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What’s your HCM POV?

Friday, March 25, 2011 by Franklin Bros

 

  I think one of the most interesting inputs at the HCI Summit I covered recently was from Gary Hamel emphasising the importance of ideology – knowing what you believe about something in order to be able to support it through the design of your organisation and its processes and practices etc (or alternatively to deliberately not support it if your own ideology is out of alignment with that of your employer!).

I also talked about ideology during my HR 2.0 webinar recently, and am going to use it as a central focus to my Strategic HR session that I’m running today.

So I thought it was interesting to come across an update from Dave Ulrich’s RBL noting the importance of having a leadership point of view (see picture).  This is exactly the point that I’m going to be making – HR leaders in particular need to have a well developed POV / ideology about HR / HCM.  (I’m not so keen on RBL’s ‘brand’ concept.)

I think this POV idea is central to our Dave’s ‘credible activist’ competency, but it goes beyond this too.  It’s about understanding the range of options open to HR practitioners to do HR differently, and designing an HR architecture which is right for a particular organisation, rather than being based on practices which are being used elsewhere (see my post on Dan Pink at the HCI summit if you need a place to start).

Sorry HR, but your best practices normally just aren’t!

 

I’ll be running more sessions on Strategic HR in the UK later in the year – see here.

 

 

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Passive job seeking still high in the UK

Monday, March 21, 2011 by Franklin Bros

 

I’ve posted several times recently to suggest that what seem like decent engagement scores being reported by some organisations and a few vendors may hide a number of potentially very significant, and growing, employment problems.

New based research from Plateau Systems seems to confirm this thinking:-

So firstly, yes, this survey also suggests job satisfaction is fairly high. In fact, 62% of the two thousand adults in Great Britain who participated in this YouGov survey suggested that they are very, or somewhat, satisfied in their current job.

There are some interesting variations within this – so whilst at the lowest end of the spectrum, only 49% of London based workers are very / somewhat satisfied, a full 73% of those not-always-so-cheerful Scots say they are similarly satisfied.

And while 62% may be high, it’s a tad bit lower than the 69% of US employees who said they were very or somewhat satisfied in s similar survey completed recently (see Plateau’s summary of this research, or John Hollon’s write-up at TLNT.com).

 

I’m Outta Here!

Based upon these findings, and what we know more broadly about the economy, it’s no great surprise that just 15% of people said they were actively job hunting (17% in London – and the North-West, and just 10% in Scotland – and only 8% in Yorkshire and the Humber).

But the survey identifies 72% of respondents, all currently employed, as I’m Outta Here’s: passive job seekers who would consider leaving their current job if approached with a new job opportunity.

And while 46% of people are seeking or would consider a new job to increase their salary, 27% are looking for career advancement and the same percentage say they just need a change - in fact 21% of people say they want to change their careers or professions as well as their employers.

(YouGov doesn’t seem to have asked people whether they’ve just felt used and abused, particularly over the last couple of years.)

 

You Comin’ Over?

It strikes me to be a pretty good time to be recruiting, particularly for people in London and the South. It doesn’t look like you’d even need to offer people huge increments over their current compensation. The main need seems to be about simply being flexible enough to give people a shot at something new.

Of course you could always try doing this with your existing workforce too. You may even create a few more I’m Stayin’ Put’s as well!

 

Plateau

This is the first of a series of posts at Strategic HCM sponsored by Plateau.

Plateau provides SaaS-based Talent Management solutions for developing, managing, rewarding and optimising organisational talent to increase workforce productivity and maximise operating performance.

Plateau software has been deployed by many of the world's most successful enterprises. Organisations such as GE, Royal Bank of Canada, Singapore Airlines and Thomson Reuters use Plateau to increase the productivity of their employees and partners.

Plateau delivers:

  • Scalable, flexible and secure multi-tenant architecture
  • 99.5% uptime
  • 24 x 7 x 654 support
  • Experienced experts to manage your system from implementation to ongoing support.

 

Contact Plateau here or call at +1 866 4PLATEAU (+1 866 475 2832) or in the UK at +44 203 1788 409.

You can also read updates from Plateau at their new blog: http://www.plateau.com/blog.

 

 

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The Winning Entry: Christine Kelly / HR Challenges at Brady Corporation

Thursday, March 17, 2011 by Franklin Bros

 

Brady Corp  I promised that I’d award a ticket for the Economist’s Talent Management Summit to one of the people responding to my recent survey on HR’s challenges and I’m delighted to announce that the winner of this ticket is Christine Kelly from Brady Corporation.

I managed to catch up with Christine last week and asked her about the responses to her survey.  First, just to let you know about Christine – she has been at Brady for 9 years and is HR Director for the EMEA region, leading 4 senior HR leaders and site teams across the region.  Brady Corporation is a $1.4 bn US owned company that you may not have heard of because its focus is in niche markets, with a particular focus on identifying and protecting premises, products and people (making for example safety signs, such as the green running man for emergency exit signs, high performance labelling systems and identity badges).

We started, as did the survey, with Brady’s business challenges.  This was all about achieving an ambitious business vision in a still uncertain economy.  One major theme was getting better organised as a global organisation.  Brady’s EMEA team has already consolidated its focus into three business streams, and the challenge now is working effectively and efficiently in these streams – using the right systems and technology, implementing best practice and clarifying responsibilities for processes – who does what etc.

The HR challenges fall out of these business challenges (I would write ‘of course’, but it’s not always the case!).  Brady HR’s first challenge is about culture and values – taking the temperature of the organisation during change and engaging employees in the company’s vision.  They do this in different ways but I particularly liked the use of what are called skip level meetings.  In these the Directors talk to the people who work for their direct reports (without the direct report being there) etc.

There’s also a strategy deployment process which sounded very empowering.  This starts with business leaders setting challenging goals for teams which will lead to the achievement of the company’s goals.  But then the teams are left to go away and find the best way of delivering against the objectives and will report regularly against the consequent improvement projects.

My third set of questions were around the preparedness of HR to deliver against these challenges, and it sounded as if Brady Corp’s HR teams are set up quite well for this.  Their processes still need work because of the recent change in business structure and processes etc (and because of the ongoing challenge of operating in a global way across the different languages and legal jurisdictions in Europe).

HR technology’s in a good state as Brady Corporation implemented Workday a year ago (and Christine says she can’t want to see the new additions in version 12).  They also use a performance and career system that they built themselves and which they see as one of the key things that support their way of doing business.  They’re also looking at a recruitment system, but the question is still whether they can justify a single system operating across the various countries they’re in, available in all the different languages that would be required – or whether they can meet their needs in a different way.

The capability of the HR team is good, partly because Christine’s been able to recruit her HR leaders herself, and has recruited them for the environment they’re working in – so understanding how to make business partnering work – which still seems to be a major challenge for many organisations, doesn’t seem to be an issue here.

Probably the biggest need is to focus on HR’s operating model – particularly given the high standards and expectations of their internal customers.  And here the issue is mainly about the time-lag between strategy and execution.  Christine explains this best herself in her response to my survey:

“The typical dilemma for HR is that the function must not only deliver the strategic support but must also manage a number of administrative tasks.  The requirement for lean teams, means that a high level of technology is required before the proportions of strategic and admin work can change.  Systems are, however, slow to be implemented and complex to standardise globally.  Pressure of work and demand for a responsive customer service demands that urgent, admin tasks suck up resources and this prevents the move to more strategic activities (and means that HR continues to maintain more administrative headcount, who are less capable to pick up the strategic work).  In practice, HR is not able to change its operating model quickly enough to meet the demands being placed on the function.”

 

I also asked Christine about the Talent Management Summit we’ll both be attending and she’s obviously looking forward to this, as in her view, in addition to the normal benefits about getting new ideas about best practice, The Economist has selected some influential thinkers, all from respected organisations for this conference - and they’ve also picked topics that are very relevant to today’s world.  I agree!

 

Also see my post on the results of the survey, and this one of my conversation with Matthew Hanwell about HR’s challenges at Nokia (Matthew will also be joining me at the Economist Talent Management Summit).

 

 

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Connecting HR Unconference (#CHRU 2)

Wednesday, March 16, 2011 by Franklin Bros

 

  At the end of my HR 2.0 webinar, I mentioned that a good example of the sort of focus on community I’d been discussing is Connecting HR.

As with the various examples I described, there’s a technology focus to this community, particularly in our new social site at connectinghr.org, replacing our previous site and the Yammer group we’d been using.

And there’s the face to face side with our series of tweet-ups, and now our second unconference which will be held on 5th May.  If you can get to London that day it’ll be an event well worth attending.

See my previous posts on Connecting HR / the 1st unconference:

 

 

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HR Innovation webinar

Tuesday, March 15, 2011 by Franklin Bros

 

   Then my next webinar will focus on innovation in HR, building on my recent comments about the ‘Big Rethink’ in HR.  You can Book here.

 

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Social business webinar

by Franklin Bros

 

   My next webinar, building on the theme of today’s will look at the social business, and will be on Tuesday 3rd May.

“The social business is often defined as one that uses social media or Enterprise 2.0 technology.  However, it's much more useful to define it by outcome rather than activity.  So Jon Ingham's definition of it is an organisation in which social relationships between employees and with others are valued and accumulated.  In this webinar, Jon will describe the range of tools, technologies and other activities - face-to-face and virtual, which are available to organisations to develop their peoples' relationships.”

 

And this webinar will be social!  Ie we’ll definitely have questions working, and I hope I’ll be able to put some of you on to talk about the social business too.

 

You can book here.

 

 

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A few questions on HR 2.0 (webinar review)

by Franklin Bros

 

  Well I found delivering that webinar fun.  I was a shame that I was challenged by the technology meaning that once again it wasn’t as social (interactive) as I would have liked.  Well OK, it wasn’t social at all this time.  Basically I had to junk the polling and Q&A etc all together, and just hope that people will email be their questions, which I can respond to here.

The problem was, as I explained, that I’m having meetings in Houston at the moment and had to dash back to my room to start the webinar.  And then because the organisation and delivery of webinars is still quite new to me, I ended up faffing about, and decided just to focus on my presentation, just so we could start on time.

Anyway, the good news is that without the socialness, I managed to cover a lot of ground.  You can listen to an archive of the webinar here – and I do recommend you do.  The content’s good, even if the delivery’s a bit patchy (the presentation starts 1 minute 20 seconds in)!  And you can always leave me your questions in the comments to this post below.

I did get a couple of questions over Twitter.   Alan noted that his business is nervous and suspicious of social media… thinking it's an excuse to get people away from doing their job, and asked:

“Do you think organisations are geared up for a social workforce...do they think social happens just outside the door?”

 

Yes, I think that’s still largely true – and particularly in those organisations that are still nervous of social media.

But I do think that’s changing.  Organisations are realising their workforces are social (are motivated to connect and bond with each other, and are more productive when they work with people they have pre-existing relationships with).  It will take time, but I do think it’s happening.

It’s a similar situation to an extent, to the early days of emotional intelligence, or at least Daniel Goleman’s popularisation of this concept.  Goleman used to suggest that people had to leave their emotional identities outside the office – hanging up their intuitive and relationship selves like their coats on a hanger.  Now most businesses realise that they benefit if they accept people are emotional beings, and try to influence their emotional effectiveness as well.  I think exactly the same thing will happen in terms of social beings and their social effectiveness too.

 

I’m hoping to get more questions from attendees later and will come back and respond to these here too.  And I’m also going to post a link to the slideset I used that will also provide links to my blog posts and other case studies.  Look out on Friday or over the weekend (maybe Monday) for all of this.

 

Picture credit: Öljylautta

 

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