Talent Edge Weekly - Issue #74

Covers 32 HR practices, leadership's perception of hybrid work, location based pay, performance management, diversity goals, and people analytics.

Author

Brian Heger
July 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

  •  The Future of People Management Priorities | BCG | A 40-page report on 32 HR and people practices across nine clusters, indicating which practices should be prioritized.

  • It’s Time for Leaders to Get Real About Hybrid | McKinsey Quarterly | Shares how while employers are ready to get back to a significant in-person presence in the office, many employees aren’t. I include other resources for how firms can make more rigorous hybrid work decisions.

  • Google Will Show Employees How Their Pay May Change If They Move Offices | CNET | Shares aspects of Google's recently rolled out new Work Location Tool that enables workers to estimate how their salaries might decrease when they move to a lower cost-of-living area.

  • Amazon Tells Bosses to Conceal When Employees Are on a Performance Management Plan | The Seattle Times | Summarizes Amazon’s performance improvement plan (PIP)—Focus—which instructs managers to not tell employees they are on a formal PIP unless the employee explicitly asks. 

  • How to Set — and Meet — Your Company’s Diversity Goals | Harvard Business Review | Ellyn Shook, CHRO, Accenture, outlines a methodology Accenture created to hold itself accountable for delivering on five DEI priorities it has shared publicly.

  • NEW BOOK: Excellence in People Analytics (PA): How to Use Workforce Data to Create Business Value | Jonathan Ferrar and David Green | A newly released book that provides several insights on PA, including practical tools and cases studies on how leading firms are applying PA.

THIS WEEK'S EDGE

This excellent 40-page report provides insights from a study of people practices from over 6,600 participants in 113 countries. Using 32 HR and people practices across nine clusters (see Exhibit 2 on p.6 for framework), respondents rated their organization’s current level of capability and each topic’s future importance. In combining these two factors, Exhibit 4 on page nine segments the 32 practices in three categories of urgency: a strong need to act, medium need to act, and low need to act. They categorized twelve of the 32 practices as a strong need to act. The most urgent are 1) Leadership behaviors and development, 2) Upskilling, reskilling, and learning and development, and 3) Strategic workforce planning (SWP). (As a side note, a poll I conducted last week (n=112) on SWP shows only 23 percent of respondents said their firm does SWP, with the rest using it primarily for headcount planning or recruiting forecasts.) The two practices categorized as a low need to act are 31) Employee relations and 32) Policy management. The report also includes a ranking of the nine clusters across four economies: Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia-Pac (pages 11-12). Other ideas are discussed.

Organizations continue to share their strategy for transitioning workers safely and efficiently back to the workplace. A component of this strategy is preparing workers and managers for operating in a hybrid work environment. For example, I have shared posts about how companies such as Pepsico and Capital One have guided their workforce on practices and principles that enable hybrid work. As employers develop and provide guidance to their workforce, this McKinsey article reminds firms that there is a disconnect between what C-Suite leaders think workers want and what they prefer. Over three-quarters of C-suite executives recently surveyed expect the typical “core” employee to be back in the office three or more days a week. However, three-quarters of surveyed employees would like to work from home for two or more days per week, and more than half want at least three days of remote work. While firms need to consider worker preferences as they make these decisions, they also should apply a rigorous approach for deciding about hybrid work models. With that in mind, I am re-sharing posts by BCG and Mckinsey that outline the multi-faceted and complex factors that underpin these decisions.  

As organizations develop and implement practices for managing talent remotely, there are several implications to consider, including the impact of remote work on rewards and compensation. This topic has spurred a debate on whether workers that move to lower cost-of-living areas should face a salary change to align with labor costs at their new location. Google recently rolled out a new Work Location Tool that will enable its workers to estimate how their salaries might decrease depending on location. The company will pay employees at the top of the local market, and equity won’t decrease for transferring US employees. It is still unknown how policies around pay cuts or how transferring could affect bonuses. Some suggest that this decision will demoralize employees and lead to employee turnover. While disengagement and retention risk is a downside, it does provide employees with transparency. In any event, the decision follows news of a senior Google executive who has caused an uproar at the company after reportedly moving to New Zealand to work remotely despite opposing remote work for the company’s lower-ranking employees. As firms make decisions about remote work, they will need to consider various implications to ensure fair and equitable decisions. 

One goal of performance management (PM) is to elevate employee performance through transparent and timely feedback. As such, many firms invest in developing managers' skills in these areas. Amazon recently received criticism about one aspect of its PM practices: the firm's performance improvement plan (PIP) called Focus. As the company describes it, Focus is a way to help underperforming employees get back on track. Managers are supposed to deliver documented coaching to employees on Focus over weeks or months. However, the program has been criticized by employees and managers since Amazon instructs managers not to tell office employees that they are on a formal performance-management plan that puts their job in jeopardy unless the employee explicitly asks. The lack of transparency has led to Amazon workers saying that the firm is not living up to its April pledge to become the "Earth's Best Employer." Or, as stated by one employee, the Focus program "is all hush-hush and a hidden way of weeding out people who are not part of the clique." What is your firm's philosophy on PM and PIP's, and do the practices that underpin that philosophy reinforce or contradict your organization's values?

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are a priority for many organizations, yet, more work is needed to make real and meaningful progress. The article by Ellyn Shook, CHRO, Accenture, outlines a methodology Accenture created to hold itself accountable for delivering on its DEI priorities. It’s based on a set of five key goals it has shared publicly, including 1) Analyze locally so your goals reflect the communities where your people work and live; 2) Focus on skills, not education; 3) Work the education-location equation and identify the proportion of residents with and without bachelor’s degrees, by race/ethnicity, in our largest office locations; 4) Pressure test your goals to ensure rigor and reasonability; 5) Build your own pipeline through tactics such as Apprenticeship programs that “create new career pathways for non-traditional hires." The article includes questions firms can ask as they create opportunities for advancing DEI (e.g., “Does your work environment enable people to be their authentic self?” In case you missed it, here is a 62-page report by The Wharton School that examined the relationship between seven categories of DEI practices and twelve workplace outcomes.

Various sources, such as LinkedIn’s Global Talent Trends Report and Mercer’s Global Talent Trend Report, continue to reinforce how vital people analytics (PA) has become in many organizations. And while PA was once reserved for experts in the field, it has grown to become an essential capability (at least understanding how PA can be used) for HR and talent management practitioners that want to show the real business value of talent, workforce, and people practices, programs, and initiatives. This new book by Jonathan Ferrar and David Green (two leading experts in the field) provides several insights and practical tools on PA. It includes several case studies from leading companies, such as Microsoft, HSBC, Syngenta, Capital One, Novartis, Bosch, Uber, Santander Brasil, and American Eagle Outfitters, on how PA is being applied in those organizations for various purposes, such as using PA to increase profits, improve staff retention, drive workplace productivity, and enhance the employee experience. An excellent read for those of you that have an interest in this topic. Thank you to Emmanuel Aryeetey and Lydia Cronin, from Kogan Page Publishers, for an advanced copy to review. 

MOST SHARED RESOURCE FROM LAST WEEK

Optimizing Return-to-Office Strategies With Organizational Network Analysis (ONA)| MIT Sloan Management Review | Provides an overview of how firms can use the data-driven approach of ONA to inform their return-to-office strategy, including determining which activities are best done virtually and in-person.

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