Talent Edge Weekly - Issue #40

November 08, 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. Resetting the Future of Work Agenda: Disruption and Renewal in a Post-COVID World | World Economic Forum with Mercer

  2. Workforce Planning Has Changed: Why You Need to Be Planning for Critical Skills Right Now | SimplyGetResults

  3. How Companies Are Winning on Culture During COVID-19 | MIT Sloan Management Review

  4. Modern Boards: Why Workforce Strategy Needs a Seat at the Boardroom Table | Accenture

  5. How External Factors Impact the Employee Experience, and What HR Can Do | Gartner's HR Leaders Monthly Magazine 

  6. Getting Serious About Diversity: Enough Already With the Business Case | Harvard Business Review

  7. Podcast: Today’s Skills, Tomorrow’s Jobs: How Will your Team Fare in the Future of Work? | McKinsey

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 pandemic continues to alter how and where we work, the ways in which work, workplaces, and workforces are organized, and the employee-employer relationship. As organizations reset their future of work agendas, this 31-page report provides five imperatives for doing. 1) Transform organization design and work design. Transition into a more simple and agile structure. 2) Align new technology and skills. Embrace the necessary integration of technology and skills to transform the workplace. 3) Cultivate health and well-being. Support employees with targeted programs for physical, social, financial, and mental well-being. 4) Build a human-centric leadership culture. Adopt a people-focused approach when connecting with workers. 5) Embrace stakeholder capitalism. Ensure equitable sharing of risks and rewards between employees and firms. HR leaders can use this framework to "reimagine how work, the workplace, and the workforce will look in the medium to long term to begin making the necessary adjustments and investments today."

For many organizations, legacy workforce planning (WP) practices have focused heavily or exclusively on role-based WP. While this approach may have been effective in a business environment where roles were stable, it is less useful in climates of frequent change and disruption. To conduct more agile WP, this article posits that firms should embrace a skills-based approach. Such an approach can help link the business outcomes with the critical skills needed to create value. The article summarizes several trends that have accelerated the need for skills-based WP, why skills are the currency for WP in today's environment, and tips for implementing such an approach. Page six includes eight questions (4 for Leadership Teams and 4 for HR Teams) that can be used to accelerate skills-based WP, e.g., Leadership Team: What are the unique, distinctive capabilities or skills you need to deliver the future business goals? HR: What are the alternatives to hiring for this skill on a permanent basis?

Organizational culture is one of the most critical differentiators companies possess. And the pandemic has tested whether the cultural values that firms' espouse have manifested themselves in terms of behaviors. In this ongoing analysis of 1.4 million employee-written reviews on Glassdoor, one theme that has emerged is that top firms' employees were twice as likely to discuss the quality of communication (such as honesty and transparency) by leaders in favorable terms during the pandemic than they were a year earlier. The article notes that despite the importance of transparency, "the theme of transparent communication is relatively rare among official corporate values" as found in a study of more than 500 larger companies' corporate value statements. Could this trend present an opportunity for organizations to more prominently reflect the attribute of transparency in their value statements? The article highlights other areas where top firms are winning on culture, including experimentation with new ways of working, flexibility of processes, and ability to execute strategy despite market changes.

According to a recent Accenture survey, the pandemic has accelerated a trend of Boards' having greater oversight of their firms' workforce strategy. The survey found that COVID-19 increased 70% of board member involvement in workforce strategy. And Boards (Modern Boards) that give disproportionate attention to workforce strategy belong to firms that experienced revenue growth of 10% or more than their peers and were better prepared for the pandemic. They also excel across five key dimensions 1) Mindset - elevation of workforce topics and shared accountability with the C-suite, 2) Mission - responsiveness to social issues that have an impact on the workforce, 3)Metrics - expansive workforce metrics inform decisions that benefit the business, 4) Muscle - confidence in management's strength and ability to execute workforce strategies, and 5) Makeup - strong board diversity across many facets. Regarding #3 Metrics, Modern Boards frequently measure and discuss workforce metrics monthly or quarterly, rather than biannually, annually, or not at all. The report concludes with five actions to close the workforce strategy gaps in the boardroom. Also, here is a Deloitte article that includes 14 questions that Boards are asking about their workforce. 

Few would dispute that the employee experience (EX) impacts several organizational outcomes of interest. And although many firms make a concerted effort to deliver a stellar EX throughout the employee life cycle, several external factors (outside of an organization's control) impact the EX. These factors range from family, friends, technology, and as we all know too well--a global pandemic. As HR Leaders continue to improve the EX, it is vital to understand which external factors affect their employees the most and how HR can address them. This article on p. 19-22 (which is 1 of 8 articles on various topics in this magazine issue) looks at how HR can alleviate these external factors' distraction and even leverage external factors to benefit the EX. It provides three recommendations for doing so 1) Invite employee input on external factors inhibiting their experience, 2) Create clear messaging about external factors, 3) Equip managers to respond to external factors. Tactics are offered for each of the three areas. 

As Inclusion and Diversity (I&D) continue to be a focus of organizations, this HBR article argues that firms need to shift from articulating the business value of I&D to implementing impactful actions. The authors ask the question: Why should anyone need an economic rationale for affirming any group of human beings' agency and dignity? Instead, they argue that firms should make the necessary investment because doing so honors our own and others' humanity and gives our lives meaning. The article provides four actions that business leaders and managers can take to unlock the potential of I&D: 1) Build trust, 2) Actively work against discrimination and subordination, 3) Embrace a wide range of styles and voices. 4) Make cultural differences a resource for learning. The article reinforces that increasing the numbers of traditionally underrepresented people in your workforce does not automatically produce benefits; what matters is how an organization harnesses and fosters I&D. Several other ideas are discussed.

THE SOUND OF INSIGHT

Organizations continue to determine the impact of automation and the changing nature of work on reskilling and upskilling their workforce. Part of this assessment requires a firm to determine the skills it will need (demand) and how much of those skills will be available (supply) when needed. And although predicting skill demand is challenging, determining the skills supply (even within a firm’s workforce) is just as difficult. This podcast reinforces how many firms lack an understanding of the skills currently in their workforce. It notes how external platforms, such as LinkedIn, have better insight into workers' skills than many firms have of their employees. Although employees can enter and update their skills manually into an organization's HR tech platform, this approach is time-consuming and has a short- shelf life given how quickly skills change. One solution is to use AI that can infer employees’ skills based on the roles they've held, their experiences, and the learning they acquired, to name a few. Such an approach can enable firms and their talent to prepare for and thrive in an uncertain future. (Note: when you open the article and scroll down a little, you will see the play button for the podcast on the left-hand side).

OTHER RESOURCES

Book Recommendations on HR and business topics, such as:

Strategic Workforce Planning

People Analytics

Learning and Development ROI and Analytics

Performance Management

Employee Surveys

Upskilling

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