CHART OF THE DAY: Another all-time record number of open jobs in the US

The most essential state of the labor market report, the JOLTS report, was issued a few days ago by our pals over at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. I won't bury the lead, the chart below shows most all of what you need to know from the Dec 2018 JOLTS data - namely, there were over 7.3 million open jobs in the US, an all-time high, at the end of December 2018.

For those keeping score at home, the number of open jobs cratered in July 2009 at about 2.2 million and for just about a decade has steadily climbed to the 7.3 million number the BLS has just reported.

And one more data point from the JOLTS, for the last nine months or so, there have been more open jobs in the US than officially unemployed persons to fill them. Said differently, even if we could magically place every current unemployed person in one of the open jobs, there would still be hundreds of thousands of jobs unfilled.

There is good (lots of open jobs means lots of opportunity and optimistic companies looking to grow), and bad (why can't we get better at hiring, training, and expanding opportunity) in this kind of number. All things being equal, the state of the labor market in Dec 2018 is much, much more preferable to the nightmare of July 2009. But here's the funny thing - it might seem like a lifetime ago, but it really wasn't. 

That's it from me - have a great weekend!

CHART OF THE DAY: Four out of five say that company culture needs to change

Quick take for a waiting for the snow to come Wednesday. I wanted to share one data point from the Katzenbach Center Global Culture Survey 2018, a broad look at organizational culture and leadership.

Here is the survey's lead chart and the one that shows that despite us telling each other that 'Culture eats strategy for breakfast' for literally 30 years, there apparently is still much that organizations and leaders need to do in the culture wars. Data first, then some FREE commentary from me after the chart:

Some quick thoughts...

1. The 'Culture eats' brigade would have us all think that well, culture does actually influence and drive business success to a larger degree than corporate strategy or even organizational talent. If so, then why do four our of five respondents claim that their culture needs to evolve and change in the next three to five years? While most of us probably agree that business strategy has to change, often fairly frequently, to respond to changing market conditions, it does seem kind of startling to see that 80% of people surveyed feel the same about culture. Is culture as malleable as strategy? Does it need to change as frequently as every 3 - 5 years, about the average tenure of talent at many organizations?

2. I still maintain that the 'Culture eats' folks ignore the importance of strategy and the need for culture and strategy to be more connected and aligned. The culture survey states this plainly - "But for the influence of culture to translate into real business results, culture, strategy and operations must be aligned." And again, I'd add to this the importance to have people, the right people with both the right skills and attitudes to be aligned with both culture and strategy.

3. Like many other workplace challenges, there is a difference of opinion and viewpoints about organizations culture between leadership and the rank and file employees. According to the Katzenbach survey, 63% of leaders feel their company culture is consistent with how people actually act in the organization, while only 41% of employees agree to that statement. Leaders at all levels need to really dig in to better understand how the organization's culture really manifests, shapes, and influences how work gets done in the organization. Culture is not what leaders talk about, it's what they do, what they reward, what they punish, and if/how the employees in the organization follow or don't follow these cues.

I feel like we have been talking about organizational culture for ages, and I suspect the conversation will not end any time soon. Good for the workplace blogger types I guess!

Have a great day!

More information is not always better information, or leads to better decisions

Quick update for a busy, cold Monday in the Northeast. Over the weekend while enjoying my typical evening of NBA League Pass and catching up on some reading, I ran into this excellent piece on the Behavioural Investment blog titled 'Can More Information Lead to Worse Investment Decisions.'

In the piece, author Joe Wiggins references a research study titled 'Effects of Amount of Information on Judgement Accuracy and Confidence' that was published in 2008 in the academic journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, (I trust you are all up to date on your stack of these journals). Long, (really long) story short, the researchers found that having more information available that was meant to help subject make decisions had interesting and counter-intuitive effects. Essentially, more information did not increase the quality of decision making in a significant way, while at the same time increasing the subject's level of confidence in their decisions, which as we just noted, did not in fact get any better.

Here's a simple chart from one of the experiments showing what happened to decision quality and subject confidence when more information and data about the decision was made available to subjects. 

The data above shows how subjects in the study had to forecast a winner for a number of college football games based on sets of anonymised statistical information about the teams  The information came in blocks of 6 (so for the first trial of predictions the participant had 6 pieces of data) and after each subsequent trial of predictions they were given another block of information, up to 5 blocks (or 30 data points in total), and had to update their predictions.  Participants were asked to predict both the winner and their confidence in their judgement between 50% and 100%. The aim of the experiment was to understand how increased information impacted both accuracy and confidence in their decisions/predictions.

Joe at Behavioural Investment sums up the results of the experiment really well:

The contrasting impact of the additional information is stark – the accuracy of decision making is flat, decisions were little better with 30 statistics than just 6, however, participant confidence that they could select the winner increased materially and consistently.  When we come into possession of more, seemingly relevant, information our belief that we are making the right decision can be emboldened even if there is no justification for this shift in confidence levels.

A really important reminder and a kind of a warning for any of us, say in HR in 2019, who are increasingly seeking to and are more able to gather more and more data and information to use and apply in HR and talent decision making. If more information does not always, (or maybe ever), lead to better decisions, then we need to be really much more careful how we plan to gather, process, and apply data for decision making. 

The most basic takeaway from this kind of study is that we probably need to spend much more time thinking about what data and information is meaningful or predictive towards making a decision, rather than increasing our efforts to simply gather more and more data, from all the possible available sources, under the probably false impression that more = better.

There are plenty of reasons why we are inclined to gather more data is we can - we might not know what information is actually relevant, so we look to simply collect data, we want to show we did a lot of research before taking a decision, or we want to be more comfortable with our decision if it is supported by more data. 

But I think it's best to start small with our data sets we apply to decisions, take time to test if the data we already possess is meaningful and predictive before chasing more data for its own sake.

Ok, that's it, I'm out - have a great week!

CHART OF THE DAY: How should we evaluate companies?

Happy New Year!

To start 2019, I wanted to share a chart from and the link to the fascinating report titled 'From Insight to Action: JUST Capital's 2018 Survey Results & Roadmap for Corporate America'.

For those not familiar, Just Capital, is a nonprofit founded in 2013 by a group that includes billionaire investor Paul Tudor Jones, and who has conducted an annual survey since then to determine which corporate-behavior-issues the American public cares about the most. Just Capital then ranks 1,000 large companies based on their performance on those issues which the survey has shown the public is most concerned with. The rankings are also the basis for the Just U.S. Large Cap Equity ETF, which launched in June 2018.

Of interest to HR folks, in these surveys, worker pay and benefits consistently rank at the top of respondents' priorities. Here's the chart, which shows which general category or issues, (workers, customers, environment, etc.), that survey respondents indicated where more or less important to them when assessing a company (and compared to the 2017 survey). Here's the chart, then some comments from me after the data.

 

Some quick observations from this data, which shows that the broad range of 'employee' issues are what the American public cares about the most when evaluating companies.

1. Concern for workers issues is trending up. In both the chart above, and in some underlying data from the report, Americans are increasingly concerned about worker's conditions, pay and benefits, and work/life balance issues. Perhaps this is the outcome of a 10-year run of an improving and tightening labor market that is leading individuals to be more open and assertive of what they look for in an employer and what they see as just treatment of workers by a company.

2. Shareholders may not be 'first' forever. Despite 'shareholders' seeming to be the ones to benefit the most in the last decade, the public cares about how companies treat shareholder and leadership issues the least. While millions of American workers are also shareholders of companies through retirement and other investments, most average employees see themselves in a different category than the large, institutional investor class. By this logic, if employee issues and concerns are going to be more important, shareholder concerns are seen as less important.

3. Creating a 'just' company for employees is not that complicated. The Top 3 underlying components that influence how the workplace treats employees are providing good benefits, paying a living wage, and providing a safe workplace. There were the elements ranked as most important to survey respondents, and quite honestly, seem to represent the lowest common denominator for employers to strive for. Said differently, it probably is not as hard as the experts make it out to be, to create a workplace that is just and fair for employees.

This is really interesting data, I encourage you to check out both the report and the Top 100 rankings according to Just Capital's survey of American workers. While there are quite a few companies on the list we frequently see on other 'Great' workplace type lists, there are also many other names you might not be as familiar with.

Have a great day and a happy, and successful 2019!

CHART OF THE DAY: How much are you using your smart speaker?

Have you finally jumped in to the 'smart speaker' game? Whether it's an Amazon Echo device, something from Google, or one of the emerging third party manufacturers who are shipping devices that run voice operating systems from Amazon or Google, there seems to be no doubt that this technology is still growing, and maybe faster than you think.

Some data from the recent Adobe 'State of Voice Assistants' research suggests that after the holiday shopping season concludes, almost 50% of US households will own a smart speaker of some kind. According to the Adobe data, about a third of US households already own a smart speaker, with another 16% reporting the intention to acquire one this holiday season. And here's another chart from the Adobe research, one that shows that the vast majority of smart speaker owners are increasing their use of the technology. Have a look, then some pithy, insightful, and still FREE comments from me.

Three takes on the data:

1. Really significant numbers of both current smart speaker owners, (76%) and non-owners (38%), report increased usage of the technology in the past year. The number to me that is really shocking is that 38% of non-owners are using these technologies more. I confess to not really knowing where or how these folks are using these tools more, but the fact that almost 40% of them are, leads me to believe that a decent number of them will become owners very soon. Said differently, over three quarters or current owners are using their devices more, as are a really healthy percentage of non-owners. You'd love to report at the end of the year that 76% of your employees engaged with any of your workplace technologies more this year.  

2. One reason for the growth in usage? The sheer number of use cases keeps increasing. While the Adobe data also reports the most common uses of smart speakers are for streaming music, getting news and weather updates, and setting alarms and timers, a growing ecosystem of applications and skills are making these devices more useful, fun, and engaging. A full 32% of respondents reported using calendar and scheduling capabilities on their smart speakers for example. And 13% have used them to help with managing finances. Bottom line, the sky seems to be the limit for more and more innovative applications and users seem eager to expand their use of these tools.

3. If you are in an HR or HR tech role, and have not started to think about how to incorporate these technologies into your delivery of HR information and services, in 2019 you really should plan some time to do so. Your employees are more and more likely to be using these tools and are becoming more comfortable with engaging with them. And pretty soon (if it has not happened yet), these speakers will be in offices, meeting rooms, common areas, cars, and possibly everywhere else. They offer a way for you to engage your employees with access to information, help, support, and more advanced activities in an interface format that everyone already understands - 'Alexa, set up a meeting in Friday with the Marketing Team'. What could be simpler?

Finally, since I think you know by now I am all in on smart speaker, I wanted to remind readers that we have a special version of the HR Happy Hour Podcast on Alexa for Amazon Echo devices. If you are an Echo user, just add the 'HR Happy Hour'Skill to your device's Daily Flash Briefing to get a short HR Happy Hour Podcast a few times a week.

Have a great day!