Here’s a scary thought — more than 90% of the world’s total electronic data has been created in the last two years alone. And by the end of this year it’s estimated 1.7MB of data will be created for every person, every second. So what is the value of this data and what exactly should we be doing with it?

This is the question many businesses are asking themselves as we enter the fourth industrial revolution, a time of intense digital transformation where the use of data is completely changing the way we do business.

Across the organisation there will no doubt be hidden, passionate data champions, and what better time to discover them and amplify their skills. Call on these team members to help the organisation on its journey.

Before organisations start considering how to leverage the data available to them though, there’s a critical question that needs to be asked — do we have the necessary skillset to derive meaningful insights from data and convert this knowledge into action? In most cases, the answer is no.

Forrester says that 74% of businesses want to be data-driven, but only 29% are successful at putting analytics into action. While McKinsey found that 70% of digital transformation programs don’t reach their goals, which means that of the $1.3 trillion that was spent on digital transformations in 2019, $900 billion was wasted on efforts that did not yield intended results.

Even more alarming, Gartner predicts that by the end of 2020, 50% of organisations will lack sufficient AI and data literacy skills to achieve business value. It’s not a technological challenge that we’re grappling with though, it’s a human one, a lack of data literacy.

The answer isn’t simply hiring more data analysts though, in fact, the number of data professionals in the world is already insufficient to meet demand.

What does it mean to be data literate?

Just as literacy is our ability to read, write and comprehend language, data literacy is our ability to read, write and understand data. More than that, it’s the ability to derive meaningful and useful information from data and to apply this to create better products, services and experiences.

Data literacy is not just the domain of a few teams across the organisation – all workers from the shopfloor to the C-suite will bring greater value to the business by better understanding how data is entwined in their everyday tasks and being empowered to realise its full potential. We need to upskill the entire workforce to be data literate, and HR has a critical role to play in developing this competency across the organisation.

While this may seem a daunting task, the good news is that data literacy is a learned skill, and with the right tools and support, anyone can become data literate.

Here are seven steps that HR professionals can take to improve the data literacy of their workforce and prepare for the future of work:

1. Make data literacy an issue

HR professionals have an incredibly important role to play in the design and implementation of any organisational data literacy program, starting with building awareness and excitement around the possibilities that a truly data-driven organisation brings.  For data literacy to be taken seriously, HR must first convey how important it is to all employees, including those in traditionally non-data roles.  Data literacy is a concern for every person across the organisation, not just a select few. And like any culture change, it needs to start from the top, so getting executives’ buy-in and support will be crucial:

Even more alarming, Gartner predicts that by the end of 2020, 50% of organisations will lack sufficient AI and data literacy skills to achieve business value. It’s not a technological challenge that we’re grappling with though, it’s a human one, a lack of data literacy.

2. Locate your data champions

Across the organisation there will no doubt be hidden, passionate data champions, and what better time to discover them and amplify their skills. Call on these team members to help the organisation on its journey by tasking them to support others in using data in their day-to-day activities. Celebrating your data champions’ skills and drawing from their knowledge will go a long way in laying the foundations for a data-driven culture.

3. Take stock

It’s difficult to design a data literacy initiative if you don’t know where you’re starting from, therefore it’s vital to measure your organisation’s existing levels of data literacy before you roll out any new programs. There are a number of assessments and measurement tools available to help measure the current level of data literacy across a diverse range of employees or the organisation as a whole.

4. Set a goal

What does ‘good’ look like when it comes to data literacy for your organisation? Start setting goals by mapping out what data literacy looks like at different levels and in different roles within the organisation. Doing this will help you to prioritise your efforts and direct resources to the right places. Unsurprisingly, some roles require higher levels of data literacy than others, for example the needs of a retail assistant will differ greatly from someone working in digital marketing. The retail assistant’s data role will most likely lay in creating and sharing data — through collecting customer details, encouraging database subscriptions, etc., whereas the marketer’s data role will involve accessing and analysing data to create targeted campaigns and communications.

5. Get learning

Once you know where you’re starting from, and where you’re going, it’s a matter of focusing on the gap in between. Your organisation’s data literacy program will require a unique mix of resources and tools to support it on its path. Fortunately, there’s an ever-growing domain of tools, templates and training modules available to learn from and implement.

Before organisations start considering how to leverage the data available to them though, there’s a critical question that needs to be asked — do we have the necessary skillset to derive meaningful insights from data and convert this knowledge into action? In most cases, the answer is no.

6. Encourage a culture of curiosity

Encouraging curiosity is an important element of building data literacy. If the teams aren’t open to exploring data or being inquisitive, they’re unlikely to uncover insights that will help the business to innovate. A study by Harvard Business School found that 92% of employees credited curious people with bringing new ideas into teams and organisations and viewed curiosity as a catalyst for job satisfaction, motivation, innovation and high performance.

7. Continually reassess

Ensure you schedule regular reviews to assess progress to date, measure incremental improvements, identify gaps and make changes to your data literacy program. Successful data literacy programs will not be a one-hit-wonder or ‘set and forget’ activity, these programs will adapt to the evolving needs of the organisation and technological advancements.

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Leadership development is critical to business performance and attracts significant investment. Unfortunately, most of this is poorly spent on programs that look good, but don’t work – primarily because they don’t follow the principles that have been proven to have the greatest impact.

What are these principles? Look at almost any award-winning leadership program, including our work with NSW Health that recently won gold for innovative program design at the international Brandon Hall Excellence Awards, and you’ll find themes of greater focus (fewer topic areas), action (experience not passive education), stretch (novel, uncomfortable challenges) and high-quality rapid feedback.

Here are the five steps any organisation can take to design and deliver a leadership development intervention that will produce the outcomes you seek.

There is no limit to the number of desirable focus areas for a leadership development intervention. But including them all isn’t helpful, as it dilutes the amount of concentration on each one.

1. Get serious

I’ve met too many organisations where they say they want a transformational impact, but they aren’t prepared for what it will take. So, before you start, make sure that your commitment matches your ambitions. If it doesn’t, you will start making major compromises from the outset, and you will end up with a half-baked intervention with limited impact.

These compromises may include:

• Can we have something that doesn’t take much participant time?
• Can we have something that is really innovative but doesn’t involve taking any risks?
• Can we have something cheap?
• Can we have something where participants don’t have to be fully engaged (so that they can be answering emails and returning calls at the same time)?
• Can we have something where we don’t have to change anything else about the organisation so that it can align with, and reinforce, what the program is trying to achieve?

These questions will diminish the success of your organisation’s leadership. So, if your stakeholders are already asking such questions and you’re intending to accede to them, stop reading now. If you’re happy to commit to excellence, read on.

2. Get clear

The most important design question you can ask is “What do we most want from this intervention?”. One example of this was for a 100,000+ employee organisation which had 21 CEO-equivalent positions, reporting through to a Group CEO. Their goal was to have a pool of leaders who would be job-ready in 3-5 years to step into one of those 21 roles. Once this was understood as the most important outcome, everything else followed. In a different case, a company’s goal was to ensure that the top 200 leaders would be equipped to work together to take the organisation through the most demanding and complex inflection point in its history.

Once these high-level ambitions are known and agreed by all key stakeholders, it’s possible to get more granular in terms of the required mindset, capability and behaviour shifts, as well as the program design implications.

The answers for your intervention could be anything from ‘driving top-line growth as we expand geographically’ to ‘making our company the most innovative in our industry’ to ‘ensuring our digital transformation is a complete success’. The key is that the question is asked and answered, and then communicated so effectively that everyone understands.

Too many leadership development interventions suffer from insufficient discomfort. When asked ‘how often in this process did you feel stretched out of your comfort zone’, the average response should be around 80%.

3. Get focused

Many programs, even after getting clear about the required outputs, suffer from a major problem: design overload.

There is no limit to the number of desirable focus areas for a leadership development intervention. But including them all isn’t helpful, as it dilutes the amount of concentration on each one. One of our most staggering findings in evaluating leadership programs is that more than 90% suffer from targeting too many capability areas. The result is that all of these programs then fail to achieve the capability shifts they were aiming for and miss the results that they could and should have delivered.

The key negative impacts are:

• Reduced time per focus area. This is as simple as it sounds. If the program affords 120 hours of participant time, then in crude terms, you can either spend 15 hours each on 8 capabilities or 40 hours each on 3 capabilities.
• Ambiguity and cognitive load. Arguably even more significant than the time difference, is the difference in clarity and focus for the participant.

That doesn’t mean dumbing down a program or avoiding leadership dimensions which are multi-faceted. It’s simply about giving the most important elements dedicated attention, not marginal attention.

4. Get active and uncomfortable

Getting active and uncomfortable is critical for participant experience. The implicit goal of any development activity is to move people’s ‘mental representation’ of the capability to a more accurate, complete or sophisticated level than where they were at.

If your goal is for people to evolve their mindsets, capabilities or behaviours, it won’t happen through listening to someone talk, or through a chat with colleagues. It will only happen if you take action – and that action must involve applying the mindset or capability that is in focus. If you are focused on, say, collaboration, then participants must do something that requires them to collaborate – and with a higher level of mastery than they usually demonstrate.

If that activity is to have a sustained effect, it must provide either intensity and/or novelty. Too many leadership development interventions suffer from insufficient discomfort. When asked ‘how often in this process did you feel stretched out of your comfort zone’, the average response should be around 80%. However, in most programs we have evaluated, the typical result is 30% or lower. Most programs focus on elements that are most visible and easiest to deliver (such as typical executive education programs) yet the lack of immersion and stretch means the chance of such programs delivering the desired results is almost zero.

For a successful intervention, you must take people to a place of discomfort (while ensuring that they feel safe to go there). That discomfort can come in very different forms (a time-pressured collaboration, a presentation to a demanding audience, a deeply emotional conversation or a completely out-of-the-box immersive experience), but the test is that participants find it ‘just about manageable’. Broadly, that means that people feel that they are likely to succeed if they give the task full effort but are likely to fail if they do not.

Of course, these ‘heat experiences’ are not enough in themselves. They must be combined with processes that cause people to take on new perspectives and challenge their old assumptions, as well as sense-making to integrate their new learning into their overall way of leading. But without the hands-on heat experiences, none of the other activities will make a difference.

5. Get results

All of these steps only count if you are clear on getting results. Quite appropriately, most major leadership development awards today place a high weighting on the quality of evaluation.

Grouped information from leadership interventions must focus on impact, not reactions. Once again, too many programs are focused on what’s visible and easy to collect (e.g. ‘how did you find the venue?’). Indeed, in our evaluation of programs, we find the lowest scoring element overall is most often the program impact measurement. They literally have no idea whether the program worked – all they know is whether participants enjoyed it.

More than anything, evaluation it is about understanding what data you need to collect and collecting this data throughout so that participants can receive rapid, dynamic feedback on their development journey – showing them where they are making progress and where they are not.

This is how we develop. We start at a certain point, we strive to improve, we see what has or hasn’t changed, presented in a way that helps us understand why and how we can continually improve our development. It’s how we learned to walk and talk, and how some of us learned to become great musicians, scientists, public speakers or CEOs.

Leadership development is critical to business performance and attracts significant investment. Unfortunately, most of this is poorly spent on programs that look good, but don’t work

Shifting your mindset from what’s easy to what works requires real commitment, but the difference in value creation is binary – executed well, you can have the strongest leadership cadre in your sector, delivering an incomparable level of competitive advantage.

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There’s nothing particularly revolutionary about the notion of online learning (or eLearning). Yet it’s astounding that after two decades, many organisations are still making fundamental mistakes — at a massive cost.

Begin with a thorough understanding of why training matters to the organisation and the individual, how the knowledge will be implemented, and what the learning outcomes are

Consider the typical approach to online training: take an existing face-to-face training program (read a hundred-plus-slide PowerPoint deck with over twenty bullet points on each), drop it into a learning management system (LMS) and whack on a ‘next’ button.

This is chalked up as a win, due to:

1. Saving a resource from having to deliver training in person, and;
2. Allowing employees to learn at a time that suits them.

In reality, however, this click-click-click-next approach rarely produces an engaging experience, and learning suffers dramatically as a result.

There’s no shortage of evidence showing the substantial performance and bottom-line benefits of effective online learning, but the keyword here is effective.

Improving online training isn’t a matter of changing LMS or jumping on the latest technology trend (we’re looking at you, virtual reality). As obvious as it sounds, if our objective is to educate people, we need to make people central to the process.

Instead of online training, a helpful frame is to think of it as an online learning experience.

Just as we would for an offline program, online learning requires a framework for engagement. This involves journey mapping the experience, cognitive framing to put people in the right mindset, setting context and the right content to deliver the desired learning outcomes.

The effectiveness of online training hangs on establishing context and carefully considering content. Without a skilled facilitator or trainer to ensure comprehension, these are the areas where online learning typically falls down.

For learning to be considered effective, a transfer of knowledge needs to take place that enables people to put what they’ve learned into practice. And if there isn’t a behaviour that needs to be changed or a skill that needs to be learned and applied, then the question should be asked — why does this training need to exist?

While there are numerous learning frameworks, the following 7 considerations ensure a great online learning experience:

1. Know the purpose (the why, how and what). Begin with a thorough understanding of why training matters to the organisation and the individual, how the knowledge will be implemented, and what the learning outcomes are — the skills that should be learned and/or the behaviours that need to change. This is the basis for establishing what content needs to be communicated.
2. Know the context for the organisation (and keep it short). Offline training allows more time to be spent on the who’s, why’s and how’s. Online learning requires a different approach. Long videos and lengthy text don’t make sense — these aren’t the way we naturally consume content via online channels. The context component should be summarised in a short introductory video, 1.5–2 minutes at most.
3. Know the context for the audience (and bring it to life). Case studies, stories and scenarios are the most effective way to bring learning to life. When people see themselves in a situation — when it’s relatable — they’re much more likely to care. And when they care, they’re far more likely to want to learn about it. It also provides people with an opportunity to think about the desired skill or behaviour in the context of their work. Wherever possible, use real examples to ensure greater relevance.
4. Know the audience (the who). An in-depth understanding of who the online learning experience is for is essential to communicating for maximum engagement. Applying empathy, using activities like personas, helps uncover detailed information about the audience, including who they are, what they like/dislike, their drivers and communication preferences. It helps determine what content is relevant, as well as appropriate language and tone of voice.
5. Know people’s attention spans (hint: they’re short). A growing number of organisations are embracing microlearning, as it suits busy schedules, short attention spans, and can be delivered anytime, anywhere, via mobile devices. Microlearning focuses on delivering a single, bite sized chunk of knowledge. Modules typically focus on only one learning outcome.
6. Know the timing. Increasingly, learning is happening in the flow of work. Just because it’s delivered online, doesn’t mean it needs to be consumed while sitting in a room alone. It should allow people to learn, then implement that knowledge immediately. By continually improving their capability and applying it to their day-to-day activities, we build a positive feedback loop.
7. Know how to inspire learning (and not because we told them to). Curiosity is an incredibly powerful driver of active learning. By incorporating curiosity into framing and content, through questions and teasing small amounts of information while temporarily withholding the rest, we put people in the right mindset to learn.

By taking an experiential approach to online learning, and beginning with these seven considerations, we can dramatically improve the outcomes.

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A new year and a new decade. A new direction in the Australian workplace?  With legal and social changes, this year promises to be a significant one for HR professionals in Australia. The workplace continues to be an area of focus for lawmakers and regulators and remains a forum for broader social issues to manifest. Herbert Smith Freehills partner Anna Creegan on what to expect in 2020 in the Australian workplace.

1. Religion

With the Prime Minister and a star Wallabies back publicly sharing their commitment to religious belief, in 2019 conditions were ripe for a reassessment of religion in Australian public life. 2020 begins with the draft Religious Discrimination Bill 2019 released by the Prime Minister and Attorney General and expected to be introduced into Federal Parliament this year.

The Bill would see the introduction of laws addressing discrimination on the basis of religion in employment and areas of public life. Notable exceptions to discrimination on the basis of religion in employment would include employment for domestic duties, religious hospitals, aged care facilities, accommodation providers, and where the individual cannot perform the inherent requirements of the role. The Bill would create a new office of the Freedom of Religion Commissioner, within the Australian Human Rights Commission.

If the Bill is passed, all Australian employers will need to understand how it affects their management of religious issues in and outside the workplace.

2. Climate

2020 begins with climate dominating the national discourse. But could this become a workplace issue? It seems it already has.

First, there are direct impacts. Employers are presented with new challenges in the form of air quality issues and temporary absences from work by volunteer firefighters and others affected by climate issues.

Then there are less tangible changes. Our firm’s 2019 report, Future of Work, returned data from a survey of 375 executives at large corporations across the US, UK, Europe, Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Australia. It tells of an anticipated rise in workplace activism which is increasingly focused on social and environmental issues, particularly climate change. Larger companies and in particular mining companies predict a rise in activism triggered by environmental issues, the report notes.

As 2019 ended, institutional investors reduced investment in fossil fuel stocks. BlackRock described sustainability as its ‘new standard for investing’. It seems reasonable to expect employee activism to follow, and there are indications that this is already happening. Our report records that Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Facebook and Twitter employees were active in coordinating 2019 climate protests. And in late 2019, CFMMEU National President Tony Maher joined those identifying a ‘lack of progress’ in Australia on climate and energy, contemplating (in a submission to the Select Committee into Jobs for the Future in Regional Areas) falling incomes and prospects for people in coal regions without major government programs.

Expect climate to be an emerging issue in Australian workplaces this year.

3. Safety

This year will see industrial manslaughter offences take effect in Victoria in July, and possibly in Western Australia.

These new laws would follow the industrial manslaughter offences already in force in Queensland and the ACT.  Further Industrial manslaughter offences are proposed in all other jurisdictions except New South Wales and Tasmania.

The message is clear, as articulated by the Chief Executive of WorkSafe Victoria, Colin Radford. In a February 2020 release, Mr. Radford said “employers are on notice to take their health and safety obligations seriously or risk jail if your negligence causes a worker’s death. If you show a reckless indifference to human life, you will face the full force of these new laws.”

Mental health has received similar attention. New safety laws that are expected to take effect in WA this year define ‘health’ as ‘physical and psychological health’. This gives a clear duty to ensure the psychological health of workers engaged in the business, at least while they are at work. This followed the Western Australian Government’s release of the Code of Practice: Mentally healthy workplaces for fly-in fly-out workers in the resources and construction sectors, which recommended a range of measures to assess and control risks associated with FIFO work.

These changes expand traditional concepts of workplace safety and create significant consequences for employers and their senior personnel if safety laws are breached.

4. Money, time and job security

Perhaps the biggest issue for Australian employers in 2020 will be ongoing scrutiny of their practices in engaging and paying staff and keeping records of hours worked.

There are a number of issues at play here:

• Fair Work Ombudsman investigations – targeting non-compliance with awards, enterprise agreements, the Fair Work Act, and sham contracting.
• the ATO’s Single Touch Payroll system – giving employees easy access to information on income, employer superannuation contributions and tax withholdings.
• updated modern awards – creating new limits on the use of annualised wages for staff in clerical, horticultural, pharmacy, banking, finance and insurance, mining, local government, and other areas, from 1 March 2020. These changes will:
• give employees an entitlement to pay in addition to an annualised wage where they work above a set number of hours in a roster cycle or pay period.
• require employers to give employees information about how the annualised wage has been calculated.
• require employers to conduct 12 monthly reconciliations of the annualised wage against the employee’s award entitlements (from the start of the annualised wage arrangement); and
• require employers to keep a record of start and finish times, and any unpaid breaks, for employees subject to an annualised wage.

Whether an employer can simply opt-out of the annualised wages requirements of awards by using a common law annualised salary is the subject of much discussion. Employers should consider this carefully.

• the Modern Slavery Act – introduced in 2018, which requires Australian entities (or entities carrying on business in Australia) with at least $100 million global consolidated revenue to (from 2020) submit an annual statement on the risks of modern slavery in their operations and supply chains.
• the rise of class actions – providing a forum for employees (in some cases with the support of unions) to pursue underpayment and other claims on a collective basis. For example, in the CFMMEU backed class action by Renyard against WorkPac, 600 union members are claiming $12m in entitlements, on the basis that they were wrongly classified as casuals.

It is clear from these issues that human resources professionals can expect a busy year. These changes and challenges will be best met by human resources teams focussing on compliance with laws, monitoring further changes to laws, and achieving direct engagement with the workforce as far as possible.

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The business case for collaboration is clear
The pace of societal and technological change makes the ability to collaborate with peers and partners imperative. Organisations and individuals that try and do otherwise will not survive.

90% of the information in the world today has been generated in the last two years. Hoarding data or expecting to gain a competitive advantage through mastery of all the knowledge in a particular field is no longer a realistic strategy, assuming it ever was.

Even when collaboration is explicitly encouraged it can be difficult to foster. Many firms struggle to move talent internally, with managers often seeing little benefit in sacrificing their stars for the greater good.

Want to understand the implications of fintech disruption on your retail bank? Far quicker to tap into your network or partner with a start-up than try and build that knowledge in-house.

And as the distinction between permanent employees and gig workers blurs, and technology enables global connectivity, collaborating effectively across these boundaries is essential.

The benefits are clear. One study showed that CEOs with a diverse network generated an increase in their firm’s value around 16x higher than their remuneration, and research has found that companies with well-connected Boards deliver better returns.

But increasing collaboration is still a challenge
Despite this, collaboration can be extremely hard to embed. This is particularly true in many professional services and investment banking environments, where there is often a strong individualist culture; deals are done and transactions completed by star rainmakers, individuals who are seen to have the unique relationships and talents to make a difference.

This focus is often reinforced by incentive schemes that target personal contribution rather than team or organisational performance. This can sometimes be unavoidable; it is generally individuals who get promoted, not teams, and most bonuses tend to be very singular in nature.

(Some pitfalls however are very avoidable. Ranking staff based on their relative performance creates a powerful disincentive to help colleagues)

Even when collaboration is explicitly encouraged it can be difficult to foster. Many firms struggle to move talent internally, with managers often seeing little benefit in sacrificing their stars for the greater good.

The challenge with top-down initiatives
Most organisations recognise the benefits of fostering collaboration, and many have structures and process in place to encourage it. Professional services firms in particular are unsurprisingly focused on this. McKinsey has a global P&L model, in part to encourage a firm-first mindset and reduce the incentive to focus on individual clients or accounts.

But driving a top-down focus on collaboration can be difficult, and there are three reasons in particular for this.

Collaboration is hugely beneficial to almost all organisations. But it’s also more complicated than pushing out a top-down message or simply building the individual skills.

By definition, such a model requires strong commitment from senior leadership. There are plenty of organisations where this commitment is less than sincere, and even more companies where the culture makes this difficult. It’s one thing to get the Managing Partner to recognise the benefits of collaboration, another to persuade them to push this onto the wider partnership.

Secondly, if incentives or processes are introduced to encourage collaboration then it is vital that these are transparently and consistently applied. Leaders need to see a clear link between their behavioural change and a future reward if they are to adapt. Again, this is very achievable, but the difficulty should not be underestimated.

And lastly, a top-down approach to driving collaboration often means that the change is being forced onto the organisation with the expectation – or hope – that hearts and minds will follow. Collaboration is as much a mindset as it is a skill, and it requires more than a change of policy or process to change the way your leaders work.

Different ways to increase collaboration
Our work with a range of organisations, particularly in financial and professional services, has shown us that collaboration can be increased significantly when different approaches are used. Here are four things to consider.

Don’t use the C word
“I don’t care what you call it, but you’re not calling it ‘collaboration’”. So said the Managing Partner who tasked us with increasing, well, collaboration across the partner group.

He absolutely recognised the need for greater connectivity across the global leadership group, but he also knew that the word itself triggers a wide range of reactions, many of them negative.

For every partner that sees a benefit in working for the greater good he knew that there were more who saw collaboration as a way of getting them to deprioritise their clients for the benefit of their rivals, a tool for diluting their profit contribution to prop up under-performers, or worse still, a synonym for communism and a philosophical undermining of the principles the partnership was built on.

It’s important to understand the organisational context, and what reaction the word “collaboration” will generate, and that this reaction is often not positive. In the above case we talked about “Leading the Partnership”, a far less emotive phrase that also resonated directly with the firm. And ‘partnership’ also one of the first words you’ll see if you look up “collaboration” in a thesaurus.

Focus on uncontentious topics
If it’s difficult to get leaders to collaborate on commercial opportunities because the competitive tensions and egos are too great, then focusing on topics that are less provocative can be a subtly effective way to increase interconnection.

The pace of societal and technological change makes the ability to collaborate with peers and partners imperative. Organisations and individuals that try and do otherwise will not survive.

We worked with an investment bank on a broader leadership development initiative and included a wellness component as part of this; like many senior executives in high-pressure industries, many of the participants had personal wellbeing challenges they were struggling with.

We tackled the topic by creating peer coaching groups, in which participants shared personal wellbeing challenges and how they had dealt with them. Even though the focus was explicitly not work-related, the groups were carefully selected to ensure participants were from business units that would benefit from greater collaboration.

Because the topic of wellbeing was a personal one with no direct impact on the participants’ work performance, any competitive tension or work boundaries were removed, and the leaders opened up more readily to their peers.

This was the start of many long-lasting peer coaching groups that were sustained well after the formal program, and while they all started with a wellness focus, many inevitably evolved into more business-focused networks that in turn led to stronger networks across the firm.

Recognise that collaboration is a mindset not a capability
Most leaders develop by learning new skills, and this development is structured around helping them understand what the new capability is and how they can build it.

Collaboration is very different. We all know the fundamental skills required to collaborate with our peers; talking and making contact, choosing to involve others rather than exclude, encouraging our team members to work together and not in competition. These are all relatively simple skills.

People invariably refuse to collaborate not because they can’t or don’t know how, but rather because they choose not to. To make collaboration work effectively invariably requires a mindset shift, not the learning of a new capability.

This is important to understand, as it has a significant impact on how you teach and encourage it. Instead of focusing on the skills that people need, it is far more important to articulate the business case and personal benefits – the “why”, not the “how”.

Teaching people how to work more closely together is not only likely to be unnecessary, it’s also a waste of time if they don’t see any benefit to doing so.

Enable it but don’t force it
Lastly, just as a stubborn horse won’t drink the water in front of it, so some leaders will refuse all incentives and urging to collaborate.

Our experience suggests there is some nuance here; many leaders are open to collaborating with their peers, but often require some support or facilitation to do so. This might be the creation of the peer coaching groups we mentioned earlier, or it could be KPIs or incentives that attempt to track and reward the behaviour.

Collaboration is very different. We all know the fundamental skills required to collaborate with our peers; talking and making contact, choosing to involve others rather than exclude, encouraging our team members to work together and not in competition.

Networking events with an enticing hook – an engaging external speaker or hosted at an offbeat venue – can provide a way to facilitate conversation and connection without seeming too heavy-handed.

You’re unlikely to increase collaboration without some structured effort and support. But it’s also true that it’s not something that you can force. If managers don’t see the benefit or understand what’s in it for them then they’re much less likely to collaborate.

This means that there’s a careful balance to be struck; provide some support and guidance to help, but not so much that it deters people. That tipping point will look different in every organisation and it’s hard to define, but be mindful of it.

Collaboration is hugely beneficial to almost all organisations. But it’s also more complicated than pushing out a top-down message or simply building the individual skills. Understanding this and taking a more nuanced approach is likely to deliver significant benefits to your organisation.

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When corporate leaders such as Atlassian, Canva, Keep Cup, Amnesty International, and Koala agreed to let their employees skip work for the afternoon to take participate in climate activism, it sent a clear message. Social activism is on the agenda at home, when we’re out, and in the workplace for 2020.

In January, millions of Australian employees returned to work whilst an unprecedented ecological disaster was unfolding around them. Heatwaves, smoke-filled skies and catastrophic bush fires have made climate change deeply personal and catapulted the environment to the top of Australian voters’ concerns.

Before making any bold statements or actions on social or political issues, organisations must tread carefully to avoid short or long-term damage to the business.

An organisation’s views, comments, actions or silence on issues of such universal concern, can, and will, translate to employee action.

Climate activism is accepted as a growing social movement that leads directly to behavioural change in the workplace. Gartner research reveals that 67% of employees actively responded to a company action or statement on a social or political issue. Employees may apply to work for an organisation that shares their views or if they disagree with the action, consider quitting current employment at the organisation.

Millennial employees, in particular, expect their CEO to not only have an opinion, but to have an active position on key issues and a solid environmental track record. A massive 82% of millennials, who currently comprise 35% of the workforce and are the largest representative generation at work, responded to organisations taking a stance on a social or political issue.

Despite employees’ rising activism, their expectations remain largely unmet. Gartner research shows that 90% of employees cannot recall their company or CEO making an action or statement on a social or political issue.

Leaders must be prepared that in 2020 and years to come, organisations will need a clear position. If they choose not to take a stance on important issues, especially those significant to their workforce, they risk losing customers, partners, and employees.

Activism: what’s in it for the employer? 
Employees are driving change at their organisations from the bottom up, pressuring senior leaders to reverse actions that they find unethical. Workers today want more from their employers than job security and good benefits; they want to spur social action, feel a sense of purpose and make a positive impact on society.

Organisations that display real commitment and responsibility to societal issues are delivering a powerful message, demonstrating they’re here for the future. Particularly if the issue, such as climate change, will affect future generations.

In 2020, not having an opinion could be the riskiest choice of all. Gartner research reveals 66% of stakeholders responded positively to seeing a company make a statement on a social or political issue, and 67% responded positively to seeing a company take action on an issue

Employees will see an organisation with a clear and decisive position on climate activism as innovative and adaptive. Additionally, in terms of culture, it will be seen as one that offers a dynamic experience where individuals and companies can support issues together.

With this decade predicted to see increasing numbers of employees choosing to work for companies that have clear environmental creds or that are attached to industries recognised as social leaders, this serves as a great opportunity to attract and retain top talent in the market.

The cherry on top for organisations that choose to publicly align with a stance on a political or societal issue is that they will appeal to new customers who seek like-minded partners and strengthen existing customer relationships.

How to take action
Any strong stance on a social or political issue can polarise a population, whether that be shareholders, customers, or employees. Before making any bold statements or actions on social or political issues, organisations must tread carefully to avoid short or long-term damage to the business.

Keeping the following tips in mind will help to mitigate risk while creating a foundational strategy for addressing social and political issues as an organisation.

Create a societal issue response committee
The best way to lead is by example and through support. Establishing an advisory board to consider and respond to emerging social and political issues will streamline the external and internal communication process, and ensure leaders are informed of contentious issues. The board accepts an advisory role and will develop a framework to assess the necessary response: no action, take action, escalate the action to the CEO.

Employees may apply to work for an organisation that shares their views or if they disagree with the action, consider quitting current employment at the organisation.

Within this framework will sit a communications foundation that identifies when an organisation needs to speak to employees or senior team leaders on an issue, and when external communications should take place.

Find the recurring issues
Determine what issues warrant a response from the organisation by looking at the organisation’s historical involvement in climate activism, or other societal issues, and what’s currently causing unrest or controversy. An overview like this will allow leaders to clearly identify recurring/common issues and take action.

Any response is better than no response
In 2020, not having an opinion could be the riskiest choice of all. Gartner research reveals 66% of stakeholders responded positively to seeing a company make a statement on a social or political issue, and 67% responded positively to seeing a company take action on an issue. In addition, messaging on social or political issues originating from the company prompts an almost identical positive response rate as when it comes directly from the CEO.

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For many people, the turn of a new year comes with a new year’s resolution. But despite our best intentions, most of us have already abandoned our resolve as the first month of the year comes to an end. Only 25% of resolution setters stick it out for a full month, and fewer than 8% take their resolution through to the end of the year.

Despite these glum statistics, the year of 2020 is a golden opportunity for serial resolution setters as it signals the beginning of a new decade and the promise of a clean slate. Bill Gates once said that while people overestimate what they can do in a year, they underestimate what they can do in a decade. What better time to turn over a new leaf and set bigger and better goals for the future?

To avoid finishing before you’ve even begun, here are some tips to help you start the decade strong, achieve your goals and come out the end of it better than ever.

Go slow. Set smaller milestones and make small incremental changes in the direction of your big goal. This helps make the goal more achievable, rather than too drastic and unachievable.

Find your purpose
A lot of people know what they want, but not why they want it. However, you will find it’s much easier to stick to something when it is something that matters to you.

Having a purpose makes it easier to bounce back in challenging times by providing stability, confidence, and determination. To kick off the new decade, take the time to re-evaluate or land on your purpose. This will help you to decide on which goals and activities are important to you and set you up for long-term success.

The Japanese concept of Ikigai could help you land on your purpose for the next decade. Ask yourself the following four questions:

• What do you love?
• What are you good at?
• What does the world need?
• What can you be paid for?

Ikigai believes that your purpose can be condensed into six words (no more, no less). My purpose is, “living, laughing, contributing, with assertive humility”.

It is a combination of these things that can help you understand your priorities and contributes to a more fulfilling life as a whole.

Go slow
We look at our final goal as if it’s the first step, leading us to feel overwhelmed and quickly give up on trying to achieve it. The key to progress involves building new, small habits to help you achieve your goals.

Go slow. Set smaller milestones and make small incremental changes in the direction of your big goal. This helps make the goal more achievable, rather than too drastic and unachievable.

For instance, if you want to lose a certain amount of weight by the end of the decade, don’t start with an unsustainable crash diet or an extreme exercise routine – it won’t last. Start by adding one positive habit to your life at a time. Start by walking your dog twice a week for a month. Once it’s part of your routine, start cutting out soft-drink during the week. Eventually, these tiny positive changes will feel like part of your lifestyle rather than a chore.

For those with a professional goal in mind, start by breaking down the steps into smaller milestones like a promotion or a pay rise. Work out exactly what you need to do to get to the next level – perhaps it’s to exceed sales targets. If it is, commit to reaching out to five next sales leads a week.

A lot of people know what they want, but not why they want it. However, you will find it’s much easier to stick to something when it is something that matters to you.

Build your resilience
For some people, a minor setback can send them off the rails, while others can bounce back with a spring in their step and even more determination to succeed. What’s the difference? Resilience.

It’s a common misperception that resilience is either a born-with skill or only developed in the wake of major adversity and trauma in a person’s life. In fact, resilience is a skill that can be learned and acts as a psychological buffer against obstacles; enabling you to maintain balance, protect your wellbeing and sustain high cognitive performance.

A few ways to build resilience to help you achieve your goals include:

• Tackle life with a glass half full approach: A positive mindset acts as a launchpad for victory, and it’s important to recognise that every challenge comes an opportunity for growth. This attitude will keep you moving forward.
• Maintain positive lifestyle practices: Exercise regularly, enjoy a healthy and well-balanced diet and get 7-8 hours of sleep a night. These basic lifestyle factors are really important contributors to emotional wellbeing and longevity.
• Be social: Having a strong support network is imperative for building resilience and improving overall life satisfaction. More than that, positive reinforcement from your peers can improve self-respect and confidence.

For some people, a minor setback can send them off the rails, while others can bounce back with a spring in their step and even more determination to succeed. What’s the difference? Resilience.

There is no better time to reflect on what the last ten years have delivered and set some goals for what the next ten will bring. But remember that your life won’t change overnight. Take the time to understand your purpose, invest in building your resilience and go slow. Doing this will allow you to keep your head up, navigate setbacks and put you on the path to being the best version of yourself this decade.

Image source: Depositphotos

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Almost every HR department is focused on the employee experience these days. LinkedIn’s 2020 Global Talent Trends research cites experience design as one of the fastest growing areas in HR, with 2.4 times more job titles related to “employee experience” than existed five years ago.

Employees are now in charge and they are your customers. You work for them; they don’t work for you.

Employee experiences are complex. Experiences encompass the physical work environment, the pay and rewards system, a company’s management and leadership, and of course, the job, opportunities to grow, and culture. So, when companies jump into this area, those involved often begin by scratching their heads and wondering just where to start and stop an experience initiative.

What I’ve found works best is to focus. Look at the variety of survey and exit data on hand and find the areas with the most pain. It may be related to new hires and difficulty in onboarding; it may be senior salespeople who feel their pay has fallen behind, or it may be simply a lack of clarity around roles and a need to an improved approach to job design.

What most do realize is that bureaucracy, driven by a twelve-year economic growth cycle, is part of the problem. There are too many meetings, programs, strategies, and tools. We need to simplify, clarify, and rationalize all the factors involved.

To address the huge interest in employee experience, a new wave of HR tech tools has emerged. Vendors ranging from ServiceNow to Qualtrics to Medallia, as well as Workday, SuccessFactors, and LinkedIn, have all started to jump into this space. In fact, almost every tool for employee feedback, wellbeing, recognition, and rewards now feels like an EX tool, making it harder than ever to make sense the available options.

• Think about the employee experience problem as one of diagnostics (listening), action planning (focus), design (solving), and instrumentation (monitoring).  In other words, you really must:
• Listen to determine what the actual problems are (surveys and feedback data),
• Develop action plans to give managers specific guidance on what to do (action plans and dashboards), Design new experiences (redesign how work gets done, often without changing back-end systems),
• Continually monitor results.

Employee experiences are complex. Experiences encompass the physical work environment, the pay and rewards system, a company’s management and leadership, and of course, the job, opportunities to grow, and culture.

Just as your marketing department is always looking at customer experience, market perception, and customer satisfaction with your product – you need to take the same customer first view in HR.  Employees are now in charge and they are your customers. You work for them; they don’t work for you.

The new world of EX is here to stay – let’s learn to focus well and we can really make work better.

Five tips for designing an improved employee experience

1. Use feedback and surveys to listen and understand where employee experience, turnover, and other employee-related issues are problematic.
2. Develop action plans that go directly to line leaders so they can resolve problems locally.
3. Co-design new solutions with your business counterparts and build them in an iterative and agile way.
4. Monitor how the EX changes over time, so you can see what works and what doesn’t; be ready to revise.
5. Remember that you work for your employees and not the other way around.

Image source: Depositphotos

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“Haven’t you noticed that opinion without knowledge is always a poor thing? At the best it is blind…”– Plato

Plato’s observation reminded me of a conversation I once had with a client CEO. He was commissioning me to work on a major organisational change that would reshape a huge portion of the business. He said, “I want you to interview some people who have the right to a point of view on this subject to get their input about our future organisation.”

At first, I interpreted his phrase “the right to a point of view” as somewhat elitist. As we discussed further, I realised what he meant meshed with Plato’s statement: those who have knowledge and experience in the dynamics we are trying to reshape have the right to a point of view and we need to learn from them. Everyone else might have an opinion on the subject, but they lack the knowledge and experience to be helpful.

Today many people voice opinions on proposed changes to strategy, structure or culture in hopes that doing so will influence the outcome.

Truth or Opinion?
Everyone may have the right to voice an opinion, but not all opinions are based on facts, first-hand knowledge, or relevant experience. Too often we assume our opinions are factual and true. For instance, which of the following statements are true and which are opinions?

• “Research has indicated that a person’s pulse rate, blood pressure and respiratory rate increase when the person is under stress. All people, therefore, should do stress management techniques on a daily basis.”
• “You should think twice about starting your own business. There are 582 million entrepreneurs in the world and 22.5 per cent of them fail in the first year.”
• “Our goal should be to remain the low-cost producer.”

Here are the answers:

So often in strategic business discussions, opinions masquerade as facts and shape decisions.

A 2018 study of Media and News by the Pew Research Centre asked participants to identify 10 statements as being either true or opinion in a similar manner to our statements above.  Here were the results:

An alarming percentage of participants failed to correctly identify many statements. One interesting observation in the pollsters’ analysis was the propensity for participants to classify both factual and opinion statements as factual when they appealed most to their own personal opinion. When they incorrectly classified factual statements as opinions, they most often disagreed with the statement.

Perhaps this is what Leonardo da Vinci meant when he said, “The greatest deception men suffer is their own opinions.”

Now, why is all this information relevant to HR professionals?

Truth or Opinions: Implications for HR
Too often, the HR point of view is assumed by others to be biased in favour of what’s right for the people and not what’s right for the business. This bias does a disservice to both. Here are four steps you might take to earn the right to a point of view on business issues:

1. Understand the facts of the company’s business performance.

Read and digest your annual report, business briefings and updates, and general business literature to learn the “facts” of the business. (Admittedly, many outsider opinions are just that – opinions. But those opinions shape a marketplace view of your company – and that is an important factor any company needs to understand.)

2. Connect your priorities to business priorities.

While working with a well-known global company, we asked HR managers to describe one of their major projects. Nearly all of them described things such as:

• Improve our hiring effectiveness
• Conduct training for new supervisors
• Roll out new company plans and/or benefits

When reviewing their project title, we asked them to explain the business purpose behind their initiative.  “You are pursuing this project SO WHAT happens?” – we got past their blank stares and began to shape the business reason behind the project. For instance:

• Improve our hiring effectiveness SO THAT we improve our retention rate from 65 per cent to 85 per cent. (Retaining 100 more managers means a savings of $15 million)

When we describe what we are doing and its impact on the business, lukewarm or opposing colleagues might support more strongly our initiative.

Everyone may have the right to voice an opinion, but not all opinions are based on facts, first-hand knowledge, or relevant experience. Too often we assume our opinions are factual and true.

3. Gain experience with your business and HR colleagues to deeply understand what things need improvement.

In every new work assignment, I began by interviewing all my key “customers” about their objectives, helpful factors, and obstacles. Compiling the individual interview data into a collective statement of my initial priorities always led to the highest levels of teamwork and cooperation.

4. Join the business discussions and offer your point of view and the supporting facts for your position.

In following the first three steps, you will have earned the right to a point of view on business issues. Minus this preparation, your point of view is an opinion that may be irrelevant (or inappropriate) to the issue. Members of the decision table who demonstrate the right to a point of view find that their perspective is credible and deserves to be considered – as a business partner.

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With devastating bushfires continuing to burn around the country and the threat of a global pandemic in relation to the coronavirus, many employers may be wondering what their rights and obligations are in respect to their employees in the event of an unexpected natural disaster or emergency event that is beyond their control.

Given the broad, intertwined and overlapping legal framework regulating employee safety, employer rights and leave entitlements, this isn’t as straightforward as you might think.

If your workplace is affected by an emergency or natural disaster such as a health pandemic, bushfire, flood or tropical cyclone, here are 8 HR emergency essentials to keep in mind to ensure the best outcome for everyone involved.

1. Employer Duty of Care and WHS obligations

Employers owe their employees a general duty of care. This duty of care includes providing employees with a safe place to work.

Employers also have WHS obligations which require, among other things, providing and maintaining, as far as reasonably practicable, a safe workplace that is free from risks to health and safety; and identifying and assessing hazards and risks to health, and implementing measures to eliminate or alleviate same.

These positive obligations mean that where the workplace is attended by sufficient risk to employee health and safety, employers should consider whether employees can attend the workplace and/or perform their work duties safely and whether there are alternative locations of work available (such as working from home or working from another location run by the employer).

An obvious example of a threat to employee health and safety is a fast-approaching bushfire. However, as the recent issues caused by bushfire smoke (which caused difficulties for those working outdoors, as well as those who commute to work and had respiratory issues) show, there may be latent or less obvious risks to employee health and safety which may mean that the workplace is unsafe.

In the context of a potential health pandemic like the coronavirus, employers should bear in mind that their WHS obligations may extend to measures ranging from mandatory quarantine of employees in the event of travel to infected areas, for example, by requiring them to work from home, to ensuring adequate facilitates for washing hands and the availability of face masks. Employers should, however, take care not to fall foul of disability discrimination laws by discriminating against employees on the basis of actual or imputed diseases or infections.

2. Standing down employees

Under the Fair Work Act 2009, an employer may stand down employees if they cannot be usefully employed because of circumstances for which the employer cannot reasonably be held responsible. If an employee is stood down, they do not need to be paid.

There may be some extra rules and requirements if an award or enterprise agreement applies to your workplace, or where there are additional restrictions in the contract of employment.

Note however that an employee who is authorised to be absent from work (because of pre-approved leave) cannot be stood down.

3. Directing employees to take annual leave

Rather than standing down employees, you may alternatively direct employees to take accrued annual leave, provided that such a request is reasonable in the circumstances.

If an award or enterprise agreement applies, employers can only do so if the requirement is reasonable and an award or enterprise agreement allows it.

There is, of course, nothing to stop employers and employees from agreeing for the employee to take annual leave, rather than an employer having to issue a direction.

4. Flexible work arrangements

If your physical workplace is affected, you may want to consider negotiating flexible work arrangements with your employees. Flexibility in the form of hours, location and pattern of work could mitigate the effects of an emergency or disaster and maintain productivity. Consider in particular whether it is feasible for employees to work from home.

5. Personal/Carer’s leave

Employees affected by a natural disaster, health pandemic or emergency are entitled to take personal/carer’s leave. They can take this if they are not fit for work due to a personal illness or injury, or are personally affected by an emergency. It may also be taken to provide support and care to an immediate family member who is ill or injured, or affected by an unexpected emergency.

Such rights may cover circumstances where an employee is quarantined due to suspicion of being infectious, where an employee needs to take time off to care for a family member who has lost their home in the bushfires, or where an employee needs to take leave to care for children who may not be able to attend school due to bushfires.

6. Compassionate leave

Employees are entitled to take two paid days of compassionate leave where an immediate family member has sustained a life-threatening illness or injury or has passed away.

7. Community service leave

Employees who engage in voluntary emergency management activities, such as firefighting or other victim assistance initiatives, through a recognised emergency management body may be entitled to unpaid community service leave. Under the Fair Work Act 2009, the amount of leave able to be taken is not specified, but it must be reasonable taking into account the activity, travel time and rest time required.

While there is no obligation to pay employees in such circumstances, you may still wish to do so through discussion with the employee affected.

8. Defence call-out for reservists

On 4 January 2020, the Governor-General initiated a Defence Call Out under the Defence Act 1903. This places obligations on employers with Reservist employees such as releasing ‘called out’ employees to undertake defence activities. Reservists have additional workplace protections under the Defence Reserve Service (Protection) Act 2001.

While there is no obligation to pay employees in such circumstances, you may still wish to do so through discussion with the employee affected.

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The above rights and obligations are by no means exhaustive. However, with these 8 essentials in mind, employers will be well on their way to appropriately handling an emergency situation that affects their workplace and employees.

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