Talent Edge Weekly - Issue #91

Covers pre-Covid assumptions managers and leaders will need to rethink, 100 critical people analytics questions, durable skills, 2022 work trends, and flexible work policies.

November 07, 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

  • Rethinking Assumptions About How Employees Work | MIT Sloan Management Review | Outlines five pre-COVID-19 assumptions leaders and managers at all levels will need to rethink as they prepare for this next work era.

  • 100 Critical People Analytics Questions: How Well Do You Really Know Your Workforce? | SAP Thought Leadership Paper | A 16-page reference of 100 people analytics questions (spanning eight talent categories) firms can ask and measure about their most important talent issues.

  • The High Demand for Durable Skills | Emsi, Burning Glass, and America Succeeds | Provides research results of 100 durable skills—categorized by ten major themes—that are foundational to most workers’ success regardless of role. Shares which of these skills are in most demand.

  • Future of Work Trends in 2022 Report: The New Era of Humanity | Korn Ferry | A 48-page report that shares insights into how the general shift in power dynamic—from employer to employee—continues to reset workers’ expectations of their employers.

  • Creating Flex Work Policies … When Everyone Has Different Needs | Harvard Business Review | Offers six strategies to help managers accommodate flex work requests without creating unintended negative consequences.

THIS WEEK'S EDGE

As firms envision and plan for a post-pandemic workplace, this article outlines five pre-COVID-19 assumptions leaders and managers at all levels will need to rethink. They include: 1) If people aren’t in the office, they’re not productive. 2) The same rules should apply to everybody. 3) We need to locate where the talent is. 4) When they’re working for me, they’re not working for anyone else. 5) Employees will work the way we tell them to. I like this article because, aside from outlining the assumptions, the author provides questions to help leaders rethink their views and prepare for this next era of work, workplace, and worker preferences. For example,  assumption #1 (if people aren’t in the office, they’re not productive) can be reexamined by asking questions such as: Can you reconfigure tasks — or outputs — to align more effectively with a remote approach? Or how will you set productivity goals and ensure that people meet them? Since many firms are investing time and resources to reskill and upskill managers and leaders for the post-pandemic era, these assumptions and questions can make for a productive discussion during manager and leadership capability-building sessions. 

HR leaders continue to refine their 2022 priorities and underlying metrics. However, a few challenges HR leaders and their teams can face when selecting the most effective measures include 1) Just selecting measures that are obvious and basic (convenience factor) 2) Only selecting measures that are currently available (convenience factor) 3) Treating all measures of equal importance and, as a result, having too many measures (information overload), 4) No clear line of sight between the talent metrics and execution of business strategy (contextual relevance factor). To help HR teams overcome this challenge, this 16-page reference includes 100 questions to help HR teams think critically about their organizations’ talent management issues. It provides criteria for selecting key performance indicators (KPIs) that can show progress toward addressing these questions. The questions span eight talent categories, ranging from recruiting and onboarding to employee experience. This reference is an excellent resource for helping HR teams determine the core metrics and measures that matter most to their organizations. As a bonus, here is an article on this topic by Deloitte Insights.

The shelf-life of skills continues to decline, presenting challenges to firms as they prioritize upskilling and reskilling efforts. The speed at which skills change has generated renewed interest in what this research report calls Durable Skills: a combination of how you use what you know—skills like critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity—as well as character skills like fortitude, growth mindset, and leadership. Unlike skills that change as technology evolves, durable skills have more staying power and are foundational to most workers’ success. Durable skills are akin to what Josh Bersin refers to as power skills. This research analyzed 82 million job postings from the past two years to quantify the demand for durable skills across industries, occupations, and U.S. geographies. Among the various findings is 1) 7 of 10 of the most requested skills in job postings are durable skills, with leadership and communication-based skills in the highest demand. 2) Employers seek durable skills nearly four times more frequently than the top five technical or hard skills. Page 11 shows the model of 100 durable skills categorized by ten major themes. Page 12 includes the durable skills in most demand. Organizations can use this report as a reference for their workforce planning, talent acquisition, and employee development efforts.

This 48-page report provides insights into how the general shift in power dynamic—from employer to employee—continues to reset workers’ expectations of their employers. While this report has various insights, a section on p.33, titled “Individuality,” caught my attention. It emphasizes how the employee experience will be influenced by “variable customizations,” where employees want greater choice and autonomy over their experiences at work. This tactic requires firms to go beyond the overly simplistic approach of personalizing the employee experience by creating personas based on demographics (e.g., New Mom Returner). It correctly notes how this demographic-based approach, by itself, cannot capture multiple aspects of one’s identity and values; a BCG report that I previously shared illustrates this point. It uses the example of Jane (p.6), who falls into the traditional segments of being female, white, and straight. However, those segments don’t factor in Jane being an immigrant, Type 1 diabetic, caregiver, part of a dual-career family household, and is without local family help. Each of these factors will affect how Jane experiences the workplace. This approach to individualization will require managers to understand their workers on a deeper level and move beyond assumptions based on broader segments. Firms will need to figure out how to factor individuality into the employee experience while considering scalability and alignment to the broader employment brand and value proposition.

Many firms have updated and announced their policies on flexible work during the past few months. And organizations that have not yet made these decisions will probably make them soon. But as noted in this article, “whatever any organization is doing — requiring everyone to return to the office, keeping people at home, or some mix of the two— at least a handful of people want or need something else.” The author presents six strategies to help managers “treat their people as the individuals they are without creating a chaotic mess of confusing, arbitrary exceptions.” The first strategy is the logical starting point of having managers ask employees about their current work flexibility and their ability to get work done regardless of work location. Five questions are offered to guide these conversations, including: Are there tools, information, or other kinds of support that would help you perform better? How well have you been able to arrange cross-functional collaborations? How comfortable do you feel about your current work situation? Although there are various forms of work flexibility, remote work is a dominating theme. So, if you missed it, this bonus article by McKinsey helps firms make remote work decisions by evaluating tasks and activities that can be performed remotely without losing productivity.

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