HR Updates in Aug. 2020 – Part 1: Innovative HR Tech, but Stress From Bad Managers

A roundup of important HR updates from August 2020 so far.

As the world continues to struggle to control and co-exist with the COVID-19 pandemic, the HR world is experiencing an influx of new products through partnerships such as IBM and Workday, which will prepare employees for the return to work. New research is published practically every day, on employee sentiments about their organizations, engagement drivers, and rising remote training needs. The state of unemployment also remains bleak, with 40% of the excess unemployment in the leisure and hospitality sectors.

Let’s dive into the significant events in HR and HR technology in August 2020 so far.

Table of Contents

Major HR Tech Product Updates

• Workday and IBM expand their partnership for a return-to-work solution
• Jobvite expands EVOLVE Talent Acquisition Framework
• $100 million funding for PayActiv for employer-sponsored financial wellness solutions
• Workforce productivity to improve as Espressive Introduces Barista conversational surveys and smart ticketing

Findings from Major HR Surveys and Research

• Kronos survey reveals employees set a high bar for workplace safety, transparent communication, and contact tracing
• PayScale research shares strategies for setting fair pay for the remote workforce
• 84% of workers blame bad managers for creating unnecessary stress, as per SHRM survey
• Clutch survey shares 6 remote training tips for businesses
• New study shares that 40% of excess unemployment is in leisure & hospitality sector
• Unproductive meetings can be reduced by limiting meeting length and size, says Doodle
• Corestream releases new survey findings revealing the importance of voluntary benefits

Major HR Tech Product Updates

Workday and IBM expand their partnership for a return-to-work solution

Workday and IBMOpens a new window announced their expanded partnership and the availability of a joint solution to help business and community leaders plan, schedule, and monitor a safe return to the workplace.

Several organizations are planning to bring employees back to the workplace. There is now a rise in the discussion of factors, including health, local guidelines, governmental policies, employee sentiment, facility readiness, and personal protective equipment (PPE). IBM and Workday will be delivering a solution that can support and accelerate their customers’ return to the workplace. This will be done by combining planning capabilities with critical employee, community health, and workplace data.

The comprehensive solution will cover Workday Adaptive Planning and Workday Human Capital Management (HCM) and IBM Watson Works, a set of products that embeds Watson’s artificial intelligence (AI) models.

Jobvite expands EVOLVE Talent Acquisition Framework

Jobvite Opens a new window has announced the expansion of its EVOLVE Talent Acquisition Framework, an end-to-end roadmap for developing top-performing talent acquisition (TA) teams. 

The expanded EVOLVE TA Framework will focus on providing talent acquisition leaders with a holistic assessment of their talent function’s current situation. This will help them to align people, processes, and technology further. The components that will be present in the new framework are free online assessments, recommendations, and action plans.

“Historically, talent acquisition teams have struggled to align recruitment strategies, optimize outcomes, and amplify their most effective programs,” said Peter Clare, Jobvite SVP operations and customers. “Using Jobvite’s EVOLVE TA Framework, leading organizations can better develop talent acquisition as a strategic function. The net result is a high performing TA team that wins top talent, anticipates critical hiring needs, and continuously improves hiring processes to achieve optimal business outcomes.”

$100 million funding for PayActiv for employer-sponsored financial wellness solutions

PayActiv, Inc.Opens a new window has just announced that it has secured $100 million of funding to help in its mission of bringing security, dignity, and savings to workers. The Series C financing round was led by Eldridge and included existing PayActiv shareholders Generation Partners and the Ziegler Link•Age Fund II. PayActiv has also structured an expandable variable funding facility (“VF Facility”) with security benefit. With the support of growth equity and VF facility financing, PayActiv can increase its capability to rapidly expand its customer base and also continue supporting current clients with cost-free financial wellness benefits.

“American families are facing more financial stress than they have in generations,” said Safwan Shah, CEO and co-founder of PayActiv. “The timing gap between work and wages is the main reason workers get hit with punitive late fees, overdraft fees and other penalties. Cumulatively, these fees reduce wages by seven % every month. The PayActiv platform is the only system where everyone wins: employers lift worker morale with little to no cost and huge dividends; employees get wages when they actually need them most; and cash re-enters the economy faster, making communities financially healthier.”

HR Technology News: Technology Is Missing in Return-To-Work Strategies: Appian and LeadToMarket (LTM) Survey

Workforce productivity to improve as Espressive Introduces Barista conversational surveys and smart ticketing

Espressive, an artificial intelligence (AI) for enterprise service management (ESM) solution, has now announced the latest advances in its virtual support agent (VSA), Espressive Barista. Barista will include two features.

Barista Conversational Surveys, the first AI-based survey, will help leadership teams to make decisions in real-time that trigger immediate action, understand employee sentiment over time, and launch new technologies with confidence.

Barista Smart Ticketing capability, which uses machine learning (ML) to build a predictive model that can ensure fast deployment and improved mean time to resolve (MTTR), will remove the need for help desk agents to classify, assign, and prioritize tickets, saving time and reducing the possibility of errors.

Findings from Major HR Surveys and Research

Kronos survey reveals employees set a high bar for workplace safety, transparent communication, and contact tracing

A recent survey from KronosOpens a new window conducted by The Harris Poll finds that nearly 9 in 10 employees (86%) believe that their employer has an “obligation” to notify employees who may have been in contact with a co-worker who tested positive for COVID-19. This is almost equally applicable to employees currently going into work (89%) and those working from home due to the pandemic (86%).

Two separate Kronos surveys have removed the misconception around COVID-19 contact tracing, which suggests employee privacy concerns outweigh safety concerns. A significant majority of the employees surveyed globally by Workplace Intelligence (86%) are comfortable with employer-led contact tracing.

Gregg Gordon, vice president, industry, Kronos said, “Employees have demonstrated that they do have safety concerns in the workplace, but generally trust their employer to take care of them. This should signal to employers that they have a responsibility to step up and employ all methods necessary to protect workers physically and mentally during COVID-19, regardless of whether employees have worked all through the pandemic, have recently come back to the workplace, or won’t be brought back for another few months. As the data shows, employer-driven methods of contact tracing are not unwanted among the workforce, though education and transparent communication cannot be overlooked when introducing new policies or protocols related to organizational safety.”

PayScale research shares strategies for setting fair pay for the remote workforce

New research from PayScale Opens a new window has found three compensation strategies that companies can follow to set fair pay. It has also found that remote work can increase diversity and help close the racial and gender pay gap. The three strategies for consideration are: pay by employer location, pay by employee location, or pay according to a national average.

As per PayScale, these strategies are based on research that shows that employees who currently work remotely full-time make more than employees who do not work remotely. If the job title is controlled for, employees who currently work remotely make 8.5% more than the median salary of employees who do not work remotely.

In an exclusive with Toolbox HR, Shelly Holt, chief people officer at PayScale said, “Remote work has the potential to make a dramatic impact on employee satisfaction and morale. Work/Life balance and flexibility is highly valued by today’s workforce and will become increasingly important to employer branding in the future. In fact, recent studies show that 80% of employees want to be able to work from home and 51% of U.S. workers would quit their current job for one that offers flex time. Businesses should be looking at how intangibles like employee sentiment and employee engagement make a tangible impact to the bottom line. If companies are able to satisfy and motivate their employees, they will in turn take care of customers. The flexibility to work remote, even if it’s only a few days a week, can have an enormous impact on employee motivation to help the business succeed. Coupled with a strong compensation strategy, businesses should be able to keep top talent around longer.”

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84% of workers blame bad managers for creating unnecessary stress, as per SHRM survey

A new SHRM surveyOpens a new window revealed that 84% of workers say that poorly trained managers create a lot of unnecessary work and stress. This survey collected responses to assess their perspective on how well-trained their supervisors were to manage people or not. In addition, 57% of the workers shared that their managers at the workplace could benefit from training on how to be a better people manager and 50% feel their performance would also have a positive impact and improve if their direct supervisor received additional training in people managementOpens a new window .

Workers were also asked about the top five skills that they think the people managers could improve. These were found to be:

1. Communicating effectively (41%)
2. Developing and training the team (38%)
3. Managing time and delegating (37%)
4. Cultivating a positive and inclusive team culture (35%)
5. Managing team performance (35%)

Clutch survey shares 6 remote training tips for businesses

Clutch Opens a new window surveyed 1,001 people to understand how to make remote training more effective for employees and identified two major themes.

First, around half of the respondents (57%) have participated in remote training in a professional setting, which seems to indicate that remote training will remain relevant as the COVID-19 pandemic ensures that remote work remains a priority.

Second, most people (61%) think remote training is practical, but there are several who also believe that remote training has limitations, and so businesses should plan carefully to make sure remote training works for employees. The remote training tips they shared are:

1. Choose remote training topics that meet employees’ needs
2. Consider the format of your remote training
3. Choose the right remote training tools
4. Reduce interruptions and distractions during your remote training
5. Seek cost-effective training options
6. Hire corporate training facilitators

New study shares that 40% of excess unemployment is in leisure & hospitality sector

AOpens a new window reportOpens a new window by the U.S. Travel Association by Tourism Economics found that the travel and tourism industry was severely affected in terms of jobs. 40% of excess U.S. unemployment was reported to be in the leisure and hospitality (L&H) sector, even though the sector was responsible for 11% of all pre-pandemic employment.

Also, though the travel season slowly restored some jobs, more than a quarter of all L&H workers remain unemployed. As per the data, nearly half of the 16.9 million jobs in the L&H sector were wiped out in March and April.

Unproductive meetings can be reduced by limiting meeting length and size, says Doodle

Doodle’s Q2 2020 State of Meetings reportOpens a new window has shared essential findings of how meeting size, duration, times of day, and notice etiquette are crucial factors that can influence the overall effectiveness of meetings. The report was a result of Doodle’s analysis that covered more than 30 million meetings booked worldwide on Doodle in the second quarter of 2020. One major finding was that the one-hour meeting duration isn’t as common as it was earlier. Only 20% of the meetings were booked for one hour. There is an increasing prevalence of keeping meetings shorter in length – for 30 minutes (36%) or 15 minutes (31%). This could be attributed to the need to increase participants’ focus and better use their time to drive better outcomes.

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Corestream releases new survey findings revealing the importance of voluntary benefits

Corestream has shared its new survey findings, according to which voluntary benefits drive employee retention and engagement. Voluntary benefits are offered in addition to the usual medical, dental, and vision coverage. The survey was conducted to cover 152 employees and 151 HR professionals in companies with at least 5,000 employees.

There is a vast knowledge gap between employers and employees. 77.5% of employers said they offered voluntary benefits, but 49.3% of employees reported that they did not know what voluntary benefits are. 68.4% of employees said voluntary benefits might positively influence their desire to continue working for their employer. Also, almost half of HR professionals (45.7%) said voluntary benefits attract new talent, 58.9% said they retain talent, and 43% said they help with employee engagement.