TALENT EDGE WEEKLY - Issue #9

April 04, 2020

Welcome to this week’s issue of Talent Edge Weekly - the weekly newsletter for strategic human resources practitioners, bringing together talent insights from various sources.

Note: You can also access this and other content I post at my website, www.brianheger.com.

COVID-19

As we all continue to deal with the impact of COVID-19, I continue to update special issue #6 of this newsletter, COVID-19 Resources for HR, each week day. So far, that issue has 80+ references that HR colleagues can leverage as they help their organizations and workforces navigate during this challenging time. You can continue to access that issue for related updates.

And while most of our time and efforts have been focused on COVID-19, many HR organizations are continuing to drive various aspects of strategic HR.

With that in mind, the current issue of this newsletter includes:

  • Exponential HR: Six Practices HR Can Do Right Now to Enable Breakout Performance Results | Deloitte

  • 20 HR Metrics You Need to Track in 2020 | HR Technologist

  • 2020 HR Technology (Digital HR) Survey: Key Findings | PwC

  • Why Internal Talent Mobility So Often Fails | Mercer

  • How Speech Patterns Lead to Hiring Bias | Harvard Business Review

  • Microlearning: The Future Of Professional Development | Forbes

If you enjoy this content, please share this newsletter with at least one of your team members or colleagues and share it on your social media networks. Doing so will help us to continue to advance strategic HR and learn together.

If you aren’t yet a subscriber to this newsletter and want to have it delivered to your inbox each Saturday, please subscribe!

Have a good weekend everyone and please be safe.

Brian

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Brian Heger leads Strategic Talent, Workforce Planning, and Analytics for a Fortune 150 organization. To connect with Brian on Linkedin, click here.

THIS WEEK'S EDGE

The last few weeks have especially demonstrated the impact that HR practitioners can have on enabling their organizations to thrive in the face of new business challenges or crises. An HR organization that can move faster, innovate, anticipate challenges, adapt quicker, and stay laser-focused on the outcomes that matter most can enable their organization to achieve sustained performance. This article delves into the notion of "Exponential HR" - ways in which HR can disproportionately accelerate an organizations' ability to move faster and adapt to market conditions more than ever before. Six practices for how HR can operate to achieve this goal are discussed, 1) Outcomes over Activity, 2) Pace over Perfection, 3) Data over Opinions, 4) Experience over Programs, 5) Digitally-Integrated over Technology-Enabled 6) Teams over Individuals. With this article as the backdrop, I encourage HR Leaders to ask their teams, at a future strategy meeting, two simple questions: a) how well are we doing in each of these six areas? b) what is one thing we can do (in at least one of these areas) that will enable us to accelerate our ability to become an "Exponential HR" organization?

The area of people analytics is a capability that has grown leaps and bounds over the past few years and shows no signs of slowing down. But as pointed out in this article, analytics must rest on a robust foundation of data and the right HR metrics. This article outlines four categories of HR-based metrics including 1) Recruiting, 2) Every Day Workforce Management--such as revenue earned per employee 3) Quality of Employee Experience, 4) Employee Development. Each category provides a few examples. As HR practitioners, we should ask ourselves, 1) what are the metrics that we should measure and that provide the greatest insights and business value? Once we understand the insights drawn from these metrics, we can then ask 2): what question should we explore further--through advanced analytics--that if we knew the answer to, would enable us to drive improvement in the business and people outcomes that matter the most? With the impact that COVID-19 continues to have on business performance and worker morale to name a few, it is a good time to ask these questions and reevaluate the top 3 -5 HR metrics you will measure. What metrics will stay the same, be modified, and what will be new?

Although the digitalization of HR – or Digital HR – is not new and has been well in motion for many organizations over the past few years, it has come into sharper focus during the past few weeks as a result of the COVID-19 crisis. In turn, HR and IT leaders are working together increasingly to accelerate the execution of digital strategies. In this report, PwC’s HR Technology Survey explores the effectiveness of technology investments from the views of 600 HR and HR information technology (IT) leaders on six continents. There are several insights in this report, including that among the top new digital investments are 1) talent acquisition tools (49%), improved user experience for employees (48%) skills mapping/career path tools (46%). As organizations create or modify their digital HR strategies, it is important to note that 8 out of 10 (82%) organizations surveyed report that they have struggled with adoption challenges, most of which can be linked back to planning phases that miss getting all the right people in the room to answer the right questions for change at scale. Tips are offered for overcoming these and other challenges.

A core component of an organization's talent strategy is internal mobility (IM). IM has many definitions but simply put, it refers to the movement of employees across roles within the same company. While IM is a core component of a talent strategy, it often fails to meet its intended result. The reasons for these failures can range from the objectives of mobility programs not being clearly drawn out to selecting the "wrong" people at the wrong times for such programs. Further, organizations often focus on the transactional aspects of IM at the expense of the strategic elements. In this short article, 6 questions are provided that can help organizations address the more strategic aspects of their IM philosophy and approach. They range from the foundational, such as "What role should mobility play in the organization’s overall talent strategy?" to "Are incentives aligned to support mobility or do they encourage “local” hoarding of top talent?" As organizations continue to refine their talent strategies to adjust to the ever-changing business environment, talent management strategists can use these questions to develop and evaluate their IM initiatives.

Most organizations understand the importance of fair and valid hiring practices. However, criteria beyond the scope of knowledge, abilities, and performance can still permeate (often unintentionally) the hiring practices of organizations, even amongst seasoned professionals with experience reviewing resumes and interviewing job candidates. In this study, the researchers tested whether people’s speech patterns — how they pronounce words and phrases — would allow perceivers to predict their socioeconomic status and, in turn, make them more or less attractive as job candidates. Participants accurately perceived the socioeconomic status of those speaking and, in turn, judged those of lower status to be less competent and a worse fit for the job. These findings should compel organizations to continuously evaluate their hiring practices and ensure that they are providing decision-makers, in the hiring process, with capability training that helps to avoid biases like these when making hiring decisions. Doing so not only reduces unfair hiring practices, but increases the likelihood of selecting the best candidate for the position.

Over the past few years, much has been written about "information overload in the workplace" (too much information and data coming at workers) and the detrimental impact it has on employees and organizations. Whether it is sifting through hundreds of emails daily, reviewing various reports, attending meetings, or having to complete training courses, information overload negatively impacts employee wellness, performance and productivity, the employee experience, and brand reputation. However, information overload is not just about the volume of information, but also the quality of that information--meaning relevance. Too much information compounded by "irrelevance" exacerbates this problem. While this article provides a few ideas on addressing this problem in the context of workplace learning through the concept of "microlearning"(short bursts of content for learners to study at their convenience), I would also suggest that L&D practitioners ask and answer two questions: 1) where can we eliminate learning content and activities that do not add value? 2) for learning activities that do add value, how can we drastically simplify them? And although the example used is for an L&D function, an HR organization should apply similar questions to each HR function, process, program, and system; doing so will not only reduce information overload but can enable important organizational outcomes such as business performance and employee experience to name a few.

SHARE YOUR IDEAS

If you have an article, report, or resource that you recommend, please send me an email at [email protected]. I would love to review it and share it in a future newsletter.

And, if you have any ideas or suggestions on how this newsletter can be improved or deliver greater value, please send me a note with your suggestions.

FINAL COMMENTS

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I look forward to sharing more ideas in next week’s Edge!

Have a nice weekend everyone and, again, be safe.

Brian