Alexandra Levit's Water Cooler Wisdom

Managing Your Data in the New Normal

Amid social distancing, stringent lockdowns and a second surge of COVID-19 cases, business owners can no longer rely on splashy launch events, mom-and-pop friendliness or a dynamite location to build customer relationships. Today, every business is competing for eyeballs and purchases made on digital channels.

Data-based approaches can help you stand out more effectively.

To successfully stand out, you’ll need to understand data optimization basics, including gathering customer information, responding to real-time feedback and reducing inefficiencies that lose revenue and diminish trust.

Gathering Customer Information

Data optimization commonly refers to collecting all the information at your disposal and maximizing the speed and comprehensiveness with which business-critical information can be extracted and analyzed.

If you have a website, this could be the most sensible place to start data collection. You likely have a handle on how many people are visiting and what pages they’re viewing, but are you using an analytics tool to assess where they are coming from, the content they spend the most time reading, and which page prompts them to leave? Do you know where your most active visitors live, how old they are and what products or services they most frequently purchase? These questions form the foundation of your business, and therefore are critical to your data-optimization efforts.

Feedback forms or emails are essential, but in today’s climate you’ll likely want to be more proactive about seeking out qualitative information about how customers value your offerings and their experience with your organization.

You don’t have to invest in a pricey or unwieldy customer survey to do this. Instead, try pushing a few questions to targeted visitors based on the defining characteristics above. You can also use analytics features embedded in the big four social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter) to ascertain what people are saying and the general sentiment around your brand.

If your customer relationships are rich with engagement points, CRM software can be a wise investment. These tools help monitor your interaction with current and potential customers, leverage data analytics to track customer history and details and suggest data-driven strategies to grow relationships.

For more where this came from, check out the full article at AMEX Business.

Superjobs Are the Roles of the Future

As companies begin to spin back up, leaders are looking to refill the roles they may have had to cut to survive. But many new roles won’t look like the old ones —organizations can structure their workforces to most effectively distribute labor between employees and automation through newly defined roles called “superjobs.”

According to Deloitte’s 2019 Global Human Capital Trends report, superjobs include components of traditional jobs to maximize the strengths of both humans and automated services. When thoughtfully deployed within an organization, superjobs can offload routine work to automaton to free up employees to focus on more strategic, revenue-oriented tasks.

"Calling for both hard and soft skills and cutting across typical departmental silos, superjobs require the flexibility to combine tasks and merge responsibilities as needed," the Deloitte report says.

While Deloitte's research on superjobs mainly focused on large enterprises, the concept is applicable to small and midsize businesses as well. No matter the size of your organization, superjobs can streamline operations in functions like supply chain management, accounting and marketing — really, wherever software exists to supplement human efforts. Indeed, Deloitte's research found that 41 percent of respondents are using automation extensively or across multiple functions. (The survey "polled nearly 10,000 respondents in 119 countries.")

To get started on this path, businesses must undertake an intelligent job design process, flatten their hierarchies to make room for flexible, self-managed teams and boost their arsenal of applied technology skills.

Intelligent Job Design 

Traditional roles are narrower in scope — the tasks an employee performs directly maps to what the employer outlined in the job description.

But automation and algorithms take over the routine and fixed aspects of work, business leaders can free their employees to use their critical thinking and feeling talents on tasks such as like data interpretation, problem solving, empathy, creativity and teamwork.

While you don’t have to throw out all your existing job descriptions, it’s worth looking at your workforce with a broader lens. Consider creating what Deloitte calls a “job canvas” — a more fluid and expansive way of examining the work you need done.

You can launch your canvas, which can be organized by team or individual, by thinking through the following questions:

• What core business problem does this team or individual need to solve?
• What should their outputs or deliverables be?
• What kind of supervision will the team or individual need to accomplish these objectives?
• What technologies can this team or individual use to augment their capabilities? Which tasks related to this business problem are best suited to people, and which should we automate?
• What learning processes can we put in place to target essential skill development for this team or individual?
• How will we measure this team or individual’s success?

Because you are now looking at your workforce at a higher level, you will likely find that your superjobs (or superteams) cross departmental fault lines of HR, IT, finance, sales, etc. Integrating data-driven insights with human intuition will be a central component of all superjobs. Depending on your business, your superjobs might include:

• a “customer experience architect,” who uses sentiment analysis to create stronger real-time engagement;
• a “case synthesizer,” who examines legal precedents mined by an algorithm and handpicks the most impactful ones; or
• a “supply chain effectiveness analyst,” who uses performance data to make recommendations that balance both cost and sustainability.

For more on superjobs, check out the full article on the AMEX Business site.

Becoming a Remote-First Organization

Companies looking to improve their work-from-home (WFH) productivity may want to adopt some of the principles of distributed work.

The most evolved version of work from home, distributed work refers to operations that are remote-first rather than office planned. Companies like WordPress and Zapier have been 100 percent distributed for years, with all of their employees — from their executives to HR to sales and marketing — working from their homes and offices around the globe.

Having entered this situation so suddenly, it's no surprise that many business owners have been winging WFH. But given that working from home and distributed workforces will continue even as we emerge from COVID-19, business owners can use the pandemic as a catalyst to permanently transform work for the better. According to a March 2020 Gartner survey of 317 CFOs, "74 percent of respondents said they will move at least 5 percent of their previously on-site workforce to permanently remote positions post-COVID 19."

Being strategic about distributed work demands a wider lens. Now is the time for businesses to adopt some of the principles of distributed to prepare for a remote-friendly future.

1. Get comfortable with managing remote teams.

To fully realize the benefit of distributed work, small-business owners must get away from a strong preference for employees to work onsite and use company space and equipment at scheduled times. If you only allow remote work in an emergency, you won't have the necessary infrastructure in place to support fully distributed work, and employee access will likely be slow and clunky. 

Being comfortable with distributed work requires trusting your employees. You can cultivate trust by stepping up communication and letting your people know you support them and are giving them the freedom to do their jobs when and how they feel it is most appropriate and effective. 

Boost your comfort level by tracking the productivity of WFH employees during the pandemic. You don't have to use software to record their every keystroke or micromanage their daily tasks — it's more about having a concrete idea of whether employees are achieving their goals as efficiently at home as they did in the office.

When it comes time to ease restrictions, seek employee feedback about an onsite schedule that makes sense. By using a survey tool or individual interviews to collect this information on a broad scale, you may find that some employees are more comfortable with returning to the workplace than others. This can help guide your decision regarding how distributed your post-COVID organization will be.

2. Embrace asynchronous work.

Accepting that closings will be long term, many companies have simply moved in-person activities online. Tools like Microsoft Teams, Zoom and Google Hangouts facilitate real-time meetings. Employees can access share drives, email and company applications remotely, but everyone is largely working the same hours whether they have distractions (e.g. children doing eLearning) or not.

On a recent podcast, Automattic CEO and WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg shared a secret for effective distributed work: a move from synchronous (everyone performs work tasks at the same time) to asynchronous processes (employees work on their own time). For instance, a synchronous process might require people to travel, sit in a meeting room and provide immediate reactions to an idea. An asynchronous process might involve presenting an issue via instant message, prompting team members to think through it in detail and then respond within a predetermined deadline.  

Organizations can shift to asynchronous processes by first evaluating whether set business hours are necessary, and if so, for whom (e.g. customer service staff). Consider how you might change your performance model to evaluate employees on the quality of their contributions rather than the time it took to produce them. For example, an agile performance management system relies on continuous feedback to establish, accomplish and reconfigure goals that align with business needs, and employees are measured on their progress against these goals in real time. 

When you stop relying on synchrony, you have the freedom to source talent across the globe. Think about assembling teams based not on who is geographically proximal, but who is best for the job. This way, you can move operations forward 24 hours a day as employees "pass the baton" to overseas colleagues.

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

Customer Retention Tools for 2020

Customer retention analytics programs that measure reach and impact can go a long way in helping business owners improve marketing campaigns as well as products and services overall.

They can also help make it easier to cross- and upsell existing customers, and to keep them over the long haul. (As we know, it's far less expensive to retain a customer than to recruit a new one.)

Top Customer Retention Analytics Tools

Fortunately, technology innovation over the last several years has enhanced the cadre of available tools that target customer retention.

Learning about customer retention analytics can help you stretch your marketing dollars and keep your most valuable business.

#1. Optimizely

An A/B test is a customer retention technique that prompts customers to choose what they prefer most about your product, service, website or marketing campaign.

Using a tool like Optimizely, you can rapidly test an A/B hypothesis for every aspect of your offering, allowing you to refine it based on what customers find most appealing or helpful.

Optimizely's features contribute to both the customer retention rate metric and the repeat purchase probability metric, which I describe in more detail below. It offers a variety of pricing arrangements ranging from a few thousand dollars a year for the basic offering to $200K a year for the enterprise plan.

#2. Google Analytics

Many business owners already use Google Analytics for customer retention statistics on their websites, such as traffic numbers and most frequently visited pages. However, a closer look also reveals your most and least popular website pages by time of day, and which customers visit repeatedly.

Google Analytics' basic features are available in the free version, but much larger businesses can take advantage of Google Analytics 360, which costs $150K annually and provides advanced machine learning features that derive sophisticated insights from customer data.

For more where this came from, check out the full piece on the AMEX Business website.

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.

Why We Haven’t Fixed Our Diversity Problems

I’ll be the first to say I don’t have all the answers when it comes to diversity and inclusion. I don’t think anyone does, but least of all me. The closest I’ve come to discrimination is being told I had to be three times as smart, competent, and amusing as male speakers because I was a small, young-looking woman. And, sometimes people ask “odd” questions about my religion (Judaism).

But just because we don’t have all the answers doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep asking the questions. The question I’m constantly addressing with other human capital experts today involves why we haven’t made greater progress with respect to D&I in the organizational setting.

It doesn’t quite make sense. After all, the business case has been clear for decades. Diverse organizations perform better, are more innovative, and have more engaged employees. In terms of our collective degree of tolerance for those different than ourselves, we’ve come a long way. We now even have software that’s supposed to help us mitigate unconscious bias. So why is D&I still such a thorny problem? Here are three speculations.

Issue #1: We focus too much on recruitment.

Most organizations understand the need to solicit talent from diverse sources and are successful at doing just that. Thanks to new partnerships with high schools, universities, associations, and community groups we may never have engaged with in the past, new employees come in the door looking and thinking differently. Here’s the thing, though. What happens after these diverse hires start? Usually, they’re simply swallowed up by the system. We fail to create an onboarding experience that’s customized to be rewarding to the individual, we don’t provide them with the right skill acquisition and we don’t provide mentors to whom they can relate. So they leave – often with  speed and disillusionment – and we are forced to start over with fresh recruits.

Issue #2: We make D&I a program rather than a culture.

This second problem is related to why diverse hires don’t stay. The D&I “function” is often relegated to a single person, or maybe a team, that’s responsible for creating initiatives. Beyond talent acquisition, such programs might include affinity groups and unconscious bias training. But many employees, especially those in the millennial generation, find a narrow focus on D&I stranger than no focus at all. A 28-year-old recently told me: “When I work at a company, I just want to walk into the lobby and see all kinds of people. I should have no idea whether they’re in the c-suite or a cube based on how they look. It’s weird when a company tries too hard, you know? We’re a diverse country, why isn’t this more natural?” And how do we make it “more natural,” exactly? The importance of D&I must be embedded in the organization’s vision and goals, consistently communicated from the top, and reflected in measurement of performance.

Issue #3: We’re creating biased software.

Hiring and performance management software that removes common barriers to inclusion and prompts us to awareness of potential bias is no doubt a brilliant invention. But this software is currently designed and programmed by a very non-diverse pool of people from a limited number of organizations, and this setup has the potential for technology to make bias worse. If we truly want to leverage algorithms as partners in this cause, educational institutions and software companies need to train and employ developers who accurately represent today’s employee populations. This is the only way to ensure that the resulting products come to the table with the right lens.

Want to learn more about the challenges and opportunities of the next generation of D&I? Join SilkRoad’s human capital futurist Alexandra Levit for a free webinar on December 10, 2019 at 2PM EST.

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. 

Agile Feedback is the New Performance Review

Many of us remember the days when we only talked about professional development during a once-a-year performance review conversation with our managers. We may have made development plans and set goals, but these were usually lost in the crush of immediate business priorities. And, by the time we got around to discussing them again, they were outdated and irrelevant.

Fortunately, many organizations have, in recent years, moved from the annual performance management model to bi-annual or even monthly models. This increase in frequently certainly benefits the process, but can we take it even further? Can we make learning and performance dialogue even more fluid and agile and therefore more useful considering the pace of change in our organizations and industries?

The Rise of Open and Continuous Dialogue

Today’s most comprehensive HRMS offer the ability for managers and employees to deliver real-time guidance and feedback as soon as an issue presents itself. This type of exchange is far more helpful for growth and engagement because it’s directly relevant to a current project or challenge. Typically, any employee can submit feedback to another regardless of level or reporting structure, so it’s an equal-opportunity endeavor that’s less biased and less restrictive.

Agile feedback systems provide an important mechanism for coaching and collaboration, and in boosting manager awareness of problems sooner rather than later, they aid in retention as well. They also alert leaders when there may be a new skills gap that needs to be addressed. For instance, if a manager sees results that indicate that a group of employees isn’t using a new technology as intended, they can get involved right away, collect more information about the disconnect, and ultimately determine if additional background or training is necessary.

For more where this came from, head over to 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.