Alexandra Levit's Water Cooler Wisdom

Time-Saving Ways to Stay Up to Date on Market Trends

Business success today depends on understanding, in real time, what your customers need and what types of competitive strategies are the most effective. After all, there’s nothing worse than spending precious resources launching a new product or service that ultimately flops in the marketplace.

Fortunately, advancing technology makes it possible to conduct competitive market research more rapidly than in the past. Let’s explore how to conduct a market analysis efficiently, as well as strategies that facilitate quick learning of key market trends.

How to Conduct a Customer Needs Analysis

The first step is getting to know your customers, which we’ll discuss in more detail in the next section. You should use the information and feedback collected to divide your customers into segments. Segments should share a common characteristic (such as age or location) and be large enough to warrant individual marketing attention.

Within each segment, it’s helpful to develop buyer profiles. Thanks to the below information on how to conduct market research, you’ll hopefully have a complete understanding of your target buyer’s needs. Picturing her as a flesh and blood human, you’ll describe her demographics and background, her motivations and challenges, what she spends her life doing, how she communicates with businesses she patronizes and the messages that are most likely to appeal to her.

Your last customer needs analysis step? Connect each target buyer’s needs to a product or service. Call out your benefits, why the target buyer would or would not choose you over a competitor. If there are holes, consider refining your offerings to better address critical customer pain points.

How to Conduct Market Research without Spending Months or Millions

You don’t need to spend a fortune with a prestigious market research firm to gain valuable customer insights. There are a number of low cost, time-efficient ways of examining market trends – many of which are online. One go-to strategy is crowdsourcing. You can use social media or online surveys emailed to your database to collect feedback about what’s working (or not) for your existing customers. Be sure to ask the tough questions, encourage honesty, and reward customers for their participation via coupons, discounts, or gift cards.

In some cases and especially if you are developing a new product to service, you might want to access the larger market. Online services like TYLM (Tap Your Larger Market) and Gutcheck allow you to use targeting criteria like gender and income to ask a series of open and closed questions to millions of pre-qualified individuals. In addition to completed surveys, these tools can capture customer emotions via one-on-one video responses and can analyze and summarize the results so you don’t have to spend time sifting through raw data.

You might also deduce market trends through the use of text analysis software. These tools help business owners gain insights from structured and unstructured text data using natural language processing (or a program’s ability to process human speech patterns). Leveraging data from a variety of sources including public reviews, emails sent to your organization, surveys, and phone transcripts, text analysis software can pull out key language patterns that get to the bottom of customer sentiment. As an example, Thematic gathers customer feedback from your existing data sources and, by distilling common themes, analyzes your best route to keeping customers. Similarly, Chattermill takes unstructured input and translates it into clear actions meant to improve customer experience. And best of all, many steps can be automated!

Of course, your market trends analysis won’t be complete without competitor monitoring. If you’re not sure how to find competitors of a company, searching them out via Google and comparing and contrasting the features and benefits listed on their websites is an excellent place to start. A number of paid tools also help with competitor monitoring, including SEMRush, which provides data about your current online performance as well as that of your competitors and helps you accurately assess the search terms leading to your company and competitors. A second option is SpyFu, which allows you to search for any competitor and download their keywords.

While conducting a customer needs analysis and market trends research doesn’t have to take over your life, it may still be worthwhile to hire an intern or freelancer to employ these strategies on your behalf. While you should probably repeat your analyses annually, you will also get more proficient at minimizing time spent!

Agility Strategies to Keep You Sane

In today’s rapidly changing business world, an agile business is a successful business. But how do you know when the best thing for the project  is to change the plan, and how can you execute and communicate changes without destroying team motivation and momentum? The following strategies may prove helpful.

Any major strategic initiative should involve the upfront establishment of goals, milestones, and success metrics. But, as Tim Berry pointed out in his article for the Small Business Administration website, assumptions should also be considered in your initial planning. “Tracking your results, you want to be able to compare them to what you had planned or expected to see,” he said.

“Get your team members together once a month to review your plan and its results. “Take a hard look at your underlying assumptions and assess whether or not they’ve changed. If they have, there’s no virtue whatsoever in sticking to the plan you built on top of them.”

Berry suggested you look at the difference between what you planned and what actually happened. Some results will be better than planned, and some will be worse. “For each key difference you discover, and all of them combined, use your best judgment to determine whether the differences were caused by false expectations or unexpected good or bad execution.”

“Also, consider external and internal factors that may have influenced the results. Maybe your expectations were too conservative, or too optimistic. In that case, you revise your plan,” he said.

Common sense, remarked Berry, is critical.  Although the project may be close to your heart, you want to remain pragmatic: for example, asking yourself if you were you wrong about the whole thing, or just about the timing? You also want to consider if something else has occurred in the market to change your assumptions.

For more where this came from, check out the full piece on HR.com.

 

 

 

The New and Improved Performance Review

What good is performance feedback if it occurs in isolation? It's just like the saying: "If a tree falls in the woods..."

“This is where it’s important to have a system that enables a company to join up performance feedback simply and in one place, where they can get a quick view of everything,” says Cheryl Johnson, chief human resources offer at payroll company Paylocity.

Paylocity uses a proprietary tool that stores multiple data points related to the performance review cycle. Employees and managers journal regularly to keep quick notes and recap conversations or meetings, and feedback is consolidated in periodic reviews so employees always know where they stand. “We also maintain performance goals and recognition awards within this same system, so when we sit down to look at the holistic perspective of someone’s performance, we have all data points in the employee’s profile,” explains Johnson.

Johnson is quick to point out that certain data points carry more weight than others, so both leaders and employees need to understand how points are weighted in the overall context of performance.

Paylocity’s Johnson has mastered the notion that different departments have different feedback needs. “Many of our departments leverage the journaling function, which makes giving and receiving continuous feedback informal, yet documented in a place where it’s easy to access when the time comes for formal conversations. Some departments have these formal conversations monthly or quarterly; others have them annually. The cadence aligns with when individual departments can collect insights that improve performance,” she says. And over time, Paylocity has adjusted its continuous feedback approach so it doesn’t require overthinking, is less cumbersome, and is more focused on input that matters – as opposed to providing feedback for its own sake.

Have you improved your performance management system recently? What did your changes entail?

Announcing Workforce 2030: A New Podcast About Our Most Critical Workplace Disruptions

Today marks a very special occasion. Alongside my partner of 10 years, SilkRoad Technology, a global leader in strategic onboarding for workforce transformation, I am releasing a new podcast: Workforce 2030. The show features discussions with leading talent management experts, business leaders and industry disrupters on topics about the future of work and how the workforce will transform to meet the needs of 2030 and beyond.

In my tenure as a workforce futurist, I’ve spent a great deal of time on the microphone with fabulous hosts, and now the tables have been turned! The inaugural episode of Workforce 2030 features Robert Dvorak, CEO and President of SilkRoad. Bob was incredibly fun to talk to because he’s been working in the technology field for 30 years and as you can imagine, has witnessed an incredible amount of growth and change.

In our lively, 30-minute conversation, Bob and I addressed what makes a successful brand a successful employer, why establishing strong employee relationships must be a combination of high tech and high touch approaches, why there’s one human managerial skill that’s essential for effective onboarding, and how tech-based systems facilitate assimilation and prevent quit quits. You’ll also hear why Bob and I are against the word “retention” and why it’s now everyone’s job to be in continuous learning mode.

Whether you’re leading an organization or a team, whether you seek the secret sauce for your own successful career in the mid-21^st century workforce, or whether you read Humanity Works and are looking for a bit more guidance, this is the show for you. Our next several guests include Jennifer Fondrevay, Chief Humanity Officer, Day1 Ready™ M&A consultancy, Grant Zallis, CEO, Founder IAR Consulting, and Ravin Jesuthasan, Managing Director, Willis Towers Watson. If you have a question you’d like me to ask these knowledgeable experts, please send it along!

Tune in to the first episode or access the whole series.

The Real Story Behind Stretch Assignments

Stretch opportunities are all the rage in the workplace. But as popular as they are, it’s unclear why some people decide to accept a stretch assignment or role – and others step aside. It’s also unclear why women haven’t benefited from stretches as much as men.

Selena Rezvani is Be Leaderly’s VP of consulting and research and a recognized speaker on women and leadership. She recently led Be Leaderly’s original research on how both genders decide if they are ready for a stretch, and how they make that decision. The report also explores how employers can create a workplace that supports employees who step out of their comfort zones. Based on a survey of 1,549 U.S.- based professionals, the research uncovered the following:

• Men (48%) and women (52%) are equally interested in ultimately advancing into senior vice president or C-suite roles.
• However, the largest portion of women (45%) don’t feel their employers make it easy to gauge if they are ready for a promotion, while the largest portion of men (40%) think their employers help them know whether they are prepared to advance.
• Women are less engaged in and passionate (67%) about their jobs than men (77%), another possible explanation for why fewer women take on stretch opportunities. A strong correlation exists between employees who feel engaged and passionate about their work and those who perceive that their employer makes it easy to assess their readiness to advance.
• In order to apply for a job, both women and men feel that they need to meet, on average, 75% of the qualifications for the role – a surprising difference from accepted thinking about gender attitudes toward the qualifications people feel they need to try for a new position.
• Women may hold back from taking stretches because when assessing how ready they are for a new job, they are less likely than men to overestimate or “round up” their skills, and more likely to underestimate or “round down” what they know or can do. (73% of women disagree that they round up their skills while 60% of men disagree).
• For both men and women, the top criteria for deciding whether to take a stretch assignment are having the influence to create a positive outcome (40% women/43% men), and getting an assignment that lines up with their career goals (33% women/33% men). Both genders say office politics is the biggest practical challenge to taking a stretch assignment (38% women/33% men), with lack of time a close second (34% women, 31% men).
• Money matters. Men are 3.5 times more likely than women to cite pay as an important factor in evaluating the appeal of a new assignment, job or level.

So what do we make of this? Well, if the workplace is being disrupted by sweeping, large-scale trends, employees must have the opportunity to continually redefine and hone their skills. One way employers can offer that is through stretch assignments that provide intrapreneurial short-term “gig economy” type work with minimal risk and disruption, all within the organization’s dominion. Employees, especially millennials, want to “job-craft” their roles. Offering an internal gig economy – or stretch marketplace – delivers big.

Strategies for Engaging an In Person Audience

In my almost 15 years as a workshop speaker and facilitator, I’ve learned a lot. The most valuable lesson of all? Be interactive.

I’ve observed that you can be presenting the most intriguing topic of all time, but it’s only a matter of time before you audience tunes out the sound of you droning on and on. If you want to keep your participants’ attention and prevent them from checking their phones or falling asleep, I recommend sticking to no more than five minutes of instructional content at once, followed immediately by an interactive component that surprises the audience out of any stupors or daydreams.

The good news is, there are more choices for engagement than ever before. The following six techniques are my go-to standards. Depending on how long your next training is, mixing and matching them is likely to liven up the session, and hopefully, increase overall learning and results!

Technique #1: Storytelling

Funny or self-deprecating stories and anecdotes are always a hit, but early in most trainings, I like to share a specific story called The Hero’s Journey. Based on the famous narrative concept, the Hero’s Journey describes all the obstacles I faced while becoming an expert in the topic. Much of the time, the audience isn’t expecting to hear something like this, and participants are fascinated. I increase the engagement by asking for a show of hands if the audience has personally experienced something like what I’m relating (e.g. “Raise your hand if you’ve ever had a boss you thought really hated you”).

Technique #2: Surveying and Polling

The best type of survey takes place in advance, so you can ask participants about their experiences in detail, and customize your content to address what you learned. Given that this isn’t always possible, you might want to familiarize yourself with online polling technology that allows the audience to answer simple questions on their phones in real time – with answers appearing on your presentation screen. Both approaches pique the interest of audience members who are curious what their fellow participants answered.

For more techniques, have a look at the DeVry WORKS website.

Why You Probably Need More Training, Not Less

In my work as a business and workforce consultant, I’ve observed that in times of change and uncertainty, some organizations stop spending money – and especially money that goes to employee training and development. However, given the future work trends of cross-functional teaming, workforce-wide digital fluency, and an emphasis on uniquely human skills, this may be a short-sighted approach. Let’s look at these one by one.

Cross-Functional Teaming

I’ve noticed that employees are starting to move around organizations with greater speed, and so they may need to know more skills than were required in the past. Even if they received a solid university education, employees might well be moved to a role in which nothing they learned in their degree program applies. For instance, it’s not unusual for someone trained in finance to end up in marketing, and vice versa. And, even those schooled and working in marketing often find it beneficial to have cross-functional expertise in finance.

My hunch is that employer training might not be able to keep up with the reskilling and upskilling requirements of cross functional teams, and this is why there are gaps. And, in the Career Advisory Board’s 2018 survey, Talent Activation, the Employee Experience, and Skill Development, 77 percent of respondents agreed with the statement: In my organization as a whole, I am concerned about employee skills gaps.

In the study, the greatest skills gaps were observed in the areas of technology/digital fluency (cited by 62 percent of respondents), communication (56 percent), business acumen (48 percent), diversity and cultural awareness (46 percent), and customer service (42 percent), and skills gaps affect employees at all levels. And, when asked about barriers to closing skills gaps, our respondents cited a too-small training budget most frequently.

If anything, it’s my opinion that cross-functional teaming requires larger training budgets, not smaller ones.

Workforce-Wide Digital Fluency

In the Career Advisory Board’s 2017 Job Preparedness Indicator survey, we defined an applied technology skill as a skill that is needed by employees to leverage the right technology to do their jobs. It’s another way to talk about digital fluency, and the research indicated that a majority of employers is now looking for these skills in new and existing employees.

Training existing employees in applied technology skills is a major challenge, in part because current professionals did not receive this type of instruction via traditional education paths. In response, many survey respondents are ensuring that their workforces continuously train and retrain on applied technology skills through the development of internal courses (40 percent), internal trainings (38 percent), tuition reimbursement (35 percent), and external trainings (31 percent). Only one-fourth said their organizations are taking no actions to develop this skillset.

As discussed above, however, developing skillsets can be expensive – especially when one round of training isn’t enough. So, in my recommendation, employers should have a specific and ongoing budget set aside for applied technology skills alone – in addition to other training requirements.

For more where this came from, check out the DeVry WORKS website.

 

Exploring and Closing the Middle Skills Gap

As the chair of DeVry University’s Career Advisory Board, I’ve been talking about skills gaps a lot recently. Usually, I address either the technology skills gap or the soft skills gap specifically, and I’m usually referring to graduates of four-year institutions who are pursuing careers in the business world

In reading my veteran HR thought leader Sharlyn Lauby’s new book The Recruiter’s Handbook, however, I was alerted to an entirely different type of skills gap: the middle skills gap. According to Lauby, the middle skills gap is defined as those jobs that require more than a high school diploma but less than a four-year-degree. Some industries affected by the middle skills gap are finance, manufacturing, telecommunications, healthcare, and retail, and the jobs themselves range from entry-level administrative positions to highly specific operational roles.

Digging Deeper Into the Middle Skills Quandary

Why is the middle skills gap a problem? “At the heart of the issue is an oft-discussed anomaly: while millions of workers remain unemployed and an unprecedented percentage of the workforce report being underemployed, employers across industries and regions find it hard to fill open positions,” said the report by Harvard Business School, Accenture, and Burning Glass Technologies.  “A first, essential step to closing this gap is to differentiate between the vast array of middle skills jobs in order to concentrate on jobs with three important attributes: they create high value for U.S. business; they provide not only decent wages initially, but also a pathway to increasing lifetime career value for many workers; and finally, they are persistently hard-to-fill.”

Lauby recommended addressing middle skills gaps by gaining information that allows you to bridge where your workforce is today with where you want it to be in the future. Specifically, Lauby suggested the following action steps for hiring managers and recruiters:

Pay attention to what’s happening in your geographic area and industry

What’s happening on a global or national stage might not pertain to your region. Your industry could also be affected by external factors other types of organizations aren’t facing. Anyone in the position of hiring needs to know their unique market conditions.

Find credible sources of information

If you’re going to cite sources for a trend or solution, they need to be from trusted authorities. You don’t want your CEO questioning your business case.

For more where this came from, check out the DeVryWORKS site.

How to Sustain the Benefits of Corporate Training After the Course is Over

In my experience as a workforce author and consultant, I’ve observed that organizations tend to invest more in their employees during good economic times, and pull back development efforts when their businesses are feeling the pinch.

Let’s recall what we learned from our earliest years in school. Our teachers encouraged us to master material through repetition. We’d be introduced to a concept in class, practice it via homework, be quizzed on it by the teacher, and be tested on it again much later on a final exam. In other words, learning was an extended, ongoing process. If you want to sustain the benefits of your corporate training long after your employees have completed it, you might consider incorporating this advice into your regimen.

Communicate the Big Picture

While they are still in the main training event, explain why it’s in employees’ best interests to apply the skills they’ve learned. How will using these new concepts help them do their jobs more effectively? Why will they now be able to add greater value to the organization? How will further mastery of the skills drive their careers forward overall?

Emphasize Concrete Actions

As part of any training, crystallize exactly what employees should do as part of their everyday responsibilities so skills are continuously re-emphasized. Decide on a cadence of activities to ensure that self-study and on-the-job practice are occurring on at least a monthly basis, and clearly communicate your expectations. Ideally, these tasks are mandatory.

Gain On-the-Spot Commitment

Before they leave a workshop, employees might write down what they have learned that is most relevant to their current roles, and specific actions they will take to apply those ideas in the next 30-60 days. If they can add results they intend to achieve by way of implementing the course learnings, so much the better. Participants can either take these goal statements with them when they leave the training, or the trainer may collect them and return them to employees at a later date.

 

For more tips, read the rest of the post at the DeVryWORKS site.

Why Corporate Training Must Be Part of Your Mix

As a workforce author, researcher, and consultant, I observed many organizations that were concerned about a labor shortage brought about by baby boomer retirement. This shortage, and the skills gaps that went along with it, was partially delayed in part by the financial crisis and subsequent recession, because many baby boomers lost savings and were working past traditional retirement age¹.

Many baby boomers, born 1946-64, are now in their 70s, and the time has come for them to exit the workforce. According to a recent report by the Federal Reserve², industrialized nations like the U.S. are facing a shortage of working-aged professionals, and employers need enough qualified employees to survive.

In my experience working with dozens of companies over the last decade, I’ve seen that corporate training and development can be an effective solution to this problem. As more senior roles are vacated, corporate training, particularly for succession planning, may be a good vehicle for mid-level professionals to master skills like team leadership, business acumen, strategic planning, conflict resolution, and decision-making.

All Employees, All Levels

One of the topics I write about most is increasing automation and machine participation³, and given this trend, I believe that even employees who will not become senior leaders must continuously upskill or reskill to maintain their value within the organization. The days of having one degree and one corresponding skillset may be numbered, because if that skillset is automated, what then? Corporate training provides one way to diversify what each individual employee can contribute and the variety of roles he or she can hold.

There are other benefits besides skill acquisition. I’ve written that despite technological advances, productivity in most organizations is lagging⁴. Corporate training is one method for adjusting your processes, targeting efficiency so employees can better perform tasks and focus their energies more specifically on company goals.  I have personally seen that many organizations with solid corporate training initiatives keep their people longer because the employees appreciate the investment in their development. And, I’ve observed that organizations that do right by their people are perceived as having strong brands that customers want to support.

For the rest of this piece, please visit the DeVryWORKS website.