PODCAST: #HRHappyHour 293 - Workplace Movie Hall of Fame: Flashdance

HR Happy Hour 293 - Workplace Movie Hall of Fame - Flashdance

Hosts: Trish McFarlane, Steve Boese

Listen HERE

This week on the HR Happy Hour Show, Steve and Trish continue The Workplace Movie Hall of Fame series with a look at the big HR and workplace themes in the 1983 hit "Flashdance".

Flashdance was released in 1983 and starred Jennifer Beals as Alex and Michael Nouri as the boss. Alex is a female dynamo: steel worker by day, exotic dancer by night. Her dream is to get into a real dance company, though, and with encouragement from her boss/boyfriend, she may get her chance

Flashdance was also the 3rd highest grossing film in the US in 1983 - $92.9M.

The film has several big HR and workplace themes running though it - some seriously hostile and harassing work environments for women, a probably inappropriate, (and definitely creepy) romance between the boss and one of his very young employees, how leaders do or do not support employee's dreams and career goals, and the importance of having a more expansive and inclusive idea of talent and potential.

We dug into how these themes are portrayed in the movie, how they inform how we think about work and workplaces today, and what we can learn from looking back at some really different norms in workplaces in 1983.

Steve and Trish also talked about the importance of leadership, kindness in the workplace, and even if it is ever appropriate to kiss and/or hug at work.

You can listen to the show on the show page HERE, or using the widget player below:

This was a really fun show! 

Thanks as always to show sponsor Virgin Pulse - learn more at www.virginpulse.com.

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Tenure and Unhappiness at Work

Caught some interesting data looking at the happiness and satisfaction with work of employees in the UK broken down by different age cohorts. As reported in Bloomberg, UK workers aged 35 years and up were twice as likely to be unhappy with work as their younger, millennial colleagues.

Here's a quick look at one data set from the research conducted by Happiness Works and Robert Half UK about employee unhappiness distributed across age groups:

According to this data, unhappiness at work takes a pretty decent sized step up in the 35 to 54 age group and increase a bit more with the 55+ group. Couple of small/medium/big things to think about before we take this data totally at face value.

One is just what do we mean by 'unhappiness?' Is it 'kind of had a bad day that day' unhappiness or is it 'I am about three minutes away from quitting and smashing the printer on the way out the door' unhappiness? And second, what is the 'normal' or expected amount of unhappiness we'd expect to find in an average workplace? I can't think of any scenario when you get a large group of people in any kind of shared endeavor where some of them wouldn't be happy. Even a few folks I heard from yesterday thought the Great American Solar Eclipse was a little underwhelming.

But getting past those concerns for a second, let's think about the implications of increasing unhappiness as the workforce ages a bit more. If true, or even kind of true, this could be an issue for more and more workplaces and more and more leaders of HR and people.

Here's some more data, courtesy of my pals at the BLS. From 2015, a quick look at the median age of the US workforce, and some projections out to 2024

How about that? The US labor force is trending older, and the trend is expected to hold for the next decade if not a little longer. So if workforces are getting older and unhappiness with work seems to be associated with the employee's age, then you could expect even more acute challenges to come with respect to happiness and its cousin employee engagement.

The problem of course with aging in the workforce is that it is pretty similar to our own personal battles with aging and its effects. It happens, or seems to happen, so gradually that we hardly even notice it. And then Wham! all of a sudden we have gotten older. And we usually are not prepared for that day.

If you are someone who has some concern or responsibility for the health, wellbeing, happiness, and productivity of a workplace you probably ought to be thinking about these issues a bit more than you have in the past.

And it probably wouldn't hurt to take time to think about your own happiness and wellbeing too.

Customers might always be right, but what they tell you isn't always useful

Happy possible-end-of-days Great American Solar Eclipse Monday!

'The customer is always right' has been a generally accepted mantra? maxim? truism? that has pretty much informed the product, service, and sales strategies for all kinds of industries for decades. And while the absolute truth and the need to adhere to this precept is certainly debatable, 'customer focus' taken more generally has developed into the operating philosophy of most successful organizations.

So while the customer is (probably, mostly) always 'right', is what they are telling you all the helpful or useful?

Over the weekend I came across this outstanding post from Cindy Alvarez called '10 Things I've Learned About Customer Development' that highlights just a few of the ways that customer input and feedback isn't always incredibly insightful or useful. Here's just one example (my favorite), from the list:

What features your customers ask for is never as interesting as why they want them. So: Direct them away from talking about the solution and back to describing the problem. Listen, pause, and then ask what it would allow them to do if they had it today. Ask what they’re currently doing as a substitute. They’ll either identify a problem (good — now go solve it) or be unable to provide specifics (feel free to deprioritize this suggestion).

In the enterprise and certainly in the HR tech space function and feature 'arms races' have been a significant driver of solution provider development and attempts at competitive differentiation for ages. This approach makes sense in an environment where customers and prospects send out voluminous RFPs and request tightly scripted demonstrations that sometimes are even spelled out in minute by minute increments. 

In an environment where business can be won by 'checking the most boxes' it just made sense for providers to, in fact, strive for the most items that could be checked off. Even if no one, customer or provider alike, is entirely sure that checking all the boxes is the best or even a sensible strategy. 

Of course there is some level of baseline capability that say a Payroll or ATS solution must provide to even be tenable - no one would argue that. But there is probably much more room for creativity, innovation, and ground breaking thinking around enterprise tech than we allow if we focus too much on 'what' we need systems to do and not enough on 'why' we think these features will allow us to accomplish.

Check out the entire list from Ms. Alvarez, there is much more food for thought in there for solution providers and customers alike.

And don't stare too much into the sun today!

CHART OF THE DAY: There are more job openings in the USA than ever

I know I have written a couple of versions of this post in the last year or so, but to me, and as the data referenced in the post title keeps increasing, I think it is worth taking a look at the latest job openings data.

As always courtesy of our pals at the BLS and using the fantastic charting capability from the St. Louis Fed.

Here's the chart showing the total number of non-farm job openings in the US over the last 10 years or so and hen some words of wisdom and whimsy from me as we get ready to head into the weekend.

Three quick takes...

1. It may be hard to see on the chart, but the end of June 2017 data point shows a whopping 6.2 million open jobs in the USA. That is the record high for this measurement since records began to be kept starting in 2000. To give the 6.2 million number a little context, the total US labor force at the end of June is just over 160 million. Said differently, if we could magically fill the 6.2 million openings today, total US employment would jump almost 4%. That is a huge, huge number when talking about this kind of data.

2. Wages, while growing, are not yet, (maybe never?), catch up to the fact that job openings keep increasing and time to fill metrics also continue to climb. I caught a quote from a random Fed official recently, can't remember which one at the moment, that essentally said something like 'If your business has a hiring problem or you think you have a 'skills gap' problem, and you have not taken steps to meaningfully increase wages and benefits you are offering, then I just don't believe you actually have a problem.' Persistent sluggish wage growth has been the most baffling element of the sustained labor market recovery of the last several years.

3. I know this is obvious, and I know I have blogged this bit a few times before when considering the tight labor market, but it bears repeating. More and more power is shifting to employees, candidates, graduates - almost anyone with up to date skills and a desire to succeed. Factor in the myriad ways for people to side hustle, and employers have to continued to raise their game and their value props to have any chance of staying competitive in today's market. I am a 'labor' guy at heart, and more leverage and negotiating power shifting to workers just feels like a decent thing to me.

Have a great weekend all!

Three quick takes on the LinkedIn - hiQ Labs news

First the news in case you missed this yesterday.

From our pals at Fortune:

A U.S. federal judge on Monday ruled that Microsoft's LinkedIn unit cannot prevent a startup from accessing public profile data, in a test of how much control a social media site can wield over information its users have deemed to be public.

U.S. District Judge Edward Chen in San Francisco granted a preliminary injunction request brought by hiQ Labs, and ordered LinkedIn to remove within 24 hours any technology preventing hiQ from accessing public profiles.

And a little bit on the back story, in case you had not been following this case over the last few months:

The dispute between the two tech companies has been going on since May, when LinkedIn issued a letter to hiQ Labs instructing the startup to stop scraping data from its service.

HiQ Labs responded by filing a suit against LinkedIn in June, alleging that the Microsoft-owned social network was in violation of antitrust laws. HiQ Labs uses the LinkedIn data to build algorithms capable of predicting employee behaviors, such as when they might quit.

Got all that?

Seems pretty simple, but at the same time the ulitmate outcome of this case (LinkedIn will almost certainly appeal this ruling) could be pretty important not just for LinkedIn and hiQ Labs, but also for you and me and everyone else who's data/profiles are at the core of this case.

Three quick takes from me since it's my blog...

1. While we are all pretty aware and comfortable with the social network concept of 'You are not the user, you are the product', most of us have continued to rationalize this away as it pertains to our usage and participation on sites like LinkedIn and Facebook. If we get enough utility and value from being a member of LinkedIn, (networking, job opportunities, sales leads, etc.), then we are ok with LinkedIn building their business around selling access to and ways to interact with our profile data. But even if we are ok with LinkedIn earning revenue in this way, are we as comfortable with a third party like hiQ doing much the same? When you and I signed up for LinkedIn, I don't recall any T&C that asked if that would be ok? I personally get value from LinkedIn. I doubt the same can be said for hiQ.

2. hiQ's business seems to be about aggregating and analyzing public LinkedIn profile data and then building out a set of tools that can help organizations make predictions about potential turnover. They are making a pretty big assumption that the 'right' amount of people have up-to-date, accurate, and meaningful profiles. And I think that is a pretty big assumption. I had to look up about 5 people on LinkedIn today, and two of them I am 100% don't have their current job title listed correctly. And these are the kinds of folks that use LinkedIn pretty regularly.

3. And despite the above caveat about the completeness and accuracy of user profiles, it is indeed true that LinkedIn (courtesy of all of us), do possess an incredible amount of workforce data. Companies, jobs, career progression, contacts, etc. All good and important stuff. But you know who else possesses an even more accurate and more detailed data set about workforces, compensation, job moves, career paths, mobility andmore? Your current HR Tech provider(s), that is who. The bigger cloud HR providers, (ADP, Oracle, Ultimate, SAP, Workday, Infor, and more), all have incredibly detailed data sets on people. Where thry work, how much they earn, where they went to school, how their careers have evolved, etc. And these providers are all taking positive and aggressive steps to create valuable tools and insights from these large data sets. Plus, I would gather that while the data in your HRMS might not be 100% perfect, it is likely closer to the truth than the stuff on the average LinkedIn profile. If you haven't yet, talk to your HR tech provider about what they are doing to create new tools to help you that are based on the knowledge that can be gleaned from millions of data points in the cloud.

I will keep an eye on the LinkedIn - hiQ case to see how it develops, but if nothing else it has served as a semi-occasional reminder that once it is on the internet, data flows like water. And you probably can't hold it back forever.

Happy Wednesday.