39 minute read
What if you can’t fire anyone?
The ability to fire people is a cheap and easy solution; and it actually disincentivises employers from doing the hard work necessary to truly manage and develop talent By Jeffrey Pfeffer & M Muneer
Does ease of doing business hinge on, among other things, at-will employment policies? Did India modify its strong labour laws that protect employee interest for improving its ranking in the World Bank’s ease of doing business report? Thankfully, the bank has paused the reporting for now on allegations of data manipulation, and to refresh the methodology.
The only country in the world practising at-will employment is the USA, where anyone can be fired without a reason – and the number of cases suing for wrongful termination is also the highest there. While the rest of the world has labour laws that are supposed to safeguard societal interests, employers there find ways to fire people at-will, either by building a case or by creating hostile environment forcing them to quit at their will.
The authors Buckingham and Goodall of the book, Nine Lies About Work, brought home some painful facts about people management. First, the state of people management remains poor. Prior to the pandemic, Gallup reported that the quit rate is at an all-time high: 67% of employees are disengaged at work; and more than half say they are actively looking for a new job. Second, HR lacks a commitment to evidencebased people management (evaluating a decision or policy with evidence such as data and peer-reviewed scientific research to ensure the desired result is achieved).
The HR practices that remain in use, notwithstanding the evidence against them like the forced curve performance evaluations, stem from one root cause: the ability to fire employees even if the laws are not in favour. Because of this, workplaces are prone to use counterproductive management approaches that evaluate rather than invest in and develop employees.
Adopting a growth mindset
Each year a substantial number of employees lose their jobs everywhere. The last two years accelerated this trend because of the pandemic. And there is evidence that being fired is not a sign of incompetence, but possibly an organisational mistake. One ten-year study of 2,600 executives found that of those who were fired, 91% found a job as good or better than the one they lost, and 78% eventually rose to become CEO. The idea that the solution to poor performance is termination produces numerous unproductive approaches to managing people.
Research has consistently shown the benefits of adopting a growth mindset over an evaluating one. An evaluating mindset implies that if a salesperson is not meeting his/her target, the diagnosis is that person can’t sell – is not a natural – and should be either fired or moved into a different job. A growth mindset, on the other hand, implies that if a salesperson is currently not effective, that individual might benefit from training in sales techniques and coaching from mentors on what they are doing. A growth mindset implies that not only should individuals play to their strengths but also that many people, with the right information, development, and mindfulness, can in fact develop new strengths.
Implementing a growth
mindset is difficult and requires more than just espousing it. There’s a great deal of effort required to develop talent through hard work, coaching and learning. If people are readily replaced, the temptation to fire them and find someone else can be overwhelming. If employers would think of firing as a last resort or consider the evidence on the effectiveness and importance of mindsets and if labour policy makes it more difficult and costly to remove people, employers HR managers might still want to provide developmental information, but it almost certainly would take a very different form. The conversation would focus on how the employee could improve and what the employer and employee could jointly do to develop that individual’s competencies, not the person’s “grade.” And instead of being performed annually or every six months, developmental conversations would occur all the time.
would be more likely to actually embrace a growth mindset and work more diligently to develop everyone to their full potential.
Performance reviews, which many managers hate giving and few employees like receiving, may be the most detrimental HR practice when it comes to developing a growth mindset.
Evaluations presumably identify who needs to go on “performance improvement plans,” and are used to rank people against each other. If firing people weren’t at the forefront of these reviews,
Nine Lies calls high potential programmes that separate employees into strata “apartheid”. If the focus was less on evaluation and more on development, every company would have more “high potentials” because companies would be committed to keeping – and developing – everyone.
Does firing even work?
Consider this logic. Unless the company is downsizing, every person fired needs to be replaced. Unless the company has somehow improved its selection process, or done something to become a more attractive place to work, the organisation will just return to the same labour pool from which it drew the now-fired individual, with the same “deal,” and draw again. What are the odds it will do better? That is why companies that fire people – and those that downsize – tend to do it again and again, because these actions don’t solve anything.
Here's a useful analogy. Almost no parents have ever “fired” their child. When the child misbehaves or doesn’t live up to their potential, great parents provide love, attention, guidance and motivation, and work hard to ensure the best possible outcome for the kid. Wouldn’t it be nice if companies did the same to employees? Instead of disposing of people, give them second, third, maybe even fourth chances. Invest in them. Provide them the social support necessary for physical and mental health, and the opportunity to do better.
We live in a world of untapped human potential as the enduring pandemic has shown. Fulfilling people’s promise requires a commitment to their development that the opportunity to simply get rid of them renders unlikely.
aBout the author
PfEffEr is chair professor of organisational behaviour at Stanford Graduate School of Business, and MunEEr is MD of CustomerLab and Co-Founder of the non-profit Medici Institute. Twitter @MuneerMuh
rAJul MATHur
Workplace trends to watch out for in 2022
Growth expectations, flexible work, technology, management competencies, the need to encompass DE&I and well-being –how can organisations address these in 2022?
Organisations have faced unprecedented changes in the last 3 years. 2020 was about sustenance enabling work from home and employee well-being and engagement. Gradual economic recovery in 2021 brought the focus back on growth while simultaneously adapting to a dynamic and flexible working environment. The start of 2022 has brought in a feeling of déjà vu as Omicron made its presence felt in India.
There are six ‘people pressure points’ that organisations are currently having to deal with: • Growth expectation as we navigate from one wave to another • Flexible working – how to get this right, both in policy and practice • Technology and data strategy – adding new value creating delivery models • Leadership / Manager competencies – making managers capable to effectively manage in the new reality • Diversity, Equity, and
Inclusion – being inclusive across all forms of diversity • Managing employee wellbeing and engagement
Add to this the challenge that the Great Resignation has brought in as most organisations are seeing a significantly higher attrition level. This is putting a huge cost pressure on organisations wherein the talent demand and supply equation has clearly moved in favour of the employees. What do we expect organisations to do in 2022?
Organisations are focusing on 3 key strategic areas to address these people pressure points:
1. Optimising work and
job design: We expect organisations to stably adopt flexible work strategy and expedite automation initiatives to redesign jobs and tasks.
Workplace flexibility is a reality! In the last 2 years there has been greater acceptability of the hybrid work model. New technolog-
ical infrastructure is being put in place. Companies have also considered investing in monitoring software to measure productivity and performance in this flexible work arrangement. Also, erstwhile work modes are being revisited and redesigned using automation, AI, and digitalisation.
As business and work strategy evolves, the ability of organisations to identify new sources of talent and imbibe new skills required to get work done are expected to gain more importance.
2. Being innovative with
pay and benefits: Organisations are likely to come up with innovative, skill based, differentiated and at times ad-hoc reward solutions to manage the challenge as presented by the Great Resignations and the new way of working.
With the new workplace and job design in place, concerns of pay parity is natural. More than ever, it is important for employers to define their total rewards philosophy and gather a good understanding of what each employee segment seeks from their Total Rewards offering. Total Rewards comprise of hard salary (like guaranteed cash, incentives, bonuses, equity etc.); people processes and programmes (like health and well-being, flexi work, learning and development, career, performance management etc.); and HR policies (like leave, benefits, promotion, succession planning etc.). Where majority employees are using flextime, employers don’t intend to change this arrangement anytime soon. Where return to work is essential, companies are looking to improve parental support / return-towork programmes. In addition to this, companies are already working on revamping their recruitment, promotion, and succession planning processes.
Having said that, with the evolving workplace and workforce, individual employee base pay increases in current roles will be affected. Market competitiveness, criticality of the role and ratings in most current year-end performance reviews are the key factors affecting individual employee base pay increases currently, however, over the next three years, possession of skills will triumph ratings.
Organisations are committed to enhancing their physical / emotional well-being programmes to provide the future security necessary to support employees in a more agile and flexible workplace.
3. Managing employee
growth and careers: Organisations are looking to focus on making changes in the way careers are defined. Organisations have realised that it is going to be critical to create a human-centric, holistic, and purpose-driven employee experience with a goal of cultivating employees’ growth with more flexibility in career options.
Lateral career progression frameworks are becoming prevalent with equal emphasis on individual contributors as well as people managers by building a talent ecosystem encompassing alternative work models.
The Great Resignation has brought a significantly higher attrition level to most organisations and putting on huge cost pressure as a result. What is the next step for employers?
In conclusion
The top 3 priorities for HR going forward would be to build new strategies around work and rewards, to build a talent ecosystem encompassing alternative work models and to create a humancentric, holistic, and purposedriven employee experience. This would require organisations to focus on providing the leadership and HR teams with the required competencies and support to deliver on these priorities.
aBout the author
raJul MatHur is Consulting Leader India – Talent and Rewards, WTW
How do you ensure that your carefully structured benefits strategy is getting a utilisation rate that makes sense for the company? Here are a few points to consider
By Mint Kang
Companies are going to spend more on benefits this year. Part of the reason is rising medical costs: data from big analysts Aon and Willis Towers Watson warns that the pandemic has so significantly changed the demand and delivery patterns of medical services, cost trends are going to outstrip inflation throughout 2022. Then there's the continued emphasis on health, safety, and employee well-being, which has seen employers around the globe making major strategic changes to their benefits approach – including developing more customised benefits strategies, investing more heavily in flexibility, and even overhauling workplace culture to make it more focused on wellbeing.
With this increased spend, the level of usage naturally comes under scrutiny. Before COVID-19, studies indicated that employee benefits often went under-utilised, usually because of insufficient awareness and understanding.
And because many HR teams did not implement a way to measure takeup rates, this trend was largely ignored. However, the digital tools and platforms popularised in the last two years have made it significantly easier to track usage, and the focus on well-being has provided incentive to do so.
What makes a benefit more likely to be used?
On the surface, certain types of benefits have recently seen greater takeup rates. For example, telehealth services and mental or emotional wellness resources have seen very high usage over the last year, based on data from the corporate wellness industry which has recorded a spike in demand for these offerings. Similarly, statistics from the recruitment industry show that flexibility-related benefits are also in great demand, to the point where these have frequently become make-or-break points in employment negotiations.
Delving deeper, though, the takeup rate of any given benefit is less about its type and more about how well it is integrated into workplace culture. Some key factors are:
Communication and awareness is high
The overall usage of benefits has gone up during the pandemic, primarily because companies introduced new resources and communicated them more aggressively – particularly around mental well-being as leaders and HR teams realised the urgency of dealing with employee stress. Often, top leadership became involved in such communications in order to emphasise how seriously the company was taking it.
For example, Regan Taikitsadaporn, Chief Human Resources Officer of Marriott International for the Asia Pacific, told People Matters that Marriott used a concentrated awareness campaign to drive usage of the company's internal well-being challenge, 'TakeCare Level 30', and mental well-being tools sourced externally.
“We promoted both resources regularly through different channels, from word-of-mouth to executives leading by example,” he said. “Our leaders cultivated open lines of communication and encouraged teams to make the most of wellbeing resources.”
The takeup rate of any given benefit is determined by how well it is integrated into workplace culture. What are the key factors that make it more likely to be utilised?
The use of the benefit is normalised
People are more likely to use a resource if they see that others around them are able to take it up. Leaders and managers can start the ball rolling, either by utilising the benefit themselves or openly communicating how they intend to do so, and they also have to create an environment where employees can do the same. This may often involve building a culture of transparency and reassurance.
Yvonne Teo, Vice President HR, APAC at ADP, pointed out that communications and transparent processes play a huge role in making employees feel more secure about using their benefits, even routine ones like taking leave.
“Trust goes a long way in ensuring that employees utilise their benefits,” she said. “They need to feel secure in the knowledge that delivered to employees' mobile phones, or adjustments to work schedules to provide employees with time specifically for benefits.
James Lee, Managing Director of Group Human Capital at Great Eastern, gave People Matters an example of wellness programmes clashing with work – possibly one of the most common reasons for skipping such resources – and how the programmes can be adjusted to accommodate people.
“We realised that last minute work demands are a possible reason for some to be unable to participate in our Life programmes (a voluntary company-wide programme covering financial, mental, physical, and social wellbeing),” he said. “This is most commonly seen for webinars. Hence, we always strive to keep these sessions succinct and in some instances, recorded for on-demand viewing anytime, anywhere.”it is perfectly fine for them to take breaks when they need to. Open communication and a collaborative culture that fosters teamwork will give employees the confidence to use their benefits.”
The benefit is provided in a way that makes it convenient to use
Just as digital tools see a higher takeup rate if they are easy to adopt, employees are more likely to utilise benefits that fit well around their work. Solutions to this include the refinement of technology and content, such as on-demand well-being resources Some key actions for employers to take
Besides adjusting communication and delivery strategies around individual benefits, companies need to ensure that their overall workplace culture supports not just the idea and implementation, but the desired outcome of benefits in general – that being healthy and happy employees who are performing well and willing to stay with the company.
One good place to start is by training people managers in
creating a supportive environment, whether by being flexible around benefits, or cultivating an open and transparent team culture, or simply taking the lead to participate in wellness programmes themselves. ADP's Yvonne Teo cited the example of educational workshops, a popular way of raising health and wellness awareness: if leaders and managers join, she said, employees will be more likely to believe in the health and wellness mission.
“It’s crucial for company leaders to attend these training sessions alongside employees, and to share how they plan to apply what they’ve learned in their own working life. Hearing this from their leaders can provide reassurance, and will help employees to understand that they do not need to compromise their health to get ahead at work,” she said.
Another important step is to keep benefits programmes up to date with employee needs. This can extend beyond the resources provided – sometimes timing and delivery has to be customised as well, as in the example from Great Eastern.
Marriott International's Regan Taikitsadaporn gave a few examples of how programmes might evolve to remain relevant at any given point in time: early in the pandemic, for instance, the team introduced mental health webinars to help employees manage their mental well-being. Now that mental well-being is less of a concern but economic recovery is underway, they launched a course to help managers handle challenges more effectively during turbulent times.
“Our programmes are planned based on our associates’ needs, where we actively conduct focus group studies and check in with our associates to mine for insights,” he said. “This has helped us achieve better takeup rate on our programmes, while allowing our associates to share feedback for us to co-create effective programs such as wellness and stress management, financial planning, and etc.”
Get leaders to participate, keep your benefits updated, and create a feedback loop that includes taking action – these are some things that will help ensure your employee benefits strategy bears fruit
Finally, the feedback loop is possibly the most important step. Although the outcome of benefits can be difficult to quantify, companies still need to make that effort to learn from their employees what works and what doesn't. Then they need to turn that feedback into change – whether adjustment of existing benefits or introduction of new ones – and monitor the effectiveness of that change, just as the effectiveness of a new product strategy might be monitored by sourcing customer feedback. After all, in the post-pandemic workplace, the returns on benefits strategies are not that far off from the returns on business strategies.
ViSTY bANAJi
Big Data – bigger performance– biggest delight
Technology allows us to recommend the right mix of work, development and compensation choices for each individual employee. How can we use this micro-targeting to raise people’s performance and happiness?
On the dashboard of every HR professional there should be at least three dials. The largest one should indicate the results achieved by HR for the people of the organisation. Then there should be a measure of the creativity and path-breaking programmes used for getting those outcomes. The third dial should show how far fast-progressing information technology has been harnessed by HR so that the innovations are realized in the service of the results. What is it that impedes the average HR department form substantially improving its dashboard readings?
We can safely assume readers of this column are (or, at least, should be) committed to raising Aggregate Long-term People Happiness (ALPH).i But how? Grandiose goals always carry the sobering fear that there is no practical way to attain them. In the case of the first dial, when the aggregate is made up of both Socrates’ and pigs,ii the possibility of figuring out what will maximise utility for each individual and then actually delivering it seems to be well beyond HR (Human Reckoning).
Perhaps there is no other glamour-domain than innovation that HR not only talks about but stakes a claim to own within the corporate landscape. While we cannot own Big Data so exclusively, we are not behind any other function in describing it as the next big opportunity. The small inconvenient fact, which keeps the second and third dials low, is that HR is rarely seen as particularly innovative by employees and the little it uses Big Data is imitative of other functions rather than original. HR, of course, is not the only late adopter in the behavioural sciences. "The capacity to collect and analyze massive amounts of data has transformed such fields as biology and physics. But the emergence of a data-
driven 'computational social science' has been much slower."iii Social scientists have begun to catch up fast. HR practitioners need to do the same.
This column seeks to nudge the needles on each of our three dashboard dials. To maximize the ALPH bang for the resource buck we need to tailor our opportunity and benefit delivery to each person’s personality and preferences. For the first time, data analytic tools have made it possible to permit substantive, individualized need choices with a virtually unlimited flexibility palette. We have to realize, though, that we shall no longer remain in the realm of the anodyne technologies that we have been used to but are on the verge of acquiring lethally abusable capabilities. Hence the checks governing them must be an integral part of their deployment. We shall examine the use of big data to determine individual inclinations, the infinitely flexible choices employees can exercise and the safeguards that must accompany this radical programme.
Taming the Genie to Tell Me What I Need
Data analytics and individually targeted communication caught public attention when it was used to influence the outcome of critical elections.iv That doesn’t mean, however, that responsible wizards can’t put the genie back in the bottle and channel it to work its magic only for the benefit of people. Several of the technologies most beneficial to mankind emerged from the desire to gain an edge in situations of competition and conflict.v Data analytics directed towards understanding and satisfying people could prove no less useful.
How could we enlist the big data Goliath in the service of ALPH and better people performance? Very simply put, we need to extract individual personality and preference markers from the waves of data swirling around us and use those to construct work and benefit choices that will prove to be the most satisfying in each case. All of us leave digital footprints when we access the internet depending on the searches we make, the websites we visit, the profiles we create, the comments we share
‘The capacity to collect and analyze massive amounts of data has transformed such fields as biology and physics. But the emergence of a data-driven 'computational social science' has been much slower.’ Social scientists have begun to catch up fast. HR practitioners need to do the same
and the 'likes' we click on.vi Every one of our cyber steps is grist to the big data mill and can be used to create a passable personality profile. 'Passable' is something of an understatement since "a user’s personality can be accurately predicted through the publicly available information on their Facebook profile."vii And that’s before we account for the bias and faking that go into the self-report personality inventory that is usually used for personality assessment.viii As Seth StephensDavidowitz puts in the title of his bestseller: Everybody Lies.ix Tracking internet use and analysing the language used on the cloud permits us to circumvent the myriad deceptions we use to veil our true selves. Best of all, the big data method will go on improving in accuracy – limited only by the robustness of the personality models themselves. The additional information available (with agreement and safeguards) from e-communications and other traces created by employees within the corporation can enable us to be far more accurate in understanding their needs than simply accessing their nonwork social media presence would.
The 5G framework describes transactions between employees and the organisation. What the employee Gives to the company and, in return, what s/ he Gets from it, Growth, Guidance and Gifting
What’ll Make Me Happiest: Unlimited Choices
There is no doubt, then, that we can build extremely effortless, insignificantly intrusive (see next section) and adequately accurate personality profiles for employees. Where does that take us? Why could it revolutionise the way we manage people for their own and their organisations’ greatest benefit? To unravel the possibilities, I find it useful to use the 5G framework for transactions between employees and the organisation. The first two Gs are what the employee Gives to the company and, in return, what s/he Gets from it. The other three Gs could be force-fitted into these two but I find it more useful to examine Growth, Guidance and Gifting separately. Space here will only permit me to give illustrative ways in which our big data-driven personality judgements can make important differences in the 5G. Your ingenuity can find many more solutions, better suited to your situations.
The most basic things an employee Gives to the organisation are availability and time. During the period of presence, the skill and commitment s/he brings to bear determines the person’s
value to the company. We can expect both capabilities and engagement to improve if there is a better fit between temperament and task (as also the other ALPH accreting measures touched on in this section). But let’s just start with touch time at work. After the Covid crisis, both physical presence and time have become variable in a way no one could have imagined or permitted earlier. As we limp back to normalcy the buzzword is 'hybrid' – which is another way of saying, "We don’t know what to do, so we’ll just muddle along". We know there are personality types that flower in the isolation of their homes and are able to cocoon themselves from domestic disturbances. On the other hand, there are those who feed on and reciprocate the energy released by physical proximity. People also have varying Circadian rhythms (also traceable through their net activity) and preferences between shorter (or longer) workdays and shorter (or longer) workweeks. There is no question that on this (as well as all the other measures of flexibility we shall consider) the final agreement or veto depends on the employee. However, most employees, even if they have some inkling of their personality type, are unaware of the work pattern that would generate most productivity and ALPH for that type, and could make far more informed decisions with such inputs.
Everyone accepts that what people Get from the company extends far beyond monetary compensation. Not all of these are fungible or variable but quite a few are. For instance, differences in short-term versus long-term preferences could be allowed to manifest themselves in benefit and welfare choices within a Cost To Company (CTC) bucket. With the advent of Gigcation and, hence, the type of pedagogy and training varies in effectiveness depending on the personality of the recipient.x The choice along each career fork (functional fit, specialization versus being a generalist, highly interactional or inward-looking role, just to name a few) can also be greatly benefited by a knowledge of the personality profile of the employee facing the choice.
Despite being a longtime votary of Situational Leadership as a means of provid-
The most basic things an employee Gives to the organisation are availability and time. During the period of presence, the skill and commitment s/he brings to bear determines the person’s value to the company
supporting systems, we can also accommodate those who genuinely prefer part-time or part-year working and are willing to let the CTC drop accordingly. While not tradable against CTC, the team assignment, work allocation and longer-term career direction of individuals can all yield a larger proportion of hits and happiness if they are guided by personality insights.
Growth and the Learning that precedes it is a major part of both Give and Get. The manner of communiing the appropriate level of supervisory Guidance, I must admit to being less than satisfied about using maturity as the sole independent variable for making leadership style choices. How much richer our choice palette would be if, in addition to using the competence gap, we could guide supervisory style choices using all the colours of the person’s personality?
Gifting is removed from the transactional nature of the Give-Get equation. It comes in many varieties,
ranging from the citizenship behaviour of the employee to the servant leadership of the supervisor. However, simply because something is a gift doesn’t absolve the giver from trying to divine what the recipient desires. That, of course, is easier said than done, as evidenced by the tearful openings of Christmas day presents and the endless circulation of tea-sets given as wedding gifts. Simply being beyond Medusa invaded our cyberspace.xii While those checks are adequate for organisations with conventional HR systems, we are now seeking to extract enriched information and, like all enrichment devices (whether investment banks or uranium centrifuges), this one too needs special safeguards. Fortunately, these are simple both in concept and implementation. The test is only to ensure they are not delayed
the call of obligation doesn’t make a gift valuable. Insight into employee make-up can enhance the warm glow elicited by a selfless gift into ALPH.
Untouched by Human Hands – Unseen by Human Eyes
Data privacy for employees has been a concern for this columnxi long before the equine offspring of or circumvented.
The first and most basic guard is the unpressured choice given to each employee to say 'no' to the personality information-yielding data analytic engines. This choice should be permanently available and accompanied, for people who exercise it after joining the data collection process initially, to have their information and identities wiped out and forgotten by the system, on demand. Being removed from the personality profiling processes, of course, wouldn’t deprive the individual of exercising the 5G super-cafeteria mentioned in the previous section. However, the personality-based prompts would be missing and the employee would be left to make the choices based on personal judgement, whim or what the person at the next work-station is doing. Votaries may point out that such a refusal would be akin to choosing medical treatment without undergoing any diagnostic tests. But that is the individual’s decision. To the extent the negative decision is informed by worry that the data gathering and analytics may be used by the organisation to snoop, the following two checks should be reassuring.
Both the data gathering for personality projections as well as the 5G choice prompts would be automated. While the algorithms inside the black box would be intensively tested and periodically reviewed for continuing validity, the actual profile and suggestions would be visible to the individual alone. Once people are assured of the security of the information gathering and analysis and the helpful pointers it yields, they may well be
inclined to permit access to their non-work social media (e.g. Facebook) as well, in return for getting get a still better fit to their needs and aptitudes.
Lastly, there will need to be an impermeable barrier separating the personality perceiving and 5G option Breakthrough Engagement
There are several very good reasons why this is an opportune moment for making this investment in our way of managing people. For the first time, technology has reached a level of sophistication where we can
prompting system from the performance and potential evaluation systems and from anyone associated with the latter. HR would, of course, be able to access information on an aggregate basis and it would prove a rich treasure trove for improving policies, recruitment choices and monitoring change management initiatives. make non-intrusive personality projections, use them to guide an unprecedented and increasing array of 5G choices while fully protecting the privacy of the induvial. First movers should enjoy an engagement, retention and cost-efficiency advantage over sloweradopting competitors.
Apart from technical feasibility, we have an open-
Notes:
i Visty Banaji, HR’s business should be happiness raising, 24 September 2019, (https:// www.peoplematters.in/article/life-at-work/ hrs-business-should-be-happiness-raising-23175). ii John Stuart Mill, On Liberty and Utilitarianism, Bantam Classics, 1993. iii David Lazer, Alex Pentland, Lada Adamic,
Sinan Aral, Albert-László Barabási,Devon
Brewer, Nicholas Christakis, Noshir Contractor, James Fowler, Myron Gutmann,Tony
Jebara, Gary King, Michael Macy, Deb Roy and Marshall Van Alstyne, Computational
Social Science, Science, 6 February 2009, Vol. 323, Issue 5915, 721-723. iv Christopher Wylie, Mindf*ck: Inside Cambridge Analytica’s Plot to Break the World,
Profile Books, 2019. v Becky Little, 6 World War II Innovations
That Changed Everyday Life, History
Stories, 26 April 2020, (https://www.history.
com/news/world-war-ii-innovations). vi Michal Kosinski, David Stillwell and Thore
Graepel, Private traits and attributes are predictable from digital records of human behavior, Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences of the United States of
America, 2013. vii Jennifer Golbeck, Cristina Robles and Karen
Turner, Predicting Personality with Social
Media, CHI '11 on Human Factors in Computing Systems, May 2011. viii Wu Youyou, Michal Kosinski and David
Stillwell, Computer-based personality judgments are more accurate than those made by humans, Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences of the United States of
America, 2015. ix Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Everybody Lies:
Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet
Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are,
Harper Collins; 2017. ness to considering many options of 5G (heretofore cast in stone) as 'choosable'. For instance, CEOs and line leaders have adjusted with great success to the new ways of working that Covid forced upon us and are quite willing to experiment further. How long this flexibility about work arrangements as radical as the ones that have already been effectively used will continue, is anyone’s guess. But memories can be short. The time to use big data for bigger performance and biggest delight is now.
There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune…
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves
Or lose our ventures.xiii
visty BanaJi is the Founder and CEO of Banner Global Consulting (BGC)
x Jacob B Hirsh, Sonia K Kang and Galen V
Bodenhausen, Personalized Persuasion:
Tailoring Persuasive Appeals to Recipients’
Personality Traits, Psychological Science, 23(6) 578-581, 2012. xi Visty Banaji, Brave new corporate world: On employee data protection and privacy, 17 April 2018, (https://www. peoplematters.in/article/employeerelations/brave-new-corporate-world-onemployee-data-protection-and-privacy17999?media_type=article&subcat=lifeat-work&title=brave-new-corporateworld-on-employee-data-protection-andprivacy&id=17999). xii Stephen Fry, Heroes: The myths of the Ancient Greek heroes retold, Michael Joseph, 2018. xiii William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act IV
Scene 3.
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Well-being: the Road to Resilience L&D Conference APAC 2022
People Matters
BeNext 21 February - 25 March 2022 Online This programme is for all HR professionals, organisational leaders, and individuals who recognise the importance of actively investing in themselves and in a workplace where mental health, focus, resilience, stress-management and psychological safety are highly valued, and who want to explore and create opportunities to safeguard the well-being of their employees through the implementation of impactful initiatives.
Designing Employee Experience in the New World of Work
People Matters
BeNext 07 March - 08 April
2022
Online This programme is for HR leaders and employers looking to reshape employee experience for their teams in the new hybrid working environment. Explore key considerations for designing an impactful, outstanding employee experience that aligns with our new hybrid reality. People Matters 24 February 2022 Online This year, the annual People Matters Learning & Development Conference examines the tools and systems that organisations have in place to support the learning and development of their workforce. How do organisations, specifically HR and L&D leaders, balance business needs and development objectives?
Futurist Forum
People Matters 08 March 2022 (India), 09 March 2022 (ANZ), 10 March 2022 (SEA) Online This invitation-only, closed door event brings top functional experts and CHROs from their respective regions together to find ways for larger business transformations and chart the path for the future of work and talent. Design Thinking & Agile for HR Teams
People Matters
BeNext 28 February - 01 April
2022
Online This programme is for HR leaders committed to finding creative solutions to complex problems facing their teams, moving from a foundational understanding of Design Thinking and Agile methodologies to a whole new mindset of creativity, innovation and people-centered progress.
Blogosphere >> lEE QuanE
Global Mobility Patterns in 2022: What Employers Must Look Out For
Between Omicron, ongoing travel restrictions, and inflation around the world, employers have had to reconsider their talent mobility strategies for 2022
In 2021, many of us began the year with the hope that the COVID19 vaccines would bring us back to a certain level of normalcy. While the vaccine rollout did allow greater mobility than at the peak of the pandemic, travel restrictions remained erratic and unpredictable as countries fought to mitigate the spread of new variants. Coupled with rising inflation, and the added challenges in navigating the world of remote working, organisations have had to rethink their mobility strategies and policies for hiring and retaining talent.
Moving into the new year, here are the top three predictions around employee mobility that we expect to encounter, and what employers should anticipate as the pandemic continues to unfold. 1. Enhancing mobility policies to retain expatriate talent will be a major challenge for companies Companies are no longer able to command the same loyalty that they did prepandemic, and this has been exacerbated in remote and hybrid environments. Working outside of the office has also made it easier for employees to explore new job opportunities.
In places like Hong Kong and Singapore, the prolonged impact of COVID19 may lead to a higher turnover rate among expatriates, including those who aren’t necessarily hired on assignment conditions in those locations. Places like Dubai, which have fewer COVID-19 restrictions, are thus emerging as enticing destinations against Singapore for expatriate talent.
According to our 2021 Global Mobility and COVID-
19 Spot Survey, one out of two assignees who were repatriated at the start of the pandemic have not returned – one of the reasons being that they can perform well even while working remotely. At the same time, continued restrictions may make expatriates question their decisions to return abroad, especially if the labour market in their home countries is more competitive – offering enticing career opportunities that also allow them to stay with their families.
Moreover, tighter border restrictions have made short-term assignments and those with regular commuting arrangements less viable. More companies are asking expatriates to take on longer-term assignments abroad and to bring their families with them. But for some assignees, concerns around the health and wellbeing of their family, and educational prospects of their children, have ultimately affected their decision to go abroad.
As companies evaluate their strategies for retaining expatriate talent, we are seeing an increased focus on employee wellbeing, and a shift to a more empathetic and holistic approach to the management of the mobile workforce. The conversation is also moving well beyond the merits of home vs. hostbased salary approaches, into the tailoring of packages around the individual, making the whole experience more personal and thus enhancing engagement levels.
2. Business travel will remain erratic and unpredictable Business travel will continue to be very stopstart. While countries are starting to open up, COVID19 is by no means beaten. Recent responses to the Our recent policy survey shows a jump in companies expecting to see an increase in international remote work assignments, as some are using this approach as a contingency move to be put in place until employees are able to physically relocate
Omicron variant show that countries will reimpose travel restrictions when spikes occur, as seen from the temporary suspension of Singapore's Vaccinated Travel Lanes back in December. In particular, China’s pursuit of zeroCOVID policy and closed borders will have a significant impact on any recovery in global employee mobility, as it is the most common destination for international assignments and a major destination for international business travel.
Despite the fact that some countries are at the forefront of vaccination rates, others are not seeing fast enough uptake, which continues to hamper widespread re-opening. Furthermore, travel-
ling during the pandemic involves too many processes such as testing and quarantines, which makes international commuting for expatriates costly, time-consuming, and no longer practical.
Even when employees do engage in business travel, hybrid work arrangements and imposed restrictions may also limit how readily available clients and the people they are travelling to see are on-site for meetings. As such, short-term assignment types are unlikely to recommence significantly in 2022, and those who do undertake business travel in 2022 may stay for a longer period to account for these changes.
3. Remote work is not a onesize-fits-all solution Our recent policy survey shows a jump in companies expecting to see an increase in international remote work assignments, as some are using this approach as a contingency move to be put in place until employees are able to physically relocate.
However, its effectiveness will remain limited according to the extent to which a person can perform their job efficiently in a remote setting. Many expatriates sent on assignment are there to conduct business development and expansion, but this is very hard to do on a remote basis and being unable to meet clients physically can put them at a disadvantage. Certain industries such as manufacturing, oil and gas, and services may not be inherently suited for remote work as workers are often required to be physically present at the location or the facility for testing or to oversee operations.
Time difference is another factor that may also limit remote workers’ ability to interact with colleagues or clients located in other far apart time zones.
Considering the above challenges, we may begin to see companies sending their employees to regional hub locations such as Singapore or Hong Kong. This would enable employees to leverage regional support and resources, and manage multiple markets from a single location with little to no time difference with nonhub markets in the same region.
Looking ahead The emergence and rise of new COVID-19 variants such as Omicron may continue to curtail the recovery in employee mobility in 2022. However, despite the pandemic, the world continues to move - albeit at a slower, disrupted pace.
In the longer term, we expect to see trends such as the regionalisation of mobility and tailoring of relocation packages gain momentum in the post-pandemic world. But before we get there, mobility professionals will need to navigate the immediate challenge of balancing the need to retain expatriate employees and manage operational costs while juggling, among their many other responsibilities, immigration compliance, tax planning, administration, and retirement benefits arrangements - all of which have become more complex in many countries as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. All of this means that there will be plenty of challenges associated with cross-border mobility to keep employers on their toes in the years to come.
aBout the author
lEE QuanE, Regional Director - Asia, ECA International
