Talent Edge Weekly - Issue #75

Covers employee experience, employee turnover, hybrid work, internal talent marketplace, talent management compensation, and a remote work podcast.

July 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 Definitive Guide: Employee Experience | Josh Bersin Academy | A 116-page report that highlights EX trends, best practices, supporting technologies, and EX maturity across industry sectors.

  • The Great Resignation: Employers Drove Workers to Quit | BBC Worklife | Provides an overview of why one reason workers are making the decision to leave their company is based on how their employers treated them during the pandemic. 

  • 4 Big Debates About Hybrid Work, and Why They're Overhyped | Neuro Leadership Institute | Presents four myths about hybrid work and offers counter-arguments as to why these four claims are overhyped.

  • Gaining a Skills Edge Through Agile Talent Practices: From Pandemic to Permanence | Mercer | This 16-page report offers a few ideas on implementing an agile, skills-based talent model by utilizing AI-based technology and leveraging its internal talent marketplace.

  • 2021 Talent Management Compensation Report | The Talent Strategy Group | Provides compensation insights for talent management, learning and development, and organization development/organizational effectiveness roles.

  • Podcast: Remote Work Revolution with Tsedal Neeley | BCG Henderson Institute | Newly released podcast where guest Tsedal Neeley covers how firms can integrate best practices for remote work in their organization. She shares aspects of her new book, Remote Work Revolution: Succeeding from Anywhere.

THIS WEEK'S EDGE

As work and the workplace continue to be redefined, various implications exist for the employee experience (EX). This 116-page report—commissioned by Microsoft and prepared by Josh Bersin Academy—highlights EX trends, best practices, supporting technologies, and EX maturity across industry sectors. It is based on a survey of business and HR professionals representing 981 companies. A few illustrations and points mentioned throughout the report include: 1) Page 7 includes an EX framework of six elements of the EX, ranging from meaningful work to trust in the organization. 2) Page 28 has a four-level EX maturity model. Level 1 (Transactional Efficiency) represents 32 percent of surveyed firms and is driven by EX practices that are tactical and transactional--where employees are seen as a replaceable commodity and a cost factor.  3) Page 32 includes the EX practices that disproportionately impact business, employees, and innovation. 4) Page 53 shows the top 15 essential EX practices. For example, practice #1—fostering a culture of integrity and helping others— is mainly driven through demonstrating empathy and transparency. Other ideas are discussed. 

Much has been written about “The Great Resignation” - a phrase coined by Anthony Klotz, to describe how many people will continue to leave their jobs. Behind this prediction is that many workers reassessed what they want from their personal and work lives during the pandemic. And while various reasons exist for why people are quitting their jobs, this article emphasizes one: workers are making decisions to leave based on how their employers treated them—or didn’t treat them — during the pandemic. Said differently, workers’ decision to stay with a firm is highly determined by whether they felt supported during the pandemic. This element of “care” and “support” is reflected in a post I made based on a Gartner report, CHRO Guide: Reinvent Your Employee Value Proposition (EVP) for a Post-pandemic Workforce. The report notes that firms must offer an EVP that generates five feelings amongst employees, making them feel treated as people, not workers. As noted by Leigh Branham’s in his book, The 7 Hidden Reasons Employees Leave: “Employee turnover is not an event — it is a process of disengagement that can take days, weeks, months or even years until the actual decision to leave occurs.”

Firms consider various factors as they decide about hybrid and remote work. And to critically evaluate the pros and cons of these work arrangements, leaders sometimes need to challenge widely held beliefs about hybrid work. This article challenges four common beliefs about hybrid work. 1) Productivity will drop if teams are not co-located. 2) Culture will suffer without the opportunity to interact in-person and face-to-face. 3) Innovation will suffer without the opportunity to interact in person with coworkers. 4) Hybrid work is inherently unfair since employees need to be in close proximity to be managed effectively and get recognized and promoted. For a few of the beliefs, the author cites research to present a counter-argument. For example, while firms may say that productivity will drop if teams are not co-located, research suggests that, given the right conditions, hybrid arrangements can increase productivity. Regarding minimizing hybrid work because it can lead to unfair outcomes (e.g., those who are not in office don’t get promoted), the author notes how this is more about addressing common biases than hybrid work. A useful resource as firms continue to evaluate hybrid work decisions.

Firms are increasingly defining work by skills and tasks rather than just jobs and roles. And, one reason for deconstructing work from the job level to the skills and/or task level is to provide firms with greater flexibility in meeting changing business needs. (A more in-depth review of these reasons has been covered by thought leaders such as Ravin Jesuthasan and John Boudreau (Work Without Jobs) and Dave Ulrich (From Workforce to Work-task Planning). This 16-page report by Mercer offers a few ideas on implementing an agile, skills-based talent model by utilizing AI-based technology and leveraging its internal talent marketplace. Throughout the report, the blue boxes include a range of questions that practitioners can ask within this context. A few questions include: 1) How are we using technology to enable the skills profiling process and keep it up to date? 2) What could we accomplish if we had insights into the skills and knowledge across our employees and contingent workforce population? 3) What performance goals will incentivize a team or business unit to share talent internally? Page 12 includes a visual of the different use cases (for such an approach) across various talent practices. Since jobs/roles have been the predominant foundation on which various talent practices are based, the resources mentioned in this post can help firms begin to explore and test a skills-based/task approach.

This report by The Talent Strategy Group provides compensation insights for talent management, learning and development, and organization development/organizational effectiveness roles. It is based on data from 101 companies and shows the average compensation for the roles mentioned above. For select roles, the report provides additional information. For example, for Talent Management roles, compensation information is broken into four levels: 1) EVP/SVP, 2) Vice President, 3) Director and 4) Manager. Within these four levels, the provided compensation information includes a) Base Salary and Bonus (total cash) and b) Long-Term Incentives. Then, total compensation is provided as a measure of A+B. Aside from the compensation averages, ranges are provided. For example, while the average total compensation for a Vice-President of Talent Management is $495k, the range is $260k to $720k. The report also shows how compensation varies depending on company revenue. Supplemental information is provided regarding vacation days. This report is a helpful reference for job seekers, incumbents, and hiring managers of these roles. In case you missed it, here is a post I made in May about an HRO Today study on CHRO compensation.

In this newly released podcast episode by Boston Consulting Group's Henderson Institute, Martin Reeves (host) has a discussion with Tsedal Neeley, Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, about remote work. During their discussion, Tsedal covers how firms can integrate best practices for remote work in their organization. Tsedal discusses aspects of her book Remote Work Revolution: Succeeding from Anywhere (released March 30, 2021), and introduces a trust palette and a “trust curve” to understand which types of trust are particularly challenging in a remote setting and how they develop over time, and explains how agile teams can still thrive in a remote setting.

MOST SHARED RESOURCE FROM LAST WEEK

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.

TWEET OF THE WEEK

BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS

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