Talent Edge Weekly - Issue #50

January 24, 2021

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 Talent Trends Report | Randstad Sourceright

  • 9 Work Trends That HR Leaders Can’t Ignore in 2021 | Gartner

  • Will the C-suite Empty Out in 2021? | strategy + business

  • Are Peer Reviews the Future of Performance Evaluations? | Harvard Business Review

  • Cognitive Load Theory: Explaining Our Fight for Focus | BBC Worklife

  • Human Capital Disclosure Rules: Getting Your Company Ready (with bonus podcast)| PWC - CFO Direct

  • Book: Agile Workforce Planning: How to Align People with Organizational Strategy for Improved Performance (released January 2021) | Adam Gibson 

THIS WEEK'S EDGE

As organizations reimagine their talent strategies to reflect current and future challenges and opportunities, this report offers ten key trends for human resources leaders to consider. It is based on feedback from 850 human capital and C-suite leaders in 17 markets worldwide. The trends range from fuel employer brand strategies with your talent experience, to reshape the supply chain with borderless talent. One of the trends, building a sustainable workforce by repurposing talent, refers to taking workers' existing marketable skills and "refreshing" them or adding complementary skills to transition into another role, assignment, or project. Page 46 offers five ways to facilitate the redeployment of talent, such as incentivizing your workforce to invest in learning, including upskilling goals and actions in employee review discussions, and considering a micro-learning strategy that can quickly upskill your workforce to support new business initiatives. One tactic I would add is to use AI-based talent tools that recommend redeployment opportunities to employees and managers based on talent-fit--a practice often referred to as Internal Talent Marketplace (ITM). As firms seek flexible talent models that enable them to quickly adjust to evolving market conditions, redeployment will become a more prominent component of an organization's talent strategy.  

HR leaders continue to be at the forefront of addressing multiple workplace trends. To that end, this article shares nine forces that are convening in the workplace in 2021 and beyond; I expand on two of them. 3) The gender-wage gap will continue to increase as employees return to the workplace. With CHROs "reporting that men are more likely to decide to return to their workplace and women are more likely to continue to work remotely," there is concern that this can lead to managers unfairly over-rewarding male employees due to a bias toward in-office workers. This issue is compounded by another trend that I posted previously, in which a Payscale study found that women often incur a pay penalty on returning to work after a prolonged absence—earning 7 percent less on average than men in the same position. As such, employers will need to demonstrate a heightened commitment to addressing gender-based wage inequities. 5) Flexibility will shift from location to time - where firms give a segment of workers more control of when (not just where) they are actively engaged in work. From my perspective, this approach will require "Trust-based working (TBW), which involves managers and leaders assessing workers on their outputs, rather than merely "time worked." This trend might require a mindset shift in some firms, providing opportunities for manager and leadership development. 

Before COVID-19, the notion of work-life balance seemed unattainable for many executives consumed by their roles’ demands. But as the pandemic has led many executives to recapture aspects of their life (family, friends, health, etc.), many of them have reevaluated their work-life priorities. As vaccinations get deployed, and firms increasingly envision return-to-work plans, organizations will likely decide that they want their leaders back at headquarters, which can be met with resistance. As noted in this article, “If companies set unwavering rules on coming to the office, executives may look to move to companies that are more accommodating of a flexible working arrangement.” Fueling this risk is a trend that I posted based on a DDI report that warns that a mass exodus of CEO and other C-suite members is coming. The article noted, “2019 marked the highest year on record for CEO departures, outpacing turnover even during the depths of the recession in 2008 and 2009. As 2020 began, January saw record CEO departures, setting the tone for an even more disruptive year. But as the pandemic and economic fallout began, CEOs stayed put.” Firms will need to consider these risk factors as they decide on this topic while ensuring that succession plans are in place.

As work becomes more team-based and interdependent, and managers have less direct visibility into their teams' day-to-day interactions, high-quality peer input has become a useful source of effective performance feedback. This article proposes a socially-based performance feedback approach that captures employees' performance from a larger group of people with whom they work regularly. And while peer feedback is not new to performance management, this social feedback system provides the employee with disproportionate feedback (often 50 or more instances over a year) from peers and others. This approach can have several benefits, including reducing bias since it relies less on a single person's (or few people's) potentially biased view. And with technology allowing quick and real-time feedback, this approach can be effective. The article offers six questions to consider when implementing a social feedback approach, such as is the feedback spontaneous or prompted, or does all feedback carry the same weight? The authors recommend testing the approach in a business unit for at least three cycles (can be monthly, quarterly, or other cadence depending on a firm's operations). This experimental tactic allows a firm to evaluate the impact before determining if it should be rolled-out across the organization.

A few weeks ago, I made a post about a Forbes article, Why Cognitive Load Could Be the Most Important Employee Experience Metric in the Next 10 Years. Cognitive load (CL) is a theory that suggests that people have trouble performing tasks and learning new things if they are trying to process too much information at once. As CL increases, it detracts from quality decision-making, productivity, and wellbeing, to name a few. The article posited that CL is a measure of productivity for the business and a measure of employee wellbeing and employee experience. As noted in the article, the measurement of CL and its impact on business and employee measures could be the "new frontier of people analytics." And while the pandemic has contributed heavily to the CL of workers, CL was problematic before the crisis and will undoubtedly exist in a post-covid world. As such, firms can benefit by expanding their knowledge of this topic. With that in mind, this BBC article provides a good overview of CL and how it interferes with our ability to focus. I believe that CL will become a more significant component of workforce and talent strategies since it is a determinant of organizational capacity. Are there specific practices, processes, and ways of working that are unnecessarily increasing the CL of your workforce? If so, what actions can you take? Thanks to newsletter subscriber, Alan Susi, Director, People (Global HR Lead) at S&P Global Market Intelligence, for encouraging more discussion on this topic.

In light of the SEC's new human capital disclosure requirements designed for firms to give stakeholders insight into human capital, I have provided several resources over the past months as firms prepare. A few of these resources include 1) a webinar by Mercer, 2) an article from Visier, and most recently, last week, 3) an article by Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance, which examined the HCM themes of the first fifty 10-Ks filed, and 4) a report by The Conference Board. As I continue to get several requests for other resources, here is an additional article by PwC that can help firms evaluate which objectives or measures to disclose to comply with the principles-based requirements and meet investor and regulator expectations. Among the various insights are 11 human capital areas that firms can report on, including the number of employees in wellbeing programs, revenue or profit per employee, and total workforce costs/labor costs per FTE, to name a few. Since firms may face challenges in obtaining, analyzing, and reporting on the data, the resource includes a chart on how firms can overcome a few of these challenges. As a bonus resource, here is a 35-minute podcast that was recently released by PwC’s Accounting Podcast, titled New SEC Human Capital Disclosure Rules: What You Need to Know Now. 

As legacy strategic workforce planning (SWP) approaches continue to become less effective in an environment of constant change and unpredictability, the release of Adam Gibson’s new book on agile SWP is timely and much needed. Adam explains how firms can use agile SWP to align and reorganize talent quickly as business needs change. Various topics are covered, such as forecasting organizational demand for people, resources and skills, and analyzing the gap between supply and demand. It includes several ideas on filling supply and demand gaps through buy, borrow, build, and bot strategies and offers considerations when deciding which strategy to use. This pragmatic book is replete with ideas supported by case studies from companies like Apple, Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, NATO, and the UK National Health Service. Regardless of your role, I consider this essential reading for HR practitioners since the insights can enable the alignment and execution of business strategy, organizational capabilities, and talent strategy. Special thanks to Adam and Lydia Cronin (Kogan Page Publishers) for providing me with an advanced copy of the book to review.

BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS

Partial View of Recommendations. Click Image to See All Books

OUR RESOURCE LINEUP

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​Talent Edge Weekly is a free weekly newsletter that brings together the best talent and strategic human resources insights from various sources. It is published every Sunday at 6PM EST.