n = 1

1. Tariffs: I am not an economist, and I don't even play one on TV. But these blanket tariffs, (code for taxes), sort of feel wrong to me. It is super complicated for sure, but the idea that in 2018 we (America), wants to value one kind of industry over another, mostly based on some romanticized recollection of the past, is misguided. We will see how this pans out of course, and like lots of these kinds of things the impacts will likely be less dramatic in the real world than the current headlines suggest.

2. TECH: Yesterday I shared some data about the growth and marker share of the 'smart speaker' market - Echo, Google Home, etc. I am incredibly bullish on how these devices and voice assistants in general are going to impact workplace tech. In my down time I have been working on a little project for the Amazon Alexa platform that I hope to get launched in the next week or two. Stay tuned for that.

3. Winter: it is still snowing here in Western NY. That is not surprising so it can't really be described as disappointing. It is sad though. A few items below there's another observation about Rochester, NY that will make more sense when considering how long and cold and miserable the winters can be here.

4. HR Happy Hour: Lots of great stuff on the HR Happy Hour Show and the HHH family of shows. Go to the HR Happy Hour Show Page to get caught up, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. We started the HR Happy Hour way back in 2009. Amazing it is still going strong after all this time.

5. Sports: I have never been less interested in my New York Knicks. Once franchise player (and hopefully savior), Kristaps Porzingis went down injured the team has become simply unwatchable. I think I can name more players on the US Olympic Curling Team than I can on the current Knicks. Dreadful.

6. JOBS: Writing this over a coffee as the monthly US Employment report hit the news. Wow - 313,000 jobs added in February 2018. That's a huge number. Unemployment rate held at 4.1% due to lots more people re-entering the labor force - makes sense since the economy is adding so many jobs. Have fun recruiting for those 'hard to fill' positions. Maybe, just maybe it's time to raise wages?

7. Location: On the same CNBC show that I caught the Jobs report update, one of the 'expert' analysts was discussing job and skills training, and the role of the private sector vs. the public sector with respect to re-skilling workers who are impacted by automation and shifting labor market needs. My ears perked up when explaining why companies need to 'own' training current and future workers he remarked, 'Let's say you own a company in Rochester, NY, (NOTE: Where I live). No one is relocating to Rochester, NY to take your open jobs. You have to re-train the people who are already there if you want to fill those jobs." Ouch. Probably more or less true. I am about 15 months from getting out of here myself.

8. Oscars: Trish and I did pretty well on our Academy Awards Predictions on the Happy Hour. Sufjan Stevens was robbed in the Best Song category though. (Embed below, email and RSS subscribers click through)

9. Social Media note of note: I have pared down my social media use to (mostly automated/scheduled) Twitter updates and (oddly enough) posting travel pics on the Chinese social media app WeChat. Over a decade on various social apps has me burned out from them. I have not logged in to Facebook in probably a year, (although links to the blog still post there) and stopped posting (and checking) Instagram last summer. Not that anyone cares. But once in a while someone tries to get in touch with me on one of those apps and I just wanted to let anyone who does care know that I don't see any those messages. I kind of feel like I'm not alone in drifting off in terms of social media use/addiction. Who knows, maybe blogs will stage a comeback!

10. FOOD: Shamrock Shakes are back. Enough said.

Have a great weekend!

CHART OF THE DAY: The Rise of the Smart Speaker

There is pretty good evidence that the rate of mainstream adoption of new technologies is significantly more rapid than it has been in the past. It took something like 60 or 70 years for the home-based, land line telephone to achieve over 90% penetration in US homes once the technology became generally available.

Fast forward to more recent technology innovations like the personal computer or the mobile phone and time for widespread adoption has diminished to just a couple of decades (if not less for modern tools and solutions like social media/networking apps).

New tech, when it 'hits', hits much faster than ever before and its adoption accelerates across mainstream users much faster as well. Today's Chart(s) of the Day, courtesy of some research done by Voicebot.ai show just how prevalent the smart speaker, a technology almost no one had in their homes even two years ago, have become.

Chart 1 - Smart Speaker Market Penetration - US

About 20% of US adults are in homes that have one of these smart speakers enabled. It may not sound like much, but think about it - how many times had you seen one of these say as recently as 2016?

Chart 2 - Smart Speaker Market Share - US

No surprise, to me at least, that Amazon has the dominant position in the US in terms of smart speakers. They beat their competitors to this market, and their platform, Alexa, has become pretty synonymous with the entire voice assistant technology. If I were a company looking to develop solutions for voice, I would start with Alexa for sure.

Once people, in their 'real lives' begin to adopt a technology solution in large numbers, they begin to seek, demand, and expect these same kinds of technologies will be available and tailored to their workplace needs as well. The data shows that smart speakers like the Echo and the Google Home device are gaining mainstream adoption really, really quickly.

If your organization has not yet started to think about how to deploy services, information, and access to organizational information via these smart speakers and their platforms like Alexa I wouldn't say you are late, but you are getting close to being late.

Better to be in front of a freight train rolling down the line than it is to get run over by it.

Last note - stay tuned for an exciting announcement in this space from your pals at the HR Happy Hour Show.

CHART OF THE DAY: There are too many open jobs, (or not enough people to fill them)

A really quick shot for a busy Thursday - from the most recent JOLTS report (that's the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey and you should have this page on permanent bookmark), the most recent (as of December 2017) data on the ratio of Unemployed workers to job openings in the US.

Here's the data...

    

The actual chart on the BLS site is interactive if you want to play around with it, but I will save you the time and let you know that as of the end of December 2017 the ratio of unemployed workers to open jobs was down to 1.1. Basically, the US economy is closing in on having nearly the same number of unemployed workers, (about 6.3 million ) as there are job openings (about 5.8 million) as of the end of 2017. The ratio of 1.1 has been steady for most of 2017 and ties the all-time low in the this data series' history.

I have not much else to add to this, beyond what you already know. The labor market continues to be at or near record levels of 'tightness'. It will be really interesting (and fun if you are a data geek like me), to see of the ratio goes below 1 at some point, a situation where even if every open job in the US was suddenly filled by an unemployed person, there still would be open jobs remaining. I guess then we will have to build more robots to fill those jobs.

Have a great day!

CHART OF THE DAY: The Changing Composition of the US Workforce

There are only two websites you need. Actually three, if you count this one. And hint, none of them are Facebook. I promise you that one day you will regret all the time you wasted with Facebook. But I digress.

One is BLS.gov, the Bureau of Labor Statistics site where all the employment, industry, productivity, time use, compensation (and more) information you need on the US labor force is located.

The other is the Federal Reserve of St. Louis' fantastic FRED site, where you can download, graph, and track over 500,000 data series covering the economy, employment, demographics and much, much more. Data geeks like me can get lost in the FRED site for hours.

I was using these two sources to update my notes and perspective on US aggregate employment across industry groups, useful information that helps me guide and shape the specific industry focus that results in both the content for this blog, topics for the HR Happy Hour Podcast, and the program for the HR Technology Conference.

This data is also useful to consider in a larger sense - like when thinking about governmental policies and investments, the focus of secondary and higher education and training, and even when answering questions like 'Just what is our country good at?' from a business/economy perspective.

Have a look at today's Chart of the Day - (built at the FRED site) aggregate US employment since 1980 in the largest category components of the labor force, then some comments from me..

We all know that 100 - 120 years ago the US shifted from a largely agricultural economy/labor force to a manufacturing, shipping, and trading workforce. And then, slowly but surely, beginning in about 1980, a shift started to occur. Manufacturing employment began to decline while professional services, health care, and retail began to climb.

Here's the snapshot of latest employment numbers for the categories in chart, (Nov 2017).

Manufacturing, while pretty apparent to most casual labor market observers, has fallen below professional services, health care, leisure and hospitality, even retail employment in terms of its overall share of US employment. For some perspective, as of November 2017 total US non-farm employment was about 149 million. At that level, manufacturing now represents only about 8.5% of US employment.

In terms of where most observers see these trends continuing out into the future, the aging US population seems to clearly indicate that health services and health care will be the largest growth area moving forward. Retail jobs are under threat from automation, online shopping (and the efficiencies and lower labor costs associated), and by the constant chase for less expensive goods produced and shipped in lower cost countries. The same threats also impact manufacturing. Even the largest, new manufacturing plants require far fewer workers than the ones of just 10 - 20 years ago.

There's lots more to think about when looking at this data. I encourage anyone interested to join me in a deep dive on BLS.gov and the St. Louis FRED.

CHART OF THE DAY: When does work usually get done?

A few years ago I wrote about a study that concluded that the optimal day/time to conduct a job interview was exactly 10:30AM on Tuesday.

Back then, I wrote:

Even without data to back up that claim, it at least makes intuitive sense to me. Mondays are terrible for everything. Many folks mentally check out by Fridays. That leaves Tuesday - Thursday as options for any kind of important meeting, like a job interview. Let's automatically remove anything after lunch, as you never know how a heavy meal, quick workout, or a couple of shots and a Schlitz are going to have on the interviewer.

So that leaves Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday mornings. Let's rule out Thursday since it is close enough to Friday to catch a little of the 'Is it the weekend yet?' shrapnel. Now we are in a tossup between Tuesday and Wednesday mornings. And since even by only Wednesday, lots of folks might already be thinking 'How can it only be Wednesday, this week is taking forever?', Tuesday seems like a safer choice. As for a time - use the Goldilocks approach - not too early, not too late (and too close to lunch), which lands you at 10:30AM.

Made sense back then I guess. We (the Royal 'We', your mileage may differ), are at our peak of attention, focus, energy, and mental capacity at 10:30AM on Tuesday. So schedule that important meeting, interview, presentation - whatever you need to be at your best for, at that time and you increase your chance for success.

Remind yourself to check back on that at 10:30AM tomorrow, (assuming you read this on a Monday, which is when it is getting posted).

I came across a slightly different version of the 'When are we at our best?' question over the weekend via some research results posted on the Redbooth (a provider of project management software) blog titled 'At what time of day do people complete the most tasks?'.

Redbooth studied anonymized data from its user base - over 1.8 million projects and 28 million tasks to try and determine when does work actually get done? Take a look at the chart below that shows what they found about how much work gets done during the typical day.

Kind of makes sense, right? The day starts kind of slow, productivity begins ramping up steeply as the work day progresses and peaks at about 11AM local time (time zones of users were taken into account). Then there is a dip in productivity during the 'normal' lunch break hours that does not really recover as the rest of the day pans out. And around 4PM productivity drops off the proverbial clip and does not recover.

Again, not totally surprising like the answer to the 'When should we schedule the big meeting/interview/presentation?' question.

But a couple of things to note in the Redbooth data that might have an impact on how we plan and perform our work, (and how we manage the folks on our teams).

One, we probably should try no to interrupt our own and our people's most productive times with unnecessary meetings, interruptions, emails, and phone calls. If the sweet spot for productivity is from say 9:30AM - 12:30PM or so, then we should do just about whatever we can to keep that block of time free from distractions and other events that can cause conflicts. Take that standing 10AM Tuesday meeting and think about moving it to 3PM on Thursday, (or consider scrapping it altogether).

Two, the productivity drop is so sharp staring at about 4PM (and continuing through the night and weekends), that we all really need to be honest with ourselves about how much we and our teams are really getting done if we are the kinds that see 12 - 14 hour days and working at least some of the time on the weekends as the norm. The data from the Redbooth platform makes it pretty clear that despite whatever great work we think is getting done at 11PM on Wednesday, it does not add up to much in the data.

And finally, this data suggests or hints at something that many of us have known and research has suggested is true - sustained high productivity over such a large block of time - 8, 10, 12 hours, is really hard for most people to pull off. If we remain committed to the 'standard' working schedule that has dominated for decades, (M - F, 8 hour days, etc.), we should be thinking harder about how we architect work, tasks, meetings, interactions, etc. to try and get the most out of these long days - while not burning out ourselves and our people in the process.

Really interesting data, I think and hopefully helps us to think about how to be better at what we do and what we are trying to do.

Have a great week!