Outthinkers #30—Peter Cappelli: HR Trends and Best Practices in the Post-Covid Workforce
Peter Cappelli is the George W. Taylor Professor of Management at The Wharton School and Director of Wharton’s Center for Human Resources. He is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, MA, served as Senior Advisor to the Kingdom of Bahrain for Employment Policy from, was a Distinguished Scholar of the Ministry of Manpower for Singapore, and was Co-Director of the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center on the Educational Quality of the Workforce.
He was recently named by HR Magazine as one of the top 5 most influential management thinkers, by NPR as one of the 50 influencers in the field of aging, and was elected a fellow of the National Academy of Human Resources.
He is a regular contributor to The Wall Street Journal and writes a monthly column for HR Executive magazine. His recent work on performance management, agile systems, and hiring practices, and other workplace topics appears in the Harvard Business Review.
In this podcast he shares:
- Insights on remote working: When does it work? Will we ever all go back to the office post-COVID?
- Gig workers: how do you manage them?
- Temp workers: why using them can decrease morale
- Psychological safety: can you ever have too much of it?
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"When you feel extremely safe, it's kind of like saying the guardrails are off. Now, I suppose if you're a true believer in psychological safety, you would say that there are other ways where you could keep the guard rails on—clear standards and clear norms, a strong culture, that sort of stuff—and we found some evidence for that. Then you get this situation where there's so high of a space psychological safety, that people's performance begins to slide. Not too surprising, too much of good things, in many cases, don't end up being so great."
-Peter Cappelli __________________________________________________________________________________________
Episode Timeline:
00:00—Introducing Peter Cappelli + The topic of today’s episode
1:45—If you really know me, you know that...
2:20—What is your definition of strategy?
2:58—What got you interested in your topic, and could you tell us about your recent work for your new book?
4:30—Could you describe some of the big gaps in tradeoffs between employees and companies?
7:15—What lessons do we have from companies that have gone fully remote?
8:38—Is there something we can learn from history about what happens when there is no longer a competitive labor market?
11:00—When labor markets are tight, and then aren't, do they revert back to the norm, or are we entering a new kind of contract between employer and employees?
13:08—Do companies compare their wages to market average value often? Are there drawbacks to not doing so?
15:15—What are the differences in how you manage gig or contract workers and employees, could you elaborate on that?
17:10—Could you talk about psychological safety? Is the approach "more is always better" valid?
18:28—Where can people follow your work and find you?
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Thank you to our guests, thank you to our executive producer, Karina Reyes, our editor, Zach Ness, and the rest of the team. If you like what you heard, please follow, download, and subscribe. I'm your host, Kaihan Krippendorff. Thank you for listening.
Follow us at outthinkernetworks.com/podcast