Alexandra Levit's Water Cooler Wisdom

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.

The Evolution of Recruiting from 2009-2019

In 2008, I published a book with ATD Press called Success for Hire. Since then, I’ve followed the field closely and for this article, wanted to consider some of the major recruiting changes that have taken place over the last decade.

The “Black Hole of HR” is No More

When I entered this field, I advised candidates never to blindly submit a resume to a job board or an applicant tracking system (ATS). At the time, doing so was often a guarantee that no human eyes would ever rest on your materials. Today, however, ATS are far more sophisticated in sorting and funneling resumes to the appropriate decision-makers, and whether the news is good or not, candidates are more likely to hear it. And, the job boards that still exist are no longer “boards” persay, but rather matching platforms offering a suite of helpful services to both job seekers and recruiters find one another.

Social Facilitates Passive Recruitment

Remember the days when recruitment processes happened in a very specific order – employer posts job, candidates apply, employer decides who to interview?  The rise of social media, especially sites like LinkedIn, has enabled employers and candidates to engage in a mutual selection process that often begins with the recruiter scoping out the skillsets and recommendations of and reaching out to people who aren’t looking for work. Passive candidates are also more likely to be spotted by recruiters via their participation in online communities, hosted events, and skills showcases.

Artificially Intelligent Software Mitigates Bias

Unconscious bias has always tarnished recruitment efforts. While most employers didn’t mean to discriminate against a candidate because of their gender, race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation, this often happened at the subconscious level. Now, though, some intelligent software programs remove resume details – such as names, photos, and education – that might lead to biased assessments. Others help recruiters word job descriptions in a certain way, and combat interview selection bias via structured conversational prompts and real-time video assessments of interviewer speech and body language.

The Total Employee Experience Starts with Candidates

Once, employers held all the cards and had all the power. If your company had a website or was in the news, you were golden. But in 2019, recruiters must work hard to convince top talent to invest their careers with an organization. To start, organizations must have a consistent, reputable, transparent, and compelling employer brand, and they then must showcase that brand through a carefully orchestrated hiring process that makes individual candidates feel respected, valued, and cared for. And – that process must transition into preboarding and onboarding experiences that make new hires feel good about their decisions prepare them to contribute right away.

If you’re interested in recruitment and didn’t catch last week’s webinar with SilkRoad client Sonepar, grab the replay here and let us know what you think!

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.

The Forgotten Transitions: New Managers, New Responsibilities

In an ideal world, every employee would be solidly prepared for a transition involving a promotion or new roles and responsibilities. And yet so often, we leave this to chance. We hope that the person in charge will make sure the employee has all of the right information, tools, and support to perform the new job effectively.

Unfortunately, this often doesn’t happen. Employees are expected to figure it out, and many get overwhelmed, burned out, and demotivated in the process. Exacerbating the problem is the fact that – due to baby boomer retirement and other workforce demographic shifts – rising millennial leaders are being promoted an average of 10 years earlier than prior generations and have a steeper learning curve as a result.

Fortunately, providing a high tech, high touch experience for new managers and others transitioning to new roles and responsibilities can be a relatively seamless extension to your existing strategic onboarding activities.  Here are a few things to keep in mind.

Provide relevant, on-demand learning content in a variety of formats

Whether you’ve created online courses in short or long format or have curated resources from other places, use your HRMS to offer employees their choice of training, being as flexible as you can regarding how and where they master the necessary information. Outline essential competencies, track training completion and skill acquisition, and suggest next steps.

Match employees with those already doing their new jobs

Your HMIS is a great place to pair newbies with seasoned managers or those performing especially well in a job function. Both formal and informal mentorship is useful in helping transitioning employees see a clear path forward and feel comfortable, supported, and confident in their new roles.

Document expectations and goals

Employees with new roles and responsibilities should understand exactly what they need to accomplish in the context of the larger organization, when specific goals must be achieved, how performance will be measured, and how other people (managers, reports, colleagues, etc.) will be involved. These details, highly customized to each new role, should be proactively communicated and reinforced.

Schedule and execute more frequent check-ins to accommodate assimilation

Managers of transitioning employees should be prompted to pay extra attention to those ramping up in a new position. This might include weekly in-person or video discussions that address both the personal and professional demands of the new job. Topics might include time management, cross-departmental rapport building, and leader-facing communication.

Demonstrate psychological comprehension

While there’s no substitute for a leader taking a new manager to lunch with inquiring after her well-being, software can go a long way in illustrating that your organization understands the obstacles and pressures of a new role and wants to be a partner in alleviating them.  For instance, an embedded app that serves up a motivational “quote of the day” could set an important tone for an employee’s new journey.

Did you miss last week’s webinar on managing effective transitions? Catch the replay here and let us know what you think!

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!

 

A Reskilling Plan Has Become Essential

Back when I graduated from college, one was expected to leave school with nearly all the basic skills needed to succeed in a career. Maybe your employer did a more comprehensive orientation, maybe it provided access to the occasional professional development training course, and maybe you picked up a few things passively while engaging in job responsibilities or talking with your boss or mentor. But overall, you didn’t have to go too far out of your way to learn the skills or competencies you’d need to be successful.

Today, we live in a different world. Regardless of the industry, organizations and markets are evolving quickly. The way we do things one day might not work the next. There’s no such thing as a long-term strategy. Rather, every plan must be revisited – and goals adjusted – annually to ensure they’re still relevant and applicable. And this means that individuals must keep up and master new areas for which employers are willing to pay for expertise. 

Skills Gaps Are Everywhere

It’s probably not a surprise that according to research I conducted with DeVry University’s Career Advisory Board in 2017, most managers feel that employees generally lack soft skills. At all three levels of employment – entry-level, mid-level and senior-level – managers cited soft skills and traits like integrity, problem-solving, interpersonal ability and adaptability as essential but not nearly common enough in the employee population.

Here’s where it gets interesting, though. In a follow-up study last year, we asked 500 hiring managers about the skills human employees need in a world with greater machine participation. That’s when we discovered the desire for greater applied technical skills, or the ability to understand the technology available to do run an organization or do a job more productively. Of our respondents, 75 percent said employees should know how to use technology to inform and drive business decisions, while 84 percent claimed employees who know how to use the right technology tools in their fields are more effective.

For the rest of the piece, head over to the SilkRoad blog.

Humanity Works Book Tour: Glimpses of the Future

One of the highlights of the last year was my #humanityworks tour in the UK, from which these six videos resulted. Check them out for short and sweet advice on what's to come in the workforce of 2030 and beyond.

Episode 1: Don't Worry about AI Stealing Your Job, Worry about Your Lack of Skills

Episode 2: Why You Should Develop Your Interpersonal Sensitivity Skills

Episode 3: Technology Will Create New Jobs

Episode 4: Will Technology Develop Consciousness?

Episode 5: Workplace Agility: The Crucial Skill for Your Career

Episode 6: 3 Important Technologies for HR and L&D

 

Supply Chain Strategies for Smaller Businesses

Supply chain management refers to overseeing the processes that transform a raw material into a final product and ensuring that goods and services proceed smoothly from initial manufacturing to customer delivery. Effective supply chain management involves streamlining the flow in a way that maximizes the organization's bottom line and the end customer's value.

Experts believe the future of supply chain management will include increased automation, along with a focus on analytics, sustainability practices and complex supplier relationships. And women are leading the charge—according to a 2018 survey conducted by Gartner Research, there has been "sustained strong representation of women in the senior-most ranks of supply chain organizations relative to other functions. We also find more supply chain leaders spearheading their own initiatives to attract, retain and advance women."

To that end, I asked a few women supply chain leaders what they are doing to further their careers as well as the missions of their organizations.

Smart Analytics

Collecting data from a variety of sources and using it to derive relevant insights for the business can have an positive effect on supply chain performance.

Jill Keto, CMO of Easy Metrics, a cloud-based supply chain visibility provider, has moved up in her career by developing tools that help organizations optimize their largest controllable expense—labor. 

“Using big data in warehouse environments to track labor is a strategy that has paid huge dividends," Keto says. “My customers see improved team engagement, 40 percent productivity improvement and 15 percent labor cost reduction simply by using data to capture the labor costs of every action.

“In a tight job market where labor demand is outpacing supply," she continues, "and where customer requirements like same-day shipping and small orders are the norm, distribution operators are running into challenges that didn't exist before."

Keto leverages the interplay of the Internet of Things, machine learning and big data to bring a degree of calm to the chaos.

Sustainability Focus

Before founding her company virtue + vice, which advises fashion brands on impact sourcing and sustainable supply chain management, entrepreneur Melanie DiSalvo worked in supply chain management, product development and production for major fashion brands. 

DiSalvo's intimate experience with the fashion supply chain and global market trends, particularly strategic regional sourcing and operations, provided the know-how to launch her own company.

“My in-depth understanding of how each level of the supply chain works has gotten me ahead," she says. “My time spent living and working overseas in factories and mills was invaluable because it taught me exactly what's possible and what isn't, and shapes how I solve problems for my customers every day. 

"Because I know what goes into making each component of a clothing item, I can come up with environmentally sustainable workarounds that most people would never think to try," she adds.

For more insights, check out the full piece on the AMEX Business site.

When Efficiency Strategies Backfire

Most business owners are after the holy grail of work efficiency. How can we do more with less? How can technology help us take a clunky business process and streamline it? How can flexible scheduling help our productivity instead of damaging it?

These are valid questions, but in our enthusiastic pursuit of answers, we are sometimes overzealous in implementing strategies we think will lead to greater work efficiency.

Let's explore a few!

Automating When You Shouldn't

Many leaders make the mistake of believing that because it's possible to automate something it means that you should.

Rather than indiscriminately automating huge numbers of processes so that you can save on labor costs and increase work efficiency, carefully consider each instance of automation.

Also consider how artificial intelligence and human workers can work together to achieve the best result. In most cases, you will need to have at least a few humans involved to provide oversight and ethical or moral guidance. (We futurists call this “human in the loop.")

Introducing Too Much Software

Admiring shiny new software and other business technologies that promise better work efficiency is normal. But if we bog our employees down with too many programs and apps that don't integrate with one another or are redundant in their functionality, we actually risk a productivity down slide. They could end up spending more time figuring out how to use systems than performing their actual jobs.

When considering a new tool, think through the value it will bring to your existing infrastructure and do a limited pilot to determine employee adoption and usage.

Estimating Numbers Instead of Documenting Them

Most business owners were more fastidious in the days when we worked with manual accounting processes every day. Now, in the name of work efficiency, we estimate numbers like revenue and expenses and don't look at the real amounts as frequently. We often underestimate expenses, which can lead to thinking our business is more profitable than it is.

Fortunately, many business credit cards include expense management tools that keep all business expenses in one place, reliably track and report on all the money funneling out of your business and simplify reconciliation. By tracking expenses on a daily basis, owners can instantly see if sales and spending patterns don't line up, or if expenses in a certain category are running amuck.

For the rest of the article, visit the AMEX Business site.