Talent Edge Weekly - Issue #43

November 29, 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:

  • Top Concerns of CHROs | HRO Today

  • How a CHRO Should Manage Talent During and After COVID-19 | Top CHRO

  • Building the On-Demand Workforce | Boston Consulting Group

  • How a New Operating Model for People Analytics Will Help Deliver Value at Scale | myHRfuture

  • The Forgotten Workforce: Are We Neglecting the Hourly Candidate? | Alexander Mann Solutions

  • A Way Forward for Working Parents | Harvard Business Review | includes a bonus podcast

  • Book Review: Measurement Demystified: Creating Your L&D Measurement, Analytics, and Reporting Strategy | by Dave Vance and Peggy Parskey (Released Nov 17, 2020)

  • Webinar: Human Capital Management Disclosures: Is Your Company Ready to Respond? | Mercer

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 nice and safe 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

COVID-19 has driven profound, multi-faceted changes to mostly all aspects of business, work, and the workplace. And with the pandemic showing little signs of slowing down, many CHROs and their leadership teams continue to evaluate and redirect their HR priorities for the upcoming year. Based on six HR leaders' feedback across various industries, this article includes ideas on how HR functions are adapting to the new normal and offers five HR priorities for 2021: 1) Supporting Individual Wellness, 2) Driving D&I, 3) Revamping Workforce Planning, 4) Leaning on Learning, 5) Developing Talent Pipelines. Concerning workforce planning (WP), one firm reports using artificial intelligence (AI) to help overcome the challenge of talent planning in an uncertain environment. This organization uses a bot to analyze various data points and determine an initial assessment of talent as part of its talent review process. The firm reported that this approach is more rigorous, faster, and provides visibility into new insights leveraged for better WP. Other ideas are discussed for each of the five priority areas. In case you missed it, you can also check out Gartner's Top 5 HR Leader Priorities in 2021. 

The nature of HR work and priorities continues to undergo a wave of changes that will ripple well beyond the pandemic. And as CHROs and their teams continue to rewrite aspects of their HR playbook, two chapters that are undergoing several revisions are talent management (T M) and workforce planning (WP). This article highlights how organizations must break free from legacy TM and WP approaches to pursue more agile and flexible practices, including 1) Workforce “futuring: using labor market analysis and technology to plan workforces for the future. 2) Purposeful talent reviews: quick, virtual sessions rather than dragged-out discussions, leveraging technology for reflective downtime, and remote talent assessments and interviews. What are three ways your WP and talent review approaches must change to be more agile and flexible? What are the barriers that need to be removed to implement these changes? What are three immediate actions that you can take to influence and drive this change? With the growing need for agile WP, I am looking forward to reading Adam Gibson's book, Agile Workforce Planning: How to Align People with Organizational Strategy for Improved Performance, due to be released in January 2021.

The 4 B method – Buy, Borrow, Build, and Bot – is a framework used by organizations to develop talent strategies that address talent needs. And while the Borrow component of this framework has been utilized increasingly over the past few years, the pandemic has made this talent lever even more appealing to many organizations. Borrow --which leverages part-time, freelance, contract, temporary workers, etc., to meet talent needs-- provides firms with access to skills they don't have internally and enables flexible cost models that help manage the ebb and flow of talent demand. However, the full potential of a Borrow strategy remains untapped as many firms use it in a transactional manner to quickly fill talent needs versus making it part of a well-thought-out talent strategy. This 32-page report highlights how firms can employ an effective Borrow strategy and offers five imperatives (beginning on p.21) for doing so, including redefining work into discrete components. This tactic breaks work down into rigorously defined parts to identify work that can be transitioned to an external on-demand/ gig workforce versus work done by a firm's internal workforce, versus automation. For two other articles on deconstructing work into specific tasks, check out Dave Ulrich and John Boudreau. For an abridged version of the BCG report, you can also check out the HBR article version.

People analytics (PA) continues to be a vital area of Human Resources. Fueling this trend are advances in PA technology investments, a greater realization of PA's ability to solve business challenges, and the creation and/or augmentation of a firm's internal PA team. But as noted in this article, "PA functions too often fall into the trap of primarily offering 'white-glove' treatment to a handful of – often very senior – business executives.--making it difficult to deliver tangible business value at scale." This article offers a new Operating Model for PA, which focuses on scaling practical analytics solutions across the enterprise. It includes three components: 1) A Demand Engine – of consultants to work directly with business executives to provide a funnel of the most critical business (not just HR) challenges and opportunities, 2) A Solution Engine – of expert analysts, data scientists, behavioral scientists, and stewards to deliver insights and recommendations, 3) A Product Engine – of designers, product engineers, and change managers to build and implement valuable analytics products at scale. As CHROs and PA leaders continue to organize their PA models to deliver scalable solutions at speed, this is a useful model for accelerating that effort.  

While hourly workers in the United States represent the largest segment (58.5% or 82 million) of all wage and salary workers, this segment of the workforce often receives less attention than salaried workers. And even though many industries with a large hourly workforce population (e.g., retail, hospitality, restaurants, airlines, etc.) have cut back significantly on talent acquisition (TA) activities due to the pandemic, it is advantageous for firms to improve their TA practices for this talent segment--which is often at the frontline of the customer experience. This six-chapter report looks at both the hourly worker’s satisfaction with the candidate experience and the practices that employers are using to engage applicants across six TA processes--ranging from Recruitment Marketing/Candidate Attraction, Assessment, to Offer and Onboarding. There are several findings in each chapter, but it is clear that firms have a significant opportunity to improve all aspects of the candidate experience--especially communication. For example, 62 percent of hourly candidates never receive any response from an employer after applying. TA functions can use this report to identify opportunities to differentiate their organizations in the eyes of the hourly workforce.

Although working parenthood was never easy, the pandemic has made it more of a crisis. And while it might seem premature to explore what being a working parent will look like in a post-pandemic world (especially with COVID case infections reaching new heights in recent days), this detailed article provides a case for how individuals, teams, and organizations can reimagine and shift their perspective on this topic. The article notes that this shift requires moving from Working Parenthood 1.0 (hiding our struggles, buckling down, and feeling perennially bad, guilty, failing, lonely) to Working Parenthood 2.0, in which all working parents can feel more confident, connected, and in control. It offers strategies that everyone can begin to employ to make a significant difference for working parents going forward. For example, at the organizational level, Employee Groups (often referred to as affinity networks, resource groups, or ERGs) for working parents are becoming commonplace in large and midsize organizations. As a bonus resource, here is a 28-minute podcast from HBR IdeaCast with Ellen Ernst Kossek, titled Managing Working Parents During the Pandemic, which outlines specific ways to give working parents more flexibility while still holding them accountable.

WHAT I AM READING

While HR and learning and development (L&D) leaders understand the importance of measuring and demonstrating the value of learning initiatives, doing so can be a challenge for many organizations. The reasons range from a lack of confidence in creating an L&D measurement and reporting strategy, imperfect data, the task being too big or complex, to resource constraints. However, as I mentioned in one of the six principles of my HR People + Strategy article on building a workforce planning capability, one way to overcome these challenges is to just start. This new book introduces a straightforward framework, the Talent Development Reporting principles (TDRp), to simplify the discussion of measurement, analytics, and reporting of L&D and talent development. It helps practitioners select and use the right measures for the right reasons, develop the right types of reports, and create a comprehensive measurement and reporting strategy meaningful to business leaders. The book also includes the Association for Talent Development's State of the Industry report benchmarks on organizations' learning expenditures and the eight learning metrics recommended by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). This reference is a useful resource for anyone charged with demonstrating the impact and value of organizational learning investments.

THE SOUND OF INSIGHT

As mentioned in a previous post, a new SEC rule requires companies to describe how they manage their human capital resources in their upcoming annual reports. The rule went into effect on November 9th, and companies have 60-90 days after the end of their fiscal year to file to their annual report. The SEC has given firms broad latitude to choose measures tailored to their business, industry, and unique circumstances. And since the SEC is not prescribing specific measures, this decision has left many firms scrambling to answer: What human capital information are we going to measure and disclose? In this Mercer webinar, experts address this question and provide insight into how companies can explain their workforce strategy and the quantitative and qualitative measures that support it. The guidance provided ranges from helping firms select measures that support the company's mission, values, and business, to determining what investors want to know about an organization's human capital story. Please note that you may need to provide your name and email address to access the webinar. 

OTHER RESOURCES

Book Recommendations on HR and business topics, such as:

Employee Surveys

Internal Talent Marketplace | Internal Mobility

People Analytics

Strategic Workforce Planning

Learning and Development ROI and Analytics

Performance Management

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

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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