TalentCulture #WorkTrends

Today I'm welcoming Liz King, the CMO of gThankYou, LLC, to talk about the importance of workplace gratitude. Sharing gratitude with employees and peers may actually be the special sauce of workplace culture. We're going to hear about the science behind gratitude, and how it transforms the workplace. We'll talk about how to shape a whole culture of gratitude, and what to do for the holidays that will make everyone smile.

Today I'm welcoming Justin Holland, the CEO and Founder of HealthJoy to talk about health benefits — and why it's so important for employers to deliver a quality healthcare benefits experience for their employees, wherever they're working, remote or on-site. Healthcare has changed radically — it's far more complex than it ever was. And right now, employees need more help and guidance than ever.

Sexual harassment is not an easy topic, and with the advent of most employees working from home, it has taken on a new dimension of difficulty. Identifying it with concrete evidence is sometimes a feeling you get because you know the other person's behavior or comment was not appropriate. Still, the question is, was it sexual harassment. Keep in mind that sexual harassment does not always occur through physical contact. The spoken word, emails, texts, and video conferencing can all serve as vehicles to deliver sexually harassing messages. Further, sexual harassment can be delivered in various ways. Comments targeted to your gender, wardrobe, hairstyle, or even an inappropriate joke can be construed as sexual harassment and under many legal jurisdictions can be reported as such.

Working with virtual assistants can be a great benefit to organizations of all sizes and industries, and especially useful for start-up companies and small businesses looking to grow. Using virtual assistants can take many burdens off of a business owner and can do it in an economical way. Often, business owners will take on the tasks and duties associated with all aspects of their business leaving them to become overwhelmed and over burdened, which can lead to burnout and the potential demise of their business. Hiring virtual assistants of varying specialties can help streamline the processes and procedures established for a business and provide the expertise a business may be missing. In this episode of #WorkTrends, entrepreneur Nathan Hirsch, the co-founder of OutsourceSchool, describes the myriad benefits of hiring virtual assistants. He explains how to properly hire, onboard, train and manage virtual assistants to get the most from the skills they bring to an organization. He, also, shares advice on when the best times are to hire virtual assistants with specific skill sets during various business growth milestones.

HR is navigating endless changes right now, including how to best advise and equip employees with the savings and financial planning they need. What's different: we're not face to face. The tools and information need to be online — and in a platform that makes sense, offers simple and clear navigating, and presents the best savings opportunities there are. Employees are under enough pressure as it is. And they need a way to better support the financial stresses they're under. And with the world changing so quickly, we need a platform that can leverage the power and the scope of automation. And while we're at it, let's make it trustworthy, reliable, scaleable, and easy for both employers and employees to use. Today I'm sitting down with Augie Smith, Founder of Otherhood, to talk about how his company partners with employers to help their employees with a pressing challenge today: saving as much pre-tax income as they can for what matters: healthcare, education, and retirement. We'll be looking at the role of automation and AI in this innovative platform, and talking about why employee self-service is so important when it comes to benefit management.

Reflektive's new report on performance management shows like every other aspect of how we work, there are major changes afoot. The 2020 Performance Management Benchmark Report, as it's called, is hot off the presses.It surveyed over 1,000+ HR professionals, business leaders and employees, on the state of performance management, including trends, employee needs, and sentiment about the future. Jennifer Toton, Chief Marketing Officer at Reflektive, joins host Meghan M. Biro to download some of the more compelling trends that the survey uncovered. The report sheds light on the present and the future — and how the shift to remote working has changed our views and expectations on performance, as well as our desire for feedback, reviews, coaching, communication, and time.

The pandemic has thrown a curve ball to many people in the workplace. What was once normal is now the old way of doing things. The new normal came quickly and it didn't give people a chance to catch up. Many employees were faced with working from home or someplace else that is not optimal for many reasons. Some find the noise distracting, the workspace inadequate, the routine disruptive or the technology lacking in ways that is causing people to fall behind in their work. In this episode of #WorkTrends, I'm spending time with two veterans of remote working, Maria Orozova and Scott Thomas. They own and manage a creative services agency and do this successfully as a married couple. Many of the struggles employees and businesses are facing now are challenges they overcame in their many years of learning how to divide child care, finding ways to create "alone" time, delineating between work and home hours and using good tactics for interactions that don't create communication fatigue.

You've worked hard to create an engaged, loyal workforce. Then 2020 hits. Overnight we are sent to at-home workspaces working in physical isolation. We balance the stresses of health and wellbeing with maintaining performance in our jobs. Civil unrest has quickly heightened emotions and anxiety. All this and we're barely past the mid-year mark. In a work world where our teams are distributed physically and mentally, how can we build and maintain trust among our workforce? Further, how do trust and belonging drive sustainable performance? Today I'm sitting down with Iain Moffat, Chief Global Officer of MHR International, to talk about the importance of safety, relationships, and purpose as the cornerstones for building real trust in today's workplace — and radically strengthening the company culture. These may be uncertain times, but creating a sense of trust and belonging in your workforce and your workplace gives people an anchor we all need — and it's an incredibly effective way of sustaining the kind of performance and engagement that, in turn, sustains your business.

Before COVID-19 one of the most popular ongoing discussions at #WorkTrends was about the gig economy — which was already breaking open the traditional 9-5 model of working and shifting the perspective from payroll to project. Coworking, freelancing, independent contractors — we were looking at generational preferences and realizing that it was highly likely that we would not be bringing talent into the workforce the same way we had before. Then came the pandemic, and suddenly we shifted to remote working and flexible schedules out of necessity — which as more than one colleague of mine has said is, after all, the mother of invention. And with that shift came the realization that we really can break out of the 9-5 mold, undo our adherence to staying in cities in order to be near our workplace, and detach from the need to stay on salary for being independently affiliated. There are, of course, tangible matters to address, including how we best source and hire freelancers with the chops and skills we really need. But here's another revelation: HR is a great opportunity for hiring freelancers – and being a freelancer. Freelancers with HR talent are on the rise and for a number of reasons, we're going to see more organizations turning to freelancers — and finding that both strategically and practically, it's a win. Today I'm welcoming Chris Russell, Founder, HR Lancers, and Jim Stroud, VP marketing, Proactive Talent, to talk about the enormous shift we're seeing in how people work and how organizations hire — from salaried to gig. And that includes HR as well, which may surprise some of you. But with millennials leaving major metropolitan areas and remote working becoming the norm, freelancing is becoming a viable way to build a great HR team. We'll talk about effective strategies for hiring the best and the brightest freelancers for HR, from best practices to best resources.

There's so much uncertainty about what will happen to the workplace — whether we will wind up staying remote or mixing it up, or be able to return to a physical workspace. Will it be safe, will it be a best practice? There are a lot of questions facing us and we're not going to have the answers for a while now, given what's happening in the country with COVID-19. Against this backdrop, we still need to hire people. And we need to find a way to onboard them into a work culture that inspires and engages them. Just how to do that has always been a challenge. But now it's even more so — because we can't rely on proximity to transmit behaviors or a sense of shared purpose, or energy, or enthusiasm. It all has to happen in a way that transcends physical boundaries and is effective nevertheless. Today I'm welcoming John Baldino, President and Founder of Humareso, to talk about the best practices for onboarding your new hires into your workforce, no matter where you are — and how to uncover the blind spots in your onboarding process as well as your workculture to make onboarding a success.