Category Archives: SHRM

America’s Greatest Threat is Lack of Labor!

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America’s Greatest Threat? Lack of Hourly Workers!

I spoke to a group of upcoming high graduates yesterday, and it got me to thinking about the future. I don’t dump on young kids like most people do today. My feeling is we all sucked when we were young. We grew up. Got experienced. And we suck less. But we look at young people and we are shocked they suck at mostly everything. We. All. Did. When. We. Were. Young!

Businesses, big and small are desperate currently for workers. Low-skill, semi-skilled, people who have no skill but are willing to be trained. The hourly rate is anywhere between $12-22/hr. I’ve spoken to companies in every market and industry, many of whom will tell me they’ll hire as many people as they can find, they just can’t find anyone!

Now, I don’t want to get into all the reasons why organizations are struggling to find hourly workers. There are many, and it’s a complex situation that isn’t going away anytime soon. I want to focus on how not having enough hourly workers puts America at a competitive disadvantage in the world.

What Happens When America Can’t Hire Enough Workers?

First, organizations will do what it takes actually to hire talent. They increase wages and benefits, which initially seems like a big win for workers. Businesses will also raise prices to pay for those additional expenses. Say hello to inflation. The supply and demand dynamics of labor all happen fairly quickly.

Organizations will look to become more efficient and add technology that, in the long term, can be a better value than workers. Let’s be honest, this has been happening since the beginning of time, but in times of true pain in hiring, all this speeds up and happens faster than normal. Say hello to the robots!

Companies will offshore more more than they already do to countries with an abundance of hourly workers. China, Mexico, India, and various countries in Africa if they can get politically stable, will gain millions of jobs from organizations looking to sell their products in America. Say hello to more jobs leaving our shores. Also, as we’ve seen with the Pandemic, this will cause further issues with our supply chain in critical times.

What Should We Be Doing In America To Ensure We Have The Hourly Talent We Need?

Okay – I’ve got some ideas. Some you’ll agree with, some you’ll hate, but something has to change. American demographics are not changing. Our labor force is shrinking and we are getting older as a country. We have a crisis staring us in the face, and we are too divided to even see what’s really happening!

  1. Major investment into trades and apprenticeship programs at the high school and post-high school levels. Free College? Screw that. Rich folks can pay for college. Let’s have Free Trades and Apprenticeship programs. Let’s start these in Junior High and High School and continue their post-high school. Let’s have 22-year-old kids making $40-60K a year in skilled occupations.
  2. Blow up public education as we know it. It’s broken. Can we all admit to this? About 70% of kids are not college kids, but we force them down the path of college. Let’s have public education that promotes our best and brightest but also promotes kids who want to work with their hands, who want to work in the arts, etc. If we are the most powerful country on earth, why can’t we have multiple avenues for our kids, whether they are rich or poor?
  3. Encourage our children to once again be firefighters, police officers, home builders, big truck operators, cooks, delivery drivers, etc. Both boys and girls. I was struck when I was in Australia how many construction workers and road workers were female. You rarely see that in America. Our children should feel proud to have an occupation that is helping their community and others, but instead, we, as parents, talk down these occupations. Our children are constantly listening.
  4. Open the Mexican border. Uh oh, he didn’t just say that!? Yeah, you know who has millions of people who want the jobs that Americans don’t want? Mexico. If you don’t want to work that $15/hr job, step aside, there are people that do want those jobs. Plus, actually having a great labor force strengthens America! Would you rather have Mexican citizens come to America and make American products, or have American companies go to China and have the communist government of China make the products sent back to America and much of the profit goes to China or India, or somewhere else outside of America?
  5. Pay Equity laws limiting the spread of pay between the highest-paid executive and the lowest-paid employee. I’m not saying that entrepreneurs and executives don’t deserve great salaries for their efforts and their risks. They do. But should a CEO of a company make a $100M a year and the workers make $17/hr? That just seems a little bit out of line, right? Should a college football coach make $5M a year? It’s a stupid game. A game I love to watch, but come on! We’ve got a bit out of line with the haves and the have-nots.
  6. National Occupation Corp. What if every single American child upon graduating high school, put in one year of service into a select list of hourly occupations? Road workers, infrastructure projects, building affordable housing in their community, building parks, etc. Mormon kids do a two-year missionary to spread their word, and it doesn’t seem to harm them one bit, in fact, most would argue it actually helps them become better adults. Doing a national occupation corp would show some kids they actually love this type of work.
  7. End or fix programs that encourage workers not to work. We need people collecting unemployment to prove they can’t find a job. They can’t get work. Because, for the most part, it’s a lie! There is work everywhere! Our Unemployment Insurance system is broken and needs an overhaul.

How do you like those ideas!? A little GOP, a little Dem, a little socialism! If you’re a regular reader of the blog some of those ideas, coming from me, probably surprise you. This is how desperate I think this situation is! We are facing an economic meltdown in the future if we don’t fix this issue, that will make the great recession look like child’s play. America can not be without a great labor force, and right now, we are quickly trailing the rest of the world in the one thing we always hung our hard hat on.

What’s Your Favorite Layoff Tech?

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Yeah, this isn’t something we like to talk about! We love talking about technology that helps our employees be better employees or technology that helps us find better and more talent. But the technology that helps us get rid of people, well, that seems a bit depressing, right?

In 2022 there have been public debates about what a recession is. We haven’t had one since the Great Recession of 2008-2009, so there is a very large part of our workforce that has never seen a downturn in the economy. We are on the precipice of an economic downturn, and companies will be laying off workers. Are you ready? How will you handle this? Spreadsheets?

Offboarding will be a major buzzword in 2023!

God bless the marketing pros who try and make termination software sound sexy! We don’t call it firing software or a termination process, we now call it “offboarding”.

At the HR Technology Conference this past year, I was a judge of the startup competition Pitchfest and one technology that was pitched was Onward HR. They actually did a great job and I really liked their pitch, but they were going up against a bunch of software that “helped” employees, not help you offboard them. Not fair to them, they had real HR software, helping solve a real HR and employee problem. A lot of the software pitched sounded positive and sexy, but it was mostly vapor. Onward had real HR stuff!

Big HCM software and payroll software will tell you they also do offboarding, but honestly, what they really do is basically just help you with the process. True offboarding should be about how do we humanely help our employees transition out of the company and quickly become re-employed. But also, a giant part of offboarding is ensuring those same employees actually might want to come back and work for us again at some point.

You see, layoffs, are an inexact science. Most organizations are bad at it because we don’t practice layoffs. We practice hiring. We practice developing employees. We practice performance management. We do not practice layoffs, so we mostly suck at layoffs. Quite frankly, I’ve never met a leader who wants to be good at layoffs!

That means the technology can help. For the most part, layoffs run like this:

  • We make the decision of how many heads we need to cut.
  • We then ask managers of people to make decisions of who specifically.
  • We then try to find a way to let people know where everyone will basically know at the same time (this almost always fails and is terrible).
  • We then try and move on and forget it all happened.

The problem with the last step is we basically move on from those departing employees, and those employees feel that, and it becomes very personal. We try not to keep a connection with previous employees. Then, two years from now, you try and launch an alumni recruiting campaign because you’re growing again and can’t figure out why so many previous employees hate you.

What is my advice for your upcoming layoffs?

Be better. Treat people like humans. I mean treat people like humans you will once again in the future want to have a positive lastly relationship with!

Does Your Average Employee Tenure Matter? (New Data!)

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I keep getting told by folks who tend to know way more than me that employees ‘today’ don’t care about staying at a company long-term. “Tim, you just don’t get it. The younger workforce just wants to spend one to three years at a job than leave for something new and different.” You’re right! I don’t get it.

BLS recently released survey data showing that the average employee tenure is sitting around 4.1 years.  This speaks to my smart friends who love to keep replacing talent. I still don’t buy this fact as meaning people don’t want long-term employment with one organization.

Here’s what I know about high-tenured individuals:

1. People who stay long-term with a company tend to make more money over their careers.

2. People who stay long-term with a company tend to reach the highest level of promotion.

3. People who tend to stay long-term with a company tend to have higher career satisfaction.

I don’t have a survey on this. I have twenty years of working in the trenches of HR and witnessing this firsthand. The new CEO hire from outside the company gets all the press, but it actually rarely happens. Most companies promote from within because they have trust in the performance of a long-term, dedicated employee over an unknown from the outside. Most organizations pick the known over the unknown.

I still believe tenure matters a great deal to the leadership of most organizations.  I believe that a younger workforce still wants to find a great company where they can build a career, but we keep telling them that is unrealistic in today’s world.

Career ADHD is something we’ve made up to help us explain to our executives why we can no longer retain our employees. Retention is hard work. It has a real, lasting impact on the health and well-being of a company. There are real academic studies that show the organizations with the highest tenure outperform those organizations with lower tenure.  (here, here, and here)

Employee tenure is important, and it matters a great deal to the success of your organization. If you’re telling yourself and your leadership that it doesn’t, that it’s just ‘kids’ today, we can’t do anything about it, you’re doing your organization a disservice. You can do something about it. Employee retention, at all levels, should be the number 1, 2, and 3 top priorities of your HR shop.

What is the Health Insurance Design Impact to Employer Paid Abortions?

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Obviously, we had major news recently around abortion rights in America.

What I really want to talk about today is an amazingly quick response by organizations to immediately offer a new health benefit. Within hours of the announcement, we saw major employers come out publicly stating they would pay for the expense of their employees to obtain legal abortions if they could not get one in the state they lived and worked. Some employers also announced that they would pay for relocations for their employees to live in states with legal abortions.

All of this, just from a health benefit plan design perspective is quite remarkable!

Most employers can’t agree on offering smoking cessation programs for their employees or paying for gym memberships, but within hours, we are now paying for abortions. We have severely unhealthy obese employees, but we won’t pay for bariatric surgery. Organizations tend to move very slowly in making benefit design changes, and those changes tend to mostly be around cost/benefit.

Are we being “Inclusive” by offering an abortion benefit?

Again – I’m 100% in favor of a woman’s right to choose!

But we need to have a conversation about the hypocrisy of some of these decisions being made around this issue. This is what we do as professionals in HR. We discuss decisions we make as organizations, and how each decision tends to lead to other issues we can’t yet know what they might be.

So, we are now offering abortions as a health benefit. Why?

Let’s say we are willing to pay $5,000 dollars for our female employees to get an abortion. It definitely makes us sound like we are a very progressive employer! It’s interesting, though, that many of the employers who are willing to pay for your abortion are not willing to pay for your parental leave if you chose to keep your baby. They are unwilling to pay for childcare assistance after you have your baby.

Why is that?

Could it be, that not having children make you a more productive and less expensive to insure employee?

We must ask ourselves this question, if not only to ensure we are being inclusive in our insurance offerings to our female employees.

If you want to be “inclusive” you offer a woman a full choice. Yes, you can choose to have an abortion and we’ll support you! Yes, you can have the baby, and we will still support you! If you only choose one side, you are being exclusionary. Why?

Abortion as an employer-paid health benefit

There are benefits we pay as employers that have very little financial impact but make us look like we are an employer of choice. College Tuition reimbursement was always the biggest one. We offer you college tuition reimbursement knowing almost no one actually takes advantage of it. It’s one of the lowest-used benefits a company can offer! But, we feel great about ourselves when we market this out to candidates and employees.

Are abortion benefits the next college tuition benefit? You offer it up, knowing it makes you look like a progressive employer, but you know it really has very little financial impact. On the flip side, offering paid parental leave and childcare assistance, well, those benefits actually cost us real money, so no, we won’t offer those!

All women should be allowed to make their own choice with their bodies. Period. Employers are going to decide if they should help women with that decision. I think we, as HR leaders and professionals, should be advising our executives that having a “Choice” is about more than one option. Our benefit plans should support any choice a woman wants to make, not just one.

Abortion is health care. Having and caring for a child is health care. Organizations need to support all choices that a woman might want to make.

SHRMLab’s Better Workplace Challenge Cup HR Tech Winner! #SHRM22

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This is the second annual Better Workplace Challenge Cup competition that SHRM has put on. The BWCC is an HR Technology Startup Competition that goes through three rounds of vetting over one hundred new HR Technology startups. The final four make it on stage at the SHRM Annual Conference and they get to pitch who they are and what they do, then an expert panel of judges decides a winner.

The winner receives a bunch of stuff including a $50,000 first-place prize! But honestly, the recognition and promotion alone of being the winner at SHRM is probably worth more than the $50,000! That means really, all of the final four are winners because they all get great exposure.

The 2022 Final Four are also unique in that all four were led by female founders! This seems appropriate given that 80% of HR professionals are female, we need more females developing the technology we use every day to help make our workplaces and our workforces better!

Let’s take a look at the Final Four:

Vinco (Your 2022 Winner!) – Lissy Giacomán, Founder and CEO based in Monterrey, Mexico.  

Vinco is an ed-tech company whose primary mission is to serve as a bridge between employers who wish to upskill, individuals who want to earn credentials, and institutions who want to drive their enrollment online. Vinco works to assist HR teams in upskilling their employees through connections at over 2,000 top educational programs.

Automation Workz – Ida Byrd-Hill, founder and CEO based in Detroit, MI (so you know I was rooting for Ida!)

The Automation Workz Life Culture Audit is a mobile app assisting HR professionals and corporate leaders to motivate front-line workers to digital career and training success. The Life Culture Audit reduces turnover and absenteeism by coaching front-liners through coding games and creation of their life vision so they realize they have the skills and potential success for new digital careers. 

Included – Laura Close, co-founder and chief business development officer

Included helps companies hire and retain a diverse workforce and drive measurable progress on diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) goals. The platform provides step-by-step guidance based on your own people data trends. Included makes sure you never miss an opportunity to hire the most qualified diverse talent. 

Inclusivv – Jenn Graham, founder and CEO

Inclusivv is a technology platform that brings people together for courageous conversations. Our conversation design process combines thorough research, psychology and the power of storytelling and follows a simple but powerful framework for hosting small group conversations: three big questions, one voice at a time, and equal time to share. 

Shoutout to the SHRMLabs team, led by Guillermo Corea, they have done an amazing job with this competition, but beyond that, they are truly bringing an in-depth focus to HR Technology that has never been at SHRM and it’s impressive.

Last year at SHRM Annual 2021, SHRM CEO Johnny Taylor, said he wants the entire HR profession to think of SHRM when they think about HR Technology and the SHRMLabs team is truly taking purposeful steps to make this happen.

Does being HR or Recruiting Certified Matter? #SHRM22 #CauseTheEffect

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This is the million-dollar HR and TA career question. SHRM will tell you of course being certified matters and will have a positive impact on your HR Career. I tend to agree with this and will explain why. On the talent acquisition side, this is more problematic, but I’m hopeful some opportunities are on the horizon for recruiters as well.

I first got certified in HR in 2001 and have maintained a certification ever since, even though I don’t work in a full-time HR capacity. I do run a company with hundreds of employees, and as a CEO having some great HR knowledge is very helpful! So, it makes sense for me to continue to sharpen my HR saw.

The reality about professional certifications

  • Certifications don’t ensure you’ll be great at your function, but it does show a potential employer that you are working on getting better and smarter. Very few in any profession put in the work to get there, so it does show your desire to truly want to be in the profession.
  • You can be great without a certification. You can, no one denies that.
  • Certification obtainment and continual learning to maintain is the real value and key to why people pursue this lifelong learning path.
  • Certification also opens you up to an international group of like-minded people all of whom are probably open to connecting and helping. This is of massive value to you professionally.
  • Most executives hiring in HR tend to look for three things: experience, education, and certification.

Okay, the HR thing we get, what about Recruiting?

I can ask 100 leaders of talent acquisition how they ensure they hire good recruiters, not even great, just good, and 100% of them will not be able to give me that magic formula. Most will say it’s a coin flip. The world is littered with recruiters who have great brands on their resumes, but each stop is around 9-18 months. That is the time frame it takes to get “found out” in most corporate TA roles.

If they are smart, they jump to another big brand before they get fully found out, so after a few stops, they have this resume that looks really good. Three or four stops at big brands, better titles, completely awful at recruiting, but now they’re up for a recruiting leader role. The TA leaders I speak with frequently are nodding their heads right now, this is the biggest issue TA faces, we have no idea how to select good recruiters. It’s a coin flip at best.

But, certification doesn’t guarantee good! So, why am I pushing for a Recruiting Certification?

Because it’s more likely someone who puts in the work and effort will be good. I’m only looking to be Lazlo Bock at Google, 1% better than the coin flip! Every little bit helps and it’s my belief that when a really great internationally accepted recruiting certification program is launched, it will have a huge impact on raising the TA game corporately around the world.

I’m looking for a TA certification program that can teach someone who knows very little about recruiting to be a fully functioning recruiter. No more post and pray, but real recruiting, hunting, great hiring manager control, awesome candidate experience, and understanding how to leverage their technology. This is what our c-suite expects from our TA functions.

SHRM are you listening!?! I’ve been begging for this since 2001!

Some inside SHRM Influencer News from this week – I think SHRM is working on something beyond their current TA micro-credential (which is a great solid TA foundation for HR pros who also have to do TA – I’ve taught this class and it’s really good.), not sure if that will be a full-blown certification program like they have for HR, but potentially starting down a path where I can see a day when SHRM has both HR and TA certification that are desired by employers!

The Two Things HR Is Most Concerned With @SHRM22 #CauseTheEffect

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Okay, I’m officially one of the biggest HR nerds on the planet because I love talking shop to everyone! (Shout out to Lindsey from GoGo squeeZ who I trapped on my flight here and talked shop for two hours!) I’ve spent the last twelve hours talking shop to the point I’ve almost lost my voice before I need to speak tomorrow!

I spent time today at the SHRM Annual Conference in sessions, on the expo floor, at the SHRM store, in the hallways, etc. Basically, at SHRM Annual, you’re always about an arms reach away from someone in HR, if not closer, so, yeah, I’ve talked to some folks. What is on the minds of HR pros and leaders at SHRM 2022? Two things:

1. We need to hire more people.

2. We need to retain our people.

Number three is so far down the list, I’m not sure anyone even cares!

The cool thing about this, is I love these two concepts. The second cool thing about this is this is core HR at its finest. The business needs us to find talent and keep our talent. HR engaged!

This is what we do! We got the people’s side of our business. You need some more folks, okay. You need to keep the folks we have longer, okay. This is what we got into HR for! To increase the talent in our organizations. By bringing on great talent. Through developing the talent we have. By engaging the talent we have to keep them longer.

Our organizations are in crisis mode and it’s not sales-related or operations related or finance-related. It is simply HR related, and I’m here for it!

Of course, we still need to do all we do around learning, benefits, DEI, payroll, etc. We do what we do, and that doesn’t stop. But right now, our organizations are telling us they specifically have a problem that they need us to solve. That’s very cool!

Johnny Taylor, the CEO of SHRM, spoke about HR causing the effect. This is our time. And he’s right. At no other time in the history of the HR function have our organizations needed us more than today.

I always get energized being around HR pros who are trying to get better. Who are learning. Those who want to bring stuff back to their organizations that they can start doing immediately to have an impact. This is what the SHRM Annual conference is about for me. Like-minded pros, learning from each other, to raise our organizations and our profession.

Now, the hard work begins – finding more talent and keeping more talent! Let’s do this!

Are there HR Tech buyers at #SHRM22 #CauseTheEffect

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Sunday afternoon in New Orleans, the location for the SHRM Annual Conference 2022 and the Expo is open. If you haven’t come to a SHRM Annual Conference the expo hall can be a bit overwhelming. There are 800 or so vendors with booths, most are in the HR Tech space, and some are services, but it’s a lot!

Today in 2022, 99% of those attending SHRM are coming from companies that are struggling to hire more workers. Hourly and salary alike, the funny thing is there are a relatively small number of recruiting technology companies in the expo!

Why?

Well, the recruiting technology vendor community will tell you there are no buyers at the SHRM Annual Conference, so I wanted to see if that was true. I set out to speak with ten expo attendees that were Director title and above and ask them why there were attending the expo, did they have the budget to buy, and if they did, how much was that budget.

Here are the findings:

I was able to easily find ten folks to talk to at those titles. The company size ran from 100 to 100,000. Most were under 1000. 90% were in the expo looking at “what was new in the tech space”, visiting current vendors, looking to replace a current vendor, and one was looking for swag!

The big question was did they have a budget they controlled to buy and if so, how much? Here are some of the people I found at the expo –

Mary, HR Director from Illinois, of a 250-person marketing firm. She had $15,000 to spend and was looking for some technology to help with engagement and connection for remote and hybrid workers. Also, anything that could help in recruiting.

Mark, VP of HR from Denver, 2500 person medical manufacturing company. $50,000 of budget he had discretion over to buy technology. Needed help with getting more hourly workers and retaining hourly workers.

Yolanda, Director level from California, 500-person warehouse and trucking. She had $5000 she could spend and was looking for something to help with retention.

Barb, CHRO out of Atlanta, Law firm, 300 total employees, $25,000, but maybe more depending on what she found. She needed some compensation help and sourcing help for her recruiter.

Robert, Director out of Dallas, 5,000 person electronics manufacturing company. $10-25,000 and he was looking for something like internal mobility but sounded more like just internal job board help.

The one enterprise buyer I spoke with wouldn’t give me a number and realistically, she told me, anything major would have to go to RFP, but she was here looking at everything, especially things that she could add onto their SAP stack.

Across the board, everyone I spoke to was in the market at different levels and many mentioned while they might be able to make this decision on their own, this was the “just shopping” phase to see what is out there. They would take back ideas and findings to their team and decide who to demo.

So, I followed up with many with the question, “What about all those that aren’t here?” The resounding answer was, “Everyone is here, or if they’re not, we probably wouldn’t be interested” assuming those were only small players. There was an assumption all the major players in the HR Tech space were there, which we know is far from true, but it was an interesting finding!

The HR and Recruiting Tech space assumes SHRM only has SMB buyers so why come, and if I’m honest, there are a lot of those types at SHRM, probably 65% or so are in the SMB space. But, it doesn’t mean SMBs don’t have money to spend.

So many of the best-of-breed recruiting technology companies are not in attendance and I know for a fact their average deal size is under $20,000. Seems like a massive missed opportunity as these buyers were looking at a lot of lower-end techs and believing it is the next greatest thing!

It seems like with most HR Technology buys, outside of enterprise system buys, the add-on market is about being seen, being found, and delivering to an audience that needs you, but they don’t know they need you until they see you. With thousands of HR pros and leaders all in one location, it leaves me scratching my head on why these vendors don’t make the investment to come.

Are there buyers of HR Technology at the SHRM Annual Conference? The simple answer is, Yes!

Digital Transformation of Work & Wellbeing – @SHRMLabs Report

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I got invited recently to be a part of a think tank of sorts on a project with SHRM Labs and Techstars Workforce Development Accelerator discussing what technologies are needed to help navigate the new digital world of work. What the heck does that mean? Good question!

If you haven’t checked out SHRM Labs they are doing some amazing work around innovation, technology, and work. Led by Guillermo Corea, SHRM is working to take a leading stance on the technology that is built for HR. This isn’t your grandmother’s SHRM! Shout out to Hadeel El-Tashi, she has been amazing as well on the SHRM Labs team.

Basically, we have three types of worker environments right now:

  • Full On-Premise work
  • Hybrid
  • Full Remote

Full on-premise work we’ve been trying to build tech and processes around wellbeing for a long time. To limited success, for sure, but still, it’s been a long focus for technologists and HR for decades. Hybrid and Full Remote, while not new, were limited in use, so the focus was not there, then the pandemic thing happened and this had to ramp up really fast.

What we found is there are limited options for organizations to truly and robustly support their team’s well-being when they work remotely and in hybrid scenarios. Here’s the basis of the report:

This report highlights participants’ voices on each of these points. It proposes ways to foster work/life integration in remote- and hybrid work environments, followed by an exploration of elements that constitute a great employee experience and effective employee culture, closing with a discussion of how companies can attract (and retain) the best talent in the face of a tight labor market and the Great Resignation.

You can download the report here

What were our main findings:

  1. All organizations need to find ways to embrace flexibility in the workplace. Not just white-collar workers, but all workers. Flexibility and “All” is a difficult undertaking.
  2. Give employees agency and develop accountability. I call this one, treating employees like adults, but smarter people in the think tank had better words than me!
  3. Drive efficiency and asynchronous communication tools. Stop the non-stop stream of zoom meetings thinking that’s how you’ll communicate effectively with hybrid and remote workers.
  4. Personalize benefits and improve the employee experience. We still deliver benefits mostly like it’s 1970. Everyone gets a 401K match, even if that’s not your priority and you have student loans or want to buy your first house. Or we offer student loan repayment, but you graduated thirty years ago and paid off your loans, twenty-five years ago. One size fits most, is a crappy experience.

We also had findings around building digital culture and attracting more workers – you can download the report to check those out.

Overall, we’ve got work to do in HR as a total function, including TA, Talent Management, Learning, Benefits and Compensation, etc. This is invigorating for the field and there are so many passionate technologists in our space trying to help us develop great solutions for our issues.

I’ve been studying the technology in our space for the past decade and I’m always amazed that the process of what we need and what’s available is ever-evolving. The pandemic while awful, has opened up the world of work in ways we’ve been pushing to make happen for decades with little movement, then this tipping point happened and it’s like HR is being reinvented all over again.

It’s an amazing time to be in our profession!

How to Improve HR Conferences Post-Pandemic

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Hey gang, I’m on my way back from SHRM Talent in Denver and thinking about how we can improve the conference experience. My favorite conference to attend is SHRM Talent. Almost everyone I run into as a TA title and these are my people! Shared pain brings us all closer together!

I was having a conversation with an attendee with the premise, what if never had HR conferences, so we had no preconceived notions of what an HR conference should be, what would we do differently? Here are some of my ideas:

– Virtual conferences suck. The interaction is limited at best. I would love to see what Facebook/Meta spaces could be for virtual if we all had headsets in a virtual conference hall. So, I’m saying conferences should be in-person, but I know we’ll always have a virtual component moving forward.

– A one-hour+ presentation sucks. I actually don’t mind doing them because I love to hear myself talk! Also, in an hour you can fumble around and still get to the end with no problem. 15 -30 minutes you must be tight! You must get to the juicy stuff quickly! People pay greater attention to shorter time segments. We love TEDx presentations because they are 17 minutes and it leaves us wanting more!

– Every conference should have some sort of professional speed dating. The real reason we go to a conference is to expand our professional network, so we have folks to lean on when we need help outside our normal work network, which tends to be limited.

– Let’s say 500 people attend a session and on a scale of 1 to 10, let’s say 30 people give it an 11! They love it! They want more! Those 30 people should have some sort of way to set up additional times outside of the conference for further discussion and networking. Community building makes your conferences more sticky. 

– Don’t put everyone in dark conference ballrooms! Set up a stage outside in the sun and let folks get some vitamin D. RecFest in London is great at this. But you also have to have some balance for those who can’t take all the heat all day. But, if I’m in Vegas or Scottsdale in October, put a stage outside and let folks get some fresh air. We all need some recess! 

– More coordination amongst conference organizers. In 2022, this spring, I’ve already run into a week where there are 3 conferences going on in the same week that I want to attend. Can’t there be a big shared Google calendar? Hung Lee put one of these together but not enough conference organizers know about it, so they all plan their stuff in the same weeks.

– Better food and drinks. It’s 2022, and we can’t figure out what people want vs. these are the options we offer you? My kid’s high school can have a food court with 15 options, but somehow I’m paying $2,000 to attend an adult conference and I get dry chicken and wilted lettuce?! And never any diet Dew!? (Except SHRM Talent – Shoutout, I had diet Dew every day!)

– Put the best speakers and keynotes upfront. We do this dumb thing where we try and keep conference attendees to the end by putting the best content last. It doesn’t matter, 40% of the folks are taking off early. Every. Single. Time. Stop trying to force people to stay at your conference longer than they want. Just put the best upfront when everyone is there, and let the ones with average content get better with fewer people watching. Unless you have Oprah or Michelle Obama as your closing keynote, you’ll always have a big number taking off on the last day to get home at a decent time.

– Make attendees commit to expo demos. You get to come, but you actually need to do three demos. You think you’ll hate them, but you’ll actually learn something. If you don’t do them, you don’t get invited back. We’re here to learn and be better, it’s okay to place some expectations on attendees. I know this sounds stupid, but I think it would actually help HR Pros.

Okay, what are your HR Conference ideas?! Hit me in the comments, let’s come up with some awesome ways to make them better.