H2 2020: The Big Shift in HR
The second half of 2020 will require new skill sets in the HR suite including mental health and behavioral science.
The war for talent is on hold right now. For the past ten years, companies’ HR strategies revolved around luring the best and brightest into their organizations. This included a focus on employee perks, unlimited vacations, and pouring a lot of money into recruiting. As a result, companies revolved their HR departments around meeting these needs. While recruiting talent will to some degree be an evergreen priority, it is no longer the #1 priority when it comes to HR strategy in a COVID-19 world.
The “war for talent age” is over, and HR leaders need to adapt.
The war right now is to keep talent motivated, productive, accountable, and focused. This requires a new skill set.
I believe there will be a substantial shift in needing HR and People leaders who have the following backgrounds:
1. Mental Health and Behavioral Science
2. Employee experience
3. Coaching
Mental Health and Behavioral Science
Prior to COVID-19 around 1 in 5 adults struggled with a mental health disorder that met diagnostic criteria. We are still figuring out how high that number has risen because of COVID-19, but a recent study conducted by Ginger found nearly 7 out of 10 employees indicated that the COVID-19 pandemic is the most stressful time of their entire professional career, which has aligned with stark increases in new prescriptions of antidepressant, antianxiety, and anti-insomnia medications. According to Ginger, 88% of workers reported experiencing moderate to extreme stress over the past 4 to 6 weeks.
Among those reporting stress, 62% noted losing at least 1 hour a day in productivity and 32% lost at least 2 hours a day due to COVID-19–related stress.
What will be the cost to employees for lost productivity using these same numbers?
The average employee works around 2000 hours/year. Using that as a basic assumption, below are the breakdown of costs of lost productivity for three pay tiers of employees:
Cost of the $100,000 salaried employee= $12,500/year in 1 hour lost productivity/day; $25,000/year in 2 hours lost productivity/day
Cost of the $200,000 salaried employee= $25,000/year in 1 hour lost productivity/day; $50,000/year in 2 hours lost productivity/day
Cost of the $300,000 salaried employee= $37,500/year in 1 hour lost productivity/day; $75,000/year in 2 hours lost productivity/day
Mental health and behavioral science backgrounds are going to be in extremely high demand because employers will want to mitigate these costs. Also, forget about all the workers’ compensation claims that employers will be faced with when some of their people are too anxious or depressed to work at all. Hopefully, the COVID-19 era will end sooner than later, but what we know from behavioral science is mental health struggles don’t turn off like a light switch. Even after we get through the worst of this virus, employers will still need to grapple with the mental health effect on their employees.
HR leaders will not be expected to be therapists in the workplace but having someone trained in mental health and behavioral science is invaluable right now. Mental health has been a cornerstone of my consulting practice since I started my business six years ago. I am a classically trained therapist finishing a Ph.D. in Mental Health Counseling. However, I do not provide direct therapy to the employees of clients who hire me. Instead, I counsel them on burnout, workplace stress, managing expectations, juggling multiple roles, difficult conversations with peers and managers, etc… all the things that compound mental health ailments. I have seen the substantial impact of this type of work in organizations (and this was all before COVID-19 struck): increased productivity and engagement, lower turnover intentions, increased employee loyalty and attachment, improved decision making, and reduced litigation costs.
Tied to mental health is a behavioral science analytics background. This is where having an HR leader trained in conducting behavioral research is valuable. Many employee engagement surveys only focus on the “here and now” and can help you identify problematic areas such as “female employees between the ages of 27–34” are less engaged than “male employees of the same age”. These surveys are bucketed into “descriptive statistics” and can describe patterns. However, these surveys do not tell you (for example) the direct impact of a remote workplace on an employee’s ability to complete their daily tasks. For those stats nerds out there (I am one of them) you know this is inferential statistics and is a level-up from descriptive. Leaders may not be “running the numbers” but they do need to know how to run them and what to measure. This is primary research and highly bespoke, which typically costs tens of thousands of dollars. If you have someone in-house able to do this, you just saved yourself a boat of $$ and greatly increased the speed and efficiency at which you can analyze data and reach valuable conclusions.
Traditional HR leaders are not typically trained in either mental health or behavioral science. There never was a big reason for them to be, until now.
Another valued background for the new HR leader will be employee experience.
Employee Experience
As the workplace physically changes so will the nature of the employee experience. The operational focus to move to a remote workforce has dominated leaders’ brains since we went into lockdown. What will be trickier is how do you build a remote culture? How do you foster a sense of belonging and build that connective tissue? How do you make sure the workplace is meritocratic? Some of the toughest questions to answer will be:
1. How do you make sure promotion and salary increases are fair and equitable in this new environment? How do you evaluate the employee who is immunocompromised and not able to physically come to an office or doesn’t yet have antibodies compared to the young healthy employee who is comfortable commuting to a physical office? Performance management will be more complicated.
2. How do HR leaders ensure a workplace is a safe place that encourages employees to take risk, come up with innovative ideas, and be brave enough to see them through? One of my biggest fears is employee innovation will take a nosedive. Work environments (virtual or not) play a huge role in whether an employee engages in innovative behavior.
3. What value do you place on internal communication? Companies tend to invest in PR departments whose job is focusing exclusively on external audiences. During and after COVID, strong internal communication is and will continue to be critical. Communication that is vague and sparks skepticism will create an undercurrent of distrust in senior leadership. This leads to disengagement and more mental energy trying to figure out what messages mean than focusing on your job. We can’t afford this especially when leaders can’t have casual watercooler conversations with their teams to “clear up any misinterpretations” of company communication.
Coaching
Coaching has become a more valued skill in HR leaders in the past few years, but now it should take center stage. Here are three ways coaching plays a big role in this new paradigm:
1. Fostering professional resiliency. If you were born after 1987(ish) you haven’t experienced a depressed economy. Employees may have personal resiliency depending on their life experiences, but professional resiliency has a different flavor. This includes bouncing back from being told your salary is frozen or there’s no budget to grow your team. This also includes the ability to compartmentalize feelings of loneliness, depression, and anxiety and be able to get your work done. Easier said than done.
2. Building emotional stability in managers. Have you ever seen an emotionally unstable manager? Of course, you have! These are people with poor emotional regulation who frequently have outbursts, lash out with anger, or get visibly overwhelmed and shut down. While vulnerable leadership is critical right now, emotionally unstable leadership is not. Emotional regulation can be tied to emotional maturity, which is not always correlated with age and experience. Emotional stability is entirely coachable for those willing to do the work. Does your current HR leader know how to coach managers in improving their emotional stability?
3. Teaching employees to tolerate “the gray”. Business strategy and priorities for most organizations have been flipped on their head. Fostering a growth mindset and encouraging employees to be agile and tolerate ambiguity will be super important. Some people are naturally better at this than others, but again this skill is coachable.
While many C-suite employees may agree that People leaders need to possess an expanded skill set, few will take action. These companies will struggle to keep their talent motivated, productive, accountable, and focused. Do not be the company that plays from behind! Just find the right person with the right skill set to move you forward.
I promise you… we are out there and ready to help!
