Talent Edge Weekly - Issue #150

Covers pay equity, using experience maps to develop employees, the L&D component of ESG, mitigating performance management bias, and scaling analytics.

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Welcome to this week’s issue of Talent Edge Weeklythe 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

  • Managers, Are You Prepared to Answer Questions About Pay Equity? | Harvard Business Review | Raises five questions managers and leaders should be prepared to answer for employees and candidates about pay equity.

  • Using Experience Maps to Accelerate Development | The Talent Strategy Group | A newly updated article on how organizations can accelerate employees’ job and career development through experiences.

  • ESG Stories L&D Leaders Should Be Telling to Inform Their Organizations’ ESG Narrative | Gartner | Provides ideas on how Learning and Development (L&D) leaders can inform the talent development component of their organizations’ ESG narrative.

  • 3 Resources for Mitigating Bias in Performance Management | Multiples Sources | Shares a few tactics for how organizations can minimize performance management bias as they prepare for year-end evaluations.

  • How to Scale Advanced Analytics in Corporate Functions—Including HR | McKinsey | Provides insight into the types of analytics being used by different corporate functions, including HR. A bonus article is provided to help assess an HR organization’s people analytics maturity.

THIS WEEK'S EDGE

Recent reports on employee preferences show that compensation and the financial components of the employee value proposition are becoming more important. The October 2022 LinkedIn Talent Trends report indicates that job candidates now consider compensation and benefits their top priority when evaluating job opportunities. Mercer’s 2022 Inside Employees’ Minds Studyfound that workers’ financial concerns increased significantly —with covering monthly expenses now in the top spot from #9 last year, and the ability to retire jumped to #2, and personal debt is now in the top 10. Simultaneously, pay transparency laws will make it easier for job candidates and workers to broach the sensitive topic of pay and compensation with employers. And given that a new Gartner survey shows that only 32% of employees believe their pay is fair, organizations will need to prepare to answer questions about pay. This article provides five of those questions—a few of which include: 1) How is my pay determined? 2) Why don’t I make as much money as my colleagues? 3) Why are recent hires making more money than me? Total rewards leaders can help prepare managers to answer these and other pay equity questions.

As I mentioned in a LinkedIn post last week, learning from experience is one of the most impactful ways to accelerate employee development. But since not all experiences provide the same development impact, it raises the question: what makes a high-impact experiential on-the-job learning? In that same post, I referenced a new Gartner article covering six high-impact experiential development attributes (Table 2 on page 16). One attribute mentioned is change and adversity (e.g., leaders should be involved in turbulent situations to build flexibility and adaptiveness). As organizations unlock the potential of experiences as an enabler of development, this newly updated article by Marc Effron provides additional guidance. It shares how organizations can accelerate job and career development through experience mapsdefining the specific experiences needed to excel in a role or function. Experience maps describe the outcomes—not just the skills — that someone must demonstrate to prove competence (i.e., create a business strategy for a $50M unit; bring a factory to ISO9001 standards). The article includes a few examples of experience maps, including one for HR. Both references (Gartner and The Talent Strategy Group) provide valuable insights for accelerating employee development through experiences.

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) are a growing priority for many organizations. As I mentioned in my post covering The Conference Board’s recent report, Telling Your Human Capital Story, developing a compelling human capital strategy and ESG narrative must go beyond providing metrics. It must put the numbers in context and tell a compelling story for various stakeholders. A critical component of that story is providing a picture of an organization’s commitment to talent development. This new Gartner article suggests how Learning and Development (L&D) leaders can inform the talent development component of their organizations’ ESG narrative. One section notes how a talent development narrative in an enterprise ESG report should include: 1) an introduction, often describing the general corporate philosophy and promise concerning talent development, 2)an explanation of how managers are supporting employees holistically with personal and professional growth opportunities, 3) a summary of the current year’s initiatives and how they align with the talent development strategy, 4) any related outcomes and 5) tables containing the key metrics described above. Other ideas are discussed for articulating a comprehensive talent development narrative for ESG.

One aim of effective performance management (PM) is objective and fair performance feedback and evaluations. And while organizations seek to achieve this goal, PM is imperfect and subject to bias. As organizations prepare for year-end performance discussions and evaluations, here are three references for mitigating PM bias. 1) Six Potential Indicators of Proximity Bias in the Workplace | Brian Heger. Given the rise of remote work, it is more likely that proximity bias (PB) can enter performance evaluations. PB happens when one views workers that spend more time in a company-designated office location—or who are in proximity to decision-makers— more favorably than their remote counterparts. Although not a validated measure of PB, this reference includes a few indicators managers can use to self-audit their PB tendencies.2) Deloitte’s Mitigating Bias in PM. This reference provides suggestions for ensuring that PM decisions are rooted in facts and input from various sources. 3) How to Crush Bias in Performance Management | The Talent Strategy Group. One point covered in this resource addresses how well-designed processes (e.g., PM calibration sessions) can help weed out PM bias since firms have more control over the process than they do over the individual behaviors of every single manager. These three resources can be leveraged to help organizations find ways to reduce bias in PM.

This article provides insights into which corporate functions—including HR — are using analytics to make better decisions. It also addresses which factors increase the chances of successfully introducing advanced analytics in corporate functions. As shown in exhibit 2, HR is bringing analytics to bear on issues such as workforce planning, candidate screening, and talent attraction. As HR organizations further evaluate where they are on the people analytics maturity curve, here is a bonus article by Visier that provides a few questions. Sample questions include:1) Do you react to questions from the business and give basic responses about diversity data, time and attendance, and headcount stats? 2) Does your organization do regular reporting on workforce statistics, such as turnover, time to hire, and reward benchmarks? 3) Are you managing and analyzing both business and people data to find correlations, trends, causes, and insight day-to-day to drive value in both HR and the business? 4) Are you integrating systems into your ‘data lake’ and starting to make predictions that are helping to inform the strategy of the whole organization? Both resources can help HR leaders identify opportunities to strengthen their organizations’ people analytics capabilities.

MOST VIEWED RESOURCE FROM LAST WEEK

A one-page PDF that includes 5 resources from Deloitte on various aspects of skills-based talent practices. A few topics covered across the resources include: a) the talent practices in which organizations are mainly integrating skills, b) suggestions for how firms can organize work beyond the constraints of the traditional job and integrate with more effective workforce planning, and c) ideas on how organizations can move towards skills-based compensation and reward structures, to name a few.

CHRO HIRE OF THE WEEK

This past week,25 new Chief Human Resources Officer announcements were posted on CHROs on the Go a subscription that provides the easiest way to stay informed about CHRO hires, promotions, and resignations.

This week’s CHRO highlight is:

  • Procter & Gamble (CINCINNATI, OHIO) [NYSE: PG] announced the promotion of Bala Purushothaman as the Company’s CHRO, effective Jan. 1, 2023. Bala will take over the role from Tracey Grabowski. Bala was most recently the SVP of HR, Global Total Rewards, Employee & Labor Relations, and Corporate Service for P&G.

To learn how to gain access to all 25 detailed Chief Human Resources Officer announcements from this past week and +1700 archived announcements, visit CHROs on the Go .

 If you are already a member of CHROs on the Go, you can log in to access all announcements and site functionality.

TWEET OF THE WEEK

BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS

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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.