Ask your favorite young person what HR does, and they might look at you with a blank stare. Or, thanks to The Office, they may think HR is horrible (thanks, Toby!) And yet, Cisco is actively recruiting those same Michael Scott fans for HR leadership programs.

As the HR function experiences an evolution, one that’s been accelerated by the pandemic, the skills needed to enter the field have expanded to include technology and analytics.

With those challenges in mind, Cisco started the HR Leadership Program, which later rebranded into the FLEX program. The program began in 2004 and has been fully-fledged since 2013.

Macy Andrews, VP of communications, marketing, events, and employer branding at Cisco, has been leading FLEX for three years and is aware of its newfound role in ensuring the company’s success.

“We do a lot of recruiting that allows for people that maybe haven’t had exposure to [HR]...it is so different than the HR of the past,” Andrews said. “We used to say it was a personnel office where you kind of hire, fire, and deal with escalations. Now, it’s such a strategic element to your business.”

Basic training. Andrews told HR Brew that the program takes around eight summer interns from each of two tracks, undergraduate and MBA, who return after their studies for a two-to-three-year rotational program aimed at placing them into a more permanent role at the end in the company’s people, purpose, or policy functions.

The FLEX experience starts with a “bootcamp” where participants are introduced to the company in a process that’s slightly more involved than a traditional onboarding, Andrews explained. Around 60 people between the two programs are participating at one time.

The program also asks participants to work on FLEX itself, leading “key elements” such as university recruiting, curriculum development, and community engagement.

Keep reading.—AK

We’ve yet to confirm if it works to play Taylor Swift’s “Stay Stay Stay” at the office, but how will we know if we don’t try? Experimentation is key in this era where a truly transformative HR strategy must keep agility and resilience in the forefront.

Even if a company is succeeding across culture, engagement, and financial performance, there are always opportunities for improvement when it comes to boosting retention. That’s why many companies are tinkering with their employment value proposition.

Start with a survey. For organizations looking to understand how to improve retention or employee engagement, it may help to quantify employee sentiment across numerous variables, including intent to stay, commitment to coworkers, and trust in leadership.

Gartner’s HR research has boiled engagement down to five categories: understanding of the job, relationship with manager, perception of senior leadership, career opportunities, and work conditions.

Detox your culture. In January 2022, MIT Sloan research found that toxic culture and “job insecurity and reorganization” were the top two reasons for turnover and also that “companies with a reputation for a healthy culture…experienced lower-than-average turnover during the first six months of the Great Resignation.”

Improving culture may be a matter of the feedback coming in, and getting better data to understand employee sentiment and diagnose issues. Armed with better data, and perhaps some new team members to help analyze the data and let it tell a story, HR leaders can even connect employee satisfaction with improved company performance to make the case for more resources and support for retention efforts.

Keep reading.—AK

Mirror, mirror on the wall. Who’s the highest paid of all?

Thanks to some recent pay transparency efforts in the US, HR professionals and other workers have a clearer image. And one new survey indicates that organizations that do share wage information may already be attracting more candidates—and better ones, too.

Clear-eyed. Pay transparency laws in the US have been gaining ground in the last few years in some of the nation’s most populous states, including California and New York. While the majority of states still don’t require companies to list salary ranges in job postings, approximately 42% of HR professionals work for a company that operates in a state that now requires it, according to a new SHRM survey.

The survey found that 66% of HR professionals believe that transparency in job postings has resulted in higher quality applicants. Furthermore, 70% of organizations that disclose a salary range in their job listings say they’re getting more applicants.

On the other hand, the study found that offering applicants a window into wages isn’t without consequences within companies. Some 36% of organizations said the pay transparency change has resulted in more current employees asking for raises.

Regardless of whether pay transparency is legally required, some experts believe that more companies will voluntarily share wage information in the years to come. “This is the next step in how employees and the workforce gain more power in the marketplace,” Stacie Haller, a career expert at Resume Builder told CNBC. “First, we had work flexibility, and now salary transparency is taking hold, starting to spread, and it’s great for everyone.”—KP

Today’s top HR reads.

Stat: Men account for 83% of named executive officers in S&P’s top 100 companies. (USA Today)

Quote: “What happens in the short-term is the company bean-counters say, ‘Well, if you get rid of this many people, you will save that much’...In the long run, layoffs do hurt companies. Period.”—Robin Erickson, VP of human capital at Conference Board, on how layoffs impact the bottom line long-term (Vox)

Read: Remote work is fueling the “afternoon fun” movement, where workers no longer wait until 6pm to hit the links or take a yoga class. (the New York Times)

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