Talent Edge Weekly - Issue #41

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:

  • Four Principles to Ensure Hybrid Work Is Productive Work | MIT Sloan Management Review

  • Strategic Talent Management for the Post-pandemic World | McKinsey Talent Blog

  • Fewer U.S. Mothers and Fathers are Working Due to COVID-19 | Pew Research Center

  • Employer DNA: The Power of People Analytics | The HR Director

  • Why You Should Apply Design Thinking to the Employee Experience | Strategy + Business

  • Book Recommendation: The Inside Gig: How Sharing Untapped Talent Across Boundaries Unleashes Organizational Capacity | Edie Goldberg and Kelley Steven-Waiss

  • Webinar: Performance Management in the Pandemic | Betterworks and Josh Bersin

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.

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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

Organizations continue to experiment with new and flexible ways of working that are suitable for both the short-term during COVID-19 and the longer-term post-pandemic world. As firms decide which practices they will adopt to support flexible work, it is essential to consider various options' tradeoffs and their impact on four elements of productivity (energy, focus, coordination, and cooperation). According to this article, two axes of hybrid work provide the basis for these decisions: Place - where people work and Time - when people are actively engaged in work. The article offers four principles (two for Place and two for Time) that firms can employ to use hybrid work as a source of productivity: 1) Use office space to amplify cooperation, 2) make working from home a source of energy, 3) take advantage of asynchronous Time to boost focus, and 4) use synchronized Time for tasks that require coordination. In addition to this resource, here is an article by McKinsey that provides six models representing a mix of on-site and remote working arrangements and the impact of each on various outcomes, such as productivity. 

CHROs and their teams continue to craft and refine talent strategies that have been accelerated by the pandemic. According to this short article, these strategies are anchored in five key areas. 1) Finding and hiring the right people. 2) Learning and growing. 3) Managing and rewarding performance. 4) Tailoring the employee experience (EX). 5) Optimizing workforce planning and strategy. The article provides ideas for each of the five areas, all of which are important; I want to emphasize #5 Workforce planning: Given that the pandemic has fundamentally changed most aspects of business and work, many firms will need to reassess how value is created in their organization. This trend will require firms to reevaluate critical roles and required skills and skill pools within their workforce. With respect to critical roles, you can check out Adam Gibson's article that helps firms separate roles into quadrants (Specialists, Criticals, Operators, and Professionals) based on the uniqueness and value of the role to the organization.

Throughout the pandemic, I have posted extensively about the impact that the crisis has had on women in the workplace. An example of these posts includes the Women in the Workplace study from LeanIn. Org that found that one in four women is considering downshifting (working in a reduced capacity) their careers or leaving the workforce due to the pandemic. And while the pandemic has impacted women in the workplace, it is important to remember that fathers have been impacted as well. This research by Pew provides five facts about how U.S. labor market activity among women and men with children at home has been affected in the first six months of the COVID-19 outbreak. The focus is on the shares of mothers and fathers who are working – employed and at work – in September 2020 and how that compares with where things stood in September 2019. One insight is the shares of mothers who were not in the labor force edged up more than fathers, but, among those at work, fathers cut back on the hours they spent on the job by a little more than mothers did. Also, the share of men overall who are working is at a record low and the share of women at work is the lowest in 35 years. These and other stats are reflective of the unique challenges that working parents continue to face during the pandemic.  

Many organizations continue to shift from using anecdotal evidence alone and instead rely on people analytics (PA) to inform and determine people and workplace decisions. This article argues that a firm can transform how it runs and allows leaders to make more effective decisions by understanding its Employer DNA - a metaphor for describing an employer’s unique purpose and values. The article submits that PA can be used to determine an Employer’s DNA and the extent to which these values manifest through a firm's culture, behaviors, employment proposition, and employee experience. It provides a “five-rung ladder” analogy to describe different PA levels: 1) Operational, 2) Descriptive, 3) Diagnostic, 4) Predictive, 5) Prescriptive. The authors mention that only 6% of employers go beyond the third rung and use advanced analytic techniques to inform decision making and gain strategic insights, such as Employer DNA. Other ideas are provided, including examples of progressive analytic techniques organizations are deploying.  

Although the employee experience (EX) was a priority for many firms before the pandemic, the crisis has compelled organizations' to rethink their EX as work, the workplace, and worker expectations continue to transform. And while the pandemic has created various challenges, this article posits that it has also created a once-in-a-generation opportunity to increase engagement and productivity via the EX - shorthand for everything an employee experiences, observes, or feels throughout their employee journey at an organization. The authors note how firms can employ design thinking (a practice used to improve the customer experience by understanding what a customer experiences regarding a firm's business, product, or service) to enhance the EX. Although the idea of design thinking in the context of the EX is not new, the authors provide a framework known as SPICE (segments, promises, innovation, coherence, and efficiency) to demonstrate how firms can reimagine their EX and use it as a source of differentiation--both now and in a post-pandemic world. For your reference, here are 45+ EX terms compiled by AIHR.

WHAT I AM READING

The internal gig economy, also known as the Internal Talent Marketplace (ITM), is a marketplace where employees, their skills, and their interests are dynamically matched to meet the organization’s talent needs (e.g., open jobs, project-based tasks, and short-term assignments). This approach enables organizations to access and deploy talent quickly, save on recruitment and development costs, retain their workforce and vital company knowledge, and unlock workforce capacity. For employees, the ITM can keep them engaged, help them grow and develop, and try out new roles and skills within the company. As firms find new ways to leverage their internal workforce, this book provides six core principles for doing so. Each principle offers practical tips and real-life examples of companies that have used this new talent operating model. This book is an excellent reference for those practitioners who seek to help their organizations unlock the hidden skills within their workforce. Thank you to subscriber Bob Kelner for pushing this book to the top of my reading list. Also, here is an article by Deloitte that provides additional ideas on how to accelerate the delivery of an ITM model through iterative design.

THE SOUND OF INSIGHT

In this 55-minute webinar, Josh Bersin shares his findings and insights into what performance management (PM) practices can be changed or adopted to drive results since the pandemic. And since PM can be an overly complex process, Josh discusses how firms can simplify the process and get it down to four foundational elements: 1) Setting Goals , 2) Learning, 3) Feedback and 4) Differentiation. Josh also discusses how firms can leverage aspects of PM to create a resilient business, primed for decision-making and leadership in the face of uncertainty. These aspects include Health and Wellbeing: take care of people and their families, Business Agility and Change: drive agility and change through mission, and Adaptive transformation: reinvent work, jobs, and talent practices. Josh's segment begins at the 2:20 minute mark after the introductions. For other PM articles, check out Gartner's September issue of HR Leader’s Monthly, which has 9 articles on PM, including one on rewarding employee performance that begins on page four.

OTHER RESOURCES

Book Recommendations on HR and business topics, such as:

Performance Management

People Analytics

Strategic Workforce Planning

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