Alexandra Levit's Water Cooler Wisdom

3 Innovative Business Trends for 2020

Remember when the year 2020 seemed incredibly far away? Sure enough, if we'd read about this year's new business trends in the late '90s, we might have thought they were pretty futuristic.

A few developments—including the artificially intelligent voice economy, democratized IT and enhanced social video—became reality in the last few years and form the basis of future business trends in 2020 and beyond. 

AI-Powered Voice Economy

Proactive voice response systems have long been a part of customer service. A proactive response from a machine prompts a human to ask a question. Then the machine answers and then asks a follow-up question.

For example, a customer might call a drugstore to order a prescription refill. The machine would offer the customer options; the customer could choose one, such as “Do I have a refill available?" and the machine could respond “Yes, there is one refill available. Can I fill the prescription for you?"

Phone-based customer service “robots" were once clunky and fussy, but the technology behind them is rapidly advancing. This progress is mostly due to improvements in natural language processing (NLP), or a machine's ability to process human speech patterns.

Artificially intelligent voice-based assistants like Alexa and Siri are taking off because if you think about it, it's much easier for humans to communicate with digital devices and software by voice than by typing onto a screen. Your assistant sits quietly in the background until you ask for its help, and thanks to NLP, it can respond to you far more accurately than in the past.

For the rest of the innovations, head over to the AMEX Business site.

How to Spot the 5 Subtle Forms of Workplace Bias

I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to be a tall, white man.

While I am Caucasian, I’m not tall or male. And because depending on who you ask, between 70-80 percent of leaders have all three attributes, I’m wondering just how much my lack of two of them has held me back.

When I talked, off the record, to a gender bias researcher at a prestigious U.S. university, she informed me that I should not take my success for granted. Apparently, being a short woman in Corporate America means I must be twice as smart, twice as competent, and twice as hardworking.

Most clients wouldn’t tell me that outright as they don’t understand it to be true. It’s not like people readily believe that tall, white men naturally make better leaders. And that’s the thing about unconscious bias – it’s an automatic attitude or perception about a person based on a single attribute like gender, ethnicity, race, or sexual orientation that we are unaware we have and act upon. Unconscious bias is almost as old as humans, as our ancestors developed it to quickly categorize threats in a hostile environment.

In other words, we don’t mean to discriminate, but we can’t help it.

The good news is, we’re getting better at spotting subtle bias at work, as well as the business process improvement techniques and strategies that can root it out before it does too much damage to your culture. Let’s examine a few places bias at work will commonly show up, now or in the near future.

Resume Filters

We often don’t realize it, but we don’t review resumes and profiles on merit alone. When unconscious bias creeps in, we can negatively assess a candidate based on their name, photo, or educational institution. Therefore, using software to blind your applicants’ resumes, profiles, and sample interview tasks is the first element of your first business improvement plan. Full candidate details should not be revealed until your recruiters or hiring managers have had an opportunity to get to know them as an individual.

Unstructured Interviews

Unstructured interviews are not a solid predictor of employee performance for many reasons, but one is surely the subtle bias that results. When we chat informally with candidates, the conversation may proceed in a direction that takes away from the candidate’s relevant attributes. Your business process improvement plan should combat selection bias by including a new interview approach that asks every candidate the same questions, in the same order, according to the same evaluation criteria. You might also consider using a video-based chatbot assessment of interviewer speech and body language to check for potential bias there.

Female Notetakers

Do you have a meeting methodology in place? If so, use business process improvement methodology to mitigate the effects of unconscious bias. Recognize that in meetings, women tend to be asked to take notes more often than men and are more frequently the victims of crosstalk and credit stealing (men may speak over them or coop their ideas). Leaders must make a concerted effort to ensure that female participant contributions are respected and acknowledged equally, and this may be involve changing the way your meetings are structured.

Questionable Writing

Business communication is becoming more informal, and from a subtle bias perspective, that makes it increasingly dangerous because we are more prone to be lazy about what we say and how we say it. Thankfully, artificial intelligence can help you make business process improvements here. Certain document creation software, for instance, provides guidance 

on potentially sensitive or offensive language (i.e. “May the best man win”) contained in a presentation, and others scans text for inappropriately gendered pronouns as part of a general grammar check.

Homogeneous Teams

When we only have contact with our ingroup – or other people who share our demographic and/or psychographic characteristics – we perpetuate unconscious bias. Strategize business process improvements that will diversify your team both traditionally (gender, ethnicity, race, etc.) and cognitively (point of view, background, etc.). This might mean recruiting teammates from new sources and devising ways to bring forward talented individuals who might not be the perfect candidates on paper.

Even a few business process improvements in this area will help you head off subtle biases at the pass. And, if you question your need to make them, spend a few minutes at the Project Implicit website. Designed by Harvard, University of Virginia, and University of Washington psychologists, the site administers Implicit Association Tests to measure personal bias. While you may be unpleasantly surprised at what you uncover, it may well serve as the motivation you need to address this critical issue.

 

Emphasizing Cognitive Diversity: Can It Be Taught?

A few years ago, I worked with The Billie Jean King Leadership Initiative (BJKLI) and The Deloitte University Leadership Center for Inclusion on a survey that sought to provide modern context around the notions of diversity and inclusion. Among other things, the research asked nearly 4,000 global professionals of all levels, ages, genders, races, ethnicities, and sexual orientations how they define these terms.

It might not come as a surprise that most baby boomers and even X-ers (read: the chronologically older people in the workforce today) think representation and assimilation when they consider the notion of diversity. Millennials tend to view it a bit differently, though. For them, workplace diversity and inclusion go beyond ensuring that people of all genders, races, ethnicities, religions, and sexual orientations are welcomed into the organization.

While this form of diversity is obviously important and essential, millennials also value the respect and consideration given to employees as individuals with different backgrounds and perspectives. This is referred to as cognitive diversity, and it means that employees can come to work and share their ideas, philosophies, and contributions as their complete selves – without fear of negative consequences.

Over the last few years, the workplace in general has improved when it comes to fostering cognitive diversity. I think we have the millennials to thank for that, because they now comprise a majority of the global workforce and are entering leadership positions – and disrupting them – and average of ten years earlier than members of prior generations. That being said, it’s not unusual to hear someone like a young, transgender, first generation American raised in a rural environment say they feel misunderstood and ignored in a big city corporation because “apparently I don’t have the background, experience or tenure to be taken seriously.”

Fortunately, though, not only can cognitive diversity be taught, but it can be systematically integrated into an organization’s culture. The first step is to educate baby boomer and Gen X-er leaders about cognitive diversity and its benefits. Once leaders fully understand why it’s good for business to be as inclusive as possible, they can acknowledge the limitations of hierarchies and minimize barriers to communication and engagement.

Rather than making critical decisions in a vacuum, leaders should take care to include voices and votes that are truly representative of the employee population. This is especially important when it comes to innovation, as many of the freshest ideas come from unexpected places. They should establish cross-functional pilot projects or committees that seek to improve business outcomes through diverse collaboration, and finally, they should put online and offline feedback mechanisms in place so all employees feel comfortable and encouraged sharing real-time thoughts.

Of course, if you’re working for a company that hasn’t mastered hiring diverse employees in the first place, you can’t put the cart before the horse. First and foremost, you must continue your work to ensure you have a population from which to solicit cognitively diverse perspectives.

Did you miss our webinar on the next generation of diversity and inclusion? Catch the replay and let us know what you think!

 

2020 Best Practices in Workforce Management

The global workforce today is anything but static. Both HR professionals and individual managers must continuously adjust employment configurations in response to evolving business conditions and increase their applied technology skills – meaning they understand how to leverage available software to manage their workforces more efficiently. At the same time, 21^st century business developments have mandated a focus on a more sophisticated employee experience that provides meaningful interaction for all types of hires at all stages of the employment lifecycle.

Visiting the KronosWorks annual customer conference to promote The Workforce Institute’s new book, “Being Present: A Practical Guide for Transforming the Employee Experience of Your Frontline Workforce,” I dug more deeply into the specific mechanics of the 2020 hourly workforce and devised these considerations for frontline managers.

Administrative Automation

Timekeeping and scheduling are perhaps the most obvious uses of hourly workforce automation. A target software solution should facilitate tracking, managing, and optimizing employee time (including hours worked, absences, employee preferences such as desired location, job type, and hours, and skills/certifications needed to do the job). Similarly, a scheduling component can improve your ability to forecast accurately, distribute your labor more effectively and minimize mistakes due to human error. Administrative automation can streamline your payroll process to ensure timely and accurate payments, file the appropriate taxes, and minimize compliance risk. It can also simplify your compensation management for greater visibility and governance and help you keep up with Affordable Care Act (ACA) compliance with enhanced benefits administration, reporting, and auditing.

Advanced Analytics and Machine Learning

When analytics capability is organically present in your workforce management solution (as opposed to layering a different solution on top of it), it’s easier and faster to collect consistent and reliable data, create insightful visualizations, and measure progress on goals that matter to the business. And, workforce management software is getting smarter all the time, examining your data through a variety of lenses and making original and proactive recommendations based on what’s happening right now as well as your employees’ preferences.

Systems Integration

While there are certainly enough HR technology vendors to cobble together any sort of configuration you want, I feel it’s essential that a workforce management software integrate closely with all the data sources that feed into and influence it. Therefore, it makes sense that the best solution is housed in the cloud, able to plug into your existing technology infrastructure and use open APIs to extend platform functionality.

Employee Experience Management

Speaking of integrated functionality, your employees will have a more intuitive, less confusing experience if your solution facilitates a consistent process of engagement through recruitment, onboarding, workforce management, learning, payroll, and performance. The talent acquisition piece, including application and candidate relationship management, interview scheduling, offer delivery and negotiation, and pre-start communication is particularly critical since it’s potential hires first glimpse into the tech-savviness of your organization and can absolutely mean the difference between securing the best talent and losing it to a competitor.

Managing a frontline workforce in the 2020s may be a challenge unlike any you’ve faced before, but the good news is, the right tools can reduce the complexity, reduce time to productivity, and help retain the strongest workers longer.

Questions To Ask Before You Jump on the Tech Bandwagon

Rapidly advancing technology offers a terrific opportunity to take your business to the next level and infuse your company's culture with an innovative spirit.

Every year unveils new software and apps with the potential to simplify processes, streamline workflow, improve communication and increase employee and partner productivity and efficiency. However, just because a solution is new and shiny, doesn't mean that it's right for your organization and culture—at this point in time or ever.

As a business owner, you don't want to introduce too many programs that don't integrate with existing systems, don't map explicitly to your strategic and operational goals or don't make sense cost-wise. You also don't want to jump on the tech bandwagon so many times that you overwhelm your employees and run into user adoption problems.

Purchasing software for your business should include a comprehensive analysis of your needs, as assessed by your fellow leaders, partners and vendors. Establish a concrete objective, detail the projects or tasks the new solution will address and determine your end users. Then, talk with stakeholders to land on an execution plan, deciding whether you'll go with a single department pilot, a phased approach or a full-scale, simultaneous rollout.

Your final step involves asking any one of the following provider-related questions before buying software.

1. What functionality does the software provide?

Study the profile of the employee who will use the software. View experiential demos to ensure the technology aligns with how you run your business and how your stakeholders prefer to engage.

Make sure the software is scalable in case your company grows quickly, and that it has strong reporting and measurement capabilities to provide you with the data you need in a useful format.

2. What are the implementation specifics?

Speak to your prospective vendor about whether your existing IT infrastructure can support the new solution. Does the new software run on compatible platforms, and if not, how difficult will it be to integrate systems with minimal downtime?

For more recommendations, head over to the AMEX Business site. 

Keep Your Business Safe During a Natural Disaster

If it seems like natural disasters are increasing, it's not your imagination. And those disasters have a very real effect on company's bottom lines.

According to a 2018 report by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, direct economic losses due to climate-related disasters have increased 150 percent over the last 20 years. During the period of 1998-2017, disaster-hit countries reported direct economic losses of $2,908 billion. The United States was hit hardest at $945 billion. As you might expect, floods and storms are the two most frequently occurring disasters.

Given these numbers, every business owner today may want to consider proactively developing disaster strategies to protect human and material assets and maintain a healthy amount of working capital should trouble strike. 

Let's examine four solutions for natural disasters you might employ to keep your business safe and increase your peace of mind.

1. Practice strong working capital management.

Working capital is the difference between a company's current assets like cash, unpaid bills and inventories of raw materials and finished goods, and its current liabilities such as payroll and taxes. Business owners use working capital to measure operational efficiency and overall financial health. 

 

Just as smart business owners build working capital reserves during anticipated slow periods, you should develop a similar strategy to cope with natural disaster-related disruption. 

Ensuring that you have enough cash and liquid assets on hand to cover sudden expenses and/or loss of income can mean the difference between your business' survival and its demise.

2. Take a second look at your insurance.

Now is the time to review your insurance policies and assess how well (or not) you'd be covered in a natural disaster. 

Sometimes it isn't intuitive. Using the hurricane scenario as an example, your run-of-the-mill business policy might cover losses from broken glass that's the result of high winds and flooding that's the result of rain. But if you want to protect your location from flooding that comes from groundwater, you may require supplementary flood insurance. 

If you live in an area prone to hurricanes, you can expect to pay higher premiums, and some carriers may not insure you at all. For more detailed information on what's generally covered and where, review the Insurance Information Institute's website.

For the rest of the piece, head over to the AMEX Business site. 

Your Workforce: Global Demographic Changes Can't Be Denied

When people talk about workforce disruptions, they’re usually referring to technology advances or evolving work structures and environments. Rarely does anyone mention demographic changes, even though these are primary drivers of who is available to work and where. Let’s look at the big ones impacting the future of work that are sweeping the globe.

The Rise and Fall of Fertility

In many western nations, the birthrate has dropped below replacement levels, meaning that each pair of adults will have fewer than two children, causing the native-born population to decrease. While population may not decrease in industrialized countries due to immigration, the resulting workforce may have different work preferences and abilities – potentially resulting in geographic skills mismatches (i.e. organizations in a given area require skills that are not readily available in their location). At the same time, fertility rates continue to increase in countries like China and India, leading these developing nations to become the leading exporters of skilled talent working in the professional gig economy by the mid-21^st century.

Boomers Exit Stage Right

The baby boomers, born roughly 1946-63, have taken longer than expected to retire from their traditional, full-time occupations. Two factors are at play here. First, many boomers lost savings in the recession and needed to work more years to support a much longer lifespan. Second, because they are healthy, many want to continue to contribute to the workforce. Rather than allowing this immense amount of institutional knowledge circle the drain, organizations would be smart to leverage boomers in part-time mentoring and consulting roles.

For more, visit the SilkRoad blog.

Talent Assembly as Recruitment 2.0

For most of recruiting’s history, in some ways all jobs were created equal. If your organization needed a human worker, you solicited qualified candidates to work full-time, onsite at your location, with the expectation that they’d be there for the foreseeable future.

Traditional employees still exist, of course. But due to a combination of demographic shifts and technology advances, the recruitment role has become exponentially more complicated.

I’ve talked about the rise of the gig economy for a while, but new surveys keep supporting its growth. For instance, a 2018 NPR study found 1 in 5 jobs in America is held by a contract worker and predicted that within a decade, contractors and freelancers will make up half of the workforce. 

This shift means that instead of relying on traditional employees to perform most organizational responsibilities, most companies are moving to a hybrid approach that includes temporary, contract, and virtual employees, as well as consultants and subject matter experts. And recruiters, still housed mostly within the HR function, are being called upon to quickly construct teams in response to immediate business priorities.

Rapid talent assembly, which fits perfectly into the agile operations model embraced by many forward-thinking organizations, has many benefits. You can source talent when and where you need it, and it doesn’t matter that the best person for the job doesn’t live near your New York headquarters. When a project is finished, you don’t have to continue paying the employee. You don’t need a crystal ball requiring next year’s staffing requirements, and you don’t have to spend your profits on unnecessary overhead and benefits.

But how do you do talent assembly exactly? In my new book about the future of work, Humanity Works, I discuss an example of a network set up by an individual organization for the express purpose of talent assembly. The Washington Post Talent Network, which is part social network and part job board, was designed to give Post editors an easy way to solicit and hire external writers for blogs, breaking news, and long features across a variety of departments.

The system includes freelancer profiles, detailing professional experience and including work samples; story pitching, allowing freelancers to tailor ideas for specific departments and editorial initiatives; assignment posting, letting freelancers consider stories the Post would like to pursue; and location tracking, ensuring editors know freelancers’ primary work locations for quick deployment of breaking news.

If you don’t have or can’t build a network of your own, several excellent sites can help with your sourcing, including:

Freelancer.com: After acquiring vWorker and Scriptlance, this is the world’s biggest global outsourcing resource.

Upwork: When oDesk.com and Elance.com merged, Upwork was the result. Like Freelancer.com, the employer support and service are terrific and the site takes only a small cut for matched projects.

Guru.com: Going beyond the more typical freelancer occupations, this site matches subject matter experts with employers.

TopTal: If you need skilled software development talent, TopTal employs a rigorous screening system and matches the top 3 percent of tech applicants with short and long-term employer projects.

If you’d like to learn more about why recruitment is such a critical part of your overall talent strategy, join me and SilkRoad client Sonepar for a free webinar tomorrow, September 17^th at 2PM EST.

How to Prepare for Leadership Disruption

As a futurist and the host of the Workforce 2030 podcast, I’m frequently asked the most important trait leaders need to develop to effectively govern 21^st century workforces. The answer is easy: agility. The business world’s only certainty is that the environment WILL change quickly, and the fastest way to organizational obscurity and failure is to deny that major disruptions are bound to occur and that regular strategy pivots will be essential.  These questions will help leaders navigate a climate in which an approach that worked yesterday is unlikely to work the same way tomorrow.

Is My Organization Agile Enough to Shift Direction Rapidly?

Many companies are bureaucratic and unwieldy, where one must wade through layers of hierarchy before receiving the green light to change a process. As we move toward 2030, the pace of change will demand real-time monitoring of markets and customer demands, as well as infrastructures and mechanisms to drive immediate action when an approved strategy no longer serves.

Have I Customized My Management Style?

We have moved from a workforce of many to a workforce of one. Today’s employees are more diverse than ever. They have different work arrangements, personal priorities, and career aspirations. Leaders must tailor their styles to the individual rather than insisting on a one-size-fits-all approach, and they must be willing to diligently supervise multi-generational, virtual, remote, and contract teams as well as traditional full-time, onsite ones.

For the rest of the article, check out the SilkRoad blog.

Guiding Your Team Through Evolving Work Structures

Whether you’ve been with the same organization or moved around, if you’ve been a manager for a while, you have probably experienced a lot of changes regarding how, where, and when people work. The boundaries for what’s acceptable and what isn’t have shifted dramatically over the last 10 years, and many agree that the waters are growing even murkier.

As we approach 2020, every organization is different with respect to policies on flexwork, technology-facilitated collaboration, virtual teaming, contract hiring, meetings scheduling and logistics, and the like. And because the dos and don’ts frequently evolve, your responsibility as a leader is to ensure that protocol is clear and that your employees can function happily and productively in the context of new structures. Here are a few suggestions for a successful transition.

Understand what the rest of your organization is doing

Before you provide guidance to your team, talk to HR or c-suite leaders about any top-down work structure-related policies, procedures, and resources that already exist and can be tweaked or updated to meet your team’s needs. If another leader is blazing an innovation trail, learn from their experience and aim to take workable arrangements to the next level.

Understand each individual’s unique needs

We now operate in a workforce of one, where every employee governs their career differently. Prior to revising a structure or process (or starting a new one), survey your team members about the most effective ways to get their jobs done with maximum impact and minimum stress, and notice commonalities in the feedback.

Choose pilot over permanent

Complete transitions to new structures gradually and on a small scale. For instance, if you want to move your team from 100 percent in-office to 80 percent, with the option of working from home or another location the remaining 20 percent, start with a three-month trial. Outline rules and expectations upfront and select a metric like productivity to ascertain how well the new protocol is working.

Educate your people on politics

If you’re reading this piece, your team may be on the cutting-edge of 21st century work. This means that your employees could run into snafus with other departments that operate differently. Think through potential complications early, manage perceptions, and ensure that your team can address objections from and continue to build trust with more traditional areas of the business. In other words, don’t let other leaders think your people are lazy or off the grid.

Encourage frequent communication

Any change process must be accompanied by more discussion than you think you need. Schedule group and individual check-ins at least twice a month so that your transition is smooth and hiccup-free as possible, protocols are consistently implemented from one team member to another, employees have an opportunity to provide feedback, and business is running as usual.  

In a business world where every employee’s journey is different, facilitating effective transitions is just as critical to engaging and retaining top talent as more traditional lifecycle focuses like onboarding and performance. Join sponsor SilkRoad and me for a webinar on August 29, 2019 at 2PM EST and come with questions!