Talentculture #worktrends

Today I’m welcoming Chris Wakely, Executive Vice President, Global Sales, Benify, to #WorkTrends to talk about benefits in general. We mean everything besides compensation — the perks, culture, health plans and other offerings that the employer offers. The best way to deliver them all is via a digital platform that meets the needs of employees today.

Today I’m welcoming Guibert Englebienne, the Chief Technology Officer & Cofounder of Globant, to talk about the power of AI-driven collaboration. This is absolutely on the leading edge of how we work, and how we manage and engage our people — using data and AI-driven tools to boost collaboration between teams and foster company culture, and enabling us to work together efficiently and creatively from anywhere in the world.

Love them or hate them. Job descriptions are a fact of business life. The problem with many job descriptions is that they are boring, lack the essential information a job seeker needs to assess a company's workplace culture and are, all too often, written to benefit the hiring company and not the person considering the job.    Information such as "a day in the life" is rarely provided, nor is enough information about the position and team or department where the new hire will be working. In essence, they are static, one-sided statements that create a challenge for engaging job seekers. This neither benefits the employer nor the job applicant. It potentially increases the risk of applications from unqualified candidates, along with confusing job applicants with poorly written descriptions. But thoughtful companies are making strides to improve their job descriptions by writing them to attract and engage interested, qualified job seekers.

Today I’m welcoming Liz King, the CMO of gThankYou, LLC, to talk about the importance of workplace gratitude. Sharing gratitude with employees and peers may actually be the special sauce of workplace culture. We’re going to hear about the science behind gratitude, and how it transforms the workplace. We’ll talk about how to shape a whole culture of gratitude, and what to do for the holidays that will make everyone smile.

Today I’m welcoming Justin Holland, the CEO and Founder of HealthJoy to talk about health benefits — and why it’s so important for employers to deliver a quality healthcare benefits experience for their employees, wherever they’re working, remote or on-site. Healthcare has changed radically — it’s far more complex than it ever was. And right now, employees need more help and guidance than ever. 

Sexual harassment is not an easy topic, and with the advent of most employees working from home, it has taken on a new dimension of difficulty. Identifying it with concrete evidence is sometimes a feeling you get because you know the other person's behavior or comment was not appropriate. Still, the question is, was it sexual harassment.    Keep in mind that sexual harassment does not always occur through physical contact. The spoken word, emails, texts, and video conferencing can all serve as vehicles to deliver sexually harassing messages.    Further, sexual harassment can be delivered in various ways. Comments targeted to your gender, wardrobe, hairstyle, or even an inappropriate joke can be construed as sexual harassment and under many legal jurisdictions can be reported as such. 

Working with virtual assistants can be a great benefit to organizations of all sizes and industries, and especially useful for start-up companies and small businesses looking to grow. Using virtual assistants can take many burdens off of a business owner and can do it in an economical way. Often, business owners will take on the tasks and duties associated with all aspects of their business leaving them to become overwhelmed and over burdened, which can lead to burnout and the potential demise of their business. Hiring virtual assistants of varying specialties can help streamline the processes and procedures established for a business and provide the expertise a business may be missing.    In this episode of #WorkTrends, entrepreneur Nathan Hirsch, the co-founder of OutsourceSchool, describes the myriad benefits of hiring virtual assistants. He explains how to properly hire, onboard, train and manage virtual assistants to get the most from the skills they bring to an organization. He, also, shares advice on w

HR is navigating endless changes right now, including how to best advise and equip employees with the savings and financial planning they need. What’s different: we’re not face to face. The tools and information need to be online — and in a platform that makes sense, offers simple and clear navigating, and presents the best savings opportunities there are. Employees are under enough pressure as it is. And they need a way to better support the financial stresses they’re under. And with the world changing so quickly, we need a platform that can leverage the power and the scope of automation. And while we’re at it, let’s make it trustworthy, reliable, scaleable, and easy for both employers and employees to use.    Today I’m sitting down with Augie Smith, Founder of Otherhood, to talk about how his company partners with employers to help their employees with a pressing challenge today: saving as much pre-tax income as they can for what matters: healthcare, education, and retirement. We’ll be looking at the role o

Reflektive’s new report on performance management shows like every other aspect of how we work, there are major changes afoot. The 2020 Performance Management Benchmark Report, as it’s called, is hot off the presses.It surveyed over  1,000+ HR professionals, business leaders and employees, on the state of performance management, including trends, employee needs, and sentiment about the future.  Jennifer Toton, Chief Marketing Officer at Reflektive, joins host Meghan M. Biro to download some of the more compelling trends that the survey uncovered. The report sheds light on the present and the future — and how the shift to remote working has changed our views and expectations on performance, as well as our desire for feedback, reviews, coaching, communication, and time.

The pandemic has thrown a curve ball to many people in the workplace. What was once normal is now the old way of doing things. The new normal came quickly and it didn’t give people a chance to catch up. Many employees were faced with working from home or someplace else that is not optimal for many reasons. Some find the noise distracting, the workspace inadequate, the routine disruptive or the technology lacking in ways that is causing people to fall behind in their work.  In this episode of #WorkTrends, I’m spending time with two veterans of remote working, Maria Orozova and Scott Thomas. They own and manage a creative services agency and do this successfully as a married couple. Many of the struggles employees and businesses are facing now are challenges they overcame in their many years of learning how to divide child care, finding ways to create “alone” time, delineating between work and home hours and using good tactics for interactions that don’t create communication fatigue.

You’ve worked hard to create an engaged, loyal workforce. Then 2020 hits. Overnight we are sent to at-home workspaces working in physical isolation. We balance the stresses of health and wellbeing with maintaining performance in our jobs. Civil unrest has quickly heightened emotions and anxiety. All this and we’re barely past the mid-year mark. In a work world where our teams are distributed physically and mentally, how can we build and maintain trust among our workforce? Further, how do trust and belonging drive sustainable performance?    Today I’m sitting down with Iain Moffat, Chief Global Officer of MHR International, to talk about the importance of safety, relationships, and purpose as the cornerstones for building real trust in today’s workplace — and radically strengthening the company culture. These may be uncertain times, but creating a sense of trust and belonging in your workforce and your workplace gives people an anchor we all need — and it’s an incredibly effective way of sustaining the kind of

Before COVID-19 one of the most popular ongoing discussions at #WorkTrends was about the gig economy — which was already breaking open the traditional 9-5 model of working and shifting the perspective from payroll to project. Coworking, freelancing, independent contractors — we were looking at generational preferences and realizing that it was highly likely that we would not be bringing talent into the workforce the same way we had before.    Then came the pandemic, and suddenly we shifted to remote working and flexible schedules out of necessity — which as more than one colleague of mine has said is, after all, the mother of invention. And with that shift came the realization that we really can break out of the 9-5 mold, undo our adherence to staying in cities in order to be near our workplace, and detach from the need to stay on salary for being independently affiliated. There are, of course, tangible matters to address, including how we best source and hire freelancers with the chops and skills we really n

There’s so much uncertainty about what will happen to the workplace — whether we will wind up staying remote or mixing it up, or be able to return to a physical workspace. Will it be safe, will it be a best practice? There are a lot of questions facing us and we’re not going to have the answers for a while now, given what’s happening in the country with COVID-19.    Against this backdrop, we still need to hire people. And we need to find a way to onboard them into a work culture that inspires and engages them. Just how to do that has always been a challenge. But now it’s even more so — because we can’t rely on proximity to transmit behaviors or a sense of shared purpose, or energy, or enthusiasm. It all has to happen in a way that transcends physical boundaries and is effective nevertheless. Today I’m welcoming John Baldino, President and Founder of Humareso, to talk about the best practices for onboarding your new hires into your workforce, no matter where you are — and how to uncover the blind spots in you

The Supreme Court recently handed down a landmark Federal civil rights law that protects gay, lesbian and transgender workers from workplace discrimination based on sex, including gender identity and sexual orientation. The ruling extends protections to millions of workers nationwide, and it’s an incredible victory for inclusiveness and diversity. But on a day to day level, we have a lot of work to do. Even in workplaces that consider themselves inclusive, coexistence can be harrowing for those whose identity doesn’t conform to gender stereotypes.    In many ways and on many levels, we so often don’t know what our fellow coworkers are going through. We don’t see their struggles — and in some cases, that ignorance can make it worse. Since bias, diversity and inclusiveness are very much front and center for so many conversations about work, and they should be, I wanted to make sure we looked at how it is for LGBTQ employees. That’s a segment of diversity and inclusion we don’t focus on enough. So we’re going t

Leaders today are grappling with very real and pressing challenges: keeping their workforce safe, balancing the need for business results with the need for compassion, staying ahead of new laws and regulations, grappling with whether or not to reopen and how to do it safely. As they put their hearts and minds into how to improve their work cultures on a very fundamental level, two factors to keep in mind: resilience — the ability to weather changes and struggles and bounce back intact, and diversity.    Forward thinking leadership means taking a clear stance on diversity that is effective and relevant. It’s one critical way to increase the resilience of your organization and your work culture. If you don’t address the problems that make your work culture brittle, it snaps under pressure. If you don’t aim to expand your workforce to represent as many diverse points of view as possible, you lose that ability to make the best decisions based on seeing all the possible angles. But if as a leader you don’t have a

As hiring kicks back into gear with companies rebuilding workforces, adding new employees, and shifting gears to meet the needs of reopening and ramping up business, here’s the question. Are you getting the results you need to get from your hiring technology? And: Are you getting lots of leads from third party job postings, or reducing time to hire? Are you meeting your diversity goals? Does your ATS help you bring in people who join the organization and stay, and thrive? Are the new hires a good match, and are you able to leverage metadata to find out?   The answers to those questions are going to be increasingly key in the coming months and the near future. Today on #WorkTrends I’ll be talking to Doug Coull. Doug is the founder and CEO of APS, Inc., makers of SmartSearch talent acquisition and staffing management software. He’s here to discuss why we need to get real about ATS. It’s a lot more than a process or a tool. An ATS system thrives on guidance, collaboration and partnership. That means having an AT

Leading through a crisis used to be part of the conversation but now, in these times, it is the conversation. We’re in a health crisis, an economic crisis, and also a social crisis — and all are having a heavy impact on our workforces. And these strategies apply to any crisis — hopefully they won’t be as mammoth as what we’re facing as of late.    The good news is that if leaders take the right approach they can help steer the company and their people through the maze of uncertainty, fear, and anxiety and be in far better shape when they come out on the other side of the crisis. That means being as transparent as you can be, communicating clearly and frequently, and being careful about the speed and velocity of any decision, or pivot. Leaders have had to oversee a dramatic shift to remote work in so many industries — and in others, they have had to find ways to help make their workforce safe. But these are all the factors of trust — and trust is the glue that’s going to hold your organization together, no mat

What’s happening today has thrown lives and work into turmoil, but we’ve never adapted more quickly. What’s enabling some businesses to pivot in record time is being grounded in the technology needed to keep the workflow going, and the people who possess the digital skills to make it happen.    Digital skills were in high demand before Covid-19, part of the digital transformation some call Work 4.0, and that demand is increasing. As businesses scale, adjust, strategize, and aim for the future, their survival depends on workforce that’s skilled in digital skills — including analytics, data-driven decision making, and new and emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning.    How do you create that workforce, as a startup, an SMB, as a Fortune 500? By understanding the nature of your business, assessing what you need to function, and identifying the gaps. And there are effective strategies to assess the digital skills of prospective hires today that accommodate a changed hiring lands

On a granular level, work cultures are made of relationships, and relationships are made of interactions. Every interaction we make has the opportunity to benefit our relationships or potentially cause damage. In work, where relationships are the backbone of collaboration, productivity, engagement and teamwork, interactions are important to get right.    But it’s not always that easy, or that simple. Even before the pandemic triggered a lockdown and work from home, we weren’t always succeeding. Now that we’re working remotely with increased distraction and less direct contact, or on the front lines as essential workers under tremendous pressures, the dynamics have gotten even more complicated. Zoom fatigue and incivility are just two factors undermining our working relationships, whether we’re aware of them or not. Today, Robin Rosenberg, CEO and Founder of Live in Their World, as well as an executive coach and clinical psychologist, joins #WorkTrends to talk about the best practices for improving our work i

What is wellness? The definition has been thrust into high contrast by COVID-19 and our changing work landscape. Working remotely or not, employers tending to employee well-being are finding themselves at the cutting edge of employee experience when their wellness offerings fit the needs and lives of their people.    At #WorkTrends we’re looking at some of the companies who are focusing on wellness as a key differentiator -- in terms of employee performance and experience, and also customer experience. And we’re looking at how the pressures and challenges today are helping to catalyze a new definition of what wellness means. It’s not a matter of offering isolated benefits or perks anymore — it can’t be. As companies shift to flexible and remote working out of necessity, they’re finding the need to provide a through-and-through culture that embodies their values — and wellness is an enormous component.  Today I’m bringing Arthur Matuszewski, VP of Talent, Better.Com to #WorkTrends to talk about how he and his