Amplify Digest: The Kids Aren’t Alright
Subscribe to the Amplify Digest: a weekly newsletter designed to help modern HR operators stay on top of the latest news, trends, and resources in all things people.
Welcome to the Amplify Digest. Every week, I break down five articles in five minutes; discussing the top people news, stories, and resources that are worth your time. Scroll down for links to the articles covered in the video (and more), a helpful thread from the Amplify Accelerator Community, and curated jobs from the Amplify Job Board.
This week’s digest explores rehumanizing work, trauma-informed workplaces, tips on remote management, the goldilocks zone of startup growth, and more.
New Amplify Jobs: check out postings for jobs at Occupier, CivicActions, Catalant, and more.
Hiring? Post your jobs on the Amplify Job Board to reach members of the Amplify community.
Sponsor
The Amplify Digest is sponsored by Greenhouse. As modern HR leaders and professionals, you know that your company’s ability to hire great talent is as important as ever. Whether you need to scale your team quickly, or improve your hiring process, Greenhouse gives you the right technology, know-how, and support to take on what’s next.
Articles discussed in this week's Digest (and more)
Everyone Is Not OK, but Back at Work Anyway (The New York Times)
Being a better manager in a remote (distributed) team (Job van der Voort via Twitter)
We Need Trauma-Informed Workplaces (Harvard Business Review)
This Is What Happens When There Are Too Many Meetings (The Atlantic)
Sponsored Post, by Greenhouse
Greenhouse’s Open conference is back and live at the Javits Center in New York City. Join me in person May 24 & 25 along with the brightest minds in HR, and you’ll get the opportunity to hear from inspiring speakers raising the hiring conversation to new heights. Register today using my special promo code (FINEFESCUE30) for 30% off your ticket and walk away with actionable strategies for everything from DE&I to sourcing and more!
🚨LAST WEEK TO REGISTER Amplify Accelerator Echo Cohort (April 21-May 27)
The Amplify Accelerator is a new approach to building readiness for modern HR and people operators through cohorts (peer-based learning). Designed to build capability and connections, the Amplify cohorts help modern people leaders build the necessary skills and network equity for the new world of work.
Accelerate your HR career and become a more confident people leader, armed with a new global peer community and a toolkit full of actionable advice, resources, templates, and more.
The Echo Cohort runs April 21 - May 27, with live sessions Tuesdays & Thursdays 1:00 - 2:30pm ET.
“The only thing better than the resource library and the world-class speakers is the community, an engaged group of vetted peers from whom I can learn and with whom I can collaborate.” — Claire Kennedy, Axios VP of People Operations
NEW: ✨ Amplify Community Wisdom ✨
The Amplify Accelerator Community was specifically designed to help modern people operators expand their networks, thinking, and connections. Each week, I'll spotlight a helpful thread from the Community to help Amplify Digest subscribers learn from the discussions.
[Question] Does anyone have any org health templates they could point me to? I have been asked to put together a report that will be presented to the board. Things like (talent acquisition and retention, performance and development, succession plans). Also curious about how others go about the data collection process for a request like this. Thanks!
A1: I’ll DM you a copy of the slide I use in our board presentations for a quick snapshot of the health of the team - I do sometimes change up the metrics I share and there may be subsequent slides to go into specific initiatives or issues, but I’ve found that this opening slide is a helpful orientation to what our board most regularly wants to know.
A2: Thanks! This is really helpful. I think there are a lot of data points from this to consider using. Just curious and no need to send but are there other slides presented to your board dealing with org health? If so, can you share the topics? Or are they just deep dives into the summary slide. Thanks again!
A3: They are usually deep dives into the summary slides…typically the subsequent slides also have specific personnel or department information, so I wouldn’t be able to share those…but I did find that orienting around Talent Acquisition, Employee Demographics, Retention, and Employee Engagement and/or Performance has been well received by our board.
A4: Also, if it’s helpful context - we have a set of shared OKRs as an executive team. The one more closely tied to people/org health is this one: [Company] will attract, develop and retain a talented workforce that is more than half BIPOC and which uniformly expresses a sense of belonging and engagement. So when I present to the board, I usually have this objective in the back of my mind as it’s at the level that they’ve been tracking…as you think about what to narrow into, I’d suggest either using OKRs or goals or whatever you know the board has top of mind as your north star, then layer in extra details or nuance on top of that.
A5: That is helpful. Frankly I need to work harder keeping our OKRs in mind when presenting people data or planning initiatives. Will land a lot better with the business. Need to develop that muscle more. Thanks again!
A6: Really great; good resource. The CPO who I report to was impressed I was able to create a board slide so quickly. I of course had to give credit to this awesome network though!
A7: I’m so happy to hear that, it took me a number of iterations to get to this, but it ended up being that the simplest solution worked the best for us! I should have just posted it here I didn’t realize so many people would be interested…here y’all go, it’s super simple, but it’s worked well for us. The text in the box on the right changes each quarter based on the focus we have (e.g., performance reviews, engagement metrics, etc.). To pull this data, I just run raw data report from our HRIS or our ATS and use pivot tables in excel to drill down into what I need. I’m not a fancy stats person, so I opted to keep this simple enough to data I could pull and manipulate myself, without having to pull our Biz Intelligence managers in. Finally, this is just my top slide to give a quick snapshot, subsequent slides from here would go into greater detail - but I’m unfortunately not able to share those as they tend to have specific department or personnel information attached.
A8: All great stuff. Looks like a lot of this data came from your HRIS. Other than that, are there other data sources you tapped? For any qualitative org health data for instance. I believe I'm going to have to rely on my org knowledge supplemented by discussions with leadership to get some of my data - like succession plans, OKR performance, etc.
A9: The three sources I typically use for data pulls (and that I pay the most attention to) are: HRIS (we use Rippling); ATS (Greenhouse); and Performance/Engagement Platform (Culture Amp)…the Culture Amp surveys are always a fascinating look under the hood. If I have other data sources (like training sessions, feedback to my team, etc.) I don’t often put those into the slides but will layer those on as stories too further illustrate the data points when I present.
A10: Super helpful, thank you. I think those are the right systems for me to start with. There's something to the HR Open Source stuff!
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