Talent Edge Weekly - Issue #76

Covers the changing worker-employer relationship, Gallup's state of the workplace, resilience, the ROI of reskilling, proximity bias, and a podcast on SEC human capital rules.

July 25, 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 Worker-Employer Relationship Report | Deloitte Insights | An in-depth article that shares four scenarios—and their implications—of how the worker-employer relationship might evolve in a post–COVID-19 world.

  • State of the Global Workplace: 2021 Report | Gallup | A 191-page report incorporating learnings from 2020 on employee wellbeing and engagement, which can be used as employers rethink their workplaces in 2021 and beyond.

  • HR Leader Monthly - August Issue on Resilience | Gartner | Includes seven articles on organizational resilience strategies that can strengthen the organization and have a lasting, positive impact on employees’ wellbeing.

  • Make Sure Your Company’s Reskilling Efforts Pay Off | Harvard Business Review | Offers four ways to measure ROI on reskilling efforts, ranging from cost metrics to productivity metrics.

  • Proximity Bias is Real. Returning to The Office Could Make it Worse | Protocol | Addresses how proximity bias—an incorrect assumption that onsite workers are more effective than their remote counterparts—will increase as firms return to the office.

  • The SEC Human Capital Rules And Why Government Regulations Can Be Good | Josh Bersin | A 21-minute podcast where Josh Bersin offers insights on the human capital (HC) disclosure information firms are sharing as part of the SEC's disclosure rule.

THIS WEEK'S EDGE

The relationship between workers and employers continues to undergo fundamental change. This in-depth report (48-min read) describes four scenarios for how the worker-employer relationship could evolve. And while there is too much information to summarize from this report, the four relationships are: 1) Work as fashion (REACTIVE). Employers feel compelled to respond at the moment to workers’ expressed preferences and competitor moves without connecting those actions to a sustainable workforce strategy. 2) War between talent relationship (IMPERSONAL). Workers compete for limited jobs because of an oversupply of talent and are viewed as interchangeable. Workers are more concerned with competing for jobs than the quality of their employer relationship 3) Work is work (PROFESSIONAL). Workers and employers depend on the other to fulfill work-related needs, but both expect workers to find meaning and purpose largely outside of work. 4) Purpose unleashed (COMMUNAL). Both workers and employers see shared purpose as the foundation of their relationship, viewing it as the most important tie that binds them together. In case you missed it, this report by IBM Institute for Business Value, provides insights into what employees expect in 2021 and beyond from employers.

As noted in my article, 2021 HR Trends and Priorities: A Summarized View of 9 Sources, employee/worker well-being (EWB) is a priority for many organizations. And as employers rethink how they can support EWB, this 116-report by Gallup provides insights into the experiences and range of emotions that workers have experienced throughout the pandemic. The report segments these insights into eleven regions, such as the US, Canada, and Western Europe. One point made is “engagement reflects what happens at work; wellbeing includes work and all other experiences.” As noted on page 17, these EWB experiences link to five areas. 1) Career Wellbeing: you like what you do every day; 2) Social Wellbeing: you have meaningful friendships in your life. 3) Financial Wellbeing: you manage your money well. 4) Physical Wellbeing: You have the energy to get things done. 5) Community Wellbeing: You like where you live. Employers can use this framework and the other ideas in this report as they generate EWB strategies. You can check out the book Wellbeing at Work by Jim Clifton and Jim Harter (both of Gallup), which expands on many of the ideas in this report. 

Resilience—the ability to sustain or grow performance through disruption without damaging workforce health (i.e., the health of individuals, relationships, and the work environment)—is an essential capability for most organizations. As such, many HR strategies focus on helping to build resilience at the individual, team, and organizational levels. In this August 2021 issue of Gartner’s HR Leaders Monthly, eight articles are offered on how HR leaders can design workforce resilience strategies that strengthen the organization and have a lasting, positive impact on employees’ wellbeing. Two articles (pages 10-14 and 28-30) discuss how HR analytics leaders can help firms avoid the “trap” of focusing on the “average” of all their employee experience, engagement, and wellbeing measures. Stated differently, “strategies designed for the average employee are unlikely to succeed because, with such a wide variety of individual experiences, few employees are actually average.” Instead, segmented approaches will better help determine which employees are struggling through disruption and which are thriving. Other ideas are discussed for building impactful resilience strategies. For reference, here is a link to a previous share of ADP's Workplace Resilience Study Report.

Upskilling and reskilling are the top priority for many learning and development organizations, according to the 2021 Linked Workplace Learning Report. Simultaneously, demonstrating the return-on-investment (ROI) of learning initiatives is increasingly important. However, as noted in this HBR article, many companies measure the impact of their investments in reskilling programs using soft metrics like completion rates, satisfaction scores, or employee feedback. The author suggests four measures that show the ROI of skill-building programs: 1) Cost metrics, or comparing the costs of reskilling with the costs of not doing so (e.g., recruiting costs). 2) Productivity metrics that quantify the impact of skill-building on the speed with which tasks are executed. 3) People metrics, such as employee retention, that show the link between upskilling investments and employees’ desire to stay with the company. 4) Sponsor satisfaction, or asking whether managers see a difference in their team’s performance after the reskilling effort. For more information on this topic, you can check out two books: Proving the Value of Soft Skills: Measuring Impact and Calculating Roi and Learning Analytics: Using Talent Data to Improve Learning Outcomes.

As firms refine and implement their return-to-office plans, much focus has been on providing workers with guidance on splitting their time between remote work and in-person work (e.g., two days offsite, three days onsite). This article highlights another consideration related to remote work and hybrid work: proximity bias. Proximity bias (PB) is an incorrect assumption that workers in close physical proximity to their team and company leaders will be perceived as better workers than their remote counterparts. This bias can cause disparities between onsite and remote workers. For example, the article references how research found that remote workers may receive lower performance evaluations and smaller raises compared to their in-office colleagues. And although the article mentions that PB can be eliminated by transitioning fully to remote work, a more practical strategy is 1) helping managers and leaders recognize their tendencies to engage in PB and 2) helping them to develop mindsets and behaviors that minimize PB when making talent decisions. 3) Use data, process, and calibration to root out PB from talent practices. Firms should incorporate these and other tactics into their return to work plans.

In this 21-minute podcast, Josh Bersin discusses the Security Exchange Commission’s (SEC), which regulates publicly traded companies, Human Capital (HC) Disclosure rule. The rule, which went into effect on November 9, 2020, gives publicly traded firms 60-90 days after their fiscal year to include HC information in their annual report. Since there isn’t much guidance from the SEC on what HC measures a firm should share, Josh mentions that this is an opportunity for firms to put together the story they want stakeholders to hear about the firms’ human capital." Interestingly, firms vary considerably on the type of HC information they share. Tesla, for instance, submitted one paragraph as its disclosure; Ford published three pages, including information on turnover rates, spending, internal mobility, and more. Fossil created a list of 70 parent HC topics the organization could report, with 3-6 metrics in each. Other insights and considerations are provided on how firms can articulate their human capital narrative to key stakeholders. In case you missed it, I have shared several posts and resources on this topic over the past year, which can be accessed here.

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