Talent Edge Weekly - Issue #45

December 13, 2020

Welcome to this week’s issue of Talent Edge Weekly—the weekly newsletter for human resources practitioners, bringing together insights about work, the workplace, and the workforce from various sources.

If you find value in this issue or any of its resources, please share them with your network by using the social media icons at the top of the newsletter.

Have a great week, and I look forward to sharing more ideas in next week’s Edge!

Brian 

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 CONTENT

  • 2021 Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends | Deloitte Insights

  • Individual Performance Management in the COVID-19 World | McKinsey & Company

  • Study on the Impact of Technology on Human Resource Jobs and Skills | Willis Towers Watson

  • Covid Shrinks the Labor Market, Pushing Out Women and Baby Boomers | Wall Street Journal

  • 2020 Pay Practices and Compensation Strategy Survey | Salary. com

  • 7 Gallup Workplace Insights: What We Learned in 2020 | Gallup

  • Webinar: Top 5 Post-COVID Workforce Planning Questions Answered With Analytics | Gartner

THIS WEEK'S EDGE

Deloitte has released its latest study on the global human capital trends for 2021, highlighting the five key trends reshaping work, the workforce, and the workplace. The five trends are 1) Designing work for well-being: The end of work/life balance.  2) Beyond reskilling: Unleashing worker potential.  3) Superteams: Where work happens. 4) Governing workforce strategies: Setting new directions for work and the workforce. 5) A memo to HR: Accelerating the shift to re-architecting work. For each of the five trends, the report urges organizational leaders to make a "fundamental mindset shift: from a focus on surviving to the pursuit of thriving." For example, the trend Designing work for well-being: The end of work/life balance refers to firms taking well-being beyond work/life balance by designing well-being into work and life. A "surviving" mindset concerning this trend is to support well-being through programs adjacent to work. A "thriving"  mindset is to integrate well-being into work through thoughtful work design. The report includes many practical insights for how firms can position themselves and their workforces to thrive in a new world of work. For reference, I also include the 2020 report here.

Performance management (PM) typically receives increased attention this time of the year as organizations conduct year-end performance discussions while preparing to set goals for the upcoming year. Although PM fundamentals haven't changed much, the crisis has forced firms' to reevaluate their PM practices to better respond to their organizations' current context. Questions that arise range from how should performance goals change, to how to account for performance when employees are under stress? Regardless of the question, it is important that the answers enable fair outcomes- a cornerstone of effective PM. This short article outlines four critical conversations that determine the degree of fairness perceived in PM. 1) Goal setting, 2) Ongoing development, 3) Year-end appraisal 4)Total Rewards. While not referenced in the article, it is essential to note that one way to enable fairness in PM is by reducing bias--an error in judgment that occurs when a person allows their conscious or unconscious attitudes and beliefs to distort objectivity. For practical suggestions on reducing PM bias, check out previous posts where I reference articles by Deloitte and The Talent Strategy Group. 

The pandemic continues to present an opportunity for the HR function to redefine how it works to best address the evolving needs of the organization and workforce. As HR functions assess how technology will reinvent their jobs and tasks, this 225-page report provides useful insights. Although the report examines the impact of technology on HR jobs and skills in Singapore, the approach used to determine the impact can be applied more broadly. The study analyzed 27 HR roles to understand the effect of technology on those roles, using three criteria: 1) extent of automation, 2) impact of technology on job scope, and 3) the impact of technology on skills. One finding is that eight of the most severely affected roles and at risk of being replaced are lower-level positions in talent management, performance, rewards, and organization development. These roles were determined to be administrative in nature and can be automated with advances in robotic process automation, machine learning, and social robotics. HR leaders can leverage the approach used, including Figure 8 on page 14, to determine how technology is likely to substitute, augment, or transform HR jobs and skills in their organizations'.

While organizations understand the importance of accounting for the external labor market (ELM) in their workforce planning activities, understanding ELM dynamics and their impact have become increasingly complex due to the pandemic. For example, according to this article, while the U.S. unemployment rate may have fallen in recent months, some economists believe this is due to nearly four million Americans having stopped working or looking for jobs, a 2.2% contraction of U.S. workforce. Behind this analysis is that the pandemic may "have pushed many baby boomers to retire earlier than planned and has also pushed many women, especially those with younger children, to curtail or stop working entirely." What effect does the drop in labor market participation have on your organization? How will your talent and workforce planning strategies need to adjust? In what ways do these strategies change under different scenarios your organization may face?  HR Leaders and workforce planners can use questions such as these to imagine possible futures and determine how talent plans must evolve with the labor market and business conditions.

As the nature of skills continues to shift rapidly, organizations need to keep a pulse on what skills they need from their workforce (demand) and ensure that the talent with those skills is available when required (supply). And for skills that are in short supply and high-demand (usually referred to as "hot skills"), firms need to rethink this trend's impact on their reward structure and compensation philosophy. The result could be a more significant shift towards skill-based compensation systems in which compensation and rewards directly focus on the individual and their unique skills, rather than merely the title of their position and level. This 100-page report includes a section on compensating employees with hot skills (pages 54-58). According to the report, 66% of respondents compensate employees with hot skills mostly by incorporating a premium into base pay (51%), a hiring bonus (34%) or slotting the employee into a higher salary range (31%). When calculating a premium as a percentage of salary, most respondents (27%) target a premium of 10 to 20% of base pay. Firms can leverage workforce planning and AI-based skill inference platforms to identify skills that warrant a premium.  

An individual's manager or supervisor's impact on outcomes such as employee engagement, retention, and wellbeing has been covered extensively over the years. And for millions of managers worldwide, the coronavirus pandemic has been the ultimate test of manager capability as managers help their workers cope personally and professionally with the demands of the current environment. This article outlines a few ways in which managers impact those they lead. A few of the insights include remote workers can have higher engagement than in-office workers -- when they receive frequent feedback from their manager. And, management has a stronger influence on burnout than hours worked. As firms continue to build manager capability, one insight I would add is that managers and leaders should enable psychological safety (PS) within their teams. PS is often defined as showing and employing oneself without fear of negative consequences of self-image or career. PS can disproportionately impact manager capability and fuel organizational capabilities such as innovation. Here is a post I made in July that includes a 40-minute podcast where Amy Edmondson and David Green discuss how to create PS in the workplace. 

This 60-minute webinar discusses how data and analytics can answer some of the most pressing strategic workforce planning (SWP) questions. And although the webinar incorporates some promotion of Gartner's technology capability in this area (as do all platform-based webinars), the discussion provides useful ideas on data-driven SWP. A few of the topics covered include conducting competitive talent demand and supply assessments, understanding skills that are becoming more important or less important, and how to make decisions regarding remote or hybrid work environments. There is also a short segment on the Top 5 Digital Skills by Demand Growth in Each Non-IT Functions. For HR, the top five are 1) Robotic Process Automation (RPA), 2) Data Insights, 3) Power BI, 4) Augmented Reality, 5) Data Strategy. You can find this information for other functions on page 27 of the presentation deck, which I also include here as a supplement to the webinar.  To access the webinar, an email address is required.

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