WEBINAR: From Employee Engagement to Employee Experience

Quick pitch for a FREE Webinar that I am co-presenting along with the nice people from Globoforce this Tuesday, Feb. 23 (that's TOMORROW), at 1PM EST titled Changing the Conversation in 2016: Moving from Employee Engagement to Employee Experience. 

Here's the quick pitch (as if you needed one to get on board with this idea):

Surveys consistently show that only about 30% of employees consider themselves 'engaged.’ And improving engagement in a meaningful way has proven elusive for many organizations. What if instead HR started focusing more on the overall employee experience?

It’s time we stopped treating branding, onboarding, coaching, and development as separate entities. By approaching these employee interactions in a more holistic manner, we have a huge opportunity to really “wow” our employees.

Join Steve Boese (that's ME) and Lynette Silva from Globoforce as they discuss how recognition plays into engagement and some useful metrics for measuring the employee experience.

What you’ll learn: 

• How to think about the employee experience from a customer experience point of view
  • 3 primary components of the employee experience
  • Errors in how we’re pursuing engagement (and how to fix them)
  • Specific ways to elevate the fundamental value you offer employees
  • And lots more...

This is going to be a fun, and pretty lively conversation with some (hopefully) good ideas you can use in your own organization to begin to create the kinds of 'wow' experiences that marketers strive to create for their customers.

You can register for the FREE webinar, Changing the Conversation in 2016: Moving from Employee Engagement to Employee Experience on Feb. 23 at 1PM EST by clicking HERE.

Hope you can join us tomorrow!

Uber drivers: Employees, contractors, or something else?

A primary issue with the so-called 'sharing economy' (companies like Uber, TaskRabbit, Lyft and a bunch more), is a classic HR issue: whether or not the people delivering these kinds of on-demand services should be classified as independent contractors, or regular full or part-time employees of these companies. 

Uber has argued, (sometimes unsuccessfully), that it's drivers are actually independent contractors as each driver gets to choose when and where they work, provide their own vehicles, and usually have other sources of work/employment besides working as drivers of the Uber service. The arguments for classifying Uber drivers as regular employees center around the significant rules and conditions Uber sets for the delivery of the service, its driver rating and evaluation system, and the types and conditions of the vehicles that drivers can use.

This 'contractor vs employee' argument is going to take some time to play out in the courts, in the court of public opinion, and maybe even in the next presidential election. And where your take falls in this debate seems to me is mostly going to be influenced by your own capacity for risk and willingness to take ownership of your own career. But at least in the case of the 'shared ride' services like Uber and Lyft, this debate is probably only a temporary one. Soon, perhaps as soon as within the next 5 years or so in some areas, it won't matter if the Uber driver is an employee of Uber or an independent contractor, because the Uber driver won't be a driver at all.

Check this quote from 2014 by Uber CEO Travis Kalanick during an interview on the ride-sharing service:

During the interview, Kalanick was asked what he thinks of self-driving cars.

"Love it. All day long," said Kalanick.

"The reason Uber could be expensive is you're paying for the other dude in the car. When there is no other dude in the car, the cost of taking an Uber anywhere is cheaper. Even on a road trip."

Kalanick said that self-driving cars ordered up through a service like Uber will eventually bring the cost of ridership so far down that car ownership will "go away."

At least in this exchange, the Uber CEO had clearly envisaged a world where the 'employee vs contractor' discussion has been rendered moot, and the drivers, 'the other dudes in the car', transitioned out of whatever kind of employment relationship they had (or didn't have), and the costs to the customer driven down since the 'other dude' is automated away.

And I think this, this threat, (and likelihood) of automation of this kind of work, and for 'normal' taxi, truck, and even limo drivers, is the really important discussion that people who care about the future of work and workers should be having. Whether or not some Uber driver is a contractor or an employee in 2015 is mostly an issue of regulations, taxes, and some benefits. It matters, but only in a limited sense if the real future of work is not really about employment status classification but rather about if there will be human employment at all.

Have a great weekend!

The disconnect between the skills that get you hired and the jobs most workers have

Wow, that was a long post title. Sorry. The post won't be that long at all, trust me.

All I want you to do is look at two charts and then draw your own conclusions about the significance, if any.

The first, courtesy of the world's largest professional network, LinkedIn, who published some data they call 'The 25 Hottest Skills That Got People Hired in 2014', (from an analysis of member skills, employment changes, and recruiter interest on LinkedIn). 

Here is the chart:

Now for the second chart I'd like to bring to your attention, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics a look at the Top 10 occupations with the highest employment (dated from May 2013, so it is slightly older than the LinkedIn data, but it was the latest I could find after about 5 minutes of exhaustive research)

Here goes:

See any differences between what gets people hired, at least people on LinkedIn, and the kinds of jobs that are held by the largest numbers of people in the USA? These Top 10 occupations make up about 22% of overall US employment, in case you were wondering.

Wonder how far down on the BLS list (and you can check the full list of occupations as defined by the BLS here), you have to go before you run in to 'Statistical Analysis and Data Mining', the top 'hot' skill for 2014 as per LinkedIn. I will save you a click and let you know that all the occupations that the BLS rolls up into 'Computer and Mathematical Operations', (where most of LinkedIn's Top Hot skills would likely map), account for about 3.7M workers, that is just under 3% of all the jobs in the country.

Ok, since I said I was going to just show the charts and leave it up to you to think about, I better shut up.

Have a fantastic day. And don't spend so much time on LinkedIn.

CHART OF THE DAY: Where the new jobs are projected to be

Once again from our friends at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, today's chart is all about jobs - more specifically a look at in which occupations the BLS is forecasting the greatest numerical growth in jobs for the ten-year period of measurement, 2012 - 2022.

Take a look at the chart, then (of course) a few comments from me afterward:

Digging in to the data a little bit more (and taking into account the sheer difficultly in making these kind of far out into the future sorts of projections), reveals both some warnings, and some surprises.

First off, something that is not surprising, is that of the 30 areas projected to experience the largest employment increases, 5 are in healthcare, including 3 of the top 4 jobs that are expected to see the greatest increase, (personal care aides, registered nurses, and home health aides).

Combined, the top 5 healthcare related occupations are projected to add 1.6 million jobs over the 2012–2022 decade. 

But while the growth in healthcare jobs is not surprising, given the pressures being put on the healthcare system due primarily to an aging population, what is surprising is what the BLS suggests about the educational attainment needed by workers desiring to actually work in these faster-growing occupations.

From the BLS sumary:

Two-thirds of the occupations projected to add the most new jobs typically require a high school diploma or less, while only five typically require a bachelor’s degree.

Now that little observation is, to me at least, a little surprising, or perhaps just a little misaligned with everything that we typically see about the importance of higher education as it relates to a candidate's job prospects. But upon closer examination of the BLS job growth projections, perhaps we should not be that shocked at all. 

The care aides kinds of jobs, the retail jobs, the food prep and serving jobs, the customer service reps, (all in the Top 10 list of 'growth' occupations), well none of these require (typically), much if any higher education and of course, also typically offer relatively lower wages than the kinds of jobs of the future we like to think about, (like coding apps, designing wearable computers, or working in high finance).

Yep, according to the BLS anyway, job growth to 2022 is going to be mostly about low-skilled, low-wage, low prospects kinds of service jobs.

Actually the easiest kinds of jobs for the robots to take.

Happy Monday.

Things your employees don't care about

Admission up front - this (brief) piece is a straight up rip-off homage to a post by Pete Warden titled 'Things users don't care about'. You should click over and check out Pete's list, from a technology service provider perspective, of things that a solution's users don't care about.  In case you don't click over to the post, here are just a few of these nuggets of insight on things users don't care about:

How long you spent on it.

How hard it was to implement.

How amazing the next version will be.

What you think they should be interested in.

Whose fault the problems are.

Fantastic stuff. And if you look across these examples, and several of the others Pete provides, it is pretty easy to discern the common themes. Namely, that users, customers, or employees from an HR service provider perspective, generally don't care about your problems. In IT it might be buggyDon't care. software, a difficult to manage supplier, or a lack of budget to procure new hardware or software. In sales it could be an inflexible pricing structure or an inability to promise a delivery.  And of course there are a million 'HR' problems that, mostly, your employees simply don't care about.

Government immigration rules making it hard to get visas for the three foreign engineers?

Don't care.

Recruiting system doesn't talk to the Payroll system making your team do double entry of data?

Don't care.

The list of 'mandatory' job requirements for the open position I'm trying to fill is so long, it's making it impossible for you to deliver a deep slate of candidates?

Don't care.

(I admit at least on that last one, your hiring manager should care, but that doesn't mean she does.)

Sure, in a perfect world and in an high-functioning, collaborative, 'Best Places to Work' kind of environment your problems as an internal service provider would actually resonate with your customers and employees. But most of us don't work in places like that.

Even in really great organizations, IT or Legal or Auditing or HR are still often simply looked at as the necessary evils of doing business. The 'users' or customers might, and often probably do care about the needed outcomes you deliver, but not one bit about the myriad of struggles, travails, and long hours you have to spend to deliver those outcomes.

It's the outcomes that matter, not what had to be overcome along the way. Within reason of course. Don't decide to go all Lance Armstrong on us.

But truly, it's a Honey Badger world when you are overhead. And Honey Badger, as we all know, simply don't care. (link to the video you have seen a thousand times, but it remains NSFW).