Talent Edge Weekly - Issue #70

Covers 2021 workforce trends, reimagine the future of work, moments that matter in the employee experience, the digital workplace, and a podcast about Netflix in its "no rules."

Author

Brian Heger
June 13, 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

  • Our Next Normal Workforce Trends in 2021 Report | Randstad | This 26-page report helps answer questions that enable firms to adjust their talent attraction and retention strategies in a post-pandemic environment.

  • 5 Ways to Reimagine the Future of Work | Fast Company | Offers suggestions for how leaders can bring employees into the discussion on how and where work gets done; includes questions leaders can ask their teams.

  • Moments That Matter: An Emerging Approach to Understanding Employees | Gartner | Provides  5-criteria for determining and evaluating moments that matter--moments that impact an employee’s organizational experience throughout his/her tenure with an organization. 

  • The Digital-Ready Workplace: Supercharging Digital Teams in the Future of Work | Deloitte Insights | An in-depth article that covers how firms can fuel productivity as they shift from physical to digital workplaces.

  • Podcast: No Rules the Netflix Way With Erin Meyer | The Talent Angle | A 54-minute discussion on how Netflix’s culture of "no rules" fosters innovation and organizational agility.

  • Poll Results: Results from last week's poll on whether your organization has or plans to develop a formal remote work policy.  

THIS WEEK'S EDGE

As firms adjust their talent management strategies, this 26-page report by Randstad helps think through 1) What does a newly mobile workforce mean for hiring and retention? 2) How is remote work and the increased reliance on technology affecting different generations? 3) Can employers require vaccinations, and if so, how should they handle exemptions? 4) How can employers leverage new workforce management models to attract and retain talent? 5) How did the pandemic change workers’ expectations about health and safety, and are those changes permanent. Chapter 2 (p.15)–New Ways of Working Mean New Opportunities & New Expectations—notes how one challenge of remote work reported by leaders and managers is that they feel they don't have full visibility into their remote workers’ productivity--which can lead to performance management bias (PMB).To minimize PMB, firms should reframe how they define “productivity” and use clearly defined KPIs for assessing the performance of remote talent. For more on reducing performance management bias, check out this webinar by Angela Lane and The Talent Strategy Group. 

As organizations continue to bring workers back to the office in some capacity, this article argues leaders should “harvest insights from employees on lessons learned and use them to reimagine and evolve work.” It offers five suggestions on how leaders can bring employees into the discussion to determine the best path forward on how and where work gets done. A few of these suggestions include questions leaders can ask individual employees and teams to understand their preferences. For example, leaders can ask individuals: What did you like best about this past year of work? What is something that made work easier for you this past year? What is one thing you want to retain moving forward? What is one change you would like to see change? A few questions that can help hybrid teams define how, when, and where they will work together, include: Are there core hours we want to establish for meetings or overlapping working times? Are we currently having the right meetings at the right time with the right people, or do we need to make changes? What would be circumstances where we might come together in person? Leaders can use these questions to reimagine work and the workplace.

The phrase “moments that matter” stems from the customer experience function’s “moments of truth” or the moments in a customer’s journey that determine if they will make a purchase from an organization. In the context of employees and the workplace, “moments that matter” are the moments that impact an employee’s organizational experience most significantly across an employee’s day, year, and career. This research by Gartner shows that there are five distinct elements of moments (Table 1 on p.4) that matter to employees: 1) Emotion-generating (e.g., moments that elicit a strong emotional response), 2) Scalable (e.g., moments that impact many in the employee population), 3) Frequent (e.g., moments that occur most often in an employee’s experience), 4) Business-aligned (e.g., moments that are aligned with the business strategy, culture, and organizational values and 5) Critical talent aligned (e.g., disproportionately impact a critical or desired employee population). As firms develop strategies to drive aspects of the employer value proposition and employee experience, this framework provides useful ideas for evaluating the moments that matter.

Work today is increasingly taking place in a digital rather than physical space. And as noted in this in-depth article (2o-minute read), working in a digital space creates challenges for organizations—mainly because “practices that drive productivity in the physical workplace may not work in the digital one.” To overcome these challenges and take advantage of the benefits a digital workplace offers, this article notes that three attributes enable a digital team to provide positive outcomes: 1) psychological safety 2) digital competence 3) management support for experimentation and flexibility. Figure 1 shows how each of these three attributes can lead to positive outcomes. For example, psychological safety—which refers to an individual’s or group’s perceptions of the consequences of risk-taking—can enable teams to develop new digital practices that facilitate effective ways of working together. Firms can use this 3-pronged framework to encourage and support the demonstration of attributes that fuel productivity in digital workplaces.

This 54-minute podcast discussion with Erin Meyer, professor at INSEAD, addresses how Netflix’s unconventional corporate culture fosters an environment of employee freedom and responsibility. Rather than focus on excessive rules and processes that can diminish innovation and creativity, Erin argues firms can focus on fostering an environment of candor—where employees give candid feedback to each other and their leaders, and then “create co-accountability where people responsibly behave.” This approach is used at Netflix, which has enabled the firm to be more agile and innovative. As I listened through parts of the podcast, it reminded me of a post I made on an article by Lars Schmidt (author of Redefining HR) where he noted: “We work so hard to find exceptional talent for our organizations. Why do we diminish their value and impact with unnecessarily burdensome and complicated processes and procedures?” As firms continue to adjust processes and policies to fit a post-pandemic workplace, I thought both resources could provide an interesting perspective. 

LAST WEEK'S POLL RESULTS

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

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. One tactic discussed is defining culture as a set of tensions, not attributes. 

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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.