Talent Edge Weekly - Issue #37

October 18, 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. Accelerating the Journey to HR 3.0: Ten Ways To Transform In a Time of Upheaval | IBM Institute for Business Value and Josh Bersin Academy

  2. The Post-Pandemic Rules of Talent Management | Harvard Business Review

  3. Jobs are Melting into Fluid Work | USC Center for Effective Organizations | John W. Boudreau

  4. Cracks in the Glass Ceiling | Visier Insights Report

  5. CHRO Insights From Latest PwC US Pulse Survey | PwC

  6. Redesign Recruiting Strategies in 3 Ways to Hire Quality Talent | Gartner

  7. Webinar: Reimagine HR Conference | LinkedIn Live |Gartner

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

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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

The HR function has significantly evolved over the past decade. And as illustrated in Figure 1 of this report, HR's evolution can be categorized in three ways. 1) Traditional HR 1.0 (Industrial) - focus on compliance, administration, and highly efficient service delivery. 2) HR 2.0 (Internet) move toward integrated centers of excellence and focus on training and empowering business partners to deliver solutions at the point of need. 3) HR 3.0 (Digital) (representing about 10% of organizations) turns HR into an agile consulting organization, one that not only delivers efficient services but also practices design thinking to push innovative solutions, cognitive tools, and transparency into the organization. To guide HR's continued evolution, this new 38-page research-based report explored 53 HR-related practices. It then narrowed them down to the top 10 (p.7) that most significantly drive seven business outcomes, including financial performance, customer satisfaction, workforce engagement and retention, and societal impact. The practices are categorized into three buckets: 1) Health and Wellbeing:  creating a support structure for families and the entire life of the workers, 2) Business Agility and Change: adoption of tech to develop new products and services, 3) Adaptive Transformation:  leveraging contingent workforce while simplifying performance management. As HR organizations continue to evolve to HR 3.0 and beyond, this report provides ideas for accelerating the journey and maximizing its impact.

Although organizations have been discussing the benefits of an agile, hybrid, and fluid workforce for quite some time, the pandemic is the event that has thrust most firms into reimagining and transforming the way they work. This article highlights five salient trends (and opportunities) to consider as firms continue to think through the implications of the remote work landscape and what it means for recruiting, developing, and managing talent. Among two of the five trends that firms are beginning to realize and must plan for is 2) Building Culture Outside the Building: As organizations continue to ask the question, "How do you possibly build culture when you don't sit together?" the authors submit that "culture doesn't exist within walls; it exists within people, so you have to build culture through people, wherever they sit. 5) Talent Geographically Unleashed. While geographic location requirements have limited firms from having access to a truly global talent pool, employers increasingly realize that they can source "best of" talent from anywhere in the world as long as they have the technology to support it. Organizations should consider each of the five trends as they continue to reimagine and transform their talent management practices.  

This article by John Boudreau points out how traditional jobs will continue to "melt" into more fluid tasks. And since jobs have been the lens through which many HR and Talent practices are driven (from learning, compensation to workforce planning, to name a few), the notion of "fluid tasks" has several implications for talent management strategies and practices. The article provides four questions and lessons for how HR leaders, workers, HR professionals, and policymakers can best prepare for the post-crisis reality of more fluid work. Lesson #2: Fluid work rests on deconstruction and reinvention - speaks to how organizations can benefit from decomposing or unpacking job/roles into specific tasks. Similarly, "workers can be "deconstructed," seen not merely jobholders, but as repositories of existing and potential capabilities." By applying this concept of deconstruction, organizations can better "match melted jobs (tasks or projects) with melted job holders (skills and capabilities) with greater agility. It also provides organizations with greater flexibility in accomplishing specific tasks through various delivery forms, such as contingent workers and automation, to name a few. For another insightful article on this concept, you can check out Dave Ulrich's article from earlier this year, From Workforce to Work-task Planning.

As organizations seek to drive greater Inclusion and Diversity (I&D), I continue to make posts on this topic, a few of which have recently been in the context of women's advancement to senior roles. Examples of these posts include Lean In's Women in the Workplace Report and The Real Reason Women Aren't Advancing. In this additional report by Visier that studied men and women's advancement into management roles, two findings have emerged. 1) In upper management, women are much less likely to succeed a male than men are to succeed a female 2) However, one promising sign (not sufficient but encouraging) is that at all manager populations, there is statistical evidence that females are moving upwards in replacing males. The report offers three steps that can be taken to drive greater female representation at senior levels in the organizations, including #2 Apply and scrutinize data across the employee lifecycle --comprised of three broad categories--attraction, development, retention. This section begins on page 8 and includes a series of questions across the three areas.  1) Attraction - e.g., Where do females drop out of the hiring funnel? 2) Development - e.g., Are performance reviews conducted fairly without bias?) 3) Retention - e.g., Are females participating in key meetings and networks where critical business decisions are being made? Organizations can use these and other questions to derive insights that lead to impactful actions.  

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to spark innovations in how organizations recruit talent in a new world of work. This article submits that “hiring quality talent today requires recruiting leaders to shift their strategies from replacing the workforce to shaping the workforce by defining needs based on skills, sourcing talent more broadly, and creating responsive employment value propositions.” Said differently, leading recruiting functions are shaping their workforce by 1) Shifting away from candidate profiles toward defining the essential skills needed to get the job done. 2) Looking at the total skills market rather than targeting available talent pools. For example, rather than source skills only from known talent pools based on credentials and background, some leading firms look beyond that by considering a candidate's potential for learning new skills. Another strategy is to hire based on where the candidate is located, not where the business is located.  3) Create a responsive employment value proposition (EVP). As candidate preferences continue to shift increasingly, leading organizations leverage these insights to inform the design of a compelling EVP that attracts candidates. Organizations can use these and other ideas to determine how their recruiting strategies must shift in this new work environment.

In this ongoing survey (with the latest conducted between September 30, 2020 and October 6, 2020), 70 CHROs and human capital leaders from Fortune 1000 and private companies, along with other C-suite executives, shared their perspectives on top-of-mind issues. A few insights from the survey include: 1) Employability - while there is optimism about workers' opportunities for employability, "there's a significant divide between male and female employees regarding how they feel about their future employability and the success of employer-backed measures to improve their work experience. For example, 64% of male respondents believe they would find a new job in their chosen field within three months if needed, but only half of the female respondents said the same." 2) Engagement and productivity - CHROs believe that personalized benefits will be critical to helping employees with different needs get the support that makes a difference to them, such as flexibility, well-being, and upskilling. CHROs report using more data and analytics to quickly tap into employee sentiment around their needs.  3) Headcount - nearly 60% of CHROs expect a net increase in US headcount, with just 4% anticipating a net decrease. The report also urges CHROs to "review traditional onboarding plans to make sure they are helping new employees get off to a fast start in a changing work environment and that a plan is in place for conducting performance reviews that reflect the best measures of performance for the moment."

THE SOUND OF INSIGHT

Gartner recently (October 13 thru 15) conducted its virtual 2020 ReimagineHR conference. The conference's primary theme is that the employee-employer relationship, or "employment deal," continues to evolve in ways that require organizations to reimagine traditional assumptions of work and roles radically. In this 28-minute video clip from the conference, Brian Kropp (Distinguished VP, Research, and Conference Chair) provides insights into these changes. Brian delivers a three-component framework for the New Employment Deal, including 1) Radical flexibility. This component emphasizes that employees want more choices over when, where, and how many hours they work. According to Gartner's research, such flexibility has a positive impact on performance. Other components of the framework include 2) Pursuing a shared purpose - e.g., 3 out of 4 employees expect their employers to have a point of view on today's societal issues--regardless of whether the issue is related to their business. 3) Developing deeper connections and relationships between employees and their families. The video provides some useful researched-based ideas on how CHROs and HR leaders can plan for and invest in a future where the employment deal will continue to evolve. 

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:

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

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

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

Brian