Where workforce planning, talent attraction, and facilities strategy meet

Quick shot for a busy summer Friday, (isn't every Friday now a busy Friday?), and a quick reminder on just how important workforce planning and talent attraction and acquisition challenges are towards making big, hairy organizational decisions like 'Where should we build the factory?' and 'Should corporate HQ be in some massive office park in the suburbs (near the affluent towns where all the C-suite lives), or within the city limits, (where the millennials all want to live?).

Take a quick Friday or weekend read of this piece from the New York Times titled "Why corporate America is leaving the suburbs for the city' to get a feel of how these dynamics and interplay between HR, talent, culture, and organizational strategy are playing out for companies like McDonald's, Motorola,  and General Electric.

An excerpt from the piece (and you really should read it all):

For decades, many of the nation’s biggest companies staked their futures far from the fraying downtowns of aging East Coast and Midwestern cities. One after another, they decamped for sprawling campuses in the suburbs and exurbs.

Now, corporate America is moving in the other direction.

In June, McDonald’s joined a long list of companies that are returning to downtown Chicago from suburbs like Oak Brook, Northfield and Schaumburg.

Later this month, the top executive team at General Electric — whose 70-acre wooded campus in Fairfield, Conn., has embodied the quintessential suburban corporate office park since it opened in 1974 — will move to downtown Boston. When the move is completed in 2018, the renovated red brick warehouses that will form part of G.E.’s new headquarters won’t even have a parking lot, let alone a spot reserved for the chief executive.

Why are these companies heading back into the central, urban areas that many of them exited for the (literally) greener pastures of the suburban corporate office park back in the last 20 - 30 years?

Like we do for everything else, it's time to blame the millennials. More from the Times piece:

The headquarters of Motorola Solutions will start moving to downtown Chicago on Aug. 15, though more workers will stay in suburban Schaumburg than move to the new offices near Union Station. But for the first time in half a century, top executives from the company will again be in downtown Chicago.

“Where you work really matters,” said Greg Brown, the chief executive of Motorola Solutions. “No disrespect to Schaumburg, but customers and new hires didn’t want to come to the suburbs an hour outside of Chicago. We wanted energy, vibrancy and diversity, and to accelerate a change in our culture by moving downtown.”

“This was the right thing in terms of strategy,” he said. “Millennials want the access and vibrancy of downtown. When we post jobs downtown, we get four or five times the response.”

On the surface, it all makes sense, and isn't really all that complex. These companies and others are finding it harder to draw the new, often technical talent they need to some far-flung corporate outpost an hour from the city center whose primary draws are things like 'good schools' and 'ample parking' - things that don't often attract childless, Uber-preferring younger workers.

But HR folks that have dialed in their workforce planning and talent attraction strategies to help inform the CEO and COO on matters such as these can't simply rest now that they have made the big call to relocate the company HQ back into the city. Eventually these new workers start to get a little older, start to think about wanting the things that make the suburbs attractive in the first place - the schools, the Whole Foods, the 1.2 acre lawn, etc. 

What happens then? Does the organization head back out to the 'burbs? Do you keep a 'millennial-friendly' presence in the city regardless? Workforce planning has always been important, it is just getting harder I think than it used to be in the past.

The best HR/talent advisor needs to have a little bit of cultural anthropologist in them I think, to better inform their organization's workforce and talent plans with at least an educated guess on what things outside of work are going to be important to the people that do the work. And where they want to live might be the most important of all.

Have a great weekend!

Also, in case you missed it - BIG news from the HR Happy Hour Show this week, read all about it HERE.

ANNOUNCEMENT: The HR Happy Hour Podcast Network

I am super excited today to share some great news - the official launch of the HR Happy Hour Podcast Network, and the details of the three new shows that will soon debut on the HR Happy Hour umbrella. My co-host, Trish McFarlane and I are thrilled to be joined by such a great lineup of shows and contributors, and you can read the details of the announcement HERE.

Some quick backstory for folks who may not be familiar with the HR Happy Hour Show, (I know, shocking!), that will help explain and set the context for today's announcement.

Back in 2009 I was an adjunct instructor at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, NY teaching a graduate-level course for HR Master's students on the topic of HR Technology. At that time I got the crazy idea to try and record interviews with HR and HR Tech leaders, and make these audio files a part of the course's required materials for the class. I used the Blog Talk Radio platform to make the recording process a little easier for guests, as back then, even Skype was hardly in use by most folks, and fewer folks were recording podcasts on their own, in even a quasi-professional manner.

Since then, the HR Happy Hour Show has evolved and transformed. The first two or three years featured mostly live-streamed shows broadcasting at 8PM on Thursday nights, complete with callers, a lively Twitter backchannel on the #HRHappyHour hashtag, and even dedicated Google Wave threads!

In the last few years the HR Happy Hour has become a more traditional podcast, generally pre-recorded, or recorded live at industry events, and (lightly) edited to fit the now much more widespread and popular podcast format and formula. The last few years have seen a dramatic rise in the overall popularity of podcasting in a number of topics and domains, and I personally am proud that the HR Happy Hour Show was podcasting before podcasting was cool! We have had a series of great guests, covered the most relevant topics in HR, HR Technology, work, and the workplace, and had a lot of fun along the way.

And now with the launch of the new HR Happy Hour Network, these first three new titles, (details are in the release here), and to be partnering with such a great group of people, I am confident the next seven years of the HR Happy Hour will be just as much fun as the first seven.

Many thanks to everyone who has listened to, supported, or even guested on the show so far - stay tuned for more great and informative content, HR and HR technology insights, and hopefully - lots of fun from your pals at the HR Happy Hour Show and Network.

VIDEO: Human Talks Show with guest Brent Skinner, Nucleus Research

A few weeks ago at the Oracle HCM World event in Chicago, I had the chance to partner with HR Happy Hour Show co-host and H3 HR Advisors CEO Trish McFarlane to record a video interview series titled "Human Talks" from the show floor.

I am excited to share this new video series that we did in partnership with Oracle. The Human Talks series is a show very similar to the HR Happy Hour Podcast where Trish and I were able to talk to HCM practitioners, analysts, and Oracle partners about some of the big issues, trends, and technologies in the HR and HR technology realms. Each episode is approximately 5 - 10 minutes or so, and well worth your time in hearing what is happening in the world of HCM. Please check out the first episode with one of our favorite industry analysts, Brent Skinner, Principal Analyst at Nucleus Research. You can check out the video HERE, or on the widget player below (email and RSS subscribers click through to see the video).

In this episode, Brent shares information on what their research is uncovering about performance management and learning and the impact from HCM technology. He also touches on how predictive analytics plays out in the workplace. Be sure to connect with Brent and Nucleus Research to learn more. 

This was a fun series of interviews and I will share future episodes of Human Talks as they are posted. 

Thanks to Trish and to our friends at Oracle for making this project possible.

Vacation wrap-up: What I did wrong, did right, and what I'd do differently next time

I am just back from a super week of vacation/holiday spent in the wonderful state of South Carolina (Note to self: If I ever get my feet back in South Carolina I am going to nail them to the ground), and wanted to take a few minutes before diving in to my hopelessly full email inbox to reflect on the break with respect to how I did or didn't handle 'work' and 'work/life' issues during the week.  I had not taken this many consecutive days off (outside of the end of year holidays), in some time, so it was an interesting and revealing week for me as well. And also kind of sad in a way, that simply taking one business week off, (and the weekends on each side of that week), creates such a challenge for me, and I would expect, many of the folks who read this blog. It just shouldn't be that hard, if you know what I mean.

But in the interest of 'I need to get back to watching Sharknado 4', let's get on with the idea for the post.  Here's what I did wrong, did right, and the next time I take a week or more offline, what I would definitely do differently.

What I did wrong:

By the time I had left for the trip I had one pretty important work item that needed to be completed, and sadly, was not. So I rationalized that I would work on said item on the plane ride down, and then it would be all set. But alas, said project took longer than I had anticipated, and I had to revisit it two other times during the trip before it was completed. What I did wrong was not finishing this project, no matter what it took, before the trip. There's no way to leave on a vacation with everything completed, but I should have realized the importance of this one thing and made sure it was done. It was completed by mid-week or so, but it did bug me for the first half of the trip. But that was on me, I needed to do a better job at prioritizing projects before I left.

What I did right:

Today is Monday, the first day I am back 'in the office', and I smartly have zero 'official' meetings or calls today. I knew that attempting to wade through the Inbox would pretty much be the only thing I would be able to attack today, and I made sure there were no other conflicts to allow me to attempt to catch up.  The other thing I did right, and I was not sure about this at the time, was actually haul the laptop with me on the trip. It wasn't because I felt compelled to 'work' on the trip, but if I really had to, (see above), I would be able to, and would not get stuck in a hotel business center or having to find a FedEx office location at the beach.

What I would do differently next time:

I will probably set up my 'Out of the office' email auto-response at least one full day before I am actually out of the office. This would create a little more airspace to complete anything that needs to be done before leaving on a vacation, and better set expectations for response time. I would also, similar to what I did today, make sure on the last day in the office that I have no meetings or calls set up.  It's kind of like setting up a DMZ situation one day before and one day after a vacation. The other thing I would do differently is perhaps pick one personal  'work' project, (for me it is this blog, the HR Happy Hour Show), to spend at least some time thinking about or working on. Those personal projects are extremely fun, and often don't really seem like work. I would have loved to come back from vacation with a dozen great blog post ideas or two or three podcasts booked. Alas...

That's it from me. If you have not yet taken some time off this summer, I really hope you do and have a fantastic break. And if you are one of the approximately 489 people waiting to hear back from me, I promise I will get caught up soon. I mean that. Truly....

Have a great week!

How to answer the 'So where do you live?' question

Quick dispatch from vacation and the beach...

From the most recent issue of GQ, (no link, not sure if this is online or not, and like I said, I am on vacation and can't be bothered to check).

From a kind of oral history piece about actor Matt Damon titled 'Damon for Dummies'

(Actress)  Julia Stiles - After The Bourne Ultimatum came out, there was a premiere in London. Prince, (The Artist), actually came to it, then got tickets for the cast to come see him perform. We were summoned into a room to meet him after the show. Matt (Damon) said, "So you live in Minnesota? I hear you live in Minnesota."

Damon - Prince said, "I live inside my own heart, Matt Damon."

Amazing. 

Not possible to answer that question better. Next time someone asks me where I live I hope I am cool enough to answer like Prince.

I live inside my own heart.

Have a great weekend!