TALENT EDGE WEEKLY - Issue #4

March 07, 2020

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

Note: You can also access this and other content I post at my website, www.brianheger.com.

This issue includes commentary and references on:

  • The Future of Work: Lessons In Job Architecture and Career Management | Josh Bersin

  • What Differentiates Good From Great HR Departments - Hypothesis Testing |TLNT - Dr. John Sullivan

  • Identifying Leadership Capabilities that Drive Business Performance | Brian Heger on Linkedin

  • When Women Thrive 2020 Global Report |Mercer

  • How to Map the Employee Journey | Predictive Index

  • Chatbots for Recruiting 2020 Benchmark Report |Phenom

  • US Worker Confidence Index: Year-End 2019 | HRO Today @ Yoh

  • Webinar: Rethinking Potential | Allan Church (PepsiCo) and Marc Effron (Talent Strategy Group)

Please share this newsletter with your social media networks, including status updates on Linkedin so that we can continue to advance the practice of strategic HR and learn together.

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Brian

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Brian Heger leads Strategic Talent, Workforce Planning, and Analytics for a Fortune 150 organization. To connect with Brian on Linkedin, click here.

THIS WEEK'S EDGE

FUTURE OF WORK | CAREER MANAGEMENT

Given the hyper-competitive job market, many organizations attempt to leverage internal mobility (IM) as a core talent management strategy for meeting talent needs. IM involves the movement of employees to new opportunities within the same company and can include new roles, projects, job shadowing to name a few. But as Josh Bersin points out, IM (especially in larger organizations) can be challenging. These challenges range from 1) salaries and job levels that prevent people from moving without a promotion 2) cumbersome job models that make career planning difficult, 3) managers who hoard talent 4) organizations not being aware of the skills and interests of their employees, to 5) lack of tools or technology for matching employees interests to opportunities. This article provides suggestions for overcoming these hurdles, including technology. And, while technology is a big lever for addressing this challenge, it first requires an organizational culture where people at all levels are encouraged--and even expected--to seek and support internal development. I like the quote: "careers are employee-owned and manager enabled”-which speaks to this aspect of culture. It will be exciting to see all of the innovation that happens in these areas.

HR EFFECTIVENESS | HR ANALYTICS

HR loves best practices. After all, they give us an idea of what HR organizations in other companies are doing, provide insights into the positive outcomes that those practices claim to achieve, and can even provide a step-by-step approach on how to implement. Flushed with excitement, many HR organizations with good intentions can blindly adopt these practices with the hope of achieving similar results within their own firms. And although understanding "best practices" is a good way to gain insights into what others are doing and to use that information to generate ideas and inspiration for one's own company, copying these practices, as indicated by Dr. John Sullivan in this article, can only assure that you won't gain a competitive edge via HR practices. Or, as stated in a Fast Company article "Best practices don’t make you the best. They make you the average." In Sullivan's article, he argues that distinguished HR organizations, such as Amazon and Google, share a common trait: they use “hypothesis testing” as a way to test assumptions either through statistical tests or experimentation to find out if a working premise or hypothesis is still true (or not true). An example of one hypothesis to test: The amount and length of onboarding impacts new hire turnover and performance. Using a data-driven approach to test our hypotheses can provide a source of competitive advantage, particularly since many organizations don't use this approach. The article provides a few examples for different HR-based hypotheses as well as a 6 step framework for carrying out hypothesis testing.

LEADERSHIP CAPABILITIES

Last week I made a post on an article titled "Nearly 100 Leadership Models" in which the authors shared 100 leadership models they came across when researching the topic. There were more models, but the authors stopped at 100. In my post, I made the point that: 1) there is enormous overlap across the models, 2) in many cases, there are a high number of leadership capabilities we are expecting of leaders and where the model suggest are of equal importance and impact. Despite the investments in building models and developing leaders over the years, organizations still experience significant challenges in developing leadership capability fast enough to keep pace with the needs of their business. As such, it is a good point to reflect and ask: how can we help our organizations identify the vital few things in which their leaders need to be exceptional to deliver the outcomes that matter the most? While written a few years back, attached is an article that I wrote on the topic and which includes a 4 step approach for doing so. Although leadership is a complex topic that includes various behaviors and skills leaders need to leverage, identifying the vital few and accelerating development in those areas can enable differentiated leadership that drives business performance.

PEOPLE ANALYTICS | DIVERSITY

According to Mercer’s When Women Thrive 2020 Global Report, the majority (81%) of organizations worldwide say that improving diversity and inclusion (D&I) is important, yet less than half (42%) have a documented, multi-year strategy for achieving gender equality. With this in mind, the report found that women’s representation of the global workforce only slightly improved to 40%-up 2 percent since 2016. Also, female representation in executive and senior management levels saw a modest 3% increase. While there are positive indicators such as rates for hiring, promoting and retaining women now being comparable to rates for men (an improvement from 4 years ago) there is more work to do. Before determining tactics to address this issue, organizations can first gain insights that enable the right actions. One useful tool I find for doing so is an internal labor market flow, which depicts the flow of people into, through, and out of an organization. Aside from showing balances or imbalances in workforce representation of men and women by career level, it answers many other questions such as: who gets hired, who advances and who stays? P.12 shows an example. A useful tool that can turn insights into an impactful set of actions.

EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE

Organizations understand the impact of the customer experience or CX (a customers’ holistic perception of their experience with an organization or brand) on important organizational outcomes, such as brand loyalty, buying behaviors, brand image, etc. The CX is influenced by everything ranging from navigating a company's website to talking to customer service. Similarly, the employee experience or EX (the cumulation of everything a worker experiences during his/her tenure at a company) influences important outcomes such as employee engagement, discretionary effort, and employee retention to name a few. As such, organizations continue to leverage the EX as a way to impact these outcomes. One tactic in delivering an EX that "matters" is to look at an organization's workforce and segment them into "employee personas" - a semi-fictional narrative of a group of employees with similar traits, experiences, and behaviors and that are based on data and insights collected about them. Using each persona, employee journeys can be mapped out to deliver a more impactful EX. P. 4 of this Predictive Index reference provides a framework for determining employee personas and can be a good starting point for organizations that want to gain traction in this area. 

TALENT ACQUISITION | ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

It is no secret that Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to permeate every aspect of work and life. In the context of work, and in particular HR, AI is redefining everything from how we attract, engage, to develop people. One form of AI that continues to receive attention in HR is chatbots. And while chatbots vary in levels of sophistication, at the most basic level, "a chatbot is a computer program that simulates and processes human conversation (either written or spoken), allowing humans to interact with digital devices as if they were communicating with a real person (Oracle)." This report by Phenom analyzes more than 20 million chatbot interactions (in the context of recruiting) from over 100+customers. It showcases insights including 1) career sites with chatbots convert more applicants and nearly double the number of candidate leads, 2) the most common questions candidates ask the chatbot relate to application status, job search, and benefits & compensation, 3) more candidates engage with chatbots on mobile devices than desktops. The report includes additional findings on chatbot trends, including case studies and adoption across frontline and knowledge workers. Aside from enhancing the candidate experience, chatbots can help to eliminate talent acquisition challenges by automating time-consuming tasks such as sourcing, screening, scheduling and answering candidate FAQs--freeing up recruiters to focus more on the strategic and relational aspects of their role. Worth a read. 

EMPLOYEE SENTIMENT

The quarterly US Worker Confidence Index (WCI) published by HRO Today and Yoh measures perceived employment security directly from the perspective of employees. And, while this is only one of many other indices that are published, it can be used in conjunction with other external measures to gain insights into employee sentiment. At the end of 2019 the WCI - which is comprised of 4 indices 1) Likelihood of Promotion, 2) Likelihood of a Raise of at least 3 percent, 3) Trust in Company Leadership, 4) Job Security, increased by 7.1 points compared to one year ago. For the entire year, the Likelihood of a Promotion component had the biggest gain by 12.9 points. Overall, these data points suggest that US workers remain confident with their employment status compared to historical standards. The report contains many other insights that are broken down by each of the four indices and can be a useful reference for workforce planning,  talent management, and HR strategists.

THE SOUND OF INSIGHT

For those of you who enjoy watching/listening to intriguing and practical ideas, this is an excellent 60 minute webinar by Allan Church and Marc Effron. In the webinar, they discuss the challenges of measuring potential and how there are various models of potential, which begs the question: "what model is correct?" Allan provides insights into this question and offers a number of suggestions during the session, which includes a Q&A at the end. It was interesting to hear that while 96% of organizations do some form of talent reviews, only 39% use data for talent management decisions, and that even fewer (13%) measure the outcomes of these efforts. This webinar is a good resource especially for those who are charged with helping their organizations more accurately assess talent within the context of potential.

SHARE YOUR IDEAS

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 share it in a future newsletter.

And, if you have any ideas or suggestions for this newsletter, please feel free to send me a note.

FINAL COMMENTS

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

Have a great weekend everyone!

Brian