This year’s Spring HR & Compliance Virtual Summit, held April 17 & 18, highlighted best practices for measuring manager effectiveness, ADA accommodations, employment law developments, employee engagement tips, and so much more. Our speakers shared insights with nearly 10,000 HR leaders over the two-day event.
Did you miss any of the live sessions? Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered! Check out our executive summary for top takeaways.
Trends and Best Practices for Measuring Manager Effectiveness
In this session, Andrea Derler and Thera Martens covered the essential metrics you should be measuring, including those readily available in Paycor, to gauge the effectiveness of your managers. Insights included:
- A Gartner study found only 27% of HR leaders believe their organizations’ managers are ready to lead through change.
- Only 38% of individual contributors want to become managers; the other 62% want to stay ICs (Visier).
- The 5 suggested manager metrics to track are: Manager engagement score; High performer resignation rate; Promotions rate; Objectives; Absence days per FTE.
- What effective managers do well: Hire well and onboard longer; Plan compensation intelligently; Actively retain top talent
Key Quote:
“It’s easy to get lost in the sea of metrics, and practices. But let’s never lose sight of the end goal: Helping managers be effective, or become more effective in their management of their business and their people.”
Charges, Claims, and Accommodations – Processes Matter!
Julie Pugh, Esq. led an engaging discussion that explained administrative charges and how to appropriately handle such claims with finesse. Highlights included:
- The pros and cons of using outside counsel, what to do with witness statements, whether or not to go to mediation, and what potential outcomes may be.
- An overview of the EEOC’s recent flurry of disability discrimination claims and the processes HR should follow when an accommodation request arises.
- The EEOC’s LEAD (Leadership for the Employment of Americans with Disabilities) initiative.
Key Quote:
“How an employer responds to the administrative charge can have a critical impact on its legal exposure in any subsequent litigation, because the employer cannot later retract factual statements it makes in its response.”
Recent Developments in Employment Law
Attorney Merry Campbell’s session guided attendees on staying up to date on recent changes to federal and local employment law and discussed how to navigate the complex landscape of employment compliance. Takeaways included:
- The EEOC’s proposal to update guidance on workplace harassment to reflect significant court cases, the #MeToo movement, and remote workplace harassment.
- EEOC guidance on HR’s use of artificial intelligence including the fact that employers can be held accountable for third-party designed tools used for making employment decisions.
- FMLA eligibility for remote workers: If an employee works from home but their supervisor or department works out of a corporate office where there at least 50 employees within 75 miles, the employee is covered by the FMLA.
Key Quote:
“Most diversity and inclusion policies are designed to create larger and more diverse pools of candidates rather than setting numerical quotas, and such policies are likely okay, but policies that are more rigid, for example, reserving a set percentage of leadership positions for women or minorities, could be more vulnerable.”
Redefining Layoffs to Ensure Compliance and Compassion
Sarah Rodehorst, Chief Executive Officer of Onwards HR, focused on the importance of conducting employee layoffs with care. Session guidance included:
- How organizations can mitigate risk, reduce costs, and improve equity by simplifying employee separations in compliance with corporate policy and employment laws.
- Actionable strategies for taking compassionate and practical steps to employee separations.
- A framework for an improved separation process that is sensitive to the employee experience.
Key Quote:
“During a layoff, it’s important to recognize that exiting employees can be brand ambassadors. You need to make a good final impression because a positive experience can help your brand, but a negative experience could go viral.”
Exploring Employee Engagement and Retention in the Face of Technological Advancements
As the global talent shortage persists, attracting and retaining employees has become crucial, putting a burden on leaders to better engage and upskill their workforce. Paycor’s Director of Strategy, Alanna Perez, discussed the latest automation and technology trends affecting small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Takeaways included:
- While businesses continue to add jobs and Mar’24 employment stronger than expected (adding 303k jobs), the hire rate has dropped since Covid (3.7% vs 4.6%).
- Only 33% of employees are engaged today vs. 36% in 2020. And Gallup reports that there is nearly $1.9 TRILLION lost in productivity from not engaged or actively disengaged employees.
- AI-powered automation will shape in the economy in the coming decades, comparable to the emergence of the internet 30 years ago.
Key Quote:
“If your leaders can articulate the mission and vision of the organization to their frontline employees, those employees will understand that the organization cares about them and is looking out for them.”
Mastering Gentelligence®: Understanding & Leveraging Generational Diversity in the Workplace
Megan W. Gerhardt, Ph.D., Professor of Management and Leadership at the Farmer School of Business at Miami University, developed Gentelligence to help organizations change how they approach generational differences. Insights surfaced in this session included:
- Discussion around the barriers that often prevent organizations and individuals from effective intergenerational collaboration.
- An assumption audit that pushed beyond lazy stereotypes to understand generational and age differences as a valuable and complex form of diversity.
- How to develop organizational cultures that normalize intergenerational learning and collaboration.
- How to have smarter intergenerational conversations using power questions.
Key Quote:
“Deloitte found that only 6% of organizations ‘strongly agree’ that their leaders are equipped to lead a multigenerational organization.”
HR Diagnostics and Auditing: Compliance and Best Practices for a Stronger Business
This session, presented by Dr. Gia Wiggins, took attendees beyond basic reporting to truly diagnose the health of their HR practices and uncover opportunities for improvement. Topics discussed include:
- The Fundamentals: Mastering the core principles of HR diagnostics and auditing and demystifying the process and its potential benefits.
- Metrics That Matter: Identifying the key HR metrics to track, analyze, and use for pinpointing areas for improvement and highlighting successes.
- Auditing Best Practices: A step-by-step approach to conducting effective HR audits.
- Data-Driven Decision-Making: How to translate HR data into actionable insights that drive strategic HR initiatives and support overall business goals.
Key Quote:
“Become a student of compliance and best practice needs for your company. Remediate things that need correction. Prioritize things that cause harm to the employees or company.”
How to Operationalize Culture & Behavior for Your Safety Program
Catherine Mattice, founder of Civility Partners, led an engaging discussion around ensuring your employees feel psychosocially safe. Highlights included:
- Defining and describing psychosocial safety as an inherent and basic human need.
- Dissecting the ways psychosocial safety influences behavior, performance, innovation and learning – and is paramount to inclusion initiatives.
- Identifying how to detect a lack of psychosocial safety in your workforce and construct clear and tangible solutions for improvement.
- Learning how to operationalize culture and behavior for your organization’s safety program.
Key Quote:
“There is a strong relationship between psychological and physical safety. People who say they felt psychologically unsafe on the job were 80% more likely to report they had been injured at work, requiring medical attention or missed days of work.”
Even though our Spring Summit has concluded, we’re already starting to plan our next event coming in fall 2024! Stay tuned for more details.
