TALENT EDGE WEEKLY - Issue #16

May 23, 2020

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

NOTE: You can also access this and other information directly at www.brianheger.com.

COVID-19

The past two months I have been updating special issue #6  COVID-19 Resources for HR, a few times a week. That issue currently has 150+ references that HR colleagues can leverage.

Starting this week, I will now only include select COVID-19 HR articles in the regular weekly edition of the newsletter. This will make it easier for readers to have all types of HR topics and issues.

I will keep the link active so you access archive articles.

For the current issue, I cover the following resources:

  • 2020 Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends | Deloitte

  • The CHRO’s Talent Plan for the Recovery | Marc Effron | The Talent Strategy Group

  • Has Remote Work (WAH) Already Become A Fad? | Josh Bersin

  • See Into the Future: The Crystal Ball of PeopleAnalytics | Capital H Blog

  • From Me to We: Next Shift in Performance Management | McKinsey 

  • Towards a Reskilling Revolution: Industry-Led Action for the Future of Work | World Economic Forum

  • Webinar: Leading Through COVID-19: Build the HR Leader’s Return-to-Workplace Playbook |Gartner

  • Book: What I Am Reading: Employee Surveys and Sensing: Challenges and Opportunities | April 2020

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Have a good weekend everyone and please be safe.

Brian

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Brian Heger is a human resources practitioner with responsibilities for Strategic Talent, Workforce Planning, and Analytics. To connect with Brian on Linkedin, click here.

THIS WEEK'S EDGE

One report that many HR professionals eagerly await each year is the Deloitte Global Human Trends report. This report, which has been published since 2011, focuses on a critical theme that encapsulates various trends, issues, and concerns regarding work, the workforce, and society at large. For the 2020 report, the theme is The Social Enterprise at Work: Paradox as a Path Forward, which tries to "resolve the seeming paradox of finding ways to remain distinctly human in a technology-driven world." The top two global trends this year are wellbeing and belonging. Eighty percent of organizations globally said worker wellbeing is important or very important for their success over the next 12–18 months, but only 12% say they are very ready to address this issue. This 120-page report is enriched with many insights that are too numerous to list here. Page 91 starts a chapter that speaks to how workforce metrics have not kept pace with workforce strategies. I agree with the point that organizations need to start asking (or ask more) fundamentally new and different types of talent and workforce questions such as "how often are job changing, which ones, and to what degree?" For each strategic question, there can be metrics that inform talent decisions. Unfortunately, three metric areas dominate current usage including 1) headcount, hiring, turnover, 2) salary costs, 3) workforce composition. This comes at the expense of more strategic metrics such as employer branding, and reskilling to name a few. Page 96 provides a good set of strategic questions that organizations can begin to ask within this context.

Just as times of financial crisis place the CFO role in the spotlight, times of human crisis--like the coronavirus pandemic-- raises the profile of the CHRO. Since the start of the pandemic, CHROs and their teams have continued to work tirelessly to support their organizations and workforces during multiple phases of this crisis. While a great deal of focus thus far has been on ensuring the safety of workers, enabling remote work at scale, and coaching leaders, to name a few, CHROs are also developing and executing strategies to accelerate their organizations through the recovery phase. This article by Marc Effron nicely summarizes 4 tips for doing so. 1) Focus everyone on their few, big, aligned goals. Now is the time to reevaluate and reset goals and priorities on the vital few. 2) Fill your critical roles with 90th percentile talent. Remember, the criticality of a role has nothing to do with the person who occupies it but rather the role's impact on accelerating organizational performance during this time. 3) Identify three performance-differentiating behaviors that drive performance. If your organization has a competency model and/or leadership model that have a litany of generic behavioral attributes, now is an opportune time to reinforce the top three behaviors that will drive high performance during this period 4) Make leaders actively manage performance, where they set very clear goals and shorten the performance cycle. By shortening the performance cycle, leaders can have more regular check-ins with employees to understand their progress towards goals and help them make adjustments in "real time," if needed.

The topic of Work-At-Home (WAH) continues to gain attention as organizations, such as Facebook and Twitter, announce plans to offer WAH as a longer-term arrangement to their workforces'. And while this is good news, Josh Bersin offers an additional perspective, based on discussions with HR leaders, that suggest how WAH isn't the answer in all cases, for various reasons: 1) Some employees don’t want to WAH (e.g. the person with a small apartment whose environment isn't conducive to productivity). 2) Sometimes employees need to work in groups. (e.g., people don't feel they can be on Zoom all day and they want in-person interaction on certain work tasks. 3) Many people cannot work at home (e.g., more than 2/3 of jobs in the US workforce,-- such as service attendants,-- are unable to WAH, 4) Managers and leaders like to be around people. (e.g., face-to-face interaction is still a preference of many people). 5)  Some Workplaces are inspiring spaces. (e.g. many work environments inspire energy and creativity and many workers prefer that type of environment. Overall, it is fantastic the WAH is becoming more popular. We just need to keep in mind that not everyone wants it. We should expand the topic of WAH to "flexible work arrangements" where people have options to choose what is best for them. The article has a 7-minute audio clip where Josh expands on the topic.

Predictive analytics (PA) is a practice that takes a set of various statistical tactics that analyze historical data and outcomes. These techniques then try to create a formula, or algorithm, that best mimics these historical outcomes. This information is then used as the basis for predicting future outcomes. You can find a fun example of PA in the movie Moneyball, where Oakland Athletics’ General Manager Billy Beane leveraged analytics to evaluate his potential roster and identify statistics that were highly predictive of how many runs a player would score. By gaining insights like these, organizations can increase the likelihood of making better business decisions, particularly when faced with conditions of uncertainty. However, only two percent of organizations are at the highest level of people analytics maturity--making PA a source of competitive edge. As organizations continue to prepare for the future of work amid uncertainty, this article outlines a few questions--such as what work can / should be automated or augmented or what skills and capabilities may need to change--that can help frame how PA can provide insights about the future and inform decision-making. The article also offers a few ideas on shifting the analytical lens from the past (lagging indicators) to the future (leading indicators).

Teamwork and collaboration (T&C) are hallmarks of many high-performing organizations. Although continually crucial to organizational effectiveness and performance, T&C is even more vital in today's workplace, given the prevalence of matrixed structures and cross-functional teams that operate as part of larger networks that work on shared goals to achieve shared results. One potential enabler of T&C is performance management (PM). And while PM is an enabler, many organizations are still figuring out how to shift their PM approaches from individual to team-focused. This article by McKinsey provides a few PM practices that can foster team-based PM, including 1) team-based goals, 2) team appraisals--where the output and impact of the team is the focal point versus individual contributions, 3) team development in which the emphasis is not only on behaviors desired of individuals but also of teams. 4) Rewards and recognition based on what the team accomplishes. 5) Team-based culture - where leaders role model the importance of working as "one" team regardless of function/ business/ geography.  Team-based PM has many benefits, however, organizations should consider how to overcome some of the challenges such as a) addressing team members who underperform on team objectives, b) top performers who prefer to have individual incentives, to name a few. Given these challenges, organizations can start by asking: what challenges would we have to overcome in order to implement a team-based PM approach? For other current thinking on PM, you can read the new book: Performance Management Transformation: Lessons Learned and Next Steps.

As technology evolves and assumes more workplace tasks, many employees will continue to need reskilling in order to operate effectively in the current and future work environment. And although organizations continue to make employee-reskilling initiatives a priority, it is important that these investments target skills areas that provide a strong ROI. In this 60+ page report, insights are provided that can help organizations separate work tasks that can be automated, from tasks that can be shifted to gig workers, and, finally, work that needs to be performed “in-house” by employees. Skills that are needed in-house can serve as the basis for reskilling efforts. The report has too many insights to mention but covers things such as a) top emerging and declining jobs in the US, b) comparing skills demand, 2018 vs. 2022, c), top 10 global work preferences of employees, and job seekers. Beginning on page 31, there are "5 Industry Roadmaps" which have examples of depicting challenges and opportunities related to the transformation of workforces in these industries. These roadmaps help with workforce planning but also can be used for career planning where organizations share information with workers about job roles that may become obsolete and, then, point workers to transition opportunities that are becoming increasingly important. Even if your industry is not listed, the conceptual framework provides several ideas on how to best depict this information.

THE SOUND OF INSIGHT

As the COVID-19 pandemic shows signs of winding down, CHROs and their teams continue to contemplate, develop, and implement strategies and tactics for transitioning their organizations to the recovery phase and beyond. CHROs are faced with decisions on how to reopen their organizations best while factoring in employee safety and health, employee concerns, business performance, and employee engagement, to name a few. In this 60 minute webinar conducted on May 5th, a panel of HR leaders shares their plans for returning to the workplace and how they plan to implement and monitor their strategies. For many organizations, these decisions will undoubtedly redefine the onsite employee experience. This is a useful webinar for CHROs and their HR teams.

WHAT I AM READING

Understanding employee and worker sentiment continue to be an important capability for most organizations. And with employee sentiment being able to change quickly amid multiple variables, as well as being linked to performance, an organizations' ability to continuously understand employee sentiment--at any given time--seems even more critical than before. Over the past several years, employee survey strategies have evolved significantly--ranging from design, technology, analytics, and insights. With so much change in this space, it was refreshing to see the recent release of Employee Surveys and Sensing: Challenges and Opportunities. This book provides a current view of employee survey topics ranging from measuring employee preferences, survey analytics, applications of computational linguistics and artificial intelligence, and ensuring the protection of data and the privacy of survey respondents. This book is part of the Society for Industrial Psychologists collection and provides the most current and comprehensive review of ideas and practices that I have come across on employee surveys. Whether you are responsible for designing, executing, and interpreting survey results, or someone who wants to understand the potential of employee surveys in helping to drive business results and other important organizational outcomes, this book will provide several useful insights.

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