Talent Edge Weekly - Issue #62

Covers the wellbeing-engagement paradox, work without jobs, developing managers' empathy as a skill, future of talent reports, and a podcast on skills taxonomy.

April 18, 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

  • The Wellbeing-Engagement Paradox of 2020 | Gallup Workplace | Shares how employee engagement and wellbeing became disconnected from each other in 2020 and went their separate ways, presenting practical implications for how we view these constructs.

  • Are You Ready to Lead Work Without Jobs? | MIT Sloan Management Review | Dr. John Boudreau and Jonathan Donner describe the leadership implications of deconstructing work into tasks and projects, and how this will change the role of organizational leaders.  

  • What Does It Mean to Be a Manager Today? | Harvard Business Review | Presents how firms can help managers develop a new set of skills that enable empathy--where managers focus less on what employees are doing and more on understanding how they feel.

  • Future of Talent Report 2021 | LinkedIn Talent Solutions | Shares insights from LinkedIn's first edition of the Future of Talent Report, including the shifting role of HR teams and how firms will plan, hire, develop and engage their talent.

  • The Future of Work 2021 Global Hiring Outlook | Monster | Provides an overview of sentiments from both recruiters and candidates across the globe on various topics ranging from 2021 hiring outlook, virtual recruiting, and navigating the skills gap.

  • Podcast: What Is A Skills Taxonomy Anyway? Understanding The Market For SkillsTech | Josh Bersin | A 30-minute podcast where Josh discusses how the skills market is changing and how firms are using skills taxonomies to organize skills information in a more consistent and simplified manner.

THIS WEEK'S EDGE

The article notes how employee engagement and wellbeing became disconnected from each other in 2020. While Gallup research has previously shown that engagement and wellbeing are reciprocal (they influence each other) and additive (each makes a unique but complementary contribution to employees’ thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and performance outcomes), new research shows a paradoxical relationship between the two. For example, although stress and uncertainty of the pandemic negatively affected employee wellbeing., employee engagement steadily increased, “even reaching record highs multiple times throughout the summer.” One explanation is that despite higher stress levels, many workers have derived positive experiences through the pandemic—such as feeling thankful to have jobs, increased flexibility and autonomy resulting from remote work, and being united with coworkers under a shared sense of purpose. These results indicate that engagement and wellbeing are two different measures and should be prioritized alongside each other. The article shares ideas on how leaders can help workers prevent burnout.

As firms increasingly plan and allocate work at the task level versus job level, this article describes how workers will be viewed less by their jobs and more by the skills they possess. This skills-based approach enables firms to deploy talent when and where needed more effectively. This shift in how work gets coordinated and allocated will also require a change in leaders’ mindset, behaviors, and capabilities. Said differently, as firms unlock the potential of their internal talent marketplace — where workers get to show interest and be considered for projects and assignments of interest — the relationship between managers and workers will increasingly become less hierarchical. Managers will face questions such as: When another leader has a task that matches the capabilities of someone who reports to me, how will we coordinate the assignment? How do I decide when to allow one of “my” direct reports to work on a task for someone else? How do I justify keeping direct reports without appearing to hoard them? The authors provide suggestions for how firms and leaders can answer these questions and successfully transition to this new working operating system.  

This article argues how firms can help managers develop a new set of skills to succeed in this new business environment. The current and future business context calls for the “empathetic manager” - one who focuses less on what employees are doing and more on understanding how they feel. This manager type contextualizes performance and behavior — transcends simply understanding the facts of work and proactively asks questions and seeks information to place themselves in their direct reports’ contexts. The article provides ideas on how firms can help managers develop their empathy. One example is Zillow, where the firm creates cohorts of managers who engage in rotating one-on-one conversations with their peers. This tactic offers managers an opportunity to practice vulnerable conversations in a psychologically safe environment with peers who are less likely to pass judgment. Further, managers are not as likely to feel isolated given that they are practicing empathy with a cohort of peers who are working on developing the same skill. The authors provide other tactics for helping managers to develop and practice empathy. 

In this inaugural study, LinkedIn has launched the first edition of the Future of Talent Report to determine how the future of work has changed. It is based on feedback from over 3,500 respondents across seven markets in the Asia-Pacific region. It explores the shifting role that Human Resource teams will play in organizations, how organizations will plan, hire, develop and engage their talent, and how employer branding will help organizations attract and keep their best people. According to the report, upskilling will be core to many firms’ talent strategies, and trends such as internal mobility, data-led hiring decisions, and improving employee experience will be a core focus in 2021. A few findings include that firms are more receptive to filling open positions internally, allow more employees to work remotely, and place more emphasis on hiring candidates with the right skills rather than adhering to traditional qualifications such as education or experience. Also, 64 percent of companies surveyed are open to hiring talent from other industries. These and other findings in the report suggest that firms are creating opportunities to bring fresh talent with new or different ideas to the table.

This report by Monster is based on sentiments from both recruiters and candidates across the globe on various topics ranging from 2021 hiring outlook, virtual recruiting, and navigating the skills gap. While the survey was conducted in Q42020, the results provide helpful insights as firms continue to adjust their hiring approaches, tools, and methods to reflect a new world of work. Among the various findings are that 87 percent of employers say they struggle to fill positions because of the skills gap, particularly in the finance and technology sectors. Concerning virtual recruiting, candidates are struggling (Gen Z in particular) to assess company culture and job fit through virtual hiring. Employers also report giving candidates more “leeway” with job-hopping and/or gaps in employment history—signaling that these traditional stigmas may recede. Regarding candidate communication tools, phone and email remain the most effective communication tools for recruiting; however, text-based communication is more prevalent with finance/banking and blue-collar recruiters. Other ideas are discussed and here is also Monster’s 55-minute webinar on the report. 

As skills continue to be an area of interest for many firms, this 30-minute podcast by Josh Bersin discusses how skills taxonomies are being used to organize and simplify skills information. Josh draws on essential distinctions between skills (which are more granular) and broader capabilities, which are a set of collectively used skills to solve business problems and challenges. For example, in Sales, the capability of objection handling—where a prospect presents a concern about the product/service a salesperson is selling—requires a salesperson to employ various skills such as listening, note-taking, and persuasion. Also, given that there are hundreds of thousands of skills, Josh mentions how specific technologies can help to simplify and infer employees’ skills based on various data points, such as resumes, Linked In, job descriptions, to name a few. Some of these technologies can also take skills information from workers and match them to open jobs and projects. Since skills impact virtually every people practice in business, this podcast is beneficial in understanding this topic on a deeper level—particularly linking skills and higher-level capabilities.

POLLING FEATURE

As mentioned last week, for the past six weeks I have included a poll question at the beginning of each newsletter issue based on reader feedback. When I share the poll results, I also provide a few of my insights on the poll topic.

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