Talent Edge Weekly - Issue #30

August 29, 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.

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

  • Leadership Development In 2020 | Leadership IQ

  • The Employee Experience Index: A New Global Measure of a Human Workplace and Its Impact | IBM Analytics and Work Human 

  • How to Leverage Data for More Influential Workforce Planning | Gartner

  • How Inequity is Showing Up in Virtual Work Environments | Culture Amp Blog

  • The Datafication of HR: How You Can Make Better People Decisions | Visier

  • Video: Microsoft Workplace Analytics Interview | MeeTime

You can access additional resources and articles at www.brianheger.com

If you find this issue to be of value, please share the newsletter link or any of its articles with your social media networks. To share an article summary, you can click the “share” icon located below the summary.

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 afternoon.

Have a nice and safe weekend everyone.

Brian

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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 EDGE

As organizations continue to develop leaders to effectively navigate the challenges that they and their teams face today and beyond, a new study suggests that traditional leadership development (LD) programs may have not adequately prepared leaders. And if organizations want to recover from the pandemic and pave a way forward for future growth, their LD approach will need to address these issues. This report, based on survey responses of 21k employees and leaders in the US during the month of June 2020, identifies 7 challenges of LD ranging from: #1 More Leaders Need To Be Open To Using Ideas From Outside Their Organization TO #7  More Leaders Need To Openly Share The Challenges They’re Facing. The findings from the study were consistent regardless of whether people were working remotely or in the office--suggesting that the seven challenges are not a result of people suddenly working remotely at scale. Organizations can use these seven challenges as a starting point to assess leadership gaps and determine the required actions to accelerate LD in the areas that matter most.

Last week I made a post about a study by Limeade Institute that explored 1) the impact of the employee experience (EX) on outcomes of interest (e.g. intent to stay, well-being) and 2) drivers (e.g. receiving feedback, receiving fair pay) of a positive EX. The research found strong relationships between EX and the outcomes that were studied and found that the items that most impacted the EX related to the emotional connection one felt to the organization. In this separate piece of research conducted by IBM and workhuman, the study used an EX Index to measure the impact of EX on outcomes. The index is comprised of 5-dimensions, 10-items to capture the core facets of EX. The 5 dimensions include: 1) Belonging – feeling part of a team, group or organization. 2) Purpose – understanding why one’s work matters 3) Achievement – a sense of accomplishment in the work that is done 4) Happiness – the pleasant feeling arising in and around work 5) Vigor – the presence of energy, enthusiasm, and excitement at work. One of the findings is that employees who experience a sense of belonging, purpose, achievement, happiness, and vigor are more likely to perform at higher levels and contribute “above and beyond” expectations. They are also less likely to quit. Organizations can use both pieces of research to shape an EX that helps to achieve better outcomes.

Although strategic workforce planning and talent management were already a growing priority for many organizations before the pandemic, the crisis has magnified their importance--particularly as it relates to understanding talent risk. Gartner defines a talent risk as the absence, shortage, or misalignment of human capital resources — people, skills, knowledge, and experience — necessary to deliver on strategic objectives and goals. And as HR leaders continue to help their organizations identify and mitigate talent risks, this article offers three steps for doing. 1) Define the talent risk catalog — build a catalog of 20-25 talent risks most likely to affect the business. 2) Use data to identify the biggest talent risks — evaluate the talent risk catalog to determine which are currently risks to strategy execution. 3) Communicate the biggest talent risks to stakeholders — share top talent risks with relevant stakeholders in a visually compelling way to drive action. Regarding Step 1 (defining the talent risk catalog), Figure 1 offers the most common talent risks to executing business strategy in Workforce Planning including a) Internal Mobility Risk - not offering enough career opportunities internally, leading high performers to leave the organization, b) Graduate Risk - not enough students graduating with critical skills to meet the organization’s needs. Several other ideas are discussed, including sample metrics to assess talent risks. 

While racial injustices and the coronavirus pandemic continue to dominate social discussion, many organizations are being forced to confront questions of equity and equality. As noted by the authors of this short article, "Equity refers to the policies and practices that account for the fact that we do not all have the same circumstances or barriers and thus may need different kinds of support. It is the creation of conditions that eliminate barriers and advance processes to ensure fairness and justice. Equity is about fairness." And since COVID-19 is impacting people in different ways, inequity is showing up in the virtual work environment and can disproportionately impact groups such as parents, news hires, women, underrepresented racial and/or ethnic groups, to name a few. This article discusses how inequities are heightened during the COVID-19 pandemic, and offer strategies managers can implement to combat them. For example Situation: some people are dealing with the inconveniences of being at home, while others have the stress of taking care of/worrying about other family members. Solution: Show empathy and flexibility. Create an environment in which if someone needs to reschedule, it is met with empathy and understanding. In short, "taking into consideration that people come to work with different circumstances is a large component of Diversity and Inclusion work that should be embedded into management styles now and beyond this current crisis."

As HR organizations continue to capture and have access to large amounts of people and business data, there are many opportunities to use data and analytics to gain strategic insights that inform decision-making. This guide explains how HR organizations can expand their HR metrics to include strategic data and analytics in recruiting effectiveness, learning, employee performance, talent employee retention, total rewards, HR effectiveness, and diversity and inclusion. For example, a commonly used metric in understanding employee retention is turnover rate. And while knowing turnover rate is useful, by itself, it does little to support strategic decisions and actions. To gain more actionable insights, organizations can predict employee turnover risk based on an analysis of turnover drivers associated with employees who have departed from an organization. Such an analysis, for example, can help organizations take actions to reduce turnover risk in critical employee segments. Or, in Learning, metrics such as “learner satisfaction” and “cost of training” are often used; still, they do not tell us how to improve the efficiency of learning organizations and their impact on business results. To achieve better insight, an organization can use data to understand which training programs and initiatives are best at getting new hires onboarded and productive the quickest. Other examples are provided across a range of HR-related areas.  

THE SOUND OF INSIGHT

Workforce and people analytics continue to be a capability that many organizations seek to build as they make data-driven decisions that can help drive outcomes of interest, such as productivity, engagement, and efficiency to name a few. In this 45-minute video discussion, Sawyer Kelly and George Honiball, from Microsoft’s Workplace Analytics team, provide various insights on how to use Workplace Analytics-- a tool that uses the power of Office 365 (Outlook email, meetings, and MS Teams), in order to gain insights into how collaboration happens in an organization, how organizations spend its time, and how people network within organizations, to name a few. As mentioned by Sawyer, "80% of the value you get out of certain use cases can come out of 20% of the insights," suggesting that just a few insights can potentially drive a disproportionate impact. As collaboration continues to become increasingly important--particularly in a remote work environment--the video offers some good suggestions and tips for those who use MS 365. Even if you don't use the application, it provides some ideas on the power and application of workforce analytics.

OTHER RESOURCES

Recommended Tools I use for my personal learning and productivity.

Book Recommendations on HR and business topics.

COVID-19 Resources for HR. These resources were gathered from March through May and contain 150+ references that can be leveraged as HR practitioners continue to lead their organizations through the recovery phase and beyond

WHO IS IN THE HR JOB MARKET?

If you are a subscriber to this newsletter and searching for an HR-related role, I am more than happy to list your name, a link to your Linked In Profile, and a sentence or two that describes what you are looking for, in a future issue of this newsletter. If interested, please send me an email from the email address that you used when signing-up for this newsletter.

  • Scott Hall - is looking for an Analytics leadership position in a diverse array of areas (HR, Industrial Engineering, Logistics/Supply Chain, Workforce Mgmt.,Workforce Planning). Thoroughly adept with Excel, Tableau, and other data analytics and visualization tools. Virtual position, greater central FL, or hybrid travel position.

  • Serguei Zaychenko - is looking for an Executive Recruiter/Talent Acquisition Recruiter role in the metro New York City area. Serguei worked both for large, Fortune 500, as well as small, entrepreneurial companies and thrives in hyper-growth environments.

  • Nora Kinsela - is currently seeking a mid/senior level Talent Management/Development role in the Greater Boston area. The ideal company is one that looks to create an engaged workforce by providing career development opportunities needed for them to thrive and be their best selves.

SHARE YOUR IDEAS

While I try to read as much as I can and share resources and ideas that I believe would be of value to readers, there is only so much that one person can possibly uncover! This is where I ask for your active contribution to this newsletter.

If you have an article, report, or resource that you recommend, please send me an email at [email protected]. I would love to review it and potentially share it in a future newsletter.

And, if you have any ideas or suggestions on how this newsletter can be improved or deliver greater value (including topics you would like to see covered), please send me a note with your suggestions.

FINAL COMMENTS

If you aren’t yet a subscriber to Talent Edge Weekly and want to have it delivered to your email inbox each Saturday, you can  subscribe by entering your email below.

If you enjoy this content and would like to access all issues of Talent Edge Weekly, you can do so by clicking here. You can also access content at www.brianheger.com

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I look forward to sharing more ideas in next week’s Edge!

Have a nice and safe weekend everyone.

Brian