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3 Hybrid Workforce Variations: Choosing the One That’s Right for You

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Many use hybrid as an umbrella term to indicate a mix of remote and in-office employees. They also use the term blended employees. These are employees who work in-office some of the time and remotely the rest of the time. This group of employees is distinct from those who work full-time in the office and those who are full-time remote. (Note: Full-time remote employees sometimes meet with other employees for team retreats or other special events during the year. But they do not go into the office to do their usual work for any meaningful amount of time.)

There are three hybrid workforce variations to consider as an employer. Each variation has advantages and challenges.

General Challenges with Blended or Remote Employees

There are two general challenges with any of the hybrid workforce variations that are important to address, including:

  • Biases | Remote employees are likely to be disadvantaged by being “out of sight” more frequently. It requires more work to create trust and belonging with and among remote workers. Leaders who are in-person may inadvertently give more attention and perks to employees they see in person. Meanwhile, remote employees may be less likely to speak up or question decisions.
  • Equity | Employees who work remotely more of the time may be in less equitable work situations than their in-office counterparts. Their Internet service may be relatively slow and their workstations may cause pain or discomfort. Additionally, their immediate working environments may be more distracting (e.g., noise, light, temperature), and they probably won’t have access to free office supplies (e.g., printers, a dedicated work phone, etc.).

Here are examples of three hybrid workforce variations.

Hybrid 1: Full-Time Mix

One of the hybrid workforce variations is a mix of employees being either full-time in-office or full-time remote. This variation requires enough office space for all full-time employees.

  • Advantages:
    • It’s easy to know where each employee is on a given day or week.
    • Working groups/teams can develop communication and collaboration patterns for this stable configuration.
    • You need less office space when some employees are remote.
  • Challenges:
    • Communication | To the extent that working groups contain both types of employees—or remote only employees—clear and concise communication is critical. You want attendees to be able to pull out the important points of communication quickly and easily. Social time and hard conversations should definitely happen over video.
    • Collaboration | If everyone who is collaborating on a given project is in the office, there aren’t any special hybrid challenges. However, when collaboration happens among individuals who are not co-located, care should be taken to implement best practices for that situation: Use the appropriate communication channels or apps (e.g., collaborative real-time whiteboards that live in the cloud, Slack channels, polls for voting). Trust among team members is important and needs to be built and maintained. Respectful behavior is even more critical.
    • Biases | All of the general challenges above are true with this variation. In-office employees may develop deeper bonds. Thus, they may unintentionally marginalize remote employees.

Hybrid 2: Come Together

Another hybrid variation is when employees spend some time in-office and sometimes remotely. Also, they do so in a concerted way at regular intervals, so that every working group is in-office together and remote together. Everyone in the group is a blended employee. For instance, a given working group may be in the office on Tuesdays and Thursdays and work remotely the other days of the week. (Or one week in the office each month, etc.)

  • Advantages:
    • Organizations require less office space when different working groups use the office on different days.
    • All working group members experience similar working conditions at the same time. So the problem of remote workers becoming disadvantaged isn’t an issue.
    • In-office time can focus on collaboration, team-building, trust-building and engagement. Remote time can be for focused individual work.
  • Challenges:
    • Communication | Best practices for communication hold. When working group members are remote, it’s particularly important.
    • Collaboration | Time in office should be for work best done collaboratively or using resources that are in office.
    • Bias | In-office time helps create and deepen belonging and trust (when the culture and the leaders promote those qualities). In turn when employees are remote they are more likely to give colleagues the benefit of the doubt. Because all working group members have the same in-person/remote schedule, differential treatment based on in-office status is non-existent.

Hybrid 3: Employee Flex Plan

Finally, sometimes employees are blended, full-time in an office, and/or full-time remote. For some hybrid workforce variations such as this one, you can set times when everyone—or most everyone—is expected to be in office, such as collaborating on projects.

  • Advantages
    • This variation provides more flexibility to employees, hopefully minimizing attrition and making hiring easier.
    • The schedule provides working groups and organizations predictability. It also gives them the ability to make maximal use of their in-office space. There may be some opportunities to take advantage of co-location, but the people who need to collaborate on a given day may not necessarily be in the office at the same time.
    • To the extent that all or most employees come into the office at least some of the time, a sense of culture, trust, and engagement can develop. However, this doesn’t necessarily include teammates who may be on a different in-person schedule.
    • Blended employees may welcome more flexibility and control over their commuting schedules.
  • Challenges
    • Communication | Although there is a predictable pattern to who is in the office on a given day, the pattern differs for each employee. Therefore, it can be hard to track in-office employees day-to-day. In turn, this doesn’t capitalize on many of the return-to-office advantages. Because working groups may not be co-located together, communicate clearly and concisely. Best practices for communication hold.
    • Collaboration | This variation does not help in-office collaboration unless relevant employees are co-located at the same time. Thus, best practices for collaborating with mixed co-located/remote groups hold.
    • Biases | Those who spend more time in-office develop deeper connections and trust and may be more likely to receive high-status assignments compared to remote workers.

Andrew Neel

Employee Burnout: How Leaders Can Help Right Now

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I want you to look around at your employees — in person where possible, and on that Zoom call. Then, I want you to think about how they’re doing. 9 times out of 10, they’re at least a little burned out. One of the areas we’ve been focusing on a lot here at TalentCulture is employee wellness. What that means right now is we’re looking at an entire workforce that seems, well, exhausted. Employee burnout is on the rise. And chances are, dear reader, that may not be a surprise to you at all.

There are certainly many external factors playing a role in the growing wave of burned out employees. Those range from a scary economy to social turmoil. And from political upheavals to a terrifying health crisis. There are domestic factors: The disruptions and worries of parenting and caregiving through the pandemic. In addition, there are more pressures facing business and the workplace now than we’ve never seen before. Recently, Eagle Hill Consulting ran a survey of U.S employees. They discovered 45 percent reported suffering from burnout, whether they are essential workers or remote. 25 percent linked their stress to COVID-19 — and that was in April, when we were just weeks in.

By July, a study by FlexJobs and Mental Health America reported that 75% of employees were dealing with burnout at work.

For employees, it’s VUCA time. So what should leaders do?

It’s time to roll up our sleeves and take care of our people. And that doesn’t take grand gestures. We don’t need to invest in new software or major changes. There are simple strategies you can execute right now. Simple. But they may mean a lot:

Commit to Mental Health

The Eagle Hill study shows employees could use more help:

  • 36 percent feel their company is not taking action to combat employee burnout
  • A mere 20 percent feel they’re getting the mental and physical wellness resources they need

And in a July 2020 poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation, 53 percent of the adults surveyed reported that coronavirus-related stress and worries were eroding their mental health — up from 32 percent in March. 

A few months ago, I had a great conversation with a start up about how they’re supporting employees through COVID-19. Being young and lean, they had to optimize their offerings without rebuilding their entire benefits program. So they looked at their mental health benefits and made a tweak or two. It’s no secret that stress, anxiety and depression can wreak havoc on an employee’s ability to focus and work. So they provided remote employees access to professional counseling through tele-therapy. In short order, among all the benefits available to employees, tele-therapy became one the most utilized and popular programs.

Bringing the need for therapy out into the open took the taboo and the stigma away — at a time when many people need mental health support the most.

Improve What Already Exists

There’s an interesting pushback going on regarding flexibility and remote working. Some employers are still singing the “when we reopen” song. They are using it as a rationale for just letting their workforce get by. Again, I know a lot of companies are feeling the pandemic pinch. They may not have the spend for their wishlist of new HR technology right now. But the reality is we may ever get everyone back to the office — at least not in the same pre-pandemic way. After all, remote working and flexible schedules are enabling people to handle one of the hardest periods of time (barring wars, of course) this country has ever faced.

Given the importance of employee engagement, staving off burnout, and increasing performance and productivity why wouldn’t you maximize the best aspects of working remotely?

Perhaps you can’t invest in a new platform right now because the business environment has thrown off your plans. That’s a reality for many. People are already functioning and working remotely and have been for months. S0 chances are you don’t need more technology to get your people to work together better.

Focus on Weak Spots

So focus on those pesky weak spots. What’s causing friction? Where is trust the weakest? Around deliverables? Around hierarchies? Maybe around teams?

Have you crafted and shared a set of policies and expectations around how your people are supposed to work remotely? If not, do it now. Do some in-house remote training on best practices and etiquette. Be proactive about the problem of sexual harassment or bias showing up in virtual interactions. Write a set of simple policies around parenting and caregiving emergencies. 

Just as important, engineer some lightness into the workdays — because, in general, those days have gotten very long. Allot time for informal get-togethers and casual conversations. Find ways for employees to have a little fun. A giving challenge or a gratitude drive, for example. Or a meet-the-kids (or the pets) event.

Working remotely can’t all be about work all the time. Now that work has come home, let some of home come to work.

Ask People What They Need

Pandemic aside, employee burnout was alive and well in countless work cultures already — and the pandemic just compounded the problem. Blame hyper-tight production cycles, toxic levels of competition among coworkers and teams, and managers too spread thin to spend any time helping teams. The fact is a whole host of other subpar conditions existed before the pandemic hit. What I mean is this: Fundamentally, most organizations want to be great places to work. But things happen. Then came COVID-19, and that’s been a whole new level of “happen.”

The silver lining here is that now there’s no excuse for reaching out to employees to make sure they’re all right. Whether that’s a pulse survey, an informal check-in via text, or even a phone call — reach out. Burnout is often triggered when employees are completely tapped out — mentally, physically, emotionally — and feel like they’re not getting any acknowledgement or support. Extended periods of high stress, overly tight deadlines, disruptive shifts in the workflow — all can lead to the mounting frustration that can result in burnout.

The Best Way to Avoid Employee Burnout

The most important thing you can do to help your workforce avoid burnout? Find out how they are and where they are really struggling. It may be hard to do this individually and in confidence. So instead, solicit anonymous feedback and share the results in a way that doesn’t expose anyone, or anything. Further, share it with a transparent commitment to make things better. Then actually do it.  

None of these three strategies need fancy bells and whistles to get off the ground. All they really require is a heartfelt reality check. One that helps deals with the here and now. One that acknowledges that work during a pandemic — remote or not — is exposing our vulnerabilities as well as our strengths. 

A video conference hosted by the Wharton School of Business and U Penn focused on the prospect of getting back to “normal” whether for corporate and knowledge workers or for frontline and essential workers. Given everything, they determined that we’re not going to get there until November 2021. That’s more than a year away. So don’t be the employer remembered for overloading your people when life was already hard enough.

Don’t shelve employee wellness until all this is over. Work to improve your conditions for the present. Prevent the employee burnout happening now.

The Five Secrets to Retaining Millennial Talent

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The job market is definitely heating up. Millennials, now the largest demographic in the American workforce, are moving into leadership positions. Wired from birth, Millennials have different expectations than their older colleagues, and those expectations are shaping how successful companies manage HR functions.

Gaps in what the Millennial generation wants versus what an employer is offering can make or break an organization’s advancement. What exactly are the most important Millennial needs that should be addressed?

We looked at SilkRoad’s “Millennial Secrets Survey 2015” to try and understand the difficulties inherent in balancing Millennial expectations, as well as the secrets to retaining this valuable and growing workforce. We also explored how to close the big gaps that currently exist between what Millennials want and what employers are apt to dole out.

The fact is, despite the continued complaining by some members of older generations, Millennials will dominate the workplace for quite some time. Organizations should recognize their needs and embrace the challenges that come with blending different generations into one efficient, satisfied workforce.

Mentoring is key, but it doesn’t look like it used to. Mentoring has been around for generations. However, to create an effective relationship with a Millennial means erasing perceptions of a wise, older advisor who is automatically given respect by a younger colleague. Instead, think of it as a two-way street, with both parties learning from each other, and discussing matters on equal terms.

To successfully mentor a Millennial, it’s important to connect their own role in your organization to company goals and highlight the mutual benefits. You’ll need to manage their expectations of rapid advancement with a more realistic scope. You’ll also want to embrace new ideas, not just new technology, which can be a huge benefit to both of you.

Connect training to their own career goals. Since professional development is something that Millennials crave, you need to connect the training you provide them to their own career advancement. Make sure to set realistic expectations, and again, embrace technology in your training programs. They need to feel that they can offer up their ideas, and that you both share an understanding of company values.

Technology, Technology, Technology. Millennials’ lives are deeply woven with everything tech; it is as much a part of their life as eating and breathing. They expect it to be used throughout all areas of your organization. Even more importantly, it can’t be clunky and hard to navigate. They expect consumer-grade tech, especially for inter-office communications.

In an effort keep Millennials feeling comfortable with your technology, ask their opinion often and be sure to make mobile a priority.

Keep them engaged. The days of the performance review are long gone. Millennials want continual feedback and recognition to feel connected to your organization. This involves connecting daily, and the real need to create a culture to which they feel they belong. Multi-generational teams are a great way to build an engaged work culture, and not only with Millennials. You will have a better chance of retaining Millennial talent if you create a real sense of connection with their co-workers.

Understand your competition. The average Millennial worker is age 25 – 34 and remains with a job for an average of three years. Couple that with the desire for professional development and career advancement, and you can bet that your Millennial employees have their ears to the ground for other opportunities. That doesn’t mean that the job-hopping Millennial stereotype is completely accurate, but it does mean that you need to offer things they really desire, like flexibility, mentorship, current technology, as well as an entrepreneurial culture of innovation.

Millennials make up the majority in the American job force and are transforming the business world right alongside the technology they love so much. To balance their expectations and retain top talent, you can’t simply give lip service to the stereotypes around Millennial expectations. You have to embrace and implement real solutions and foster an environment that is appealing to them as part of your work culture.

Image : BigStock

Make Your Own Blended Worlds of Work

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The three of us have lived and breathed on all three worlds. We’ve been full-time employees, we’ve been independent contractors, and we’ve been entrepreneurs – all in varying capacities and with varying success. And sometimes we’ve been on two or even all three at once.

Because of this, we of course agreed that the way we used to work is long gone. We being myself, TalentCulture #TChat Show co-founder and co-host Meghan M. Biro, and founder and CEO of Zenith Talent Sunil Bagai, a recent show guest. We discussed how the days of primarily being full-time or part-time have given way to what we call the blended workforce – those individuals working as regular employees, freelance workers, and self-employed entrepreneurial talent side-by-side their full-time brothers and sisters.

Employers are now hiring record numbers of contingent workers and relying increasingly on this mix to achieve their goals. Staffing Industry Analysts research states that after rising substantially for a few years, the average percent across respondents has held steady at 18% since 2013. And earlier in 2015, a report by the Government Accountability Office showed that contingent workers make up 40 percent of workforce.

Not only that, we assumed during our discussion that these workers (us included) are happier, have achieved greater work-life integration and are profiting on their own. If that’s true, it’s welcome news for employers and workers looking to improve their opportunities.

And if it’s true, building and managing this blended workforce does still present challenges on almost every front – particularly when it comes to effectively sourcing and hiring contingent workers. It’s an on-demand world regardless of our classification – we want to do what we want, when we want and how we want.

That said, there are also no active or passive employment seekers on any level. Being called passive is a misnomer. It’s just incorrect. We’re all free agents loyal to the work we love to do first and foremost, and how we do that work, then those we do it with, around and for. So employers need to rethink the way their source, recruit, hire and onboard anybody for their organizations.

The three of us have also traversed two other interconnected universes that embody all three worlds above – one that supports us financially and the one that supports us emotionally and psychologically. I’m sure many of you readers have as well. The mix of breathable atmospheres is always dependent on where we’re at any given time, but I’d argue that the happiest of us frolic in our own by-design Milky Ways, with the heavy gravity of economic reality keeping us fixed in both spaces on any of the blended worlds.

Part of the softer gravitational pull does include how we perceive, consume and absorb like-minded cultures at those (blended workforce) opportunities – those that may feed our emotional needs. For example, 2015 Talent Board Candidate Experience research of over 130,000 job seekers revealed that what attracted more of them to specific employers over 40 percent of the time for Gen Xers, Millennials and Gen Z (or Centinnials) were the company values. For Baby Boomers it was number two, but still nearly 40 percent. And both men and women valued values over 40 percent. (An interesting note was that financial information was in the top five only for Boomers and men.)

While this is important from a recruitment marketing perspective, Josh Bersin shared new research by a research firm named Imperative that echoed the softer gravity and the fact that we’re much more productive, are higher performers and are significantly more likely to be net promoters of their organizations when we are doing personally fulfilling work in any capacity, outweighing any financial gain.

Ultimate success is relative and subjective, but I’d argue that we three have made our own blended worlds of work and gained invaluable rewards both tangible and intangible. That’s definitely the way to make a elevated living today.

#TChat Recap: Blended Workforce Benefits and Staffing Challenges

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The days of full-time or part-time employees have given way to the blended workforce — a mix of independent contractors, freelance workers and self-employed entrepreneurial talent working alongside full-time colleagues.

This week, the TalentCulture community talked about the many benefits of a blended workforce and the staffing challenges a blended workforce creates. With our guest Sunil Bagai, Founder and CEO of Zenith Talent, we had a fantastic conversation about this growing movement and how it’s impacting the world of recruiting, hiring and overall workforce management.

Employers are now hiring record numbers of contingent workers and relying on a mix of employees to achieve organizational goals. Not only that, research shows that these workers are happier, have achieved greater work-life integration and are profiting on their own. That’s welcome news for both employers and workers.

But building and managing a blended workforce presents challenges on many fronts — particularly when it comes to effectively sourcing and hiring contingent workers. Employers need to think about — and hire — talent differently.

Listen to the recording and review the #TChat highlights to learn more.

Thank you to all the TalentCulture sponsors, partners and supporters!

#TChat returns Wednesday, Nov 18 @ 1 pm ET/10 am PT. Topic: How Wellness Programs Improve Employee Performance with special guest Ann Wyatt, vice president, account management at HealthFitness. The #TChat radio show runs weekly for 30 minutes and then we switch to Twitter for a highly engaging social discussion on the chosen topic.

Join our social communities and stay up-to-date! The TalentCulture conversation continues daily. See what’s happening right now on the #TChat Twitter stream, in our LinkedIn group and on our Google+ community. Engage with us anytime on our social networks or stay current with trending World of Work topics on our website or through our weekly email newsletter.

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#TChat Preview: The Blended Workforce – Benefits and Staffing Challenges

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Last week we talked about how to make meetings worth everyone’s time. This week we’re going to address the benefits of a blended workforce and the staffing challenges it brings.

The way we used to work is gone. The days of full-time or part-time employees have given way to the blended workforce — a mix of individuals working as independent contractors, freelance workers and self-employed entrepreneurial talent alongside full-time colleagues.

Employers are now hiring record numbers of contingent workers and relying on a mix of employees to achieve organizational goals. Not only that, research shows that these workers are happier, have achieved greater work-life integration and are profiting on their own. That’s welcome news for both employers and workers.

But building and managing a blended workforce presents challenges on almost every front — particularly when it comes to effectively sourcing and hiring contingent workers. Employers need to think about — and hire — talent differently.

Sneak Peek:

#TChat Events: The Blended Workforce – Benefits and Staffing Challenges

TChatRadio_logo_020813#TChat Radio — Wed, Nov 11 — 1 pm ET / 10 am PT
Join TalentCulture #TChat Show co-founders and co-hosts Meghan M. Biro and Kevin W. Grossman as they talk about the benefits and challenges of a blended workforce. Our guest is Sunil Bagai, Founder and CEO of Zenith Talent, innovators of the powerful new staffing model for the contingent workforce called Crowdstaffing.

Tune in LIVE online Wednesday, Nov 11

#TChat Twitter Chat — Wednesday, November 11 — 1:30 pm ET /10:30 am PT Immediately following the radio show, the team will move to the #TChat Twitter stream, where we’ll continue the discussion with the entire TalentCulture community. Everyone with a Twitter account is invited to participate as we gather for a dynamic live chat, focused on these questions:

Q1: What is a blended workforce and what are its benefits? #TChat  (Tweet this Question)

Q2: How have companies adapted to blending permanent and contingent workers? #TChat  (Tweet this Question)

Q3: What should companies know today to plan for the future blended workplace? #TChat  (Tweet this Question)

Until then, we’ll keep the discussion going on the #TChat Twitter feed, our TalentCulture World of Work Community LinkedIn group, and in our TalentCulture G+ community. So feel free to drop by anytime and share your questions, ideas and opinions. See you there!

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This Workplace Merry-Go-Round Never Slows

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“Midway hawkers calling
‘Try your luck with me’
Merry-go-round wheezing
The same old melody…”

—Neil Peart (Lakeside Park)

We became carnies for a day – midway hawkers calling out from our very own front yard. The main reason was to make some quick cash since my sister and I had already blown through our weekly allowance. It was summertime, decades ago, when I was 12 and she was 10.

School was out so we had to promote our little Saturday carnival via the neighborhood kids and the viral word of mouth. At 10 the morning of, after our mom had left to run errands, we taped the big poster to the garage door that read:

Carnival Today – 10:30-12:30. All games 25 cents. Everybody Wins!

We hung colorful balloons from the mailbox and set up chairs, TV trays and a folding table in the front yard. We used an old cigar box for our cash register. We then pulled out beaten up boxes we had dragged out from the garage full of old games and toys and set them up on the table as prizes. A few of the toys were in good shape, but most had broken or missing parts, especially the games.

My sister was the mastermind of the operation. She created a series of actual carnival games from everyday items around the house, some of which included a ring toss with our mom’s wooden and metal bracelets and Pepsi bottles; a lawn dart toss with real metal darts; and a baseball throw using my old little league baseballs and some of our expendable stuffed animals to knock down. To keep the littler kids occupied during carnival, we turned on our Slip-N-Slide at the other end of the front yard.

At first I felt a little guilty that we gave away our old toys and games to the kids as prizes. That lasted until noon after we had raked in the dough, about $10 in total. We couldn’t have been happier with our entrepreneurial endeavor and were already planning how we’d spend the loot at the mall that afternoon.

Never mind the part about some of the parents coming to our house that night asking for refunds and returning our broken toys and games. That’s not the point.

No, the point is that my sister’s been hawking herself and her skills her entire life. I’ve been a exuberant hawker myself; adapt or perish, as I found out quite readily during the past five years alone. Most of us have learned to do the same.

For as long as we’re trying to earn a buck and turn it into two, we have to shape and hawk our wares. On a merry-go-round wheezing the same old melody. That’s the perpetual carnie candidate experience – from individual contributor to captain of industry.

“Try your luck with me!”

Where lady luck is nothing but a game of chance weighted in your favor with sought-after skills and circumstance. And a better marketplace as well. Hey, hiring plans across the board are favorable:

  • According to the recent Vistage CEO confidence index survey, 62 percent of respondents plan to expand their workforce in the year ahead, up from 56 percent in the fourth quarter of 2013 and the highest since the first quarter of 2006.
  • CareerBuilder’s annual job survey found that 36 percent of employers expect to add permanent, full-time staff this year. That’s a 50 percent increase over what employers said at the beginning of 2014.
  • Released in early December, Manpower’s Employment Outlook Survey of 18,000+ employers found a seasonally adjusted 19 percent of them plan to add staff in the first quarter alone.

Lady luck indeed. Every startup founder to CEO to CHRO to board member knows (or better know) the right people can mean the difference between boom or bust (including themselves), which is why organizations are moving away from how they source and categorize their people and toward a unified workforce that’s managed for results regardless of employment status. We’re talking full-time folks and freelancers.

According to Staffing Industry Analysts (SIA), temporary workers currently make up 15 percent of the workforce and are predicted to climb to 20 percent by 2016. In fact, contingent workers can make up more than 50% of the workforce, especially at tech companies, where contractors or freelancers are hired for their expertise. It’s called the “blended workforce,” although more accurately should be called the “fluid workforce” since 40% of contingent workers convert eventually to permanent roles.

Plus, a recent study by the Freelancers Union suggests that one in three members of the American workforce do some freelance work, which does include a higher proportion of younger people. The on-demand economy is crazy hot!

But even with all this exciting and disruptive workplace economic change not seen since the early part of the 20th century, the new how and why of work, the “sourcing the right” skills race continues to heighten dramatically. In fact, according to a soon-to-be-released PeopleFluent talent strategy survey, over 50% of respondent companies said recruiting hard-to-find skills in both leaders and employees is one of main issues keeping them up at night.

That mantra continues with the same Vistage CEO confidence index survey referenced above revealing that the high demand for skilled labor, specifically finding, hiring and training staff, was mentioned about three times as frequently as financial issues or economic uncertainty.

“Try your luck with me – if you can find me!”

The 2014 Candidate Experience Awards report will be released soon (also known as the CandEs), and part of the latest data from nearly 150 companies and 95,000 candidates includes the fact that 30 percent of candidates actively researched and applied for jobs for more than 16 weeks before landing one (or giving up).

Plus, the vast majority of these candidates, the ones that either weren’t selected or simply gave up trying, were never asked for further feedback on the recruiting process, whether they were notified by the company the process was ending or they withdrew on their own. This continues to be a big missed opportunity to better understand what may have been “missed” on both sides during any part of the recruiting process, including the “why” of skills disparity and what both sides should do about it.

The complexity of this situation is compounded by the fact that more and more of the work that “knowledge professionals” deliver will be automated by magic algorithms and software, and skill flexibility and fluidity will be the new currency – constantly being assessed by magic algorithms and software.

“Try your luck with me – please?!?”

So let me wrap it all up now with this idea, one shared with us in full by Brian Carter and Garrison Wynn on the TalentCulture #TChat Show, co-authors of The Cowbell Principle. Yes, a metaphor based on the SNL skit of the cowbell namesake. For individuals, a cowbell is a talent or gift. For businesses, it’s a durable competitive advantage.

The key to happiness and success is knowing who you are and how to succeed with hawking your best stuff. Your cowbell gives your value to people and they (hopefully) love you (and invest in you) for it. But do make sure you target those “investors” that align with your best stuff.

Today more companies are asking candidates to show more of their skills and talents up front in the form of virtual job tryouts, and 25 percent of candidates who responded to the CandEs solved a puzzle, problem or case situation relevant for the job they applied to.

We’re all in this never-ending game of workplace chance and we’ve got to practice, practice, practice our ring tossing to get a ringer. It’s not impossible to win once in a while either – if we continuously develop the skills that are deemed relevant, in demand and economically valuable, and learn how to continuously hawk the hell out of them to maximize our unique differentiating strengths.

Because this workplace merry-go-round ain’t ever slowing down for us carnies.

“Try your luck with us – a winner every time!”

About the Author: Kevin W. Grossman co-founded and co-hosts the highly popular weekly TalentCulture #TChat Show with Meghan M. Biro. He’s also currently the Product Marketing Director for Total Talent Acquisition products at PeopleFluent.

photo credit: mbtrama via photopin cc