Talent Edge Weekly - Issue #61

Covers Uber's approach to internal mobility, purpose as a worker priority, the rise of working from home, 11 workforce/workplace questions, and a Josh Bersin HR Tech guide.

April 11, 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

  • How Uber's Approach to Internal Mobility Helps Employees Find Roles They Love | LinkedIn Talent Blog | Highlights how Uber fosters internal mobility to fill talent needs, increase employee retention, and lessen its reliance on external recruiting. 

  • Help Your Employees Find Purpose--Or Watch Them Leave | McKinsey Insights | Discusses how purpose in one's work is becoming more of a priority for workers and shares ideas on how firms can help employees fulfill their purpose through work.

  • The Rise of Working From Home | The Economist | Shares ideas on the impact that hybrid work will have on how managers interact with their workers, employment law, and deepening the political and cultural divide between knowledge workers and other worker segments.

  • Governing Workforce Strategies: New Questions for Better Results | Deloitte Insights | Provides 11 workforce and workplace questions that can help firms obtain relevant, actionable workforce metrics that inform human capital risks and opportunities.

  • HR Technology 2021: The Definitive Guide | Josh Bersin | 96- page report that provides an in depth analysis of the changes taking place in 13 different HR technology categories, ranging from employee listening, culture tools, gig work management, and analytics.

THIS WEEK'S EDGE

As firms find ways to engage, retain, and unlock their workforce’s potential, this article highlights Uber’s efforts to fuel its internal mobility strategy. These efforts focus on encouraging lateral role moves—which can be to non-obvious work areas—and short-term assignments and projects that take up 5 to 15 percent of an employee’s time. On average, anywhere from 30 to 40 percent of Uber’s hires result from internal movement, enabled by an employee self-service model on the firm’s internal “gig market” platform. The article notes one challenge in implementing an internal mobility strategy is managers’ who hoard talent. Uber addresses this issue by using “hard data” to show how employees are more likely to leave when they don’t have internal opportunities. For example, employees who move into a new role at Uber stay twice as long with the company as peers who don’t change roles. It augments this tactic with storytelling, where employees share the impact of internal mobility on their engagement and desire to stay with the firm. Other tactics include having a leadership team committed to internal mobility and revisiting old policies to ensure they’re not impeding access to opportunities. 

A few weeks ago, I made a post about an IBM Business Value Report that noted how workers who voluntarily left their organization during the pandemic cited lack of purposeful and meaningful work as a top reason. And as workers continue to reevaluate their lives and work, this trend has implications for a firm’s talent management strategy and company performance. This McKinsey article provides insights into the role that work can play in individual purpose, what employees want from employers and how those needs are being met, and how firms can address these areas. One finding is that 70 percent of the surveyed employees said their work primarily defines their sense of purpose. And while 85 percent of executives and upper management said that their work fulfills their purpose, only 15 percent of frontline managers and frontline employees agreed--presenting firms with a significant opportunity. One suggestion is for leaders to create psychological safety so that workers are more forthcoming about what they want in their work. “When employees in our survey said they experienced little psychological safety, they stood a 0.5 percent chance of saying their purpose was fulfilled at work.”

This article highlights the implications of remote work at scale and what they mean for organizations. These impacts range from how managers interact with their workers, employment law changes, and deepening the political and cultural divide between knowledge workers (whose work supports remote work) and other worker segments. The authors first depict how many of the workplace predictions from early in the pandemic will not sustain in the long term despite the rise in remote work, such as remote-only companies will become a majority, firms will “onboard” new staff through video links rather than in-person, and will swap their full-time staff for freelancers, to name a few. One change that remote work will bring for the longer term is the blurring distinction between work and home will require managers to communicate more effectively and frequently with their teams, and “place more trust in technology that lets workers communicate and collaborate effectively.” While managers have made improvements in these areas since the start of the pandemic, firms will need to invest in developing this capability within their manager population. Several other ideas are discussed. In case the hyperlink cuts off the article, you can try this PDF version.

Many firms leverage data, metrics, and analytics to inform their decisions about the future of work, the workforce, and the workplace. Despite progress in these capabilities, this article argues that many workforce metrics and governance have not kept pace. It submits that firms must increasingly ask “fundamentally new questions to find relevant, actionable workforce metrics that can inform bold decisions around critical human capital risks and opportunities.” And while this article was written in May 2020, it was timely to reappear in my newsfeed as firms refine workforce data collection efforts that enable them to navigate the future more effectively. Figure 3 of this in-depth article includes 11 workforce and workplace questions that can help firms get actionable insights. One question on future leader readiness is: What new trends, challenges, and scenarios are our leaders being prepared for? Regarding human capital brand: How is our culture, workforce, and leadership being portrayed externally? As firms ask these and other strategic questions, they can uncover actionable insights that empower them to take decisive action on the workplace and talent issues that matter most.

As HR technology buyers and implementors evaluate various tech applications, this report analyzes the changes taking place in 13 different HR technology categories, ranging from Employee Listening, Engagement, Culture Tools, Gig Work Management, and Analytics, AI, ONA, and Natural Language Systems, to name a few. The report sets the context by articulating how we continue to see a shift from HR Technology (e.g., HRMS, engagement surveys, recruiting, etc.) to Work Technology (e.g., wellbeing, lifestyle, etc.) This shift represents a growing need that “everything we now buy must feel useful and important as a tool for getting work done.” While there are too many insights to summarize from this 96-page report, page 8 begins a section titled: Skills: The Decomposition of Jobs into Fractal Work. This section shares how leading companies focus on skills as the currency of success versus jobs/roles. Figure 4. on page 9 illustrates the deconstruction of a) Job - what is in the HRMS, b) Role - specific goals, activities c) Capabilities - what people rely on to deliver and perform, d) Skills - more granular enablers of capabilities. These distinctions are important since they help buyers of these technologies more fully evaluate various tech solutions.

YOUR VIEW - POLL RESULTS

There have been recent articles and reports suggesting that firms may be at much greater risk of losing critical talent (e.g., top performers, high-potentials, those in critical roles, successors, etc.) as we get closer to a full return-to-work.

With this as the backdrop, I asked readers: Which statement best reflects the level of retention risk of critical talent segments within your organization compared to prepandemic baseline levels.

With only 11 percent of respondents indicating that retention risk is about the same as prepandemic level, and the remainder believing risk is slightly higher (50%) or much greater (39%), firms can benefit from proactively addressing retention risk concerns.

Drawing on the practice of the “stay interview” — where a manager and an employee have a conversation about what keeps an employee working for an organization and what aspects need improvement—managers can ask their employees the questions below at their next one-on-one meeting: 

  • How has the past year changed what you value in work and from an organization?

  • In what ways are we (the company) meeting those needs? In what ways are we falling short? Where do you have concerns that we may fall short as we eventually enter a full-return to work? 

  • What can I do to make working here help you achieve your longer-term work and life goals?

Asking these few questions to employees while they’re still employed with the company could be one of the most critical talent management actions your firm takes in the coming weeks. 

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