Talent Edge Weekly - Issue #96

Covers 2022 workplace trends, equity in organizations, the Omnicron variant, performance management resources, a culture for flexible work, and organization design.

December 12, 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

  • Glassdoor Workplace Trends for 2022 | Glassdoor Economic Research | Highlights four workplace trends to be amplified in 2022, including that 'remote work will boost access to top talent but at a higher price point.'

  • How to Make the Internal Labor Market More Equitable | Gartner’s HR Leader’s Monthly - December | A 57-page issue that includes nine articles centered on the theme: The Equity Imperative—How Fairness Improves Performance. I highlight one of these articles.

  • The Omicron Variant: How Companies Should Respond | Harvard Business Review | Provides guidelines as firms evaluate and make workplace decisions in response to the Omicron variant. I provide updates on how a few firms are responding.

  • Four Performance Management Resources to Support Year-End Reviews and 2022 Objectives | Multiple Authors | I highlight a few previously posted resources on performance management that firms can reference as they support year-end reviews and 2022 objective setting.

  • Rebuilding Culture for Flexible Working: How HubSpot is Creating True Equality Across Locations | HRD Connect | Shares insights into new practices, norms, and tools that HubSpot uses to support employees in three distinct ways of working: office-based, home-based, and flex.

  • New Book: Data-Driven Organization Design: Delivering Perpetual Performance Gains Through the Organizational System | Rupert Morrison | A newly released second edition book on using data to guide organization design decisions. I also include a recent webinar discussion with the author on aspects of the book.

THIS WEEK'S EDGE

This Glassdoor report highlights four workplace trends to be amplified in 2022. They include 1) Hiring won’t be easy in 2022. 2) Remote work will boost access to top talent but at a higher price point. 3) Employers will prioritize DE&I action and accountability. 4) Workplace community will expand beyond company walls. Regarding 1 (hiring won’t be easy), I believe this insight presents even more of a reason for firms to unlock the capacity of their workforce through their internal talent marketplaces. Specifically, rather than filling work needs merely through open jobs, organizations can fill a segment of those needs by redeploying workers in short-term assignments that also support workers’ career goals. Firms should also overcome resistance to hiring nontraditional candidates—those with the skills and desire to perform the work but don’t fit the narrowly defined profile of the “perfect candidate” (e.g., attended certain schools, held specific jobs, etc.) These “hidden workers” get excluded from talent pools and provide firms with an opportunity to meet their talent needs. Does your 2022 talent strategy include tactics on tapping the potential of your internal talent marketplace and hidden workers? In case you missed it, check out a post I made about a Harvard Business School and Accenture report, Hidden Workers: Untapped Talent. 

This 57-page issue of Gartner’s HR Leader’s Monthly includes nine articles centered on the theme: The Equity Imperative—How Fairness Improves Performance. The articles range from how HR can create a more fair employee experience to improve talent outcomes and how equity will drive employee engagement in the hybrid world, to name a few. Page 10 begins an article on overcoming barriers to equitable internal labor markets, defined as the processes and infrastructure within an organization that facilitate fair treatment and equal access to mobility of employees from their current roles to roles with a mutual fit of skills and interest. Three barriers to equitable internal labor markets include 1) Awareness: managers communicate job openings and opportunities mostly to existing connections. The authors mention how many employees know more about opportunities at competitor organizations than within their own organizations. 2) Access: high-potential talent are prioritized for opportunities, and 3) Support: managers hoard talent and block internal moves. HR leaders can address these inequities by democratizing awareness of internal opportunities through technology, opening universal access to opportunities, and incentivizing mobility support. Tactics are offered for translating these ideas into practice.  

I mentioned last week that as concerns over the Omicron variant grow, a segment of firms is altering their return to office plans and health and safety protocols. Google, Apple, and The Hartford have pushed back their return to office dates, and Hyundai Motor Group introduced new rules around office gatherings. This past week, Jeffries Financial Group asked its employees to continue working from home because of an increase in COVID-19 cases. The firm also canceled client parties and almost all travel. Meta Platforms, formerly known as Facebook, said it would fully reopen its offices in the US on January 31 while allowing employees to delay their scheduled return by three to five months. Lyft announced it wouldn’t require workers to come back to its offices until 2023, though they will fully reopen as planned in February. Ford Motor is pushing its return-to-office hybrid plan for 30,000 workers to March next year. And while Molson Coors has reopened its offices, it has provided employees with color-coded wristbands (red, yellow, and green) to help colleagues signal their comfort level with physical contact (e.g., handshake, elbow bump, hug). As firms continue to evaluate and make workplace decisions in response to the Omicron variant, this HBR article provides a few guidelines to consider. For your reference, here is my list (pre-omicron) of how 149 firms were approaching their return-to-office plans and vaccine mandates.

With 2021 coming to an end, managers and workers are preparing for year-end performance reviews and 2022 objective setting. To help firms prepare for these discussions, I have pulled together a few previously posted resources on PM. And while this is not an exhaustive list, a few tips and resources include: 1) Incorporate "stay interview" questions as part of these discussions (see INSEAD article, Performance Reviews Need a Brand-New P&L, which has questions to ask, such as What are your aspirations for career advancement? What are your needs at this life stage? How do your lifestyle needs align with your growth aspirations?) 2) Determine how and if goals should be adjusted and how these decisions affect the way managers evaluate and reward employees (see Marc Effron’s article, How to Manage Performance Management Post-Pandemic). 3) Implement tactics for mitigating PM bias. (see Deloitte’s article, Mitigating Bias in PM.) 4) As work becomes more project-based with shorter performance cycles, provide employees with feedback, evaluation, and rewards based on their project-to-project performance. (see Gartner’s Six Predictions for the Future of PM.) For additional resources on PM, you can click here or on the image or title of this post. 

As work models become more virtual, hybrid, and remote, firms are determining how to enable equal opportunities for all employees, whether they’re working at home or in the office. One area driving this concern is proximity bias (PB), 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. Validating this concern is previous research that found remote workers may receive lower performance evaluations and smaller raises compared to their in-office colleagues. This HRD Connect article includes insights into new practices, norms, and tools that HubSpot uses to support employees in three distinct ways of working: office based, home-based, and flex. One practice they have implemented is allowing workers to select which of the three ways of working best suits them, which can be changed as their circumstances change. Another practice is striving to make 70% of HubSpot’s new job postings location-agnostic; most of their jobs are posted with all three location options available. People managers also receive dedicated training and workshops on proximity bias, hybrid working, and psychological safety. Other ideas are discussed. 

The topic of organization design has received renewed interest as organizations transform in response to changing business contexts, workplaces, and the workforce. At the same time, firms seek ways to use data to guide decision-making. In this newly released second edition book (released October 26, 2021), Rupert Morrison covers topics ranging from identifying and collecting the right data sources to aid organization design decisions, macro and micro factors that influence organization design, and tactics for ensuring that design decisions can support the constantly evolving and changing demands of organizations. For those of you that like webcasts, you can also check out this November 17, 2021 NYU Human Capital Management Program webinar, where Anna Tavis (Clinical Associate Professor and Academic Director of Human Capital Management Department) leads a discussion with Rupert on ideas from his book. The conversation starts around the 11:05 mark of the video, and the book can be accessed on Amazon. 

MOST SHARED RESOURCE FROM LAST WEEK

Talent Management Challenges During Covid-19 and Beyond: Performance Management to the Rescue | Business Research Quarterly | Provides five recommendations for adapting and improving performance management to better align with the future of work.

TWEET OF THE WEEK

BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS

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