To Link or Not to Link Your HR Data
















We have been discussing the importance of HR analytics on this blog for many weeks now. I have debriefed from 3 conferences over the last six months providing the latest and greatest research on HR Analytics.

One thing comes up over and over. You can't look at your data in silos. Whether you are talking about HR data, operational data, customer data or financial data, it needs to be analyzed from a systems perspective. We are now at a place in the metrics journey, where managers in organizations need to be predictive and have data to make better decisions.

So, that requires the leadership from all functional areas to: actually collaborate around execution of business strategy, consider initiatives to be embarked upon and to solve business problems with intelligence that already exists in each functional area.

How, you say? The first step is after you have created your beautiful, shiny new business strategy, you actually need to develop actions around that. By using a business strategy mapping process, each functional area has its marching orders and can then determine its functional metrics.

After this process is complete you then move into tracking and measuring execution. This is where it gets fun. Let's use this example:

A company has embarked on a strategy of gaining market share in the US for its product. After the strategy session it is decided that a new rewards and recognition program is on order to increase employee engagement. How do you know if this has had any impact on your desired result?

Solution:
  1. Use historical employee engagement data to determine that rewards and recognition are important drivers of engagement
  2. Use turnover data and performance data to determine that your HIPO's (High Potential Employees) are turning over at the highest rate.
  3. Segment your engagement data to determine that HIPO's have the lowest satisfaction with the rewards and recognition program
  4. Segment your customer satisfaction data to determine your most satisfied customers are being served by your HIPO's
  5. Analyze your financial data and determine that your HIPO's revenue per employee is 25% higher than your regular employee population
  6. Calculate that HIPO turnover last year cost you $1.9M
By making the investment in the rewards and recognition program not only is market share impacted by retaining the HIPO's but you can also save turnover cost in the process, adding to the bottom line.

The point of this story is, if you only had HR data, you wouldn't have the full story.

Linkage is in....data in silos are out!

And the organization lived happily ever after...


At Visionova HR Consulting, our virtual HR support platform is built around a network of SPHR and PHR certified professionals. Our onsite and virtual HR services provide a formidable partnership that lets you be the best you can be. Human Resources is crucial for all businesses. We focus exclusively on small business and nonprofits with 5 – 100 employees. We really understand the unique needs of small and startup businesses.

The Age of Mobility & the Executive

There is an interesting download paper on the "The Untethered Executive: Business Information in the Age of Mobility" in the latest edition of Forbes Insight. As a member of the Forbes Insight Panel I thought you would be interested. 


In summary the paper says" Much has been written about how smartphones and other mobile devices are changing the way people communicate. But little has been done to understand what the impact of this shift is on the executive suite. Are executives willing to use their smartphones for business purposes beyond email? Is the information they access via a mobile device being used to help drive business decisions? Do different “generations” of executives treat mobility differently, and are some more willing than others to blur the lines between business and personal communications devices? "


Check it out at http://www.forbes.com/forbesinsights/untethered_executive/index.html

Has HR GAINED or LOST Ground Post Recession?


In the most recent edition of HR Magazine, there was a very interesting article by Edward Lawler, Jay Jamrog and John Boudreau, "Shining Light on the HR Profession" (membership required) regarding HR's positioning post recession.



SHRM distributed a survey to approximately 1000 HR executives and other types of managers to organizations ranging in size from 1,000 to more than 100,000 employees.

For me, the interesting results were these:

  1. HR Executives felt that they did improve effectiveness and their strategic role as a result of how HR responded to the recession. AND
  2. Not only did HR Executives toot their own horn but when managers were asked the same questions they agreed that HR had gained strategic and effectiveness ground.
This is the good news, HR gained ground....but there were areas that were cited where HR needs improvements:
  1. Talent Management-HR needs to make sure that they are committed to the quality of their talent management decisions and that their performance management system provides accurate data about their talent.
  2. Analytics and Metrics-No shocker here from my last few posts on the subject. The HR leaders who emphasize numbers were the ones that made the most gains in their effectiveness in the survey. Enough said...
  3. Innovation-HR needs to be open to new practices that lead to tangible results. By constantly looking at new and creative ways to solve business problems, HR can really add to its perception and reputation by being innovative.
I keep reading and hearing anecdotal data from both sides on this HR value topic. I read articles like the one described above that has a glass half full. I also, here anecdotally, that it has been too little effort too late, on HR's part, so the business has started to look outside of HR to get the 3 areas accomplished above.

What are your thoughts?

Think about your current organization, did you gain ground post recession by keeping the train on the tracks? What have you done in the 3 areas mentioned above that would add to your HR street cred?

Are You Creating A Culture of Innovation?

Great companies make innovation happen. The basic element is culture. The worlds best structures will under perform without a culture that supports people trying new things. 


How can we engender a culture that supports innovation you ask? Here are a few of the insights the Kellogg Innovation Network has learned:

  1. Nurture a sense of purpose - take a contrary approach to business; innovate around your core product; practice flexibility in the face of obsolescence
  2. Operate as an ethical alternative - focus on a purpose of significant social merit like supporting recycling, saving the planet, support cleaner air etc.
  3. Celebrate smart failures - understand why there was failure and build on it to succeed and avoid similar outcomes.
  4. Create MAOE - create meaningful, actionable objectives & enable people to act - inspiring challenges can fuel an innovative culture. Meaningful objectives can inspire people to create solutions.
  5. Emphasize the team - culture is not an individual it is a team, group, division, company, Top innovators require teams to challenge and take the idea to market.
  6. Walk the talk - you have all heard that before, and you will continue to hear this. Hypocrisy is one of the most powerful ways to generate a culture that becomes dysfunctional. If leaders to not find time to encourage new ideas, then others will not follow.
Does your company create a culture of innovation and how any of these six areas does your company follow? 

thanks to Robert Wolcott @ Kellogg Innovation Network and Jorn Bang Andersen from the Nordic Innovation Centre

HR Metrics Summit-Final Day Recap









After three days of listening and participating in the IQPC HR Metics Summit, I have a renewed and confirming passion around the subject of Human Capital Metrics.

It is exciting for me to hear that HR practitioners that are attending this summit are moving past typical tracking measures and actually getting to metrics that matter to the business.

Today, I heard case studies from HR professionals on how they have "linked" various data sets to create insight for the business. (Thank Goodness!). Examples include:

  • linking volunteerism to employee engagement resulting in higher productivity/performance
  • Linking employee engagement to customer loyalty resulting in increased profits
  • Linking leadership effectiveness to employee engagement leading to increased customer loyalty
I am in a unique environment at this metrics conference. I am hanging out with people like me that understand that metrics and analytics are necessary and the one way that HR can finally be strategic and add value to the business.

My concern is that HR professionals as a whole have not hopped on the the metrics train soon enough. As Jac Fitz-Enz said at the Conference Board last year, "If HR doesn't do metrics, someone else will." YIKES!

Another piece of information that got my attention last week:

Accenture just completed a study that 80% of CFO's have seen an increase in their responsibilities - and 39% said that included taking over Human Resources projects/programs
So, with reluctance to get onboard the metrics train and the increased interest from Finance in HR's business....I think we have now crossed into the urgent arena.
What are your thoughts, are we on the train, has the train left the station, can we catch up?

HR Metrics Summit-Day 1 Recap





I have been honored to serve as the Chairperson for IQPC's HR Metrics Summit this week in Chicago. There is a slate of excellent topics and speakers including:

  • The Evolution of HR Analytics At Sear Holdings by Steve Woolwine
  • Sales Force Effectiveness by Carl Schleyer from Sears Holdings
  • Making Manager Self Service Improvements by Brenda Sural
  • "Group Therapy" session discussing which 5 metrics you would choose to discuss with your CEO.
  • The Story of Accor's HR transformation, using HR Metrics to drive business results
  • Using Analytics to Make the Right HR Investments by yours truly :)
  • "Group Therapy" Session-When HR Metrics Fail to Connect with Your Executives, hosted by Tim Sackett, Writer, Fitful of Talent
  • Workforce Analytics: Mapping Out a Data Supply Chain by Brent Auble, SAIC.
  • Assessing the Business Impact of HR by Rick Buchman
Some of my key takeaways from day one are as follows:
  1. Case studies shared by Sears, Accor and Kraft discussed metrics being a journey that is continuously changing as the business changes
  2. All presenters discussed the importance of aligning metrics to business outcomes
  3. Data is everywhere and getting control of it is hard but worth it
  4. Simple tools already on the desktop can do the job
  5. PhD's not needed to perform most analysis
  6. Insight through data is a narcotic...people just want more
  7. HR and Finance need to hook up! Both functions need to talk the same language and combine forces to produce valuable insight
  8. There is a difference between metrics and analytics....read this!
  9. Asking stupid questions leads to stupid answers. Find out what your customers want!
  10. Dashboards report what happened and Analytics on what could/will happen
Stay tuned for Day 2 recap....


What is the Difference Between Metrics and Analytics?




I know, I have been asked many times about the difference between metrics and analytics. Luk Smeyers with INostix in Europe has created a very cool list of words that show the difference between the two concepts. Thanks Luk!


A lot of my clients and contacts are asking me quite often: "In a few words, what's the difference between HR metrics and HR analytics?" For a few weeks, I have been writing down such words in my beloved iphone (the 'Notes' app). Here you go...enjoy!


Metrics

Analytics

1. Tangible

Intangible

2. Accounting

Finance

3. Past

Future

4. Data

Insights

5. Large

Selective

6. Transactional

Strategic

7. Information

Transformation

8. Low value

Differentiator

9. Gathering

Asking questions

10. Reporting

Analysing

11. HR Scorecard

Business Scorecard

12. HR ownership

Management ownership

13. Controlling

Optimising

14. Inside-in perspective

Outside-in perspective


What other differences have you seen or experienced between Metrics and Analytics?

HR’s Strategic Role in Innovation

Historically, Human Resources (HR) has not played a very strategic role in innovation. This needs to change rapidly as we move in the 21st century. HR needs to support the cultural change to enable innovation; and the upcoming generation of HR practitioners are not going to settle for an ‘administrative-only’ role.


Innovation is primarily a social thing. Really. While processes are important, ideas come from interactions between and among humans. At the 2nd Open Innovation Summit and at the BIF-6 conference this came through loud and clear. The most fundamental asset a company has is its humans. So, wouldn’t you think the organization assigned to maximize (20th century business = manage) that resource is critical to a company’s success?


Companies are good at managing tangible, concrete, known assets, and they try to manage humans the same way. Business schools, corporate training etc. don’t do well teaching us how to ‘manage’ or ‘measure’ social assets – to train, support, and enable people to create the social networks that enable the flow of knowledge, not the storage of knowledge, needed for innovation. Hence, the current debate on whether big companies can really innovate again.


Well, what kind of things could HR start to do? HR can:



  • Put strategically-focused people into decision and influence making positions.
  • Help design the organization’s structure, reinvent/innovate roles & responsibilities, to increase multi-discipline knowledge flows, internally and with external partners and provide tools.
  • Address organizational cross-functionally and cross-disciplinary challenges
  • Train people to develop the competency of applied learning, with reward and recognition.
  • Help the organization overcome FEAR -of losing control, the unknown, looking stupid, failing, punishment, peer pressure, etc. through shaping the culture, encouraging the needed leadership and providing some tools to help overcome fear.
Obviously this list is not complete. And this sounds a bit formidable (okay, it is). But it can be done. Believe it or not, a stodgy, 160+ year old company in a perceived boring old industry is one of the best in class at using HR strategically for innovation. Menasha Packaging , in the middle of Wisconsin, is using HR in ways I’ve virtually never seen before…with very positive, and obvious, results. So, give it a try. You don’t have to remake all of HR, try with a small step, and see where it goes.

Submitted by Blogging Innovation by Deborah Mills-Scofield










Developing a HRM Strategy

Faced with rapid change organizations need to develop a more focused and coherent approach to managing people. In just the same way a business requires a marketing or information technology strategy it also requires a human resource or people strategy.
In developing such a strategy two critical questions must be addressed. 
  • What kinds of people do you need to manage and run your business to meet your strategic business objectives?
  • What people programs and initiatives must be designed and implemented to attract, develop and retain staff to compete effectively?
In order to answer these questions four key dimensions of an organization must be addressed. These are:
  • Culture: the beliefs, values, norms and management style of the organization
  • Organization: the structure, job roles and reporting lines of the organization
  • People: the skill levels, staff potential and management capability
  • Human resources systems: the people focused mechanisms which deliver the strategy - employee selection, communications, training, rewards, career development, etc.
Frequently in managing the people element of their business senior managers will only focus on one or two dimensions and neglect to deal with the others. Typically, companies reorganize their structures to free managers from bureaucracy and drive for more entrepreneurial flair but then fail to adjust their training or reward systems.
When the desired entrepreneurial behavior does not emerge managers frequently look confused at the apparent failure of the changes to deliver results. The fact is that seldom can you focus on only one area. What is required is a strategic perspective aimed at identifying the relationship between all four dimensions.
If you require an organization which really values quality and service you not only have to retrain staff, you must also review the organization, reward, appraisal and communications systems.
The pay and reward system is a classic problem in this area. Frequently organizations have payment systems which are designed around the volume of output produced. If you then seek to develop a company which emphasizes the product's quality you must change the pay systems. Otherwise you have a contradiction between what the chief executive is saying about quality and what your payment system is encouraging staff to do.
There are seven steps to developing a human resource strategy and the active involvement of senior line managers should be sought throughout the approach:
  • get the big picture
  • develop a mission statement or statement of intent
  • conduct a SWOT analysis of the organization
  • conduct a thorough human resources analysis
  • determine critical people issues
  • develop consequences and solutions. To expand on this you need to:
  • implementation and evaluation of the action plans.
Have you re-evaluated your strategy plans and taken into account this issues and approaches? 


©2010 Accel-Team

Talent Management: Does What Get Measured Really Get Done?




I am very excited to have Sean Conrad from Halogen Software as our guest blogger today:

Cathy has done a series of great posts recently on HR metrics and analytics. I couldn’t agree more with her take on the importance of measuring and analyzing the right things – HR data that matters to the business, because these are the metrics that can be used to track against corporate objectives and to help make business decisions.

Now of course I have a pretty specific focus on talent management metrics. Over the past several years I’ve had the pleasure of working and talking to hundreds of HR professionals who are passionate about driving high performance within their companies, but who at one time or another have struggled with determining what to track. Suffice it to say that without the ability to centralize performance and talent management data in some type of system, the question is moot, because it’s nearly impossible to get meaningful insight from paper.

But for the many who have taken the step of centralizing their talent management processes and data online the task of accessing the data is much easier. But now that you know you have access to metrics, it’s important to determine which ones you and your business care about.

For example, you gather a lot of useful data during your performance management processes. Are you making strategic use of it to drive business decision-making and organizational success? Here are just some of the questions you should be able to answer using data from your process.

· What are your strongest organizational competencies? Do these support your organization's mission/vision/strategy?

· What are your weakest organizational competencies? What learning programs could you put in place to strengthen these?

· Who are your high-performing employees? Are they being rewarded appropriately? Do you need to take action to ensure they remain loyal and engaged?

· Which employees are underperforming? Do their managers have specific development plans in place to help them improve?

· Which employees are currently on a performance improvement plan? Has their performance improved as a result of the actions taken?

· If you conducted any training initiatives last year, aimed at improving specific skills, did they have the desired impact on employee performance?

· Will your organization be able to achieve its stated goals? Do employee goals for the coming year support organizational goals?

· Are managers rating employee performance fairly and consistently?

· Does every employee have goals? Does every employee have a development plan? Are they making progress on these?

· What is the profile of your high performers? How can you use that data to predict the future success of potential job candidates?

· What are your workforce planning needs? Can you forecast your employee demand 2-3 years out?

Again, collecting this data is only beneficial if you’re going to do something with it. This can sometimes require a cultural shift within your organization that may require you to change or refine existing business processes, perceptions and levels of accountability.

Getting your organization comfortable using your talent management system is an important step since you need your managers and employees to input information into the system for there to be data to report on. While an automated talent management solution that is easy to use can help, you need buy-in at the executive level to make the performance appraisal process strategic to the organization and not just to HR.

Start by determining which of the above questions are most important to your C-suite and can be tied to your strategic objectives. Then get executive buy-in into your performance management process to ensure you get the answers they are looking for.

Doing so will create a level of readiness and accountability across the organization to ensure everyone is engaged in the performance appraisal process appropriately so that you analyze performance data accurately and effectively. It’s important to note that talent management data you collect and measure must be part of your overall Human Capital Metrics so that you can determine how well employees are performing against corporate objectives. To get a complete picture on workforce performance, you need to also be measuring recruiting, learning, financial data and more.)

I am really pumped to be co-hosting an upcoming webinar with Cathy Martin that delves a lot deeper into the concept of talent management metrics and analytics. I hope you can join us on February 23!

Sean Conrad is a senior product analyst at Halogen Software, working closely with customers on a day-to-day basis. Sean is an avid writer and blogger on the topic of Talent Management. For the past 15 years Sean has focused on enabling organizations to successfully implement software solutions. An accredited Human Capital Strategist, Sean has worked with hundreds of HR professionals on defining their talent management strategy and execution.

The 10 Best-Designed Intranets For 2011

Here is the list of the 10 best designed intranets from Jakob Neilsen's Alertbox:
  • AMP Limited (Australia), a wealth management company
  • Bennett Jones LLP (Canada), one of Canada's largest law firms
  • Bouygues Telecom (France), a telecom, mobile, fixed, TV, and Internet communications services company
  • Credit Suisse AG (Switzerland), a global financial services company
  • Duke Energy (US), an electrical power holding company
  • Habitat for Humanity International (US), a non-profit, non-denominational Christian housing ministry
  • Heineken International (The Netherlands), a leading brewer and owner and manager of a portfolio of beer brands
  • KT (Republic of Korea), an information, communications, and technology company
  • Mota-Engil Engenharia e Construção, S.A. (Portugal), a leading construction enterprise
  • Verizon Communications (US), a provider of wired and wireless broadband and communications services to US consumers, as well as of global business networking, data, and managed solutions to enterprises worldwide
More and more companies are designing their intranets like extranets and internet sites. How imaginative and innovative is your intranet site? Let me know at wgstevens2@gmail.com