Talent Edge Weekly - Issue #86

Covers 2022 HR priorities, moments that matter in the employee experience, ethical AI in recruiting, internal talent marketplace, and questions the CEO want to ask about talent.

October 03, 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

  • Updated: How 20+ Companies (Now 143) Are Adjusting Their Return to Office Dates and Vaccine- Mask Mandates Due to Delta Variant | BrianHeger .com | I share an update on how 143 firms are approaching their return to the office and vaccine mandates.

  • Top 5 Priorities for HR Leaders in 2022 | Gartner | Shares survey results and insights from over 500 HR leaders across all major industries on their HR priorities and expected challenges in 2022.

  • This Time It’s Personal: Shaping the ‘New Possible’ Through Employee Experience (EX) | McKinsey | Provides ideas on how companies can craft an EX to attract, retain and engage the best talent, including a framework that articulates nine moments that matter in the EX.

  • Ethical AI: A New Strategic Imperative for Recruiting and Staffing | MIT Sloan Management Review | Covers how to ensure that AI is being used responsibly, fairly, and ethically when making various talent decisions; also touches on the topic of minimizing unintentional bias in AI.

  • How to Tame the Talent Marketplace | TalentQ | Based on lessons from their internal talent marketplace (ITM) launch at PepsiCo, Allan Church and Natalie Cori share 9 truths for firms to think through as they consider implementing an ITM technology platform.

  • The CEO's Three Questions About Talent | The Talent Strategy Group | Marc Effron provides several ideas on how HR leaders can articulate their entire talent narrative by answering three talent questions that matter most to CEOs.

THIS WEEK'S EDGE

Organizations continue to share their return-to-office dates and vaccination mandate decisions. And while you can access my updated list of how 143 firms are approaching these topics, a few headlines this past week are: 1) BlackRock Inc., the world's largest asset manager, will require more than half of its employees to return to the office for at least three days a week starting in November. 2) Wells Fargo, which has the largest workforce of any U.S. bank, announced it is pushing back its return-to-office plans to January. Similarly, ViacomCBS is again delaying its return, this time to 2022. 3) PwC has offered its U.S. employees the option to work remotely full-time. Employees who choose this option would have to come into the office a maximum of three days per month for critical in-person appointments. And those who opt to work virtually full time from a lower-cost location would see their pay decrease, a practice embraced by Google. Regarding broader trends, a new 48-page Cushman & Wakefield report notes that, as of September 2021, approximately 40% of all global office workers have returned to the office. Most office workers globally are expected to return to the office in the first quarter of 2022. As firms get closer to their return date, this will trigger employee turnover. Firms should already be conducting "stay discussions" with employees they want to retain, and TA functions should track the number of job offers they make that get declined due to your firm's policy around flexibility and remote work; these data can be used to inform policy adjustments that may need to be made.

In early 2021, I developed a reference, “2021 HR Priorities: A Summarized View of Nine Sources,” to help practitioners distill the various insights into one view. I linked most collective priorities to Culture, DEI, Employee Wellbeing, Digital Transformation, and Reskilling. As we enter the last months of 2021, new reports will emerge on 2022 priorities, including Gartner’s, which just published its top five. For 59% of HR leaders, the top priority is “building critical skills and competencies for the organization.” This priority emphasizes 1) Firms are basing their talent strategies around skills, not just roles, to enable a more adaptive workforce. 2) Organizations face challenges in predicting the skills needed because of the speed at which skills change. For example, nearly one in three skills needed for a job in 2018 will not be required by 2022. And while labor market and AI-based platforms can help predict needed skills, a few questions to ask at your next team meeting are: What skills are becoming more important, less critical, and obsolete in our organization as well as the external market? How do these answers change depending on different scenarios our organization may face, a point I emphasized in a written Q&A interview with HR Exchange Network. What combination of build, buy, borrow, bot strategies would we employ under each scenario, factoring in costs, speed, impact, and viability? The answers will crystalize your team's thinking around this priority and help determine the next steps.

The past 20 months have brought significant shifts in how, when, and where work gets done. These changes have led workers to recalibrate their personal preferences and expectations of their employers. And with a general shift in power dynamics from employers to employees taking place, many workers are more discerning consumers of an organization's employment value proposition (EVP) and employee experience (EX). As employers determine how best to respond, this article provides ideas on how companies can craft an EX to attract, retain and engage the best talent. It starts with the premise that the EX considers what people value in the broadest sense, acknowledging how life stage, personal circumstances, and even personality type make different propositions attractive for different people. As shown in Exhibit 1, an EX framework is offered and includes three core areas of EX—social, work, and organization. Each of the core components comprises three elements—creating 9 EX elements for firms to get right; they range from work control and flexibility to purpose. The authors offer ideas on using design thinking to identify the moments that matter, which create a disproportionate uplift in EX. And while these moments will vary by organization, Exhibit 3 includes an example of nine moments across most firms.

With the HR Technology Conference last week (see agenda here), it is exciting to see the growing tech and AI capabilities across various vendor platforms. One recruiting and hiring capability for HR technology is using AI, machine learning, and natural language processing to reduce a large pool of candidates to a select few who most closely match specified criteria for a position. But as I pointed out in a recent post, a study by Harvard Business School and Accenture, Hidden Workers: Untapped Talent, found that these technologies can exclude viable candidates from consideration. As firms seek the benefits of these technologies while reducing the risk, this MIT article provides a few ideas: one involves minimizing unintentional bias. It notes that while humans have preexisting biases in the hiring process (more than 180 biases), AI can be prone to algorithmicbias. The authors expand on the notion of Explainable and Transparent AI—where the methods or techniques used to arrive at conclusions can be easily understood by people. I recommend you ask vendors two fundamental questions: 1) What measures do you take to reduce unintentional bias? 2) How are you able to explain how the AI-based recommendations are achieved? I also recommend testing these technologies and their outcomes in parts of your business through an experiment or pilot before making a purchasing decision. In case you missed it, here is a post I made regarding a LiveHire article, 15 Questions to Ask HR Tech Vendors for Your Recruiting Solutions. 

As noted in Josh Bersin’s HR Technology 2021 Report, the Internal Talent Marketplace (ITM) or Talent Marketplace is one of the hottest trends in the HR tech space. An ITM is often described as an AI-based platform that provides workers with suggestions on jobs, projects, and development opportunities that match their skills, experience, and aspirations. But as PepsiCo’s Allan Church and Natalie Cori mention in this article, “at a minimum, HR and talent management professionals need to understand what it is—and what it isn’t” before implementing an ITM. Based on lessons from their early state post ITM launch at PepsiCo, Allan and Natalie present nine truths to be aware of when considering an ITM. Truth #4—Technology integration is easier said than done—speaks to the challenges firms can encounter when embedding ITM platforms into their existing tech ecosystem and talent processes. This truth is one reason I recommend firms experiment with an ITM platform under consideration well before making a purchasing decision. This miniature version of implementation and integration (i.e. pilot within a few business units) helps uncover the complexities of tech integration using actual employee data within a firm’s existing HR tech ecosystem. Even with an experiment, successful pilots may not scale as conditions present during the pilot may differ in a larger rollout. However, this tactic increases the likelihood that issues are detected upfront and factored into ITM purchasing decisions and implementation plans. 

Every year, we see publications that share survey results on CEOs' collective priorities and concerns for that given year. And each year, talent is among the top priorities. However, the interest in talent and talent strategy has been amplified, particularly given the events of the pandemic and the implications they have for talent management in the years to come. Boards are also taking a greater interest in talent and workforce strategy. Simultaneously, SEC human capital disclosure rules place more accountability for publicly traded companies governed by the SEC to share aspects of their human capital measures and outcomes. Given the breadth and depth of various talent practices and initiatives, Marc Effron’s article helps HR leaders integrate this multi-dimensional topic into a holistic framework, showing how all the components fit together. The framework allows CHROs to effectively explain how what they and their teams are doing answers three talent questions that the CEO cares about most. 1)What capabilities do we need to win? 2) How will we get a deep bench of high-performing talent? 3) What’s the three-year plan to win through talent? For each question, Marc provides a narrative for how HR leaders can answer these questions—connecting all HR practices and initiatives to these question areas. A great reference for CHROs and their teams.

TWEET OF THE WEEK

BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS

To check out my summary of book recommendations, click here or on the bookcase image below.

Partial View of 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.