Talent Edge Weekly - Issue #128

Covers how to leverage data for workforce planning, skills-based rewards practices, EY's back-to-office plan, how firms are using coopetitions to source talent, and internal mobility.

July 31, 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

  • How to Leverage Data for More Influential Workforce Planning | Gartner | A 16-page reference on how HR teams can use data to assess 11 talent risks to business strategy and use the findings to guide workforce planning.

  • Breaking Tradition with Skill-Based Reward: Reshaping Your Organization Using a Skill-based Reward Structure | Deloitte US | Offers ideas on how organizations can begin to move towards skills-based reward structures.

  • Inside EY's $22 Million Strategy to Get Workers Back Into the Office | Human Resource Executive | Shares how Ernst & Young (EY) invested $22m to support an “EY way of working transition fund” that would help workers overcome a few obstacles to returning to the office.

  • Beyond Competing for Talent: An Integrative Framework For Coopetition in Talent Management in SMEs | International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management | A new 17-page research paper on how smaller firms can use "coopetition"— sharing talent pools across organizations—as a component of their talent strategy.

  • Who Owns Internal Mobility in Your Organization? | Brian Heger | I raise the point of how one of the barriers to internal mobility (IM) in organizations is not having a clear "owner" for IM.

THIS WEEK'S EDGE

Strategic workforce planning (SWP) is a priority for many organizations, yet SWP practitioners often struggle to implement SWP in their firms. According to a Boston Consulting Group (BCG) study of 32 HR practices, SWP is among the top three practices with the most significant gaps between the importance organizations place on the capability and their ability to deliver it effectively. At the same time, HR Teams are increasingly encouraged to leverage data to inform their talent and workforce strategies, including SWP. This 16-page Gartner reference provides three steps for how HR Leaders and their teams can effectively use data to assess talent risks to business strategy and use the findings to guide SWP: 1) Build a catalog of talent risks most likely to affect the business. 2) Evaluate the talent risk catalog to determine which are currently risks to strategy execution. 3) Share top talent risks with relevant stakeholders in a visually compelling way to drive action. Table 1 on page 5 shows 11 of the most common talent risks to executing business strategy in SWP. For example, Development Risk is when not enough internal talent is developing critical skills to meet the organization’s needs. Pipeline Risk refers to not having enough engaged talent in the recruitment pipeline to meet critical skills needs. Table 2 on page 7 shows the top metrics to use as key risk indicators for each of the 11 most common talent risks. The reference provides examples for communicating talent risks to stakeholders. 

Much has been written about how a segment of organizations is moving from jobs to skills as a primary way of developing and implementing talent management strategies. And as firms shift toward skills-based talent management, they must consider the implications of various talent practices that have been built on jobs and roles, including pay and rewards structure. As noted in this article, “in a traditional reward framework (see Figure 1), a worker’s job title drives their base pay while company and individual performance primarily drive incentive pay. To achieve an increase in base pay, workers must meet the job, skills, and competency criteria for the next level job in their career path and typically receive that pay increase after an annual performance cycle. However, this traditional reward framework is not responsive to how workers will be expected to gain and demonstrate skills in a skills-based organization.To overcome this challenge, Figure 2 shows a Skills-Based Rewards (SBRs) model in which a worker’s base pay comprises both a 1) core salary, which all workers of the same level earn, and a 2) skills salary defined by a worker’s demonstrated proficiency in each skill. This model allows the skills salary portion of employees’ compensation to change as they acquire and demonstrate new skills relative to the value the organization places on those skills. While this is an interesting idea, it can be very challenging to implement, especially considering survey results by the Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp) that show many organizations do not even have a skills taxonomy or common language for identifying and understanding the skills of their workforce. The Deloitte article shares a few ideas for overcoming the barriers to skills-based rewards. 

Many organizations continue to refine their return to office plans while considering insights from various data sources. For example, some sources mention how an impending recession could shift the balance of power back to organizations—where there is a more significant push for a full return to the office. Other sources suggest that new COVID variants will fuel fully remote work this fall. As organizational leaders consider various sources of information in their decision-making, it is always interesting to learn from “actual practices” organizations are implementing to support their return to office strategies. This article shares how Ernst & Young (EY) invested 22M to support an “EY way of working transition fund” that would help workers overcome some obstacles to returning to the office. The basis for this initiative was a survey that found, “while many of EY’s workers wanted to be in the office part-time—say, a couple of times a week—the company wasn’t seeing that desire reflected in the number of workers actually showing up in the office....Employees weren’t sure what to do about childcare or pet care. Others were reluctant to commute to their offices—they were worried about soaring gas prices as a result of inflation or didn’t want to use public transportation to get to the office during a pandemic. To help its employees, EY’s implemented a fund that would cover all commuting costs, all dependent care costs, and all pet care costs for its 55,000-plus U.S. employees. The benefit has been used so far by a 29,500 EY employees, and reimbursements totaled $22 million to date.

One talent management benefit in many larger organizations is that the size and number of employees in these firms allow them to develop internal talent pools that can be reallocated to different parts of the organization and at different organizational levels. But as this new 17-page research paper points out, the traditional use of talent pools is often impractical in smaller firms, given their size and flatter structures. As a result, organizations with fewer employees often need to reimagine a modified version of a talent pool strategy for their organizations. This research argues that one variation of traditional internal talent pools is coopetition—a talent management strategy that involves the collaboration of independent companies, even when they compete around broader business activities, to combine resources and capabilities. In talent management, coopetition uses inter-organizational talent pools to do everything from co-attract, co-develop, and co-retain talent. Figure 1 on page 7 shows a framework of prerequisites, catalysts, and inhibitors that likely influence the effectiveness of setting up coopetition in smaller firms. While the research looks at coopetition through the lens of the hospitality industry, the principles can be used for various industries. Other ideas are discussed. 

A few weeks ago, I shared a post about the non-technological barriers to internal mobility (IM)—the movement of employees across roles and opportunities within the same company. These barriers range from policies that restrict internal movement (e.g., the employee must be in a role for a certain amount of time before moving to another internal role or opportunity), talent hoarding (i.e., managers prevent or discourage employees from pursuing internal opportunities), and a limited view of career development (e.g., managers and employees emphasize upward progression or only seek opportunities in one’s native function or business areas), to name a few. Another barrier to IM, particularly in larger organizations, is a lack of a clear owner for IM. And while “everyone” can be said to own IM, when no one group or team is charged with enabling coordinated IM efforts (e.g., strategy, process, tools, technology, success measures, etc.) across an organization, IM can languish or stop altogether. As a result, many HR leaders continue to ask questions such as: Should IM be owned by a COE, such as Talent Management, Talent Acquisition, Learning and Development, or Organizational Effectiveness? If so, which COE should own it? Should it be decentralized and driven by HR Business Partners within a business unit? Should another part of the business drive it? Or, is it a coordinated effort across an internal mobility team comprising stakeholders from multiple groups? While various factors (e.g., organization size, structure, etc.) will determine an organization’s answers to these questions, are you able to articulate who is responsible for driving IM in your organization? If so, do the rest of the stakeholders that influence IM share this same understanding? If not, establishing that shared understanding could be a starting point for fueling internal mobility in your organization.  

CHRO HIRE OF THE WEEK

This past week, 25 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 25 detailed Chief Human Resources Officer announcements from this past week and +1600 archived announcements, visit CHROs on the Go .

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MOST VIEWED RESOURCE FROM LAST WEEK

Shares the top ten trends across 30 new Fortune 200 CHROs that came into the role in 2021. Topics range from CHRO succession, diversity, and turnover, to name a few.

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