TALENT EDGE WEEKLY - Issue #18

June 06, 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.

As a reminder, you can obtain content like this at www.brianheger.com and you can still access archival COVID-19 HR resources in issue # 6, COVID-19 Resources for HR. That issue currently has 150+ references.

For this week's issue, I cover the following resources:

  • Why HR Chiefs Must Rethink Talent Management After Covid-19 | Financial Times

  • How CHROs Have Met the Moment | Harvard Business Review 

  • Rethinking Performance Management for Post-Pandemic Success | MIT Sloan Management Review 

  • 6 Tactics Schneider Electric Used to Amp Up Internal Mobility | LinkedIn Talent Blog

  • Becoming a More Effective HR Business Partner | HR Exchange Network

  • Reorganizing for Survival: Building Scenarios | Toptal

  • Podcast: How People Analytics Has Progressed in the Last 10 Years | Jeremy Shapiro and David Green

If you enjoy Talent Edge Weekly and aren't yet a subscriber, please sign-up so that it can be delivered to your email inbox each Saturday.

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

As organizations continue to navigate through the recovery phase of the coronavirus pandemic, there is renewed interest in "agile talent management" or "talent fluidity"--where organizations are able to make fast and informed talent decisions. During this pandemic, many organizations were caught off guard by not having a full understanding of their talent supply chain–or the skills of their workforce, which inhibited their ability to quickly redeploy talent as needed. As such, organizations are making a concerted effort to better understand the skillsets and mindsets that will be needed to continue to operate, grow, and evolve in a time of continuous disruption. This article provides four suggestions for doing so. 1) Discoverability. Organizations need to grasp and have a good understanding of their talent supply in terms of skills, capabilities, and experience in the workforce. 2) Skills forecasting. Organizations must determine the capabilities and knowledge that are needed in this new environment (e.g., remote working at scale) and prepare their workforces. 3) Tapping into “trapped value.” Recently, there has been much discussion about an organization's internal talent marketplace (including an article in this issue) and how organizations can better leverage this practice for quickly filling short-term talent needs, such as project work. 4) Next practices. Organizations must develop and employ more creative talent practices, such as developing a network of trusted partner organizations through which organizations can share, borrow, or “rent” talent from each other–a practice that I made a post on last week. What are the 2-3 disruptive talent practices that your organization will execute during the recovery phase and beyond?

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, in times of financial crisis, CEOs lean on their CFO to help navigate their organizations and employees through the crisis. In a human crisis, like the coronavirus pandemic, CEOs rely heavily on their CHROs to ensure their workforces are supported throughout all phases of the crisis, including the recovery phase and beyond. As a result, CHROs continue to work tirelessly to role model empathy, compassion, inclusive leadership, and foster a resilient culture to help employees through ambiguity and uncertainty. This article offers three ideas for CHROs as they continue to support their organizations. 1) Put on your own oxygen mask first. To help your organization build resilience, you need to first build your own. 2) Role model healthy habits through micro-steps, such as sharing new mental and physical habits they you are adopting, e.g. setting a news and social media cut-off time. 3) Relentlessly focus on your people’s needs. While it takes an enormous amount of time and energy, empathy is essential in this environment. CHROs and HR teams must lead by example, starting every conversation with simple, direct questions, like, “How are you?” “How is your family?” “Are you ok?” Actions such as these enable workers to share what otherwise might be kept private. Furthermore, these actions will not only accelerate organizations through the recovery phase, but will "ensure they emerge from it with a stronger, more inclusive, compassionate, and resilient culture." 

The impact of the coronavirus continues to force organizations to rethink and reimagine their workforce practices. One such practice is performance management (PM). With dispersed, distributed, and remote workforces--PM needs to take into account the realities of digital workflows and interactions. In many cases, productivity now demands more aggressive and actionable measures, which in turn requires a recalibration in key performance indicators (KPIs). The article provides examples of what a few companies are doing to redefine, repurpose, and remeasure their performance management, which presents truly disruptive opportunities for post-COVID-19 growth. For example, a) at one company, top management dramatically accelerated project delivery schedules for its new remote teams, which forced a mechanism for inspiring greater communication coordination, and collaboration expectations for team members. The same organization created a complementary buddy system to help ensure that more isolated and/or introverted employees felt connected. b) At Adobe, a senior global research project manager programmed his laptop to display a personalized end-of-day dashboard visually summarizing — with pie charts and graphs — “dashboard transparency” which has sparked cross-functional exchanges he’d never had before. Next-generation PM practices like these that enable more digital monitoring, tracking, and collaboration can serve as enablers of performance. Other ideas are discussed.

Well before the coronavirus pandemic, the notion of an "internal talent market" was a growing practice within many organizations.  However, as with other practices, COVID-19 has placed a spotlight on internal mobility as organizations seek to redeploy their workforces, quickly and efficiently, to where they’re needed most. This article highlights Schneider Electric, who launched its internal mobility platform, Open Talent Market, as a part of its retention strategy near 2018. Schneider’s AI-driven platform gives employees access to job postings, mentors, training, and part-time projects, creating what the company calls “an internal gig economy.” The initial and primary focus was on helping employees move to new jobs within the company, but has expanded to short-term projects — both of which allow the company to optimize its talent. The article provides six tactics Schneider used to create a state-of-the-art program for internal mobility and workforce optimization, ranging from a) revising policies that impede internal mobility — or do away with them altogether, b) building a platform that matches employees with opportunities, c) going beyond an internal job board and create your own ‘gig economy’, d) matching aspiring employees with mentors and training, to name a few.  An organization's ability to create and leverage its internal talent marketplace can provide a source of differentiation, reduce turnover, increase employee engagement, and accelerate the upskilling and reskilling of employees. 

The importance of the HR Business Partner (HRBP) role continues to rise in many organizations. This perception is largely due to HRBPs increasingly tying HR strategy and actions to business strategy and driving value to their organizations. And while it might be misconstrued as HR 101, this article highlights four actions that HRBPs can take as they continue to focus on the "Business" component of the HRBP role. 1) Spend most of your time and effort in understanding the company and/or division’s business-related matters, and how HR might facilitate them, rather than focusing heavily on HR programs and services. 2) Enhance your practical knowledge or acumen in the financial, operating, and strategic aspects of the business, such as sales and revenue, R&D and Product Development, and Manufacturing, 3) Understand the specific financial, operating, and strategic business objectives for the company in the upcoming fiscal year that top management is committed to achieving for the Board of Directors and shareholders. 4) Identify and implement innovative HR projects that are directly related to the achievement of a specific business objective and that result in increasing sales, improving cash flow, reducing costs, improving productivity, enhancing customer care, fostering new product development and market introduction, and so on. With advances in people analytics, I am excited about how the HR function, not just HRBPs, can enable business performance through HR and talent strategy. For HR professionals looking to develop greater capability in this area, you should read the book Financial Analysis for HR Managers. You can also read my article, Linking Talent Strategy with Business Strategy.

As I mentioned in a few posts over the last two months, scenario planning (SP) is a process that enables an organization to depict possible futures (scenarios), consider their impact, and plan for these futures. And the importance of SP is often magnified in times of crisis, such as COVID-19, when organizations need to make fast decisions related to talent, finances, operations, and resources. This article provides a few insights on effective SP, including how to build and implement scenarios. As mentioned in the article, there will typically be three scenarios, although more can be necessary for more complex organizations: 1) A base-case scenario describes the expected outcome and is the basis of management’s objectives. 2) A worst-case scenario considers what the most severe outcome could be. 3) A best-case scenario is an ideal outcome. Using this 3 scenario framework, this article shows the impact of each scenario on net income as an example. While this article is written through the lens of "financial implications," the same type of approach can be used to understand talent implications of each scenario, such as skills required, # of people needed, location, to name a few. Other ideas are discussed on how SP can help managers understand and anticipate changes in performance and their drivers.

THE SOUND OF INSIGHT

In this podcast, David Green interviews Jeremy Shapiro, the Executive Director for Workforce Analytics at Merck, to discuss the considerable progress the field of People Analytics has made over the past decade. This episode is recorded in two parts, part 1 was recorded before the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the world, and part 2 was recorded more recently in the midst of the crisis. During this 55 minute podcast, they discuss everything from a) how workforce analytics team is organized at Merck and talk through examples of their work, b) The New York strategic HR analytics meet up group that Jeremy co-founded and how this has helped foster a thriving people analytics community in NY, c) Whether AI and automation is a threat or an opportunity for HR d) work that the team is doing around employee listening, both using active and passive data sources e) how the COVID-19 crisis is acting as an accelerant to digital transformation and the work of people analytics teams, to name a few. Aside from the podcast, the link also provides a transcript from the discussion, which is a great one by all measures.

OTHER RESOURCES

If you are looking to catch-up on ideas from some great business books, I recommend that you try two of my affiliate partners:

Soundview Executive Books Summaries which provides 7-8 page PDF summaries, and audio summaries, on the newest ideas and strategies from the best business books. They offer both individual and corporate plans, which can be monthly or yearly. One free sample is available for download.

Audible, who offers a 30-day free trial where you will get two free audiobooks immediately. You get to keep the two free audiobooks even if you decide to not purchase a monthly or yearly Audible subscription.

BECOME A SPONSOR

If you would like to sponsor an issue of this newsletter and feel that 1) your offering fits in line with the topics of Talent Edge Weekly and 2) the interests and needs of HR practitioners, please send me an email at [email protected]

JOB SEARCH

If you are someone with whom I worked or that I know and are currently in a job search, I am here to help you in whatever way I can. Feel free to send me an email at [email protected]

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