Recently, we’ve been conducting research with CHRO’s to better understand the challenges they and their organizations face in today’s talent landscape. You can read about the macro trends in that research in The CHRO and People Leaders Crisis whitepaper that was just released. This blog is going to delve into important micro challenges CHRO’s shared with us, and ideas for how to solve them.

1) Technology has been reshaping the way we communicate with employees and as a result, employee’s relationship with work. While the outcomes from this shift are both good (resiliency) and bad (miscommunication & disengagement), there is a simple challenge that arises – how do you proactively manage a constantly evolving digital experience so that your culture and critical behaviors don’t get lost in the technological shuffle? Here are a few strategies to consider:

• As always, make sure your values, behaviors and employee value proposition are top of mind and enforced. You can’t plan for every scenario, or manage everyone’s decisions at work, but you can build a consistent set of criteria to guide judgement and action.
• Be clear on your policies for communication between employees, especially when it comes to responses being created through automation & Generative AI. Don’t let important points of connection become empty or performative, and ensure any AI generated content is reviewed by people in detail before being shared.
• Audit your employee touchpoints across the entire lifecycle, through the lens of technology. Understand what moments matter, and how these experiences are being delivered (ex. are they in person, who is creating the content for these moments).

2) The continued push to Return To Office (RTO), serves as an example of the challenges to communicate changing organizational expectations while also staying attractive to talent. CHRO’s are being asked to help executives to make good decisions in these scenarios, and they need the resources and data to do so. One people leader we spoke with mentioned using a pulse survey to understand the effect of a potential RTO showed that +90% of their workforce preferred working from home. The research also showed employees felt highly connected to the culture of the organization. Faced with the data, leadership was quick to realize that they were getting everything they wanted from talent (engagement and productivity), and that it was best to cancel the RTO. That scenario breaks down into an approach that can be used for similar balancing acts, including:

• Before you mandate a new policy, take a simple pulse survey to understand what the impact will be to your key talent.
• Get the results you have collected in front of leadership for quick decision making, and timely communication of those choices (especially when it’s what employees want)
• If you are considering something that will be unpopular with high-performing employees, be transparent about the reasons why, and where possible look to invest in making them worthwhile. For RTO, instead of risking platitudes and empty productivity claims, consider leaning into using your return to office for purely social reasons, and setting corresponding policy for connection and culture building activities.

3) Engaging the different generations in the workplace is a challenge for all levels in an organization. The cultural differences between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X and Boomers, is impacting everything from talent attraction, to onboarding, collaboration and succession planning. Here are some ideas for how to equip your organization to navigate these nuances:

• Leadership has always needed to understand how to connect with employees, it is especially important now as the boomer population faces the responsibility of finding succession plans, and not knowing what younger generations value in their careers. Educating and equipping leaders for retention conversations, is critical to retaining your future leaders and ensuring business continuity.
• Often, we get trapped by only thinking about employee data based on roles, but there are many other dynamics that get missed with this approach. While the most obvious relationship most organizations want to understand is Leader-to-Direct report, understanding Peer-to-Peer relationships and the different generational cohorts within, are equally important to know. Generational blind spots can impede how groups collaborate and serve customer needs.
• HR Teams also need new tools to effectively manage these dynamics. Understanding your workforce starts with having the data to correctly identify key demographic shifts, and the resources to track and manage the changing preferences of talent. Real-time dashboards like the Blu Ivy Employer Brand and Culture Index, provide the insights required to effectively manage these changes.

If you are interested in diving deeper into these challenges or others, please drop us a line, we’d love to connect and talk about how we can reimagine the future of work together.

Blog Contributor:

Mike Hoffmann
Senior Director Growth & Innovation
Blu Ivy Group

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