations, the direct and indirect costs caused by constant churn will be magnified. In this new McKinsey article, data show that the needs of lower-wage earners often go unmet relative to higher earners. The article provides ideas on what business leaders can do to address the psychological needs of their front-line employees. One finding to note is that for people (in the survey) in all occupations at all levels of income, the most important drivers of their job satisfaction were interpersonal relationships and having an interesting job. As managers of frontline workers identify what is most important to the individuals on their team, I am resharing this highly viewed INSEAD article, which includes 18 questions managers can draw from to help identify what workers value the most.

MOST SHARED RESOURCE FROM LAST WEEK

Offers examples of HR operating models that are alternatives and/or variations to the three-component model adopted by many HR organizations.

CHRO HIRE OF THE WEEK

This past week, 35 Chief Human Resources Officer announcements were posted on CHROs on the Go – a subscription that provides the easiest way to stay informed about CHRO hires, promotions, and resignations. This week's CHRO highlight is:

To learn how to gain access to all 35 detailed Chief Human Resources Officer announcements from this past week and +1600 archived announcements, visit CHROs on the Go .

If you are already a member of CHROs on the Go, you can log in to access all announcements and site functionality.

TWEET OF THE WEEK

BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS

You can see several book recommendations by clicking the image below. One book I have been referencing this week from my bookshelf is:

Partial View of Recommendations. Click Image to See All Books

OUR RESOURCE LINEUP

​​brianheger.com provides free access to +1,000 curated articles, research reports, podcasts, etc. that help practitioners drive better business results through strategic human resources and talent management.

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​Talent Edge Weekly is a free weekly newsletter that brings together the best talent and strategic human resources insights from various sources. It is published every Sunday at 6PM EST.