Talent Edge Weekly - Issue #69

Covers 4 workforce challenges, CHRO and CEO conversations about culture, mothers in the workplace, internal talent marketplace, remote work, and deconstructing jobs.

June 06, 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 Reimagined Workplace a Year Later: Human Capital Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic | The Conference Board | This 13-page report, based on survey feedback from 231 human capital leaders, covers four main talent and workforce challenges firms will face in the months ahead.

  • 3 Culture Conversations Every CEO Must Have With the Head of HR | Gartner | Offers insights on how CEOs and CHROs can uncover ways to (re) align their workforce with the desired culture.

  • For Mothers in the Workplace, A Year (and counting) Like No Other | McKinsey | An in-depth article that provides recommendations firms can take to help working mothers—who faced setbacks during the pandemic—get back on track.

  • Driving Workforce Equity With the Internal Talent Marketplace | Deloitte Blog Capital: H | Shares ideas on how a firm's internal talent marketplace can enable internal mobility and diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workforce.

  • BOOK: Remote Work: Redesign Processes, Practices, and Strategies to Engage a Remote Workforce | This newly released book provides guidance on how firms can reassess and modify their workforce strategies, practices, and processes to enable remote work at scale.

  • PODCAST: Rethinking Jobs for the Age of Automation | Get Reworked Podcast | Discussion with John Boudreau and Ravin Jesuthasan on how HR and Talent leaders can help their firms adjust their mindsets, leadership approaches, and talent practices as jobs get deconstructed into tasks.

  • POLL: Poll question on whether your organization has or plans to develop a formal remote work policy.  

THIS WEEK'S EDGE

The Conference Board recently identified four significant human capital and talent challenges firms will face in the months ahead. The four challenges are based on survey responses of 231 human capital leaders (mostly from larger firms) and include: 1) Adjusting to a world where a large share of employees primarily work remotely; 2) Recruiting qualified workers and retaining existing workers, 3) Addressing deteriorating employee well-being, and 4) Managing the return to the workplace. Regarding the challenge of recruiting qualified workers, 87% of respondents say they are now willing to hire remote employees in some form, compared to less than 50% before the pandemic. Also, 50 % of respondents say they are willing to hire predominately full-time remote workers if those workers can occasionally commute into the office. Concerning return-to-work, 72% of firms are planning to reopen in the next six months for their remote employees (22% between May and July 2021; 50% between August and October 2021), while 10% have already returned or never closed. Other ideas are discussed in this 13 -page report.

There are aspects of an organization’s culture that shifted during the pandemic and that will remain in a post-pandemic environment. And as firms align their workforce with the desired culture, this article submits CEOs must have three conversations with their CHROs; one conversation is on defining culture as a set of tensions, not attributes. Said differently, while it is common for a firm to (re)define its culture as attributes (e.g., collaboration or innovation), these individual attributes usually lack sufficient detail and confuse employees. Instead, leading firms focus on the intersection between attributes — identifying points of tension in the culture that arise because of conflicting values, stakeholders, objectives, or priorities (Fig. 4 on p.6). One example given is when an organization says it wants employees to be both innovative and rigorous; innovation requires employees to be comfortable with failure, but that is difficult if the organization only promotes employees who are rigorous to a fault and play it safe. At your next leadership meeting, spark a discussion on the points of tension in your firm’s culture and use it as a starting point to drive change.

While the pandemic has impacted everyone, I have posted extensively on the negative effect it has had on working mothers. These impacts range from women downshifting their careers or dropping out of the workforce entirely (LeanIn.Org report) to being less optimistic about their career prospects than before the pandemic (see Deloitte report). This new and in-depth article by McKinsey underscores the challenges facing working mothers. It provides recommendations firms can take to help these women get back on track in a post-pandemic workplace. A few recommendations include adjusting childcare-related policies and programs, resetting norms around flexibility, and implementing ‘returnships’ to help women reenter the workforce gradually but without losing prior progress. Another tactic is to remove/minimize bias in performance reviews that inhibit the progress of mothers by including less relevant markers of performance (e.g., always requiring someone to be accessible even if it is not a key performance criterion). Several other ideas are discussed. 

As I noted in 2021 HR Priorities: A Summarized View of Nine Sources, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DE&I) are a focus for many organizations. Simultaneously, firms emphasize providing workers with fair access and visibility into career and development opportunities across their organization; further, minimizing unconscious bias and enabling internal mobility are topics of interest. This article notes how these factors can be addressed in part by the Internal Talent Marketplace (ITM), which uses an AI platform to provide a firm's workers with suggestions on jobs, projects, and development opportunities that match their skills, experience, and aspirations. And while these platforms are not without challenges (e.g., it takes time for algorithms to work and learn), they provide several advantages, one of which is to remove barriers to opportunity and address unconscious bias. It is worth pointing out that firms developing an ITM strategy must think beyond the technology and consider how current talent practices and policies need to change to enable an ITM (e.g., incentivize managers to share talent vs. hoard talent).  

While remote work (RW) was on the rise before the pandemic, the COVID-19 crisis has cemented this work arrangement as a prominent and permanent fixture in the workplace. And as indicated through various reports, many workers increasingly desire RW, are willing to take a pay cut to get it, and will even leave their employer if not provided this flexible work arrangement. As firms reassess and modify their workforce strategies, practices, and processes to enable RW at scale, this new book is timely and relevant for HR practitioners, leaders, and managers charged with this task. This newly released book helps to answer questions such as How can I develop a team if they’re not in the same place? How can I build a company culture with employees in an office, working at home, and in co-work spaces? How can I maintain organizational oversight if I can’t see my employees? It provides ideas on various practices that enable RW, such as measuring performance in a RW context and creating virtual ‘water cooler’ environments. The book is an essential read for those helping their organizations and teams navigate the RW landscape. 

Several months ago, I shared a post based on an article by John Boudreau titled, Jobs Are Melting Into Fluid Work. The article points out how traditional jobs will continue to "melt" into more fluid tasks. And since jobs have been the lens through which many HR and Talent practices are driven (from learning, compensation to workforce planning, to name a few), the notion of "fluid tasks" has several implications for talent management strategies and practices. In this newly released podcast episode of Get Reworked, co-hosts Siobhan Fagan and Mike Prokopeak talk to John and futurist Ravin Jesuthasan about highlights of their forthcoming book, Work Without Jobs, scheduled for release in 2022. This 52-minute podcast is full of insights on how Talent and HR leaders can help their firms prepare and shift their mindsets, leadership approaches, and HR practices and systems to manage and optimize work at the "deconstructed level."  Please note that when you click on the link, it will require you to select the listening method (e.g., Spotify, Apple Podcast, Stitcher, etc.) you prefer.

POLL QUESTION

CLICK ON IMAGE TO CAST YOUR VOTE!

If there is a poll question you would like to see in an upcoming newsletter, you can submit your question HERE.

MOST SHARED RESOURCE FROM LAST WEEK

CHRO Compensation and Fairness: What a Difference a Year Makes | HRO Today | Examines publicly available compensation data on 113 senior HR executives in the Fortune 500 to determine various insights, including gender pay gaps.

TWEET OF THE WEEK

BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS

OUR RESOURCE LINEUP

​brianheger.com provides free access to +1,000 curated articles, research reports, podcasts, etc. that help practitioners drive better business results through strategic human resources and talent management.

CHROS on the Go is a subscription that provides the easiest and most convenient way to stay informed about Chief Human Resources Officer hires, promotions, and resignations in organizations of all sizes and industries.

​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.