L&D and the Employee Experience
Digital technology ends the limits of education.
—JAMES BURKE
Similar to the agricultural era, work in many ways is now moving back home and will likely result in a transformational shift in where the work gets done, especially for cognitive workers. The technological convergence of the digital age is enabling this shift, affording more workers the potential and opportunity to leverage the internet, communication apps, cloud-based software, and other technologies to be as productive (if not more) while working remotely.
The new workforce models and platforms we are creating are shredding the long-accepted understanding of the term employee, and it’s becoming even more pronounced due to the 2020 pandemic. Still, worldwide, more than 212 million people have been employed on the front lines in hospitality alone (Gaille 2017). This may mean that people at all levels will have more to say about the conditions and environment in which they work.
It’s too early to tell if businesses and workers will want to make full-time remote work permanent. In-person meetings may become more valued due to the desire for people to gather. Regardless of how we decide to get the work done, it’s more necessary than ever for companies to focus on elevating their employee experience. The need to suddenly enable remote work as the pandemic spread jolted many companies that were unprepared from a process and infrastructure standpoint. Vulnerabilities with VPN access, home internet connections, software compatibility and operability (and tolerability), and challenges with conducting remote meetings brought an entirely new dynamic to work.
The positive change that has come out of the forced remote work model is in bringing the employee and their considerations forward. A new dynamic has been forged in that employees see and feel a shift away from physical presence being a key performance attribute and more focus being placed on their productivity. The move to judging output rather than hours spent in the office should ultimately improve the overall employee experience if the scrutiny is not transitioned to digital surveillance mechanisms.
In this chapter I examine these changes to your L&D role as it expands beyond its traditional purview. To further that end, Elizabeth Lembke looks at recruiting top talent, and Cher Murphy discusses talent management in the digital age.
Expanding Your Development Role
L&D has a role to play in developing the employee experience and in partnership with HR functions assisting with a change in culture to see the employee as a person rather than a tool of the business or a cost burden. In the areas of health and well-being, technological capability, continuous learning, and embedding learning opportunities into the work environment, L&D should expand its scope to become more engaged in the conversations about how to improve the employee experience. All companies are challenged by the need to attract and retain the best talent possible and to continually reskill employees. L&D can serve as performance consultants in modernizing the employee experience in three key areas:
• Workplace adaptability
• Employee well-being
• Employee engagement
Workplace Adaptability
How can you help your business provide a work environment that fosters flexibility, dynamism, agility, and velocity? The changing work world requires employees who can think fast, have a level of autonomy, are decisive, and have a strong perspective. Critical thinking is an essential skill (along with creativity and innovation) for business success. How does the work environment itself play into the employee experience? For those who don’t work remotely, the office is where they spend a considerable amount of time, especially for the frontline worker. To support the shifting needs, how can you help your company build learning into the work environment itself?
Traditionally, L&D has not been involved in designing the environments where the work gets done. When you think about where the work occurs and where the training often occurs—there’s something missing in the middle. For years, many of us have tried to embed training into the flow of work, often with mixed results. Now is the time for L&D to be more involved in the design of the workplace itself and to design learning into the environment from the ground up. Here are three critical design principles to consider in the creation and setup of the work environment:
1. Focus on high-impact performance challenges. See the challenges, understand them, and address them through environmental and systems design as well as training. For example, one environment I worked in empowered any employee to call a safety time-out at any point during work. All work would temporarily stop, and employees would gather to resolve the problem. Does the work environment and culture foster a sense of deep ownership among the employees for the process, and does it value optimal performance even when it temporarily stops the work?
2. Understand that high-impact connections between smart people lead to better knowledge transfer between them. Consider how learning flows through the organization. Consult with the business to ensure complementary business functions are able to collaborate and communicate with ease, and when appropriate share physical boundaries. For example, try and identify how knowledge and expertise is shared in your company. How does culture impact the ability for serendipitous connections between people in different lines of business to occur? How can you impact changes in the work environment to motivate people to make these connections with one another? Is there a way for employees to pose problems to others outside their immediate work team to find an answer?
3. Determine what layouts and systems magnify learning while working. Consider how to embed learning into the physical environment and the digital systems that workers use. In some environments, performance-enhancing instruction is built into the signage and displays. This enhances knowledge acquisition between employees and between customers. Physical devices in the work environment that enable or encourage learning can be critical components to advancing performance.
L&D has not historically been included in the design of work systems and work environments. As business reinvents both the work systems and the work environments, L&D has an opportunity to partner with the business to make the systems and environments more conducive to learning. This means shifting away from designing the work environments for scalable efficiency—as corporations have done for decades—and moving to what John Hagel refers to as scalable learning (Hagel 2019). In this shift, Hagel discusses that when designing the work environment we need to move away from the design focusing only on task efficiency, cost savings, and scalable reproduction and change designs that motivate people to learn faster, engage in activities that foster learning for efficiency and productivity (as well as quality), and amplify the potential for learning to occur individually and within the work team. Hagel defines scalable learning as “Learning in the form of creating new knowledge through action and reflection on results—it’s not about sharing existing knowledge or just coming up with new ideas.” This correlates well to the imperative of providing lifelong learning opportunities to the workforce as well as transitioning learning deeper into the flow of work, as Bob Mosher and Conrad Gottfredson have encouraged with their Five Moments of Need model.
It’s unsustainable to continue to overlay training onto work environments that are not conducive to learning to begin with and continue to expect high performance from workers when the work systems and environments contain barriers to learning. Together with workplace designers, L&D can help identify the areas that will accelerate performance in work (in both systems and physical environments), such as physical layouts that drive collaboration and communication, signage that provides instructional prompts, and systems that have nudging and reinforcement built in. Furthermore, helping to identify where workers truly make a difference in performance is critical. We often train to standardized procedures or best practices without realizing the systemic barriers that keep workers off task.
How do we mitigate those barriers through design and system improvement or make affordances for them in expectation of what can realistically get done? Embedding learning into the systems is a powerful antidote to performance lags, but it will require fundamental rearchitecting of the systems and environments. It does, however, correlate well to the needed redefinition of jobs and job architectures in light of the transformation brought to us by the digital age. As we discard the last vestiges of rote work being performed by humans and integrate more automation into the work environment, we will find opportunities to reconfigure the environment along with the systems and processes, which will provide an opportunity for L&D to take action on embedding learning into the work and not just on top of the work.
Many of us recognize that a large number of employees already learn how to do their job from peers, leaders, environmental mechanisms, and other forms of work-based support—what we often refer to as informal learning. Learning in the flow of the work has been occurring since people found themselves working together. L&D has evolved its perspective over time by delivering iterations of “less formal” (training mediated by L&D) learning in the flow of work—through job aids, system augmentation, instructional signage, work-based accessible content, and so forth—creating overlays onto the existing work environment that provide performance support. This overlay of instructional messaging is context-driven and intentional in its purpose of providing immediate support to enable continuous work without interruption.
We can see gains in the area of software usage. As we continue integrating more software-based systems into the workflow, workers at all levels will experience increased complexity and will be required to interact with systems and software to get their job done. The complexity comes from continuous integration of software improvement, which means software releases occur more often. This negates L&D’s legacy model of creating canned screencasts to train employees on how to use software. It’s unsustainable to think a team of instructional designers can efficiently and effectively sit by and create canned software demonstrations and deliver them quickly when software releases are generated in days and weeks versus months and years. This is one reason software system overlays have become popular augmentations for support. These overlays provide contextual performance guidance on top of the actual software. The overlaying of performance support onto the existing work environment is the first iteration of L&D transitioning learning experiences from the captive audience approach that most formal learning requires. When done well, the overlay strategy works. The second iteration is for L&D to intentionally engage in embedding learning into the design of the environment and systems as they’re designed to prevent the need for the reactive overlay approach—to erase that missing middle—and assist with designing adaptive and flexible work environments from the ground up that are infused with learning capability.
L&D AS PERFORMANCE CONSULTANT
Earlier in my career, I worked at a large retail company where my team was responsible for training employees on customer service, sales, and product knowledge to help customers make the right product choices. We received a request from one of the business functions responsible for a product line. They saw a training need on their product due to decreasing sales.
This is a common request for L&D. A business function introduces a new product line, enhances existing ones, or determines that sales need to increase, and they assume training should be delivered to achieve the change they desire (and they may be right, although it would have been better if we had been involved in the product development). In this instance, we met with the business team and listened to their concerns. A product vendor had told them that employees were missing an opportunity to drive increased sales because they were not engaging with the customer and directing their buying decision. OK, so far, so good. We hear this a lot. How can we train employees to provide a more consultative experience with customers and get to know their needs, then direct them to the right product? I recommended that we and the business team visit a few stores and observe the sales motion.
We visited three stores and spent approximately four hours observing. We did indeed see several missed opportunities where customers were in need of assistance and attention from employees and waited, asked, and waited, and in several instances never received follow up and left the store. In a debrief meeting, the business team said that more consultative selling training was needed. But we explained that no new training was needed at all. Instead, we concluded:
• The design of the work environment was detrimental to the employee and the customer easily and comfortably engaging each other. The setup of the area was conducive to fulfilling product orders in an assembly-line manner (which was the majority of the business conducted in this area). It wasn’t designed for employee and customer engagement.
• The work area was overwhelmed with myriad choices and little guidance for the customer who wanted to consult with an employee. There was no system for the customer to register their desire to consult with an employee.
• Furthermore, the way the business operated precluded this type of sell. The majority of the business conducted in this area was transactional and volume based.
We explained that we didn’t see a need for additional training in this work area, which would mean training hundreds of employees across the company. The effort to develop the training and then deliver it would not show an ROI because a behavior change was not necessary—but a work environment and business process change was required. We recommended that the work area be redesigned to drive the consultative selling process and make it easier for customers to engage employees in consultative discussions.
Surprised, the business team members responded that it would be too expensive to reconfigure the work environment across the stores. We replied that training hundreds of employees on a process that wasn’t supported by the work configuration would also be costly because it would not result in performance changes. The work constraints were too difficult for employees to overcome. We didn’t want to complete and deliver unnecessary training. We preferred to work with the business to make the job easier for employees and offer them more enhanced services.
This is a typical example of L&D being asked to engage in activity to “check the box.” Instead, we took the role of performance consultants to the business. If L&D could be involved in the design of the work environment itself, we could also embed learning into that environment, which could drive sales even higher. In our analysis, if a few adjustments were made, sales would increase by $20 million over three years. In this example, we were able to successfully move away from order taking and toward true performance-based business results.
Employee Well-Being
L&D professionals should be more involved in creating and promoting wellbeing in the workplace. There is a belief that employees who feel supported and engaged perform better and work better in team settings. A company’s talent is their most significant competitive opportunity, and especially in the post-pandemic world it’s critically important for companies to provide support for their employees beyond just the standard set of work tools. We all know that employees were under quite significant pressure during 2020 as the pandemic unfolded and began changing almost every aspect of work. Too often in the past, the well-being of employees was not considered when making business decisions. The pandemic year, however, has caused many companies to begin looking at the impact of their decisions on employee well-being in areas such as stress, anxiety, and depression that affect employee productivity to try to address them.
Many companies design programs to support employee well-being, but should consider moving beyond the program paradigm and design well-being into the physical and virtual work environment. This means potentially restructuring work itself to strengthen the connection between how employees feel and how they perform. L&D has a unique role to play in helping to ensure the work and the work environment are conducive to well-being.
Although L&D doesn’t have the ability to modify work tasks or hours, it can provide consultation on how work systems impact behavior and how learning can drive motivation for employees to remain engaged. Cultivating an overall culture of learning helps with employee well-being, and that’s where L&D can impact the idea of the “whole person” as it applies to helping people be their best. Professional development and growth opportunities intentionally designed for the individual often result in an increase in positivity towards the company; if the employee feels supported and inspired, they will be motivated to be more productive and satisfied.
Employee Engagement
If asked, most people would respond that they want to work at a company that is committed to employee development and engagement. People join companies with the hope that they will have the opportunity to advance in their career and align with the company on values and purpose. The advances we are making with technology are promising to make the world of work more meaningful, but companies have to intentionally construct more meaning into the experience of work itself. A CEO now has four primary stakeholders: customers, shareholders, communities, and employees.
As the 2020 pandemic unfolded, many companies experienced a rolling network effect as employees left the office and started working from home. Corporate infrastructures were strained as employees began virtual meetings almost nonstop during the day. How people get their work done changed almost overnight as many were required to change their work tools. Technical skills became even more important as employees were forced to combine home technology with new forms of work technology to communicate, collaborate, and get their work done.
The sudden lurch in work methods tested not only company infrastructures but also its leaders and their relationships to their teams and individual employees. Leading remote workers and distributed teams presented new challenges to leaders who are used to seeing their teams in the office. Employee disengagement can become heightened when employees spend most of their day working alone at home. Constant meetings on live virtual platforms are different than typical in-person meetings—they can be mentally and physically draining, especially when they’re back-to-back. The intense focus on sustained eye contact (where do I look—the webcam or the person’s face I’m talking to?) leads to cognitive overload. Leaders needed to find new ways to engage their teams. In their day-to-day work, leaders don’t often discuss the impact of societal disruptions such as global pandemics, so many found this a challenging moment and struggled with how to help their teams adapt. Resilience among the workforce is necessary to keep the business functioning in times of crisis, but leadership is also critical to keep employees engaged.
Simultaneously, many business functions, including L&D, immediately transitioned into supporting business continuity processes. We’re all used to the nature of changing workplaces, but this change happened almost overnight, and many were unprepared. Now that we’ve had some time to reflect, there’s a lot to appreciate. With technology already enabling many components of typical business operations, some of the changes were seamless. However, there are also several areas about day-to-day work that exposed the need to take a deeper look at work itself and how it impacts employee engagement. For many, this term is somewhat amorphous—employee engagement. What does it really mean? As work in the digital age rapidly evolves, worker satisfaction is a concern for every employer. In the US, workers spend, on average, 40 hours a week working. This amounts to more than 80,000 hours of the typical person’s life spent working. Most of us spend the majority of our lives working. However, most workers state that they’re disengaged from their work and are unhappy at the place they spend the majority of their lives (Burnett and Evans 2020). Combine worker dissatisfaction with the skills polarization and companies face a dilemma: how to increase employee engagement while the world of work is rapidly evolving, and still unlock employee potential?
Employee engagement manifests itself through the work people do. If people find their work meaningful, rewarding, and supported, they will find satisfaction in what they’re doing. The motivation that comes from satisfied employees directly translates to productivity and profitability for the company. There is no more important workplace imperative than to foster engaged employees. L&D has a prominent role to play in employee engagement since highly motivated employees result in fewer negative outcomes and greater organizational success. There are several areas L&D should focus on when it comes to employee engagement:
• Develop leaders. Leaders account for the majority of the variance in employee engagement scores. Leader development is an essential component to drive these scores higher. A leader’s ability to connect to employees, develop them, celebrate their accomplishments, and inspire them is a critical behavior for the employee to feel valued.
• Offer continuous learning opportunities and one-on-one development. Too often, companies focus on employee satisfaction sporadically and don’t see it as a strategic element in their day-to-day operation. By stressing continuous development and offering coaching, employees will become more enthusiastic about their ability to succeed at the company. Leaders drive almost all employee engagement, so choose those who lead others carefully. Leaders need to be able to coach their employees to the next level or to what areas of development they’re interested in.
• Correlate outcomes to personal contributions. Correlating business outcomes to the employee’s individual contribution produces a direct impact to employee motivation.
• Foster connection and stretch goals. Feeling a strong connection to the work team is important, but people also want to know what’s personally expected of them in their role. They also want personalized stretch goals to help them get to the next level they’re seeking.
Highly engaged employees are enthusiastic about their work, are brand advocates for the company, and are owners of their contribution. They drive the performance and innovation that moves the organization forward. Nonengaged employees are unattached and unhappy at work; too often they expose their dissatisfaction to colleagues and potentially undermine the work of others while negatively impacting overall morale. The key to uncovering what leads to disengagement comes from opening a dialogue with employees and following through on the results of that dialogue. L&D can play a prominent role in changing the culture that improves the work experience through programs and initiatives that develop more capable leaders, ensure promotions are related to more than just a hiring manager’s biases, and help to design environments that create a better workplace for all.
Navigating the New Talent Landscape
As the digital age unfolds, it’s critical for companies to maximize workforce value. Work longevity is becoming a cross-generational imperative as broad demographics of workers are now claiming they want careers with one company instead of jumping around between several (Overfelt 2017). Career-long learning and development then becomes both a worker and employer imperative as they realize skills have a shelf-life much shorter than for previous generations. As the new landscape of work evolves, our legacy thinking around worker expectations is rapidly evolving:
• Age is becoming less of a criterion in assessing ability. Companies are realizing that they must engage employees across all their stages of life and that there are critical contributions that workers at all ages can bring the company and the need to develop people does not end at a certain age. Additionally, it’s important to note that age discrimination is illegal and counterproductive to creating an inclusive workforce.
• Internal mobility is now a prerogative. Historically, companies often looked outside when seeking more innovation and creativity. Now companies are seeking creativity and innovation inside and encouraging existing employees to engage in training that inspires creativity and innovation at all levels of work.
• Inclusion and belonging are key to business strategy. There’s competitive advantage behind everyone feeling safe and valued at work. It’s now important that the work environment values diversity, equity, and inclusion, which leaders know enables the broadest range of ideas to come forward. Companies are beginning to face their legacy of wage and gender equality and focus on bringing gender-balanced leadership and inclusion practices to the workplace.
Recruiting in the Digital Age
In this book, I’ve discussed how the digital age is reshaping the very meaning of employment. For most of the 200-plus years of the industrial era, human progress created more jobs than it destroyed, and wages steadily climbed at all levels of skill and education. The digital age is different, and it’s more critical than ever to place the best talent at every level in the company. Many talent acquisition functions are redefining their processes for seeking curious, accomplished people to bring into the company. They are partnering with L&D to assess the internal workforce capabilities and uncover opportunities to develop people inside the company to take on new roles. Recruiting top talent has become the most important aspect of people operations as companies must find new talent pools from which to choose. Hiring fit-to-role is critical as employees have high expectations that their job will be a platform for them to be able to do their best every day.
Potential employees expect to play an active role in shaping their company’s decisions, and will not be happy operating in a closed marketplace within a work silo. Historically, L&D is not involved in talent acquisition. L&D usually deals with the talent already acquired from a development perspective. Many companies, however, are beginning to expand their thinking in how they attract, hire, onboard, engage, and develop their employees. L&D needs to be involved in each step of the process as a consultative business partner to ensure a skilled and broad workforce is hired:
• Attraction. L&D has a good understanding of the workforce’s capability. L&D can provide information to talent acquisition about the gaps that need to be closed across the workforce. Too often, hiring is based on a specific job role with defined tasks controlled by a hiring manager. That hiring manager is usually sharply focused on the work they need for a specific role. By broadening the process to include goals beyond a specific job role, does the candidate pool expand and offer more potential to the company?
• Hiring. It’s important that the candidate experience reflect the employee experience. Many companies are now embracing the candidate experience as a precursor to actual employment and often refer to candidates as “colleagues” during the process. Driving a feeling of inclusion and belonging is an important aspect in this phase. Ensuring fit-to-role is also critical. L&D can partner with the hiring function to assess the candidate for fit-to-role with job tryout assessments.
• Onboarding. Onboarding the new employee is the first milestone in their career at the company. It sets the stage for their overall experience and instills a feeling about the company that will last for their entire tenure. L&D should partner with HR and other functions to ensure onboarding is as world-class as possible.
• Engaging and developing. It’s important for highly engaged employees to begin their career at the company with a development plan. The first meeting between a leader and their new employee should include a discussion about not only their new job but also what their potential career opportunities at the company entail. It’s important to stress continual development as an imperative.
RECRUITING TOP TALENT IN THE DIGITAL AGE BY ELIZABETH LEMBKE
Elizabeth (Liz) Lembke is Chief Talent Navigator at Transforming Talent, a global and virtually active consultancy specializing in people and culture solutions. She has more than 15 years of experience in strategic and hands-on human resources. I asked Liz to share her perspective on the challenges of recruiting in the digital age.
Can you provide an overview of the talent recruiting landscape in the digital age?
Recruiting for top talent in the digital age doesn’t have to be complicated—in fact, now is the time to make it more meaningful than ever. Recruiting is now a critical component of the company’s brand and value proposition. Candidates want to work for companies they believe in. It used to be that we only cared about how a company treats candidates when they’re actively seeking a job. Now, we care about how companies treat their people overall.
What do candidates expect from companies they want to work for?
People want work that is purpose driven, where they feel a sense of belonging and connection to others, make progress toward goals they believe in, and overcome personal challenges via growth opportunities. Overall, job seekers want to have a positive impact in the work they perform, and they want to work where they feel the values of the company align with their own personal values. In a 2018 PwC study Aaron Hurst states, “Today, we are in the early days of a new era, the Purpose Economy, where a higher sense of meaning and purpose in work are sources of innovation and the core narrative of the workplace” (Brewster, Hurst, and Schuyler 2018).
People want work that is purpose driven, where they feel a sense of belonging and connection.
What are some key challenges you see in the talent acquisition process?
There are many challenges we face in finding the right talent, including:
• Suffering under the illusion that when a job is posted, the right-fit talent will see it—and apply for the position.
• Mistaking quantity over quality of applicants via the “easy apply” feature on job boards resulting in significantly more applicants to sort through (and not necessarily better ones).
• Making applications more complicated than necessary. If the application process takes longer than 15 minutes, there is a 365 percent drop-off rate for completions (Forman 2015). Top talent needs to feel that completing the application process will be worth their time.
• Not clearly communicating what is important about the role and why someone would want it. Job descriptions and postings too often read like a bulleted laundry list of requirements and expectations. This may result in exceptional and underrepresented candidates to opt out if they believe they cannot fulfill all the requirements.
• If an applicant does see your post and applies, the average viewing time for a recruiter is six seconds, as they often have 15–30 other jobs they are recruiting for.
• Recruiters sort through an average of 250 applications per job role.
You’ve mentioned that we need to reset, rethink, and respond to the new dynamics of finding talent in the digital age. Can you expand on what you mean by this?
Yes, companies need to first reset their strategy as it applies to recruiting. What talent do you have today, what talent do you need today, and what talent do you need tomorrow? These three questions will help you determine your priorities, but they are also just a start. We are now living, working, and hiring in a different context. Consider what you automate and where you use machine learning to help you be more effective—not actually hinder you in the hope of efficiency. When we are recruiting for roles, we need to consider the expectations that both employees and employers have about differing work models among more dispersed and multidisciplinary teams. Companies must now focus on engagement, unity, plurality, growth, safety, and well-being because employees expect work to be personal, social, and adaptive. This also means we need to change our mindset and approach hiring talent more broadly, nimbly, and with a strong focus on thriving through challenging times.
Next, we need to rethink how we recruit talent so that the experience provides not only a positive impact on the individual candidate, but also on the team the candidate joins. Before you start the position-requisition or talk with HR, ask yourself and your team:
• Why is this position mission critical for us?
• What are the results we will look for?
• What criteria do we need to establish to enable a candidate to be successful in role?
• How are opportunities to learn and grow core to this role?
• Will we consider alternatives to a full-time position that would be attractive to get great talent onboard?
Now, think about the role from the candidate’s point of view and answer the following questions (and consider thinking about them as a colleague more than a candidate—this slight change in mindset will help you build a stronger correlation to their overall experience):
• Why would a top-quality, fully employed person want to work for you?
• Why would a top-quality, fully employed person want to work at this company?
• Why would a top-quality, fully employed person want this particular job?
• What are the challenges a new hire will face that we need to immediately address?
• What are the three things this new hire should accomplish over the first 12 months to be considered successful?
• To be successful, who will this role be working closely together with and how?
• How will this role evolve?
Why would a top-quality, fully employed person want to work for you?
Taking the candidate’s point-of-view and thinking of them as a colleague helps you understand what their experience will be as they navigate the recruiting journey at your company. No matter the technology or processes you use to get them into the running for a position, they will want to know:
• Who is my new employer?
• What impact will I have? For example:
» What is the daily work like, where (hybrid or fully remote), with whom will they be working, and what is the purpose and meaning of the job?
» What are the current and future challenges and demands of the role or group?
» How does the role drive or support the strategy of the organization?
» What differentiates high performers from average or low performers?
» What challenges will be faced in the short- and long-term, both internal and external?
» How will I be able to grow?
• How will this role help me future-proof my employability?
• Who will I be working with and the type of relationships will I have?
• Am I part of a broader team that I can learn from?
• Am I the right person for this job?
» Are the requirements directly related to the job description, and do they make sense to me?
» What can this employer and job offer me?
• Why should I apply for this particular job with this company?
» Who can I ask?
» Candidates regard this as an indication that you value them.
Finally, my third recruiting imperative is simply to respond to them. In its simplest form, recruiting is about connecting with people. Ask yourself how you are respecting their time, their potential, and their opportunity to add value to the company and their lives by working at your company. Candidates should not be ghosted or left nail-biting. Please keep the humanity in the process. Recruitment is a two-way street. Your role in recruiting top talent for your team is to connect people to a sense of belonging and sharing in a broader purpose, where personal and professional growth at work is integrated and, perhaps most importantly, that the work has meaningful impact for both the employee and the employer.
Please keep the humanity in the process. Recruitment is a two-way street.
Creating an Employer Brand
The digital age has changed the way we connect to career opportunities and how companies find and attract talent. Labor platforms such as LinkedIn and CareerBuilder provide a global marketplace for talent and afford job seekers a more transparent market in which to find rewarding work. The digital labor market also provides a suite of tools and opportunities for seekers to connect to peers to broaden their network. Additionally, recruiters connect, collaborate, and find the best candidates through the digital labor market. The massive skills gap inside companies is fueling the ongoing search for the empowered, capable worker. Labor platforms have helped high-performing workers understand their value and what they bring to the table, requiring companies to improve the way they attract new talent and differentiate themselves as employers. Employers are beginning to see the importance of establishing their company as a brand where employees want to work.
TALENT MANAGEMENT IN THE DIGITAL AGE WITH CHER MURPHY
Cher Murphy is an organizational development expert and talent strategist. Her work focuses on matching individuals and organizations to maximize performance and growth through more engaged, fulfilled, and effective work. Cher has spent the last 20 years building and leading teams in high-growth organizations as both a consultant and internal leader. She’s currently the Chief People Officer at Ph.Creative, a global creative agency that helps clients communicate their purpose, impact, and belonging. I talked to Cher about the challenges and opportunities of managing talent in the digital age.
Most CEOs tell us that workforce capability gaps are a primary concern for them as they continue to integrate technology into the business. What is your perspective on this upskilling challenge—is it a significant effort for companies?
There are currently five large disruptors occurring simultaneously: the digital transformation, the 2020 pandemic, a new financial recession, the largest social justice movement since the 1960s, and climate change. These events accelerated what we refer to as the “future of work” and laid it on our doorsteps now, today. All companies are navigating these disruptors, and they’re affecting how talent is attracted, acquired, retained, and developed. Talent management in companies has pivoted to focus on what skills are needed in the digital space and what digital-first activities workers need to be capable of doing. This has brought people analytics forward as a preeminent focus area for talent management leaders. A global understanding of the skills and capabilities of your employees is a must for every company. Having a deep understanding of who has the capabilities, what value those capabilities bring to the team and the organization, and where the agglomeration of capabilities reside in the organization are vitally important. You must be fluid with talent across the enterprise and intentional about how you logically match the best skill with the critical need. It’s important to have the agility to bring people together to work collaboratively, and to succeed at that you must enable a dynamic people analytics function. A relevant example of the reskilling challenge can be found in the financial industry where many legacy brick-and-mortar banks are closing their branches. These financial institutions are smart enough to know that their employees must be reskilled to perform other tasks than the ones they performed in these physical locations. Reskilling employees based on the reconfiguration of jobs is a massive undertaking.
Reskilling employees based on the reconfiguration of jobs is a massive undertaking.
Do the L&D leaders have a forward-thinking view of the workforce and their ability to transition into new roles? Can they be successfully reskilled? What new customer service tasks can they perform? We must be proactive in helping the workforce migrate their skills. If companies lag too much, they risk remaining competitive in their industry. CEOs and CLOs used to focus on what they were going to do, but now they must think about who they need to be to navigate their people through the digital age.
CEOs and CLOs used to focus on what they were going to do, but now they must think about who they need to be to navigate their people through the digital age.
What responsibility does the company have for displaced workers?
This is an interesting area because overwhelmingly employees see developing their skills as their individual responsibility rather than the responsibility of the company or even the government. But it’s clear that the company must provide the context for reskilling or upskilling and assist the employee with the right decisions to successfully execute on the company strategy while affording the employee personal enrichment and career mobility. Obviously, there’s a significant economic component involved. We’ve seen companies such as Amazon, PwC, and AT&T announce large initiatives to provide upskilling and reskilling for their workforces. What will best work is a combination of traditional skilling strategies that are human-centered combined with appropriate use of digital-enabled learning strategies. Companies must be intentional about not letting the technology lead the talent development process. I’ve worked with CEOs and broad demographics of employees to devise a framework for coaching employees to uncover their superpowers and help them find their marketable strengths. It begins by asking them, “What are you really good at?” It is critically important for the company to help the employee identify and advance in their career journey—but to do it in a way that keeps the employee in control of some of their upskilling.
Another benefit of this approach according to Sanyin Siang, Thinkers50 #1 Executive Coach and a Duke University professor, is that it creates an added sense of psychological security, “When employees know what distinctive contributions they are bringing to the organization, and hear it from their managers, it cuts down on the type of comparison traps and insecurities that can derail team cohesion. Awareness of their superpowers unleashes the capabilities of individuals and teams in a constructive human-centered way.”
What should CLOs be looking for when hiring?
Many search firms construct three profiles of the ideal candidate for a job role. Hopefully, they focus less on what they were doing while at the last company and are more focused on what their potential is in this specific role. In many ways, the idea of “the ideal candidate” is no longer relevant. Too often we miss great talent by examining the amount of time they’ve spent at companies. That does not indicate their fit for the role being filled. All companies need to do a better job at integrating new mindsets from new generations. The pillars that matter are bravery, working with a challenging client through a difficult time, and developing people on their team. And too many hiring managers are worried about the hard-to-quantify cultural fit. We need to look for a cultural add, not cultural fit. One of the most important questions a CEO should ask a candidate is, “When you look at your career at this point, what are you most proud of?”
We need to look for a cultural add, not cultural fit.
What are practical innovations you’ve seen that are happening around talent management?
Talent management used to be process driven based on company silos and policies with little direct engagement from the employee. Now employees are driving their talent journey more than the company. They expect a career path to be constructed and are willing to partner in the process. There’s never been a time in history where consumer behavior directly correlates to how companies treat their employees more than now. Companies have a responsibility to provide programs and work environments that are human centered and values driven. Customers are judging companies by their behavior toward their employees at all levels. Additionally, companies are now expected to share their commitments and perspectives on public issues. New generations will only buy and work at companies that closely align with their values and provide opportunities for advancement. New generations want to make an impact now, and their beliefs and values drive their actions. Historically, companies used to have to make a business case for diversity, but now it’s expected that they will do the right thing.
Customers are judging companies by their behavior toward their employees at all levels.
Should companies be focused on integrating AI into the talent management process?
The future of work arrived on March 13, 2020, when many companies closed their physical offices. We’ve now become more reliant on technology for more than “back-office” processes and hiring, but also for ways to advance culture and to encourage collaboration. Now you must create connection, understanding, and intimacy through the screen, which can be challenging at best. In these early days of AI integration into the interviewing process, we are fearful of too much bias, and there’s potentially a backlash as it can be seen as removing the humanity from the process. But as technology advances, it will play a key role in the talent acquisition process. There is potential to leverage more of it at the top of the acquisition funnel. As we have been saying for several years, recruiters must be talent acquisition strategists and advisors.
What condition is the global labor market in? Is there available talent on the market, or must companies reskill their existing labor?
New talent trends arose at the beginning of the pandemic. Companies created a talent directory of employees who were laid off. This became more useful in the COVID era where many companies in affected industries had to resort to layoffs. Now, companies ask other companies to access and recruit from their talent directories. One global hospitality organization used their internal executive recruiters to place people in other companies. Organizations that used to compete for talent are joining together to help strong talent land new roles.
Worker expectations are also drastically changed now. The workforce will not necessarily default to accepting five-day, in-office work models. Salaries can now be determined based on where employees live. This is a new challenge of the next normal. The old model of recruiting and relocating is gone as companies now can leverage the global marketplace for talent.
Now, organizations that used to compete for talent are joining together to help strong talent land successfully in new roles.
What is the biggest challenge in our pandemic world for talent management?
The COVID era has shown that a person has to be not only good at their craft, but they must also be fluid and adaptable. They must be able to communicate and collaborate and build remote global relationships. More companies will leverage the strength of teams to close individual capability gaps. To retain talent and re-energize them, provide opportunities for them to be on high performing teams and provide team coaches to help them produce innovative results.
What are your words of advice for CLOs as they manage talent in the digital age?
Learning organizations need to focus on looking for talent that understands technology and how to leverage it. Learning people at all levels need technology acumen. Look for people who are in technology programs in college, not organizational development or HR. CLOs must inspire young tech people about the fact that all business success is about learning. Seek talent that’s curious about learning and how people learn. Seek tech people interested in how tech affects people. CLOs need to know the key capabilities the CEO finds important and then assemble talent development plans through that lens.
Seek talent that’s curious about learning and how people learn. Seek tech people interested in how tech affects people.
Building on Your Playbook
The changing work world requires workers who think fast, have a level of autonomy, are decisive, and have a strong perspective. It’s critical for companies to rethink the entire employee experience from attracting, hiring, and onboarding, to developing and even offboarding them.
In this section of your playbook, document your employee experience strategy, including how you will address workplace adaptability, employee wellbeing, and employee engagement. How does the work environment itself play into the employee experience? We often think innovation is inherently risky, but is it riskier to not systemically encourage innovation at all? Having engaged workers at every level is critical, and all companies must embrace open innovation—none of us is as smart as all of us. As you consider L&D’s role in designing and delivering world-class employee experiences, ask yourself:
• What are the implications of L&D becoming more involved in the design of work environments? How can learning be embedded into the environment as it’s constructed? Have you seen examples of this?
• Identify barriers in the workplace that inhibit optimal performance. Can you overlay or augment that environment to mitigate the barriers? Can L&D foster changes in the work environment itself to remove those barriers completely?
• Should L&D be more involved in designing and delivering employee health and wellness programs? Is L&D already involved in this area?
• How can L&D connect performance outcomes to employee well-being?
• Should you integrate lifelong learning programs into your L&D strategy?
When you consider that your primary function is talent development, should your L&D function be more involved in the talent acquisition process? Would that help your strategy on closing skills gaps across the workforce? While some larger organizations have begun to reposition L&D to take a more active recruiting role, that’s a fundamental rethinking of the traditional L&D operating model. If you’re able to be more prescriptive on the capabilities coming into the company, will that positively affect talent development overall? In some ways, this requires a reevaluation of the business of L&D in the digital age. You’re no longer in the business of delivering training products. You’re in the business of delivering innovation. How is business value generated now? These questions are important to consider as you recommend changes in how L&D partners with other functions across the talent landscape.