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TalentCulture #WorkTrends

Welcome to #WorkTrends - a weekly podcast hosted by Meghan M. Biro, one of today's foremost "world of work" experts. Get all the insights you need to navigate the rapidly changing world of work, with fresh insights from "hot topic" interviews with a spectrum of HR practitioners and technology innovators. Tune-in anytime. Then join us live on social media - just use the hashtag #WorkTrends to find us and keep the conversation going!
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Now displaying: 2020
Dec 15, 2020

Today I’m welcoming Quincy Valencia, Vice President - Product Innovation at Alexander Mann Solutions. We’ll be talking about the importance of providing a great candidate experience not just to any employer, but to hourly employers, who often get short shrift in that department. We’re going to lay out the central factors in a positive hiring experience for hourly candidates, and look at an innovative solution in hiring that transforms the journey, end to end. Alexander Mann’s Hourly is a platform that locates the entire hiring process within mobile, providing more communication, more connection, more interaction, and smarter and more effective ways to run assessments that really engage the candidate. It brings a sense of dignity and respect to the hiring journey, making hourly candidates feel valued. These days, that’s more important — to both the employee and the employer —  than ever.

Dec 11, 2020

Today I’m welcoming LaFawn Davis, Vice President of Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging, Indeed to look at best practices for cultivating a diverse and inclusive workplace where everyone feels like they belong. It’s not enough to aim to improve diversity or inclusion on its own — it’s when you strategically focus on all three factors that you can really transform your workplace. We’ll also look at some common mistakes leaders, managers and HR teams make when trying to address diversity and inclusion in their workforces and why they don’t work. And we’re going to lay out what to do instead.

Dec 4, 2020

Blending personal and professional goals into a comfortable mix is gaining ground. As more and more people seek gratification in their personal lives, finding satisfaction in one's career is equally important, if not more important, than some aspects within a person's personal life. According to a research study conducted by a team of academicians at Purdue University, they discovered that some people considered their employment more important than their marriage. Ultimately, though, most people's goal is to find the intersection where happiness lies at the crossroads of their personal life and work life. 

 

Attempting to create strict boundaries between one's personal life and work often meets with disappointment. Given that we live in a world where communications travel fast and people are easily reachable, distancing oneself from personal life when at work and work when on downtime is becoming increasingly difficult, but not unacceptable. In actuality, it is possible to blend personal time and work hours into a finely balanced lifestyle. However, with some concerted effort, people can find ways to balance satisfying personal and work goals. 

Nov 20, 2020

The pandemic state of 2020 has taken its toll on everyone, everywhere, and for many, it has thrust them into working conditions they did not anticipate. Millions of people who were once driving to work and being in an environment where collaboration and face-to-face contact was a common practice are, for the most part, no longer doing this. So now that we are working from home and cannot lean over the cubicle with a quick question or ask for assistance and feedback, how can we effectively put ourselves in a position to get what we need and maintain our productivity levels along with the need to be heard? Simply, honing and using finely tuned communication skills. 

 

According to many pundits on this topic, our ability to communicate any time, especially now during the pandemic, is our best way to stay actively engaged with our business associates. Some experts take it further and encourage people to be over communicators, especially when engaging with their supervisors. This action will help people set the stage for what they need and how their new work-life balance has changed. For productivity to be maintained, both employees and leaders must understand how the new work-life balance will affect workloads and prepare themselves accordingly. 

Nov 13, 2020

Today I’m welcoming Dawn Mitchell, Vice President, Human Resources, Appian

to look at effective strategies for supporting your workforce and their mental health during and beyond the pandemic. Appian was a fully in-house, open-door, come-together work culture that found a way to take that work culture remote — and also make sure its employees get the support and help they need. And that includes mental health: we’ve all seen anxiety levels jump over the past 9 months. The key is to acknowledge it, and find ways to discreetly remind employees they have access to help.

Nov 6, 2020

Corporate integrity is not just a buzz phrase; it sits at the core of an organization's business dealings and how the organization conducts itself, both inside and outside the company. Corporate integrity applies to all organizations, whether it be a non-profit or profit-gaining business. It's like doing the right thing when no one is looking and knowing that the right thing is the most integrity filled way of conducting business. Companies that conduct themselves using intentional integrity and do so for the greater good of the organization and its employees, are leading the way in revolutionizing how smart companies are changing the landscape of business. However, outside (and sometimes inside) unforeseen forces can lead companies astray. 

 

Enter the pandemic of 2020. If ever there were a time when corruption could rear its ugly head, it would be now. Given the confusion, lack of face-to-face contact, loosened controls, and opportunity for fraudulent activity, the time is ripe for integrity to take a nosedive. In fact, according to a 2020 survey conducted by EY, they discovered that 90% of employees believe that the pandemic puts their employer at risk for unethical business dealings. 

Oct 30, 2020

Today I’m welcoming Natalie Baumgartner, Chief Workforce Scientist, Achievers 

to talk about the challenge of alignment in workforces right now. Achievers’ Workforce Institute just put out the 2020 Culture report, based on their June survey of over 1100 people around the world. Culture alignment now is just as important as ever — but as with so many facets of working today, COVID-19 has had a profound effect. Culture alignment plays a key role in recognition as well as engagement. We’ll talk about the study, and the best strategies to promote alignment now.

Oct 23, 2020

Today I’m welcoming Brad Sutton, Strategic Accounts, EightfoldAI, to talk about how talent management — and talent acquisition as well —  are being transformed by AI. AI is changing the game in everything from recruiting to team building to succession planning, and proving a powerful ally in retention and engagement initiatives as well. 

Oct 16, 2020

Today I’m welcoming Dickens Aubourg, Paycom Director of Client Learning, to talk more about the power of reskilling, retraining and upskilling when it comes to engaging, retaining, and developing your talent, and why that’s a key business strategy right now. Developing from within is always a smart approach, but it makes even more sense in the context of remote workplaces — and the need to engage our people and motivate our top performers.

Oct 9, 2020

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.

Oct 2, 2020

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.

Sep 25, 2020

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.

Sep 18, 2020

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.

Sep 11, 2020

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. 

Sep 4, 2020

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. 



Aug 28, 2020

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 when the best times are to hire virtual assistants with specific skill sets during various business growth milestones.

Aug 21, 2020

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 of automation and AI in this innovative platform, and talking about why employee self-service is so important when it comes to benefit management.

Aug 14, 2020

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.

Aug 7, 2020

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.

Jul 31, 2020

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 performance and engagement that, in turn, sustains your business.

Jul 24, 2020

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 need. But here’s another revelation: HR is a great opportunity for hiring freelancers – and being a freelancer. Freelancers with HR talent are on the rise and for a number of reasons, we’re going to see more organizations turning to freelancers — and finding that both strategically and practically, it’s a win.

 

Today I’m welcoming Chris Russell, Founder, HR Lancers, and Jim Stroud, VP marketing, Proactive Talent, to talk about the enormous shift we’re seeing in how people work and how organizations hire — from salaried to gig. And that includes HR as well, which may surprise some of you. But with millennials leaving major metropolitan areas and remote working becoming the norm, freelancing is becoming a viable way to build a great HR team. We’ll talk about effective strategies for hiring the best and the brightest freelancers for HR, from best practices to best resources.

Jul 20, 2020

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 your onboarding process as well as your workculture to make onboarding a success.

Jul 10, 2020

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 to head from an expert on the issue who’s developed a very effective methodology for increasing empathy and self-awareness. It’s a tool for reducing unconscious bias, microaggressions, and other challenges that LGBTQ employees face all too often, and creating a sense of camaraderie, collaboration and support that truly includes everyone. 

 

Today I’m welcoming Elena Joy Thurston to #WorkTrends. Elena is an inspirational speaker and founder of the PRIDE and Joy Foundation, and she has an incredible life story. She’s here to talk about the connection between growing our self-awareness and making our work cultures truly inclusive.

Jul 3, 2020

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 well-developed sense of emotional intelligence, you won’t practice the empathy and the clarity to understand the dynamics at work in your organizational culture, and steer your workforce through a crisis — any crisis. And you likely won’t be able to keep your best talent for very long. 

 

Today I’m welcoming Melissa Lamson, CEO of Lamson Consulting to talk about the new imperative for leaders — to bring resilience as well as diversity to their organizations, and why the two go hand in hand.

Jun 19, 2020

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 ATS partner who can work with you to create great solutions. An ATS partner helps companies make the best decisions around hiring — to improve their hiring success and sustain their business as they move forward, regroup and rebuild. There’s a lot to know about the why and the how of ATS.

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