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Meet The Boss TV Re-Launches Their Website
The 5 Most Important Talent Management Metrics
7 Tall Tales of Talent Management
One of the topics that really caught my eye was the title of this post" 7 Tall Tales of Talent Management" by Mary Kay Vona, Ed.D and Executive VP @ Aon Hewitt. So why this topic you may ask? Well, since we have begun to come out, and I mean slowly out, of this economic recession, employees are restless, not happy, and most of all not overly engaged in their businesses. Why, well all the HR huff and puff with training, incentives that don't mean much, inflated philosophies about people not leaving a company in a recessional period, and a blind eye to really watching the ball has caught many HR professionals off guard with real good talent their companies.
First and foremost she points out that many talent management programs operate from generally accepted assertions that are untested, outdated, or purely anecdotal. So she outlines the 7 myths as follows:
- Shifting demographics will create a global talent void - panic you say "we don't have enough people". Reality is the younger generation will fill the void of the Boomers and retirees.Case in point the number of people working past normal retirement age has increased from 12.9% to 16.8% over the past decade.
- There are no good organically grown HR leaders - well think about that and I will not expound any further. Hogwash I say!!
- Performance evaluations are the only way to measure talent - "its not the tool stupid, its the talent", need I say more. Think about all the hoops you jump through each year doing evals, talent succession planning, and where does it go? I can tell you from experience that doing a month+ work of work never was acted upon in my 30 years of HR except for a 2 year period in 1999-2000 at a technology think tank and design division.
- Reverse mentoring is a crazy idea - mentoring in general has proven to be the differentiators for many, including yours truly.
- Leaders cannot impact climates of innovation - it is more than a team of thinkers and futurists, it requires big action, that only comes from the top of the organization.
- Talent assessments have plateaued - well they work believe it or not and I am not contradicting what I said in #3.
- In the current economy, people are lucky to have jobs...talent is always available - I think she says it best hubris + hyperbole = an unhealthy approach.
The HOW's and WHY's of Getting Into HR
Communicating Effectively Throughout the Organization
I have continued to preach that you have to stay close to your CEO, communicate daily with him/her as well as have daily meetings. I am sure I do not need to tell you that it is equally important that you are able to communicate across the organization to be effective.
If you are a good communicator you should be able to portray a high level of self-confidence, self-concept, and project a positive external image to the managers you support up, down, and across the organization. There are ways to do this and the best way is to make sure you have established trust and credibility. If you have these two(2) key elements you will have stronger working relationships with those that you support. These key elements are the foundation of your level of effectiveness in your organization.
If you have these two(2) building blocks you then need to make sure you are an effective influencer,that you provide a clear and direct image and knowledge base. You need to make sure you have targeted your audience and built a message that is clear and concise that people understand and not mistake or feel it is HR speak. If you can do this you will reap beneficial results for your project/program/initiative or whatever. This will also flow though to your subordinates.
I hope that this short message on communication is helpful especially to the mid-level HR manager, director. For those at the top, the CHRO, CPO you should already know this
HR Analytics at Google, 8 tips from Prasad Setty
Luk Smeyers, with iNostix is our guest blogger. Thanks Luk for continuing to provide great content!
No HR background
Prasad Setty, a self-described "numbers guy," never expected to find himself in HR, says Andrew McIlvaine in a 2010 article in HREonline. "If you'd asked me in business school if I would be spending time in HR, I would've laughed, because I thought HR was soft and fluffy and that I had no intuition for people issues," says Setty, who holds an MBA from the Wharton School and a master's degree in chemical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.
VP of People Analytics
And yet today, Setty is happily ensconced in HR at Google Inc., albeit in a numbers-driven role, serving as the company's VP of people analytics. "Google is a great place to try a data-driven approach to HR," says Setty, who joined the Mountain View, Calif.-based technology behemoth in 2006 after stints at McKinsey & Co. and Capital One.
At Google, Setty's mandates includes:
· finding better ways to determine what's on the minds of "Googlers," as the company's employees are called
· making sure top performers stay with the company and continue to innovate throughout their careers
Setty’s 8 tips for HR Analytics
· understand what's important to the organization on a people level (and start measuring it)
· determine what's on the mind of your employees
· measure the impact good managers have (and develop more of them)
· build a decision-making system that avoids cognitive errors
· measure the intention to stay or leave (and not a long satisfaction survey)
· compare retention scores of high performers versus low performers
· be very transparent with results of surveys
· identify low performers and give them the opportunity to course-correct
Not copying best practices
In so doing, he's found a way to match numbers and HR in exciting new ways, encouraging his HR staff to push the boundaries of what can be done within the profession. This is partly out of necessity: Given its unique culture of constant invention, Google simply isn't interested in copying best practices from other large companies, says interviewer McIlvaine.
You can read the full article here.
Ten Tech-Enabled Business Trends to Watch
Advancing technologies and their swift adoption are upending traditional business models. Senior executives need to think strategically about how to prepare their organizations for the challenging new environment.
Don't Just Survey Your Employees: Link Your Data!
1. Choosing the metrics to link to employee engagement2. Determining the logistics of the research3. Sharing results of the research with employees to create an action plan to achieve improvements.
- Make sure you link to the right metrics. Look at your industry and company and make sure that you understand what drives your revenue and/or what impacts your strategic execution.
- Make sure your data is reliable and valid. This is one of the hardest areas for most HR professionals. When it comes to data hygiene HR hasn't been the best.
- Look at how you will be analyzing your data. Data is everywhere in your company. To be able to look at data system wide you have to have a unit of comparison. Whether that unit is by department or by location. You have to compare apples to apples.
- Tell a compelling story. Don't just do a show and tell of ALL of you cool data. Paint a picture on what you found out and what it means to YOUR AUDIENCE.
- Follow through on your observations and recommendations with action plans that hold managers and employees accountable for change.
YouTube Acquisition to Foster Better Video, Sell More Ads
Mountain View, Calif.—YouTube has acquired video production company Next New Networks to help contributors develop better original content and attract advertisers.
The Future of HR - by Peter Cappelli
As the U.S. economy begins to right itself from the financial crisis and associated recession, our thoughts turn to spring and the possibility of new growth -- and new opportunities for business. How about for human resources?
It's the season for guessing what's ahead, and here are two reports that offer their guesses.
The first of these is a study, Working Beyond Borders: Insights from the Global Chief Human Resource Study, conducted by IBM that is based on interviews with 707 chief human resource officers from around the world.
It's worth remembering that many of the world's economies have been chugging along nicely even while the United States and much of Europe were in the doldrums, so the experience of these other countries such as India, Brazil and China might be quite different from that in America.
Having said that, it is surprising to see that the overwhelming priority at the moment for HR leaders around the world in the study is to become more efficient, or in other words, cut costs. This is not a happy finding for those of us who were hoping for some renewed vigor in the HR function.
A potentially big realignment of resources is associated with globalization. Companies in "mature" economies (read: United States, western Europe and Japan, in particular) are focusing their expected head-count growth in developing countries.
Interestingly, almost as many HR heads in the developing countries said that they expect to be expanding their head count in North America. The possibility of expansion, even if modest, back into the United States is something we haven't been anticipating.
In terms of HR-specific challenges, there was much less concern with the ability to hire than with the ability to retain employees across the world. Apparently we are more puzzled about retention than hiring.
CHROs in developing countries thought the hiring challenge was mainly about money, while those in mature markets thought it was more about aligning company values with individual values.
With respect to retention, developing-country representatives said opportunity for advancement was the key to success, more so than those from mature markets who focused on challenging assignments.
I can't help wondering if the responses from the mature-market representatives reflected something like rationalization: We can't offer money -- given cost pressures -- or career advancement -- given the lack of growth -- so let's hope something we can offer will do the trick.
The biggest gaps the HR leaders saw in the capabilities of their own area were in development -- developing workforce capabilities, generally, and leaders, specifically -- and knowledge sharing.
The second study (SHRM Foundation Leadership Roundtable: What's Next for HR?) was conducted by the SHRM Foundation and was based on a focus group of HR heads and thinkers and observers of business. (Full disclosure: I participated in this study.)
The task here was more explicitly to look forward, beyond the current issues, to anticipate future challenges for HR.
There was a recognition that the recession had changed some things, and not in a good way. HR at least in the United States is even more starved for resources, more dependent on outsourcing and more risk-averse.
On the whole, the view was that not much has changed in human resources over the past decade or so. And there was a concern that HR was actually falling behind in terms of the business acumen needed to operate at senior levels and through the acceptance of a support role as opposed to one that drives business.
This group saw three important issues facing the HR side of business in the future. It is possible to see them as both challenges and opportunities. One echoes the IBM study, and that is globalization and the challenge of managing workforces in many different countries.
The other two are quite different, though.
The first has to do with managing risk. The financial crisis has made most businesses pay more attention to the financial risks they are exposed to and, by association, the business risks. As with most aspects of business, managing these risks comes down to managing people differently.
What are the HR implications of taking risk management more seriously?
The other issue is the avalanche of metrics, and business-related data more generally, that has the potential to overwhelm organizations if not managed carefully -- but also has the opportunity to change them for the better if they can use that information appropriately.
Nowhere does that data have more opportunity for good than in HR, where so many costly and strategic bets are still made on the basis of hunches. Can we harness these data in ways that improve our decision making, finding the value and reducing costs?
Here's my take, looking at these two studies together.
- I wonder whether the HR issues in developing countries, where economies are booming and labor markets are tight, will have much of anything in common in the future with the HR issues in mature markets, where the opposite is true. HR in these developing economies is a hot area where the best talent is going and new ideas are being generated.
- Second, especially in mature markets, I worry that we are fighting the last war in HR.
Is anyone thinking about what it means for HR to take on new challenges such as risk management seriously? Are we making any progress in improving our use of metrics to make decisions in different, better ways?
Finally, I'm wondering whether we have reached something like a tipping point for HR in mature countries where the innovation, ideas and energy shifts clearly from HR departments to HR vendors.
Perhaps HR departments are now so starved for resources and so focused on the operational goal of cost containment that thinking about the future has to be ceded to some other group.
Peter Cappelli is the George W. Taylor Professor of Management and director of the Center for Human Resources at The Wharton School. His latest book, with Bill Novelli, is Managing the Older Worker: How to Prepare for the New Organizational Order.
Current International HR Shock - Future HR International Talent Drought
The shock is that we operate in a global economy and not just an economy within our borders. If we think locally and not globally then we lose, and I mean lose big in today's world. In the constant evaluation of product offerings and how far they reach throughout the world we also have to evaluate if our(your)human resources professionals also reach throughout the world. What do I mean, let me be more clear:
- does your HR team understand global exchange?
- does your HR team think outside your domestic boarders and do they understand global econometrics?
- does your HR team understand how to manage people abroad, and do they understand local international laws and the financial ramifications to your bottom line?
- does your HR team think in terms of international competition?
- is your HR team flexible to move internationally and do they speak a second language?
- can your HR team communicate effectively with your company's partners outside your borders?
- are your HR teams focus still on tactical issues rather than global insight?
Is your HR team ready to address the international economic trade and business environment? I would like your thoughts on this important subject. I also think that SHRM and other HR associations need to change their focus and emphasize the international issues.
How Many Metrics Do You Have? Really?
Repost.Us Launches in Bid to Protect Original Online Content
Why HR Metrics Don’t Work
Thanks again to Luk Smeyers from INostix, Netherlands for guest posting on our blog. Another great topic.
A few days ago, I was reading a digital summary at FT.com of the brand new 2nd edition of Wayne Cascio’s and John Boudreau’s book ‘Investing in People’. Especially the chapter ‘hitting the wall in HR measurement’ is my absolute favorite. Let me summarize a few of the ideas.
Hitting the wall in HR measurement
Type "HR measurement" into a search engine, and you get millions of results. Scorecards, metrics, dashboards, data warehouses, surveys, benchmarks, and audits in abundance ratios. The spectrum of HR measurement methodologies seems unlimited. The paradox however is that even when HR measurements are executed well, most organizations typically hit a ‘wall’: HR metrics or measures only rarely drive true strategic change! Boudreau’s and Cascio’s figure (see below) shows how, over time, despite more sophisticated measures, the trend line doesn't seem to be leading to the desired strategic results.
A huge gap
Some HR professionals assume that they have strategic impact by - at best – holding line managers accountable for the outcomes of HR metrics. Proudly they declare that top managers’ bonuses depend in part on the results of an HR scorecard. Unfortunately, there is a major gap between the results of the measurements and their actual impact on the organization. Because descriptive metrics – such as turnover, retention, time to fill, illness rate, etc. – just don’t have a strategic impact. These kind of metrics will never give HR the necessary insights to break through the wall.
What can HR do?
• Moving from descriptive metrics to much more insightful analytics to be able to break through the wall (and understanding the differences between HR metrics and HR analytics)
• Developing more insightful analytics to underpin strategic decision making (and linking with bonus absolutely doesn’t make sense!)
• With HR measurements, focusing much more on the organizational impact of HR investments instead of focusing too much on HR efficiency metrics (like HR costs, HR ratios, cost of hiring, etc)
• Moving from an HR scorecard approach to a Business scorecard philosophy.
Luk Smeyers, iNostix, February 2011