Talent Edge Weekly - Issue #36

October 11, 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.

This week's Edge covers the following resources:

  1. The Work Trend Index: A Pulse on Employees’ Wellbeing, Six Months into the Pandemic | Microsoft 365 Blog

  2. Rewiring How We Work: Building a New Employee Experience for a Digital-First World | Slack

  3. The Real Reason Women Aren’t Advancing | TalentQ

  4. Want More Diverse Senior Leadership? Sponsor Junior Talent | Harvard Business Review

  5. How New SEC Human Capital Disclosure Rules Impact CHROs and CFOs | Visier 

  6. The Future of Work Is Immersive Learning | HBR Analytics Services and STRIVR

  7. Webinar: An AI-First Approach to Recruiting | Talent Tech Lab

If you enjoy content like this, you can access additional articles and resources 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 every Sunday.

Have a great week everyone!

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 EDGE

As remote-work at scale has now been in place for over six months, this Work Trend Index report by Microsoft looks at how the pandemic has impacted workers' well-being around the globe. The study analyzed trillions of information from meetings, emails, and chats to identify patterns and trends while safeguarding personal and organizational data. Among the six key findings are: 1) The pandemic increased burnout at work – in some countries more than others. In Brazil, for example, 44% of respondents said they felt more burned out due to the coronavirus pandemic. This result compares with 31% of US respondents and 10% of Germans who reported this increase in burnout. These findings underscore that, while the pandemic impacts everyone, people are experiencing it differently. 3) Six months in, there are more communications and fewer boundaries as workers adjust. "People are in significantly more meetings, taking more ad hoc calls, and managing more incoming chats than they did before the pandemic. After-hours chats, or chats between 5pm and midnight, have also increased." 4) No commute may be hurting, not helping, remote worker productivity. Although remote-work has eliminated the "dreaded commute" that many workers experience, ironically, the commute helped maintain work-life boundaries—and our productivity and well-being. Said differently, for many people, commutes provide "blocks of uninterrupted time for mentally transitioning to and from work, an essential aspect of well-being and productivity. Organizations can leverage these findings as they continue to refine remote work strategies that enable productivity and worker well-being.  

The pandemic continues to force most organizations to "establish new organizing principles that enable a redesign of the places we use for work, the experience of our people, and the processes we use to run efficiently." Within this context, The Future Forum has launched the Remote Employee Experience Index to help organizations redesign work. The Index is based on data from 4,700 workers in the U.S., the U.K., France, Germany, Japan, and Australia who are primarily working remotely. It measures five key perceptual elements of the remote working experience: 1) Productivity: the ability to complete tasks efficiently while delivering a high quality of work 2) Work-life balance: the fluidity between priorities in work and personal life 3) Managing work-related stress and anxiety: the ability to manage pressure and worry in the virtual workplace. 4) Sense of belonging: a measure of whether knowledge workers feel accepted and valued by others on their work team, 5) Satisfaction with working arrangement: the perception of the infrastructure and support that underpins their remote work experience. While the 'knowledge workers' that were surveyed are generally more satisfied with working remotely than they were with office-based work, the one element where most knowledge workers are less satisfied is their sense of belonging (–5.0). The implication is that organizations should continue developing and implementing strategies that foster a connection with employees as these bonds are vital to organizational effectiveness. The article offers five of the biggest myths about remote work that the Index dispels. For a good overview of Belonging's importance in the workplace, you can check out this excerpted article (8 min read) from the Deloitte 2020 Global Human Capital Trends report. 

Although many organizations tout the importance of appointing women to senior roles, many indicators still suggest that women lag behind men in representation in leadership positions. As noted in a post that I made last week, based on Lean In's Women in the Workplace Report, the pandemic is exacerbating this issue as 1 in 4 women (including senior-level women executives) consider downshifting (working in a reduced capacity) their careers or leaving the workforce due to the pandemic. And although the pandemic is compounding the disparity in gender representation in senior levels, this perennial topic requires getting to more of the root causes. In this article, the authors asked the questions: "Why do early-career women not develop the skills and behaviors needed to be contenders for senior roles later in life, when their male counterparts do? Why did their professional development differ?" The article submits that lack of feedback over a career is one reason that women may not develop the skills and experiences necessary for success at the most senior levels. In other words, women suffer from getting less fair, developmental feedback, which undermines their ability to be prepared for more senior roles. This premise aligns with recent research on which I have posted, including Women Hear More White Lies in Performance Evaluations Than Men, where researchers from Cornell University found that underperforming women are given less truthful but kinder performance feedback than equally underperforming men. Anyhow, this Talent Q article offers five steps to remove gender bias from feedback, which is critical in addressing the larger issue. For those interested in giving fair and honest feedback in ways that improve performance while engaging and developing employees), the authors (Angela Lane and Sergey Gorbatov) also published a book, Fair Talk: Three Steps to Powerful Feedback.

As the sense of urgency intensifies for better diversity and inclusion outcomes, many organizations continue to develop and implement new ways to diversify talent pipelines for senior roles. And while not a magic bullet, one practice that firms are leveraging in this regard is: sponsorship. Sponsorship within this context refers to "a helping relationship in which senior, powerful people use their clout to talk up, advocate for, and place a more junior person in a key role." Although the concept of sponsorship may appear similar to mentorship, mentors share their knowledge, perspective, and experience, as pointed out in this article. In contrast, sponsors wield their power on behalf of their protégés. The article offers four ideas on how to drive sponsorship, ranging from how to best pair sponsors and protégés, to training both sponsors and protégés to manage "like me" bias. The illustration in the article provides an effective way to depict how sponsorship covers a range of different kinds of support, including 1) Mentor - provide advice and coaching, 2) Strategizer- strategize on how to get ahead within the organization, 3) Connector - making introductions to influential people, 4) Opportunity Giver - provide high-visibility opportunities, and 5) Advocate - advocate for the person in situations where he/she can't advocate for him/herself. By introducing these five components of sponsorship, organizations can accelerate diversifying their talent pipeline for senior roles. 

For years we have heard the mantra, "people are an organization's most important asset." Well, recently, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) approved a rule that now requires firms to disclose materially relevant human capital information. A reason for this rule is so that investors and other stakeholders can get a sense of the role employees play in creating their firms' risks and successes. And as pointed out in this Visier article, "the change in disclosure requirements drives a whole new set of investment priorities for the CHRO, their tech stack, and their team." The SEC goes on to specifically call out the three areas of "attraction, development, and retention of personnel as non-exclusive examples of subjects that may be material, depending on the registrant's business and workforce." In addition to this Visier article on the topic, this additional Chief Learning Officer article points out a few recommended metrics for the three SEC focus areas: 1) Attraction: Time to fill vacant positions, time to fill critical vacant positions, percentage of positions filled internally, percentage of critical positions filled internally, 2) Development: Development and training cost, percentage of employees who have completed training on compliance and ethics. 3) Retention:  Turnover rate. This ruling presents organizations with an opportunity to go beyond "compliance" and to use it as a chance to understand the full value of their talent strategy, "inclusive of direct, contingent and indirect (outsourced and SOW) labor the more effectively they can empower operations and drive benefit from how resources are deployed."

As the pandemic continues to reshape how organizations prepare for the future of work, many firms are reevaluating traditional learning methods. And as noted in this article, many of these conventional and "passive methods of learning—from seminars to videos, from role-playing to all-day group training sessions—tend to be slow, don't scale well, pull workers away from their jobs for hours or days, don't always have a clear ROI or metrics for success, and often require travel." Instead, organizations can benefit from more agile ways of training in a business climate that continues to change at an accelerated pace. This article provides an overview of Immersive Learning (IL), founded in virtual reality (VR). IL re-creates in VR the day-to-day challenges workers encounter on the job, letting them practice what to do and say in a safe, realistic simulation. One practical application of this technology is in "soft skills" training, where it captures metrics such as verbal analytics about what learners said and how it affected the scenario's outcome. Organizations can begin to experiment with IL and integrate it with other learning experiences and modalities to maximize learning impact. For more information on VR's benefits in soft skills training, check out PwC 's study The Effectiveness of Virtual Reality Soft Skills Training in the Enterprise.

THE SOUND OF INSIGHT

In this one hour webinar co-hosted by Talent Tech Lab (TTL) and Eightfold.ai, the presenters discuss how AI is shaping recruiting systems now and in the future. They cover applications such as job matching, gamification and assessments, sentiment and textual analysis, career-site personalization, and job-spend and media management, to name a few. The conversation highlights practical examples of how these technologies are being used today. It also includes a fireside chat panel discussion. After the sponsorship announcements and introductions, the presentation's content starts at about the 8-minute mark. 

OTHER RESOURCES

Book Recommendations on HR and business topics, such as:

Recommended Tools I use for my personal learning and productivity, such as two of this newsletter's affiliates:

  • 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.

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.

The following subscribers are in the HR job market:

  • Cathy Ellwood - is looking for roles at the Director and Sr. Director level in Talent Management, Talent Acquisition, Organization Development and/or Learning & Development. Cathy especially enjoys roles where she can lead in each of these areas, but it is open to leading just one. Fully relocatable (currently in St. Louis), with a first preference of Columbus, Ohio.

  • 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 every Sunday, 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

If you found this issue to be of value, please share the link above with your social media networks.

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

Brian