Today's post comes to us from Workforce Institute board member Dennis Miller, AVP of Human Resources and Benefits Administration at The Claremont Colleges.

As the COVID-19 global pandemic continues to impact every aspect of our lives at work and at home, I'm seeing several topics of interest continue to float to the top in the field of higher education where I work.

We have seen many examples of remarkable leadership by institutions when it comes to how they are approaching this unprecedented and ever-changing time. In fact, just recently the Chancellor of the California State University system, the largest higher education public institution in America delivering higher education to nearly 500k students, announced the 23-campus system would continue to deliver coursework using their virtual model through June 2021

At an individual employee level, we're seeing a variety of impacts. Some employees can and do work remotely, such as those in accounting, IT, payroll, HR, faculty, librarians, and a list of others. Conversely, those working in buildings and grounds, building maintenance, campus security, student services, and others will need to continue to work mostly on-site.  Meanwhile, those workers in commercial operations such as food services or housing services, have experienced furloughs and lay-offs in many institutions.

Further, at a more granular level, another set of sub-groups seem to emerge with their own stories of how this pandemic is impacting their lives. Employees with small children that are not yet old enough for school seem to be impacted especially hard since day care is nearly non-existent, so parents working remotely must tend to their children and work simultaneously. Those with children in grades K-6 have a mixed impact, depending on the school district in which they reside. Some might be able to drop their children off at school for 1-2 days a week, or not at all. Those employees with children in grades 7-12 might fare a little better since children in these grades tend to be more self-sustaining when compared to a 1st grader.

Those with older children, or no children face their own unique challenges and may in fact feel that they are being asked unfairly pick up some of the slack from their co-workers who have small children at home and are not always able to respond quickly to work-related issues during typical work hours. In fact, employees with no children might feel they are working harder right now than their co-workers who might be tending to one or more small children at home throughout the workday instead of focusing on work issues. 

There are no easy answers to these issues and yet we have to have every expectation that they will continue for the foreseeable future.

I'd advise organizations and individuals to keep two things in mind when dealing with these difficult times: First, we all need to pace ourselves - this pandemic will be a long and challenging journey for everyone. We need to do our best to have compassion for all of our co-workers, and organizations and managers need to make sure that they are treating all workers with this same compassion, understanding their unique needs and supporting them as best as possible. As an individual, you can offer to help a colleague with a project or send a note of encouragement. As a manager, you can schedule regular check-ins with your employees just to hear what they are experiencing and how the organization may be of help.

My second piece of advice is that we all must work diligently to find and remain focused on the positive aspects of life and loved ones during this crisis and know that the situation we find ourselves in is for now, not forever.

We'll get through this time more successfully if we support each other and if organizations everywhere lead with compassion.

Today's post comes to us from Workforce Institute board member Alexandra Levit.

A new DeVry University study conducted for Labor Day found that at a time when American workers should feel recognized and celebrated, more than a third felt their employers could take or leave them.

Thirty-six percent of DeVry respondents said that based on their employers' actions since the start of the pandemic, they believe their employers view them as disposable. This perception resonated  more with younger workers than older ones, with 47 percent of Gen Z-ers (born after 1996) and 42 percent of millennials (born 1980-95) saying they felt disposable compared with 28 percent of Gen X-ers (born 1964-79) and 32 percent of baby boomers (born 1946-63).

Respondents agreed that in today's workforce, tenure, education, and industry experience do not matter as much as hard work,  meeting goals and deadlines, and having a positive attitude.

If you're an employee, being disposable is clearly not the ideal status as it makes you vulnerable to layoffs, consolidations, or random turns in your marketplace. Fortunately, you can protect yourself from natural evolutions and future disruptions by focusing on your career durability, or your ability to sustain gainful employment over a long period of time. The five components of career durability are:

  1. Soft skills are interpersonal attributes that you need to collaborate successfully with others at work. We've written about them in the past at The Workforce Institute. As machines take over more work tasks over the next 10 years, soft skills like empathy, intuition, diplomacy, judgment, and problem solving will set human employees apart. You can hone yours through personality assessments/recommendations, classic business books such as those by Stephen Covey and Dale Carnegie, and on-the-job experience.

Employee actions are only one piece of the puzzle, however. What if you're an employer, and you're rightfully concerned that so many of your talented employees feel disposable? Improved benefits and greater pandemic safety measures are essential, but don't get to the heart of the disposability issue. The key  is to show appreciation early and often. The DeVry survey respondents indicated that the most effective ways are through pay increases (69 percent), awards (34 percent), and greater schedule flexibility (30 percent).

With Labor Day in our rearview mirror, now's the time to take the right steps to make employment beneficial and as satisfying as possible for all sides.

Today's post comes to us from Workforce Institute board member David Creelman.

If you were building an HR department from scratch, what things would you not do that you are currently doing now? To make this a bit more focused, let's imagine that you are building it from scratch, but you only have 70% of the existing headcount. What 30% of tasks or activities would you cut?

This kind of exercise is most useful if you do it yourself, rather than just read my opinion, however, given that this is an article, I'm going to have to tell you the approach I would consider taking.

Automate everything

If I were building from scratch, I'd be tempted to adopt the mantra that all tasks must be automated. For every process we designed, whether it be recruitment, training, or benefits, the goal would be to create an automated process and if a task couldn't be automated, we'd see if we could remove it from the design.

This is the inverse of how we normally do things. We usually decide on the process we want and then see if parts can be automated. Here automation is prioritized. The philosophy parallels the "mobile-first" approach to user interfaces. Companies no longer design for a big-screen then see if they can adapt it to mobile, they design for the small mobile screen in the first place.

Lean on outsourcers and gig workers

If I use outsourcers I'll need to cut my headcount even more to pay for it, yet I believe that in many cases outsourcers do more for less. An obvious case is recruitment process outsourcing (RPO).  The recruiting world is undergoing such rapid evolution that it's hard to see how an average in-house team could match the skills and technology found in a good RPO.

I'd also put aside part of my budget to allow my HR team to use gig workers. Instead of having one of my precious few staff spending an afternoon making a pretty slide deck, I'd encourage them to spend $100 on a gig worker to do that. I'd encourage them to develop their skills in using gig workers so that they could multiply their effectiveness.

Invest in analytics and business savvy

I'd want to cut even more tasks than the 30% suggested in this scenario because I'd want to invest in some new things we weren't doing before. Let's hope the automation, minimization, and outsourcing tactics will reduce the number of tasks so effectively that we'd have some budget left over. The most important new tasks that I'd want to invest in are having a much more analytics-savvy and business-savvy HR team. To encourage business-savvy, I might ask the team to go to (or attend virtually) more industry-focused conferences. Furthermore, I'd only hire HR pros who had spent at least a couple of years in a non-HR function.

Conclusion

It's much harder to transform an existing HR function than to imagine what one would do if starting from scratch. Nonetheless, this kind of exercise may open up your eyes to see a vision of what HR could be even in the face of fewer resources. This wholesale reimaging is certainly more inspiring than thinking about hundreds of small cuts one might need to make to achieve a budget reduction target.

Today's post comes to us from Workforce Institute board member Dr. Steffi Burkhart. 

Most of you know me as an authority on “Millennials” and the “Next Level of New Work” in Germany. I have been researching and speaking about this topic for over six years now, always looking at it from the perspective of my generation (1980 and onwards). I was inspired to do this work for two key reasons: (1) Millennials have no political lobby in Germany to hear our voices and (2), we are, at the same time, perhaps the most relevant generation in the labor market today.

By 2030, due to Baby Boomers leaving the workplace, there will be a shortage of around 6-8 million skilled workers in the German employment market. In parallel, far fewer young people will be entering the job market, resulting in an enormous workforce void that can only be filled through AI, digitization and technology development.

Despite our smaller numbers, Millennials have an outsized impact on work today. We are the ones who have primacy in interpretation over the most important mass technology of our time, the Internet. We are the ones who will have to solve the future world and economic problems and who will be tasked with saving the planet over the next 50 years.

And we are the ones who are intensely developing work even further.

Millennials today want to work and live differently. It is important that there is an optimal dovetailing of what I call First-Place (home office), Second-Place (office), Third-Place (anywhere else - roof terrace, park, lake or restaurant) and Fourth-Place (virtual space) in all work zones, so that we can work at any time, optimally, productively, meaningfully and, above all, with pleasure - which, sadly, is currently lacking almost everywhere.

Millennials want to work in an agile, iterative, cooperative and networked manner, test innovations and, as a matter of principle, strive for the permanent development of their own skill set. They want to learn from the best, on-the-job and along-the-job. Among other things, the workplace is perceived as a point of experience. Companies must take note and pay into this account as well.

Of course, we all find ourselves in a new world now, with the COVID-19 global pandemic affecting workers around the world of every generation. Ensuring the health and safety of workers has become even more important than ever before. It is now the role of organizations not just to wait for bans and edicts from the Government, but also to proactively develop it's own policies for keeping workers and customers safe. We have seen this in the United States with companies like Target and Walmart instituting country-wide mask requirements though the federal government has avoided doing so.

Beyond just making their own policies, organizations should also use technology to keep physical locations and employees and customers as safe as possible. Over time and largely through the use of social media, populations have become much more comfortable giving up privacy for connectedness. During the pandemic, as Kronos research recently showed, most employees are comfortable having their employers collect data on them to make meaningful contact tracing possible.

The last few months have proved that working remotely - a rarity for many before this crisis - will be indispensable in the future. However, in my opinion the following challenge also arises: Working remotely can reduce the quality of communication leading to a loss of creativity and problem-solving skills.

An answer to this problem may be to focus on teaching all employees but especially Millennials those “soft skills” (written about in detail here by my fellow Workforce Institute board member John Hollon) such as emotional intelligence, communication skills, active listening, critical thinking, empathy, and teamwork. By doing this, we can improve remote work overall and help employees of every generation reach their full potential as their organizations succeed along with them.

Today's post is courtesy of board member Bob Clements, President at Axsium Group,  a leading workforce management consulting firm.

Do you know what your organization's “COVID overhead” is? In other words, what costs have the pandemic added to your organization? The Wall Street Journal reported that T-Mobile spent more than $50 million on extra cleaning and safety gear while a food distributor spent $20 million on plexiglass and testing alone. These stories are not unique.  Organizations of all sizes have seen costs rise sharply because of the pandemic, those increases are not limited to cleaning supplies and personal protective equipment (PPE). Labor costs have increased dramatically, too.

Those cleaning supplies, for example, need to be used by workers. Whether they are used for deep cleaning by janitorial staff or to sanitize shared equipment, cleaning takes time and employees' time is literally money. And, cleaning is just one example of how COVID-19 has changed or added work to employees' jobs; temperature checks, health questionnaires, and counting heads at the door are just some of the new health and safety-related tasks that have been added to employees' to-do lists.

Many employees are finding their core job is changing, too. Retail workers are being asked to pick, pack and prepare online orders for delivery or curbside pickup. Manufacturers have changed lines to produce medical equipment or PPE. When work changes, productivity goes down and costs go up as employees learn the new way of working.

On top of that, these new and modified tasks employees need to do were implemented quickly - and, partly because of that, are very inefficient. This is because they were often poorly designed in a hurry, not automated and often performed inconsistently from location to location. This adds to your COVID overhead as well.

And, none of this accounts for higher wages driven by COVID-related pay premiums or to attract new employees. It does not account for the cost of increased absences as employees need to self-quarantine due to potential coronavirus exposure or infection. Nor does it account for the administrative costs of implementing and managing all these changes.

I have spoken with several executives who are alarmed at their payroll costs relative to revenue. For organizations that saw revenue decline, it can be hard to fathom why payroll has not shrunk at a similar pace. For those that saw their revenue increase, it stings to see higher labor costs cut into profitability. Regardless, your executives will expect you - an operator or human resource professional - to get labor costs under control.

You cannot take a big knife to labor costs to solve this problem. In many cases, the pandemic has not created redundancies in your workforce, but rather increased the volume of work to be done while simultaneously decreasing productivity and increasing absences. Unless your organization has closed facilities, laying off or furloughing employees will only exacerbate the problem. The challenge, for most organizations, is to do more work with less. A more surgical approach is required.

When the pandemic started, many organizations added time codes and absence reasons to their workforce management systems to create a coronavirus data trail for government assistance programs. While these changes were adequate to meet government reporting requirements, they did not provide enough information to really understand what has contributed to COVID overhead.

Deeper forensic analysis is required to truly understand COVID overhead, where it comes from, and how to manage it. Organizations will need to dig into the data from their workforce management and production systems to uncover the problem's roots. They will need to work across the organization to find labor efficiencies - improving wasteful processes or automating manual tasks - to offset the impact of coronavirus on labor costs.

Fully understanding COVID overhead will not be easy, but it will be rewarding. It will save jobs and make your company stronger coming out of the pandemic.

Today's post comes to us from Chris Mullen, executive director of The Workforce Institute at Kronos.

Back in May (if you can remember way back then), Kronos introduced an exciting new program called the U.S. Workforce Activity Report. The Report is a weekly, data-based analysis of workplace trends that aims to help business leaders and policy makers understand where and how fast employees are returning to work.

Analyzing 30,000 businesses with more than 3.2 million total employees, the Report provides an immediate view into the preceding week's data, including employee shifts worked, new hires, terminations, and pay statements. While this would be interesting and useful data at any time, it's even more germane now because the report compares workplace trends since the week ending March 15, 2020, when the U.S. declared a national state of emergency, against pre-pandemic conditions.

The most recent report was released on August 11th and showed that for the week of Aug. 3-9, shift work volume struggled to grow half a percentage point, increasing only 0.5% week-over-week. Shift volume remains below totals experienced the week ending July 19 - which was the highest volume of activity since hitting “the bottom” the week ending April 12 - while recent average weekly shift growth continues to lag behind what was experienced early in the recovery.

One of the really cool parts about this weekly analysis is that there are both region-specific and industry-specific data points provided. The most recent report showed that regionally:

From an industry perspective, as K-12 school districts begin fall semester operations, public sector recovered another 2% and is now 23% below pre-pandemic levels. Manufacturing; retail, hospitality, and food service; and the services and distribution sector all remain converged at 12% below normal with no measurable week-to-week growth. Healthcare continues to hover at 8% below pre-pandemic shift volume.

My colleague Dave Gilbertson, vice president in the HCM practice group at Kronos notes, “Shift volume is struggling to grow even one percentage point per week, further reinforcing that U.S. businesses have downshifted into a slower recovery phase during these typically quiet summer months. Organizations are still trying to generate enough activity to call back all furloughed employees, which has been an arduous process. They will need to work through furloughs before the net-new job creation needed to accelerate the economic recovery can gain traction.”

If you are a data junkie like I am, this kind of week-over-week analysis is very welcome in understanding where we are in this recovery. It also speaks to our mission at The Workforce Institute to elevate issues affecting the often overlooked hourly workforce in the United States - many of whom are currently on the front lines of the pandemic.

You can see all of the reports and subscribe to receive new reports as they are released here: https://www.kronos.com/about-us/newsroom/update-us-workforce-activity

Today's post comes to us from Workforce Institute board member David Creelman.

The standard advice I give in any change effort is to “over-communicate”.  Ask employees if they are kept in the loop the way they need to be and they'll say “No, we don't get enough communication”.

Now turn around and ask those same employees if they get too many emails, memos, and reports. They will say, “Absolutely, we get way too much communication.” 

That's the communication paradox. Employees simultaneously get too much and too little communication.

Understanding the paradox

We can understand this paradox by considering which communication we like and that which we don't. Let's think primarily in terms of email.

Email we like is:

Email we don't like is just the opposite:

In essence, it is not so much about more or less communication. What employees want is more selective and higher quality communication.

Tactics for higher quality communication

For the formal messages from HR and leadership, we can and should get input from skilled communicators before we blast off a message. This might mean running things by an internal communications department, using a gig worker who specializes in communication, asking for help from someone in the department who is good at writing, or simply taking more care yourself in crafting the message and deciding who it should go to.

The challenge is that most communication is from individual managers and peers, not HR and leadership. To address the communication paradox, we want all employees to be good at email communication.

If you agree that improving the quality of communications is a problem at your organization, consider the following steps:

Wrapping up

As is usually the case in management there is no magic in the steps needed to improve communication. We start with data, get leadership buy-in, then ensure that people can learn what to do, and are motivated to do it.

There are two other points worth noting before we end. As much as possible information should be accessed as needed rather than pushed out to people. If there are status updates on a project, these can usually sit in the project management software rather than be pushed out via email.

The other point is that tools like Grammarly are getting more effective at helping people write well. Expect much more from software tools that aid communication in the future. Using these tools adds a small extra step which takes some of the author's time but saves everyone else time.  If quality communication is a leadership priority, then people will take this extra step.

Today's post comes to us from Workforce Institute board member Dan Schawbel, Managing Partner of Workplace Intelligence and New York Times bestselling author of “Back to Human”, “Promote Yourself” and “Me 2.0”. Here, he talks about trends in contact tracing by employers during the pandemic.

As the Covid-19 pandemic continues to change nearly every aspect of our personal and working lives, worker safety, both for organizations who are looking to reopen and those that have remained open throughout the crisis, is taking center stage. My company partnered with Kronos to survey 3,903 workers globally in order to uncover perspectives, practices, and trends focused on Covid-19's impact on organizations.

The study found that 86 percent of workers are comfortable with varying degrees of employer-led contact tracing for the purpose of organizational safety. Almost half of the workers are either "very" or "a great deal" comfortable, as they are willing to sacrifice their data and privacy in exchange for a safer and healthier work experience.

Why workplace safety is now at the top of a job seekers criteria

Before Covid-19, people prioritized compensation, healthcare benefits, flexibility, and development opportunities when conducting a job search. While these factors are still at the top of the list of priorities for many a job search, "safety" has been prioritized during these times and will be in the future. In fact, 60 percent of those who worked in an office pre-Covid won't return until it feels safe and over 80 percent expect up-to-date information on cases and new safety procedures. Before applying for a job, people are conducting online searches to uncover an organization's safety procedures and understand how they are handling their back-to-work strategies. If an organization doesn't offer remote work or hasn't taken the necessary office precautions, a candidate is less likely to apply for a job there.

One study examined job seekers' criteria when evaluating an offer and found that that the "safety of the work environment" ranked ahead of "opportunities for professional growth" and "quality of potential coworkers".

How companies can make the workplace safer

SHRM investigated what companies are prioritizing when it comes to workplace safety. They found that almost all (97%) employers request employees to self-report their Covid-19 symptoms. In addition, many employers are requiring employees to wash their hands before entering offices (89%), enforcing spaced seating in common areas (85%), enforcing spaced seating in common areas (85%), reducing available seating in common areas (83%), implementing new contactless procedures (77%), requiring on-site medical screening (73%) and are adding touchless fixtures (68%).

Aside from these policies, a host of new technologies has surfaced to help make workplaces safer. Produced by companies like Amazon, PwC, and Kronos, these technologies are helping to operationalize suggested safety measures.

For example, Amazon's “Distance Assistant" uses the latest artificial intelligence combined with cameras to alert workers when they are fewer than six feet apart from each other using a 50-inch monitor. PwC has released three different technology tools to help their clients, and their workers, feel safer at work. First, the “CoronaManager” app uses Bluetooth handshakes and geofencing for contact tracing to keep track of employee health status and share personalized and localized health news. Second, the “ConTra Contact Tracer” uses Bluetooth to provide social distancing reminders and data analytics for all types of institutions and workplaces. Third, their “Check-In” platform provides contact tracing by collecting proximity information and notifying workers when they've been in contact with an at-risk teammate. Different from Amazon and PwC, Kronos offers the “Kronos Employee Contact Tracing Tool”, which uses data from employee time and attendance entries to identify potential contacts who were working at an identified location at the same time as an affected employee.

These companies and others, have taken the lead from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and created solutions that will ease workers' anxiety as they return to their offices. Since we are all more adept at using technology now, these tools seamlessly integrate into our work lives and provide the information we need when we need it to make better decisions. In this way, technology is pivotal to ensuring that every worker is equipped with a protective solution that promotes safety and security.

The safest companies will dominate the future of work

Safety is the main ingredient that will forge trust between employers and employees during this crisis and in its' aftermath. This isn't the first or last pandemic we will experience, and the more trust a company, and its leadership, build during a crisis, the easier it will be to retain employees and build customer loyalty for the future. Safety is quickly becoming a powerful recruiting and retention tool. If companies want to remain competitive, they can't avoid safety measures and must remember that their employees' safety is at the core of their business.

This post was excerpted from a longer article originally published on LinkedIn.

Today's post is a podcast conversation between Joyce Maroney, former Executive Director of the Workforce Institute and Dan Schawbel, Managing Partner of Workplace Intelligence. Listen in to hear Dan's take on how collaboration between humans & robots at the frontline will change the future of work.

This conversation with Dan is part of our series based on our recent book, Being Present:  A Practical Guide for Transforming the Employee Experience of Your Frontline Workforce.  Dan's been researching the future of work for a while, and is a widely sought after expert on the topic. In his chapter in the book, he argues that artificial intelligence and robots are not going to replace human workers. He does, however, make the case that organizations need to be planning now for how they'll incorporate these new technologies into their operations and their workforce development.

I hope you'll listen in to hear Dan's insights.

Today's post comes to us from Workforce Institute board member and Skeptical Guy, John Hollon. While poor leaders make lots of workers miserable, he wants to go on the record that there is good news about bad bosses.

Here's one thing I've learned about bad bosses: they're a never-ending source of headache, heartache, and angst.

They also drive a lot of research studies, including a global study we did in 2019 that indicated seven out of ten employees believe they could do a better job than their boss.

Plug the term "bad boss" into Google and you'll get 1.65 million results. Googling "bad manager" results in 347,000 listings.

Bad bosses are on my mind because of a new survey, by the resume advice website ResumeLab, digging into the topic of those terrible people who "keep you up at 2 am and give a whole new meaning to Monday blues, not to mention sapping away your energy from a potentially very fulfilling role."

ResumeLab surveyed “over 1,000 Americans who had the misfortune of having to work under a terrible manager,” and asked a series of questions including:

  1. How long did you work for a bad boss?
  2. Why did you put up with them for as long as you did?

The answers from the ResumeLab survey are interesting and instructive. Here's what they found:

How long did you work for a bad boss?

Why did you put up with a bad boss for so long? 

What makes for a bad boss, you ask? According to ResumeLab, there are four things that employees identify as the absolute worst things they do:

  1. They criticize employees in front of their peers;
  2. They systematically kill ideas and initiatives;
  3. They deny raises or promotions without a valid reason; and
  4. They lie to people -- both employees and other managers -- on the job.

What does it take to be a great manager?

Here's my take: I was thinking about this bad manager survey when I came across an old Harvard Business Review (HBR) post titled Why Good Managers Are So Rare.

It started out by citing research on employee engagement -- a Gallup study back in 2016 that said only 13 percent of workers were engaged -- but it also offered this smart advice on how to improve employee performance:

"The root of performance variability lies within human nature itself. Teams are composed of individuals with diverging needs related to morale, motivation, and clarity – all of which lead to varying degrees of performance. Nothing less than great managers can maximize them. But first, companies have to find those great managers."

This raises the question: Just what DOES it take to be a great manager? HBR lists these traits, identified by Gallup, as the hallmarks of a great manager:

My experience is that great management takes lots of hard work and frequent communication, but many managers and bosses don't even want to do that, much less tackle the tough challenges that separate real managers from the wannabes.

There is one upside though: the best thing about working for a bad boss is that you learn all the things YOU shouldn't do when you start managing people.

Yes, there's nothing like learning from a bad boss.

Today's post comes to us from Workforce Institute board member, Dan Schawbel. Employee activism has been on the rise in recent years. Is your organization equipped to handle it?

Today's divisive political climate has given rise to employee activism. Almost every single day you'll see another example of a group of employees speaking out about the decisions their employer makes on a variety of political and social topics affecting them such as global warming, criminal justice reform, war, and now, the COVID-19 pandemic. 

One reason why employee activism is more prominent in today's workplace is because employees increasingly want to work for companies that share their values, views, and beliefs. Employees want their companies to make a positive difference in society, not just a profit, and some profit motives can go against an employee's value system. 

The surge in employee activism is being led by the youth. One study”¯found”¯that over a third of employees have spoken up to support or criticize their employer's actions over an issue that affects society. Almost half of Millennials have spoken out compared to only 27% of Baby Boomers.  Our own Gen Z research tells us that they are most encouraged to do their best work when they feel their ideas, projects, and contributions are valued by the organization and its mission.

There are countless examples of employee activism just in the past month alone. Fast food workers in Florida from fifty different chains went on strike to advocate for more health security and higher pay during the pandemic. And, employees at meat-processing plants are taking leave or quitting for fear of contracting  COVID-19 in facilities where their colleagues have already contracted it.  

Employer responses have been all over the map. Some employers have shut down modes of communication to quash free speech and even fired employees for voicing their dissent. Conversely, other employers have taken the opportunity to”¯be more open, encouraging employees to speak out about corporate practices and perhaps, even more importantly, listening to them and changing policies to provide safety equipment and paid leave. 

Many companies haven't had to worry this much about employee activism in the past, and have no playbook for how to handle it. They need one. We know that there will be more activism in the future, especially with this political climate in an election year as the world returns to work following the pandemic.

A lot of the decision comes down to culture. If your company has an open culture that promotes psychological safety and collaboration, employees will feel secure in expressing their views. Even if employers do support free speech, they still need to be prepared for employee disagreements, and protests, and have a plan for what to do when they occur. On the other hand, if employees know they will be criticized, ostracized, and potentially fired for sharing their beliefs, then they will be afraid to speak up and may, as the economy improves, search for employment elsewhere.  

Today's post comes to us from Workforce Institute board member and HR Bartender Sharlyn Lauby. Here she shares how to use the data you're collecting to make actionable decisions.

A couple of months ago, I wrote a post about digital transformation and why it's important to business. Digital transformation is about organizations getting answers through the strategic use of technology.

But once organizations get answers, they have to do something with the information. I've always said that one of the worst things that organizations can do is ask employees for their opinions and then do nothing with it. The same philosophy applies. It doesn't make any sense to collect a bunch of data and then do nothing with it.

The key is making data actionable. The question becomes how to do that. I wish I could say it's easy but it's not. Organizations can certainly get off track thinking that collecting the data or reporting the data was enough. Here are five steps that organizations can take to make sure that they put their data to good use.

  1. Agree on what to measure. And how to measure it. The first step in making data actionable is having everyone believe the data. No one is going to react to data that they are skeptical about. The organization needs to reach consensus on what data is important, how to measure it, and where to collect it from.
  2. Regularly review the data. Not just when there's a problem. There are two different ways to look at data. We can take a bad situation and make it good. Or we can take a good situation and make it even better. Organizations sometimes miss out on improvements because they only look at data when things aren't going well.
  3. Create a hypothesis. Including what happens if we do nothing. Think of the data analysis and action as part of the scientific method. Organizations want to make a prediction (based on the data) that tells them what will happen if they take certain actions. Let me add that it could be helpful to also make a prediction on what will happen if no action is taken.
  4. Use agile implementation strategies. Agile is used in software development to help project teams stay on track, avoid major setbacks, and better allocate resources. The premise is to take large projects and break them down into smaller more manageable steps. After each step (or milestone), the team can evaluate their progress, and make adjustments as needed.
  5. Hold implementation teams accountable. Finally, if the goal of collecting data is to make a decision - even if that decision is to do nothing - then people need to stand by the decisions they make. The good news is that data is always changing. So new data might prompt a new decision.

Today's technology allows us to collect good business data. We can use that data to make sound business decisions. Organizations should put a protocol in place to ensure that the data they're collecting is put to good use.

linkedin facebook pinterest youtube rss twitter instagram facebook-blank rss-blank linkedin-blank pinterest youtube twitter instagram