Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:00:08 Hello everyone. Today I wanna talk about a whole bunch of topics that I think are relevant in the world of leadership and HR and management that have to do the economy, the job design work, the systemic model of HR and a few other things. So let me start with the economy and the workforce. You know, the inflation rate remains high and despite the fact that the job market is very competitive and there's lots and lots of jobs and people are taking jobs pretty quickly, the transformation of the pandemic is actually here in front of us. The interesting thing we're finding from most of the conversations we're having with companies is that hybrid work is a reality and yet it is very hard to manage Employees continue to be very focused and very much want flexible or hybrid or work at home. Employers are not crazy about it.
Speaker 1 00:01:01 LinkedIn introduced some research this week that said that during the height of the pandemic, almost 25 to 30% of the jobs posted on posted on LinkedIn were quoted as remote. Today it's about 15%, so it's dropped a lot, but it's still a significant number. But 55% of the applicants and applications are going to those 15% of remote jobs. So workers, employees, staff, like the flexibility of working at home. I know you're all having a lot of debate internally about how you get people back into the office. And I had a long discussion with a whole bunch of people at the LinkedIn conference. Let me just state this. There is no question from any of our research that face to face interaction is essential. You will not get strategic or difficult or complex, important conversations to take place over Zoom or teams. And so there are lots of excuses why people need to come together.
Speaker 1 00:01:54 You as an HR team or as a business team need to decide what those are and basically tell people we're not forcing you to come to the office every minute, but there's gonna be some meetings you have to come to. So get ready to get in your car and deal with it. And I think we'll go back to a new normal that will be a much more of a steady state of hybrid. I'm seeing this in every single company I talk to as well as putting together rituals and rules and good guidelines on hybrid work. Second thing on hybrid work is an interesting conversation we had this morning about diversity, diversity and inclusion based on the experts we've been talking to in the big reset has gotten better. And the reason it's gotten better is that hybrid work has forced companies to explicitly talk about inclusion, belonging, reduction in microaggression, fairness, equity when we used to sort of take it for granted that the person on the other end of the phone was not equitable and we were just gonna be dealing with it, but now we realized we can accommodate that person and we can create an equitable relationship.
Speaker 1 00:02:56 And so more and more companies have improved their DEI programs and the general sentiment is things have gotten a little bit better. Third thing I wanna talk a little bit about is recruiting versus skills. Now you've all heard me talk a lot about skills and this kind of big hairball problem everybody's trying to do. LinkedIn introduced their 55,000 skills into the market this week at their big conference in Los Angeles who's very interesting and they're really trying to build much more skills centric recruiting and learning tools in the LinkedIn platform. But the interesting thing about the skills problem, as many of you know, is it's a very complex dynamic issue. You can create a skills taxonomy in the HR department. You can throw it out there, you can use it for training, you can use it for recruiting, but it's gonna change constantly. Every time there's a new job created or a new role or a new technology or a new platform, the skill matrix changes.
Speaker 1 00:03:48 So what we discussed, which is a really fascinating topic, is the fact that ultimately the solution to this is what we call a much more systemic model of hr. For those of you that have been reading about the four R model, recruit, retain, reskill redesign, which is this model now is beginning to become very popular amongst our CHROs. We have to think about all of these things going together. So if you're starting a skills project or you're trying to deal with skills and you're sitting around as an HR tech or an L and d team trying to figure out what they should be, you really have to look at all these roles together because the people that know the most about the skills and the job design issues actually are recruiters. Because what happens to recruiters is a hiring manager will create a job title, they'll throw everything but this kitchen sink into the description and skills needed.
Speaker 1 00:04:42 They'll throw it out to the recruiter and the recruiter will come back and say, That person doesn't exist, we can't find them and maybe you have to go back and change this job. And now we have a job design or architecture project going on at the line manager level, by the way, which is where it should be happening. Rethinking the role. And that's really the idea of systemic HR is these COEs like talent acquisition or learning and development or employee experience or whatever they may be, don't exist in isolation. They have to work together. And when the people in those roles feel empowered to push back, then the the company responds more quickly. And for those of you that have been keeping up with the gwi research, we have pretty much discovered that this tight labor market is not going to change. Maybe we'll have some sort of a mini recession here and things will slow down.
Speaker 1 00:05:33 And yes, some of the tech companies in the banks are letting some people go, but there's still far more jobs than there are people and far more new skills than there are skilled humans. So getting the HR function to operate in a systemic way is gonna be a big topic. And we are go going to be really spending a lot of time on this over the next couple of months and going through it in quite detail at our conference next June. The fourth thing I want to talk about is pay. Now, there was a really interesting survey that came out from Mercer this week who does a lot of really interesting surveys. And it really was about the voice of the employee, but ultimately what it was about was pay. And what they found is that in 2022 this year, which is not quite over yet, the number one issue on the minds of employees, and this is many, many thousands of people that took this, is covering monthly expenses.
Speaker 1 00:06:27 11% of people rated that the number one issue, the number two is being able to retire. The third is work life balance. So all these issues we've had about overwork, stress, burnout, psychological health, mental health, they're still there but all of a sudden they just got superseded by money. And that certainly makes sense given what's going on with the inflation in the economy. What that means for you as an HR person is you have to look at the pay process as a much more strategic part of the business. We've done a lot of studies on pay and rewards over the years and we have a new one coming out soon. And what we generally found is that compensation and benefit is one of the most traditional, somewhat old fashioned parts of the company. Once a year there's a review, there's a performance management process, there's some form of forced ranking or forced distribution, pay bans get updated, managers go out and give people raises and that's the end of it.
Speaker 1 00:07:26 And once a year is more or less enough because that's about as much as we can put into it cuz it's so complicated, well that just doesn't work anymore. We have pay equity issues that are being created almost constantly because new people are being hired in in such a high level of pay. We have new laws from the federal government and the state governments on pay transparency. So you can't really just pretend like you don't have a pay band and just pay somebody what they're worth. You have to post that pay. Now employees are literally underperforming at work because they can't afford their gas or their car or their commute, especially in hourly workers. So companies like SoFi are now offering all sorts of amazing benefits programs that you can do to supplement pay, create savings accounts for employees, pay down their student loans, or forgive their student loans.
Speaker 1 00:08:17 And given the fact that most companies are still pretty profitable, we can raise pay without being overly concerned about the impact on the bottom line. Now we're going through sort of a slowdown. So CFOs aren't gonna be thrilled about this, but my argument to you is if you really think of human beings as an investment and not an expense, as I talk about in my book, getting a couple more percentage to pay isn't gonna be a bad idea. One of the most interesting reports that just came out today, I just poured through it, is Microsoft's poured on diversity and inclusion. It's one of the best diversity and inclusion studies I have ever read by an employer. Kathleen Hogan deserves a lot of credit for putting, putting this together. It's a very, very detailed analysis of pay equity, diversity, inclusion, and all sorts of other factors at Microsoft.
Speaker 1 00:09:01 And if you read through it, there's a chapter in their own pay. And you see Microsoft did is they studied pay equity across all the roles in Microsoft and they are giving women a raise and they are giving other groups a raise just because the equity wasn't right, wasn't correct. So that is a process that is becoming more and more of an institutionalized process in hr. We have an amazing series of case studies and research on pay equity that are coming out. Cathy's just finishing that given what the Mercer research just pointed out. This is a strategic issue. Now, this isn't something that just happens once a year and then you move on. This is a more regularly revisited problem that companies have to deal with, at least for the next couple of quarters until we get into some sort of a more normal environment.
Speaker 1 00:09:48 The next thing I want to touch on that came up with a lot of the meetings this week is employee experience. Now, employee experiences turned into this massive complicated topic. And for those of you that have read our study, we have developed a pretty good diagnostic for you to evaluate your level of maturity in different areas of employee experience. And if you would like to take that diagnostic, we are happy to work with you to do that. It's a very powerful tool. We just did a diagnostic for a very large global company and the C level executives were shocked at how inconsistent the employee experience was around the company. And I think most organizations find that there are groups that are doing a great job of taking care of employees and there are groups that aren't. And unless you have a very, very sophisticated survey process along the tunes of a Microsoft, you probably don't know that.
Speaker 1 00:10:34 So our assessment will help you. But basically what comes out of the ex activity that's going on right now is hybrid work, of course is a big part of this. And not forcing people to go back to the office in an undo rigid way. Pay is part of employee experience, obviously wellbeing and work-life balance and also job design. You know the fourth R is redesign. And as we talked about in the healthcare research we did a couple of months ago and the new research on banking by the way, is gonna really blow your mind. We have to build a muscle in constantly revisiting roles and jobs and job descriptions in the company, not in HR in the company. And great companies who will perform really well are constantly looking at jobs as work, not jobs. In fact, this is an entire chapter in my book, Irresistible Work, Not Jobs.
Speaker 1 00:11:26 If you're running a team or leading a team or leading a project and the project's moving along and you realize you're missing some skills or somebody's overworked or somebody's underworked, it's really up to you as a team to decide who's gonna do what and what skills are we missing. You can't wait for the HR department to do a massive reorg to do that. Now of course the artifacts of the job architecture get in the way of that, but that gets to the issue of employee experience. If the employee experience is lacking in some part of the company because people are being overworked or undertrained, it is really incumbent on you to empower that organization with your help as a consultant to address those issues. One of the companies we just had on the phone this morning basically was told by their talent acquisition group, We are not going to go out and recruit the people you want.
Speaker 1 00:12:15 It's too expensive. They're asking for skills that are too hard to find and we don't have, and you don't have the budget to hire them. However, we think some of the skills you need are in the call centers because the call center folks know our business really, really well. Many of them are modestly paid and they wanna work on some of these more high value roles. So we're gonna help you find people in the call centers to fill these roles that's job redesign in real time. And so that fourth R, that sounds a little bit like an academic PhD process, is actually much more attainable than you realize. And so going into the fall here in the winter when we're gonna have little more pressure on financials, make sure you're flexing that muscle and talking about it amongst your team. Next topic I wanna talk about is the upcoming launch of our banking study.
Speaker 1 00:13:05 So I've told a lot of you in the past that we launched industry vertical research about a year and a half ago. And through our massive database with the help of eightfold and others, we have been really learning a lot about the talent side of different industries. We, we've learned a tremendous amount about healthcare, which we'll share with you. For those of you that are members, we've just completed a similar study of the consumer and retail banking business, which is a fascinatingly interesting business. Stella is going to be introducing that in a webinar in a week or so. So please come to that. The detailed research will be available to our members. But essentially what we've discovered is that once again, skills look like they're the problem, but they're really not. So if you look at the banking industry and what's been going on, of course banks are being disrupted by FinTech companies and payment companies and various technology companies that provide different forms of banking and savings in different modes, but they're regulated and they have a very, very important role in the economy and they're not gonna go away.
Speaker 1 00:14:05 So they're doing everything. They can take their legacy systems, which are stove pipe, mainframe systems, not integrated into single data platforms and redesign the end and redesign the front end around all sorts of consumer-like banking experiences. And what we found is that amongst the two or 300 companies we studied, the ones that are doing this well, don't just have better tech skills. They have better tech cultures, they have better organization models, they have better go to market models. They are designing their organizations around advanced technology, iterative design, design thinking, agile skills development, continuous development and so forth. And you're gonna really learn a lot from this research. Believe me, there's a lot to learn here that applies to every industry. And so this belief that we're just gonna upskill everybody and everything's gonna get better is not at all true because in banking, the people you're trying to upskill are in very, very high demand and they won't work for you if they don't like the work, like the company, like the team, like the project.
Speaker 1 00:15:10 So the problem in banking isn't just skilling and developing skills, it's designing organizational structures and reward systems and projects and agile teams around these new technology platforms that are needed. And in many ways, as several of the trailblazer banks have told us, they're really not banks. They're really technology companies that offer financial services. And that's a completely different idea from the old Bank of America mainframes I used to sell when I was at ibm, when we basically looked at it as a transaction processing big, fantastic, high value, high performing transaction processing system. We're in a whole new era here and it's all about organization and culture and rewards and skills and mobility and management and leadership. So stay tuned for that. We're really excited about it. We are really getting our arms wrapped around these industry projects and the banking one's gonna be as interesting and as educational, if not more than the one we did on healthcare.
Speaker 1 00:16:10 Final thing on my book, we launched it this week. I was very excited to see it went into near bestseller status on all sorts of lists. And let me just tell you from the feedback I've gotten and having reread it multiple times, you will learn a lot from this book. This book does summarize a decade of my experience talking to many, many of you and many, many other companies looking at research and really stitching together these seven big ideas that define success and what we call the irresistible company in the future. So if you haven't picked it up yet, please get it. We have a 99 cents special going on in Amazon right now for the Kindle version for a couple of days. So you can get it for virtually nothing. If you want to use the Kindle version, the print version is absolutely beautiful and you know, I'm just really proud of it.
Speaker 1 00:16:59 So I hope you get a chance to look at it. We are really excited. Next week I'm at the Gloat Conference in Florida. We're gonna be talking about a brand new idea down there in organizational agility and organizational adaptability. I won't spill the beans yet. And then for the rest of the year, we're gonna be spending a lot of time in Europe doing some interesting things over there. As many of you may know, I'm going to meet the Queen of the Netherlands to talk about the future of work with a bunch of policy makers. And we have a series of meetings with Workday in Stockholm, in the UK and in the Netherlands with some of our favorite clients. And we are just here to help you. So if you wanna join one of our big reset groups, please let us know. Look for the conference next June 20th to 22nd.
Speaker 1 00:17:46 It's now linked on their website. You can at least bookmark the date. I'm not sure if you can buy a ticket yet, but you will be able to pretty soon. And please keep sending your ideas and needs and interesting findings to us. We're really excited to hear about what you're working on and you gotta ignore the politics and the economy and just keep doing your job because we're still all doing amazing things for our employees, for our workers, for our companies, for ourselves. And uh, even though the world feels a little bit broken at the moment, if you look at the war or the inflation, it will get better. I do believe in the unquenchable power of the human spirit. I see it every single day of my life and I encourage you to feel the same way. Thank you very much and let's keep in touch. Talk to you next week.
