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Social Media in HR Summit, Dublin, Ireland

Tuesday, June 12, 2012 by Franklin Bros

 

   I’ve recently arranged to speak at another couple of great conferences over the next few months.  On Thursday 27th / Friday 28th September I’ll be speaking at Fleming Europe’s Social Media in HR Summit held in Dublin:

 

How to leverage social media properly?

Are organizations exploiting social media to reach external audiences?

Who is using social media in the workplace?

Do organizations provide any social media training to employees who engage in social media activities?

These are only a few questions that were asked in the SHRM Survey 2011: Social Media in the Workplace. The results were rather startling. They revealed that while 68 % of organizations leverage social media to reach external audiences, only 27 % of them provide employees with training on how to work with social media.

Are you among them? Are you looking for a change?

 

At this one-of-a-kind event participants will meet highly qualified experts from Microsoft, Deloitte, LinkedIn, Twitter, Nokia, Orange, Ford, Unilever, Vodafone, Dell, Samsung, HSBC, etc. These forward-looking, top-level enthusiasts working in the strategic communications industry and new media will focus on the importance of embedding digital thinking and social media impacts in HR practice.

In order to bridge the gap between the necessary and real-life practice we have chosen topics including social engagement, recruitment futurology, digital networks, social media footprints, risks and exploitation of social media strategies and much more.

Fleming Europe's premiere cross-industry HR event is aimed at Senior Executives responsible for Talent, Recruiting, Knowledge Management, Employee Engagement and Learning as well as Communication Executives responsible for Employer Branding, Internal Communication and Social Media.

Are you interested in exploring the most 'viral' social network issues? Do you want to seize the opportunity to gain valuable contacts and useful information? Then do not hesitate and join us in Dublin. Learn more at http://cross.flemingeurope.com/social-media-hr/

 

I hope you can join me there.  And I’ll be live blogging from the event here too.

 

 

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Don’t Jubilee’ve It!

Monday, June 11, 2012 by Franklin Bros

 

   Sorry for the lack of posts last week but I was away and didn’t manage to get any posts prepared early.

And why was I way? – well in case you didn’t notice it was the dear Queen’s diamond? jubilee last week.  That meant we all got an extra day’s bank holiday, delaying the UK’s exit from recession.  And also I really didn’t want to be around.

Isn’t it time the UK grew up and became a republic?  I certainly can’t see how any HR practitioner could support the current system.  Take any aspect of organisational management that we aim to deal with and the retention of monarchy makes absolutely no sense in this (the UK) organisation:

  • Organisational culture: the system reinforces the belief that people progress based upon birth or luck rather than by skill or hard work.  I don’t think it’s any accident that the US’ republican culture produces such a higher proportion of entrepreneurs than the UK.
  • Organisation design: the system of princes and princesses, lord and ladies, dukes and duchesses etc may not represent the way real work gets done but it’s still an important shadow system.  It may provide a source of fascination for tourists and my six-year old daughter but removing it would bring the top and bottom of our organisation much closer together and provide a much needed boost to social mobility.
  • Performance management: one of the main reasons people seem keen to keep the monarchy is that the Queen is doing such a good job.  And I’ll admit that she is, but I really don’t think it’s that hard to do (and half of the time I don’t think it’s her arm waving anyway!).  OK, she doesn’t get much holiday, but then with all of that travel and horse riding – never mind the water ski lake at Balmorel! – does she really need one?
  • Recruitment – this is the crux.  The Queen may be doing OK but do we really want to leave the nation’s fortunes down to this particular family?  Elections may not be perfect either but at least you’re not tied to the same person for their lifetime.

 

Catching up on the news (though I don’t think the papers’ or even the BBC’s coverage always counts as such), despite the heavy rain, there do seem to have been a lot of people celebrating, but is this just because 2m people (including most of the republicans?) deserted the country instead?

And anyway, I’m all for a good party – but surely there are more constructive and important things to celebrate?

Not the English Summer however…

 

T-shirt credit: www.republic.org.uk

 

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Innovative talent management – pharmaceuticals example

Friday, June 1, 2012 by Franklin Bros

 

   Lovely day today for the first day of June – just the jubilee to get over (more on that soon) and then a busy and entertaining month ahead – including the Economist’s Talent Management Summit on 14th June.

I’ve been asking for innovative example of talent management in return for offering two tickets to go along to the Summit with me.  There are two leading entries to date – this is the second – from Keith Wilson, Global Talent / Change Director at Astra Zeneca (I know many of you will already know Keith as I suspect he’s the most connected HR person on Linkedin!):

“Great challenge Jon. I'll answer with a mixture of what we're doing and what we have plans to do.

But firstly my approach. I don't see the question that we're trying to address changing - i.e. balancing 'what does the organisation need', with 'what's right for the individual'. But I do see rapid change in the available toolset.

I try to triangulate (my favourite word of the moment) across the 'science', 'art' and external best practice in Talent Management to ensure that we continually evolve to have an agile approach.

The Science: we're making good progress on getting the right systems in place. I continue to be impressed by the likes of SuccessFactors and Rypple and we're seeing increased interest in what big data implications are for HR. For me this is about timeliness, accuracy and point-of-need; giving Line Managers actionable information at their fingertips, and reducing noise/complexity.

The Art: this gets to the heart of your question and I think this differs very much company-to-company (depending on that lazy c-word, culture). What is the common Talent language and how are decisions made?. I see a continued tilt towards the 'art' of talent management (as opposed to the science) in more relationship-based orgs, where perception/judgement and the subtleties of influence are more important. I wonder if we'll see roads towards the science of measuring that, perhaps an internal organisational Klout score? I'd also suggest that increased focus on building a truly diverse reflection of global footprint is accelerating the need to answer these questions. When it comes to how we think, the concept of 'unconscious bias' is proving a useful conversation.

Best practice: I've observed, recently, what I think is an interesting trend. The likes of Google & Microsoft have been saying that traditional leadership/talent development programmes haven't been working for them and that they're focussing on 'stretch-assignments', 'planning the next 2 roles', 'global mobility'. This has always been our approach (and has proved very successful from pov of succession/retention) and it's interesting to see other industries moving towards it...

So.... I try to THINK in 3-D (triangulation), ACT quickly, simply, based on timely information, and BEHAVE responsibly, confidently and with integrity.

I'm interested to hear others points of view...???”

 

Love it – and I definitely think there’s going to be a big focus on aligning talent management with organisational influence rather than individual contribution over the next few years.  More about that on this blog again soon as well.

Any comments for Keith, or me – do leave them here…

And if you think you can do better? – there’s still time to post your entry (the deadline has been extended till the end of the weekend).

But if you don’t make it you can still get a 15% discount by quoting SHCM when you book.

 

Also see http://strategic-hcm.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/innovative-talent-management-financial.html.

 

Picture credit: Picking up on Keith’s cue, I tried to use Twiangulate for him ( @kjw_hrd ), the Economist ( @EG_LeadershipTE ) and myself ( @joningham ) to analyse our relationships but it didn’t tell me that much – other than Keith doesn’t use Twitter as much as he does Linkedin!

 

 

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Innovative talent management - financial services example

Thursday, May 31, 2012 by Franklin Bros

 

   June tomorrow and only a couple of weeks to the Economist Talent Management conference on the 14th where I will acting as a media partner (ie I’ll be blogging a lot) and moderator (interviewing Ryan Blair).

I’ve been asking for innovative example of talent management in return for offering two tickets to go along to the Summit with me.  There are two leading entries to date – this is the first, from Alan in a financial services firm:

“Hi Jon. We have a few things which I think wouldn't count as very revolutionary (web based recruitment tools, etc) but the thing we are doing which is my 'entry' for your ticket competition is to massively extend the notion of leadership for change to everyone in the company. Its been done before in a few places, but not many. The issue is this - we have 4000 people worldwide. We have lots of things we want to achieve, lots of changes we want to make, but it will be too slow if we try to manage and control everything through some central process. We could spend forever analysing the changes required, assessing who we think our talented people are to go on the teams, creating plans, coordinating thru a programme office, etc, etc.


You know the picture because we've all seen it many times before. It works to a degree, but its inefficient, regularly underdelivers and often creates new management controls which stifle the business.

So we're heading in the other direction. We have a few projects for things like IT systems that need to be built, but almost everything else is up for grabs. There's an overall direction in terms of aspirations for the company, but the changes required are defined locally by people who have the energy to do something about it and can convince other people to get involved. Anyone can volunteer to identify something that's holding us back and get rid of it, or something that's an opportunity and go for it.

This way our talented people are not the ones who pass a conceptual assessment, but the people who step up and move the company forward. Its early days but in a few months we are on the way to millions of dollars of new business, simplified processes and the beginnings of a new buzz in the place.
And all of this is being done with no managers/leaders controlling what we do, no additional budget and no extra resources. It won't stay that way forever, but its an interesting journey as we explore what's possible.

Technically this is not a 'talent management initiative', in that its not being directed by HR and no-one is using the word talent, but it is developing people, it is changing the business, and it is delivering real results in line with our strategy, so I'd argue that counts :-)”

 

Me too – I think it also resonates very strongly with the concept of lowerarchy we’re been discussing at ConnectingHR.

But think you can do better? – there’s still time to post your entry (the deadline has been extended till the end of the weekend).

But if you don’t make it you can still get a 15% discount by quoting SHCM when you book.

 

 

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Making meetings more exciting?

Friday, May 25, 2012 by Franklin Bros

 

    There was some interesting research out a few weeks ago from Epson and CEBR suggesting that the average UK office worker wastes 2 hours and 39 minutes in meetings every week.

  • £26 billion: the amount lost from UK economy through time wasted in meetings in 2011
  • 2 hours 39 minutes: the number of hours workers feel are wasted in meetings during an average week
  • 49 minutes: the number of wasted minutes in meetings not made up for later
  • 10 hours or over: the amount of time one in five senior managers and directors say they spend in meetings per week
  • 11 minutes: the average amount of time it takes for people’s attention to drift in a meeting.

 

Nothing too surprising about any of this, other than perhaps how low some of them are (people concentrate in meetings for 11 minutes at a stretch – really???).

Anyway, I’ve got an article in Management Today providing some suggestions for dealing with this problem.  The last one’s my favourite!

  • Dispense with chairs
  • Get social
  • Opting out
  • Avoid technology blunders
  • Water cooler culture
  • Be bold with timings
  • Get creative with locations
  • Weapons of mass distraction
  • Use professional facilitation
  • Better biscuits

 

There’s a bit more detail on Management Today.

 

Picture credit: Crowne Plaza lays fresh grass carpets

 

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#SAPForum Doing Ulrich – or a return to the flexible resource pool?

Tuesday, May 22, 2012 by Franklin Bros

 

   Today I was at SAP Forum in London.   There were a couple of interesting technology oriented sessions (which to me, more than anything, showed the similarity of issues faced by IT and HR departments) and a few good HR ones (with a couple of less good ones too).

The best of these I thought was one on Ulrich – and beyond, presented by Accenture and providing some early insights into some research they’re doing currently (there’ll be a book).

Let me come clean on my perspectives before I start my review- I think Ulrich’s work largely makes a lot of sense (though I don’t agree with outside-in) and am looking forward to seeing him in Dubai and at HR Performance.  But I also think ‘doing Ulrich’ is an awful idea and that organisations that do this have only themselves to blame when things don’t work out.  More on my perspectives at the end of the report…

 

So, Accenture do see an issue in the model (or in execution of the model).  Those clients looking to stay with Ulrich are seeking to refine and optimise it as follows:

  • Joining up, connecting and providing more governance across the model
  • Assessing and developing business partners – often the weakest link
  • Bringing in a COO as an overlay on top of the model to make HR more commercial
  • Tailoring the model as one size does not fit all, eg using concierge services for investment bankers who aren’t going to do employee self-service are they? (just getting them behaving like decent human beings would seem to be enough of a challenge for most)
  • Unfudging global / regional / local activity splits
  • Moving more work into shared services and offshore to increase efficiency
  • Making hybrid the new market, eg a company might outsource to support growth in emerging markets but keep activities in-house elsewhere, or develop other, lower services to support the rising contingent workforce.

 

But how can it be that everybody is implementing the model badly?  Perhaps the model itself needs to change.  Accenture suspect the next new model will involve:

  • Focusing more strongly on operational excellence to deliver lower quartile costs
  • Keeping numbers of business partners to a very small number
  • Putting everybody else into a flexible, agile resource pool
  • Making all this work through ‘ruthless measurement and analytics’.

 

The last point seemed to get a lot of stress (this is Accenture!).  So for example:

“If HR can’t measure what it does and prove the value of what it does then it shouldn’t be doing it.”

 

This to me is absolute garbage – worse than that in fact as it’s not just useless, it’s also hugely dangerous as it’s just going to drive HR’s focus to more measurable activities which are generally less valuable.

 

I was pleased to see, however, that Accenture is stressing the need for HR to help their organisations rather than just support general austerity in their organisations by cutting their own numbers (which XpertHR suggests is what’s happening currently), so:

“HR can have a lot more impact by improving sales performance even 0.002% than it can through functional operational improvement.”

 

The biggest point for me though is that actually the whole debate is a red herring.  Ulrich never proposed ‘his’ model as a solution organisations should implement.  And it should never be one.  All organisational transformation, including HR’s, should begin with clear organisational principles, the identification of potential options and the comparison of the pros and cons of these options against the organisational principles.  The best solution may end up looking like Urich’s straw model or it may not.

So to me, it’s Accenture’s finding that “blanket ratios and sizing of the function were applied” that is pretty much the root cause of the problem – not the model nor the execution actually.

 

 

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HR Performance 2012

Monday, May 21, 2012 by Franklin Bros

 

   Straight after that I’m following Dave Ulrich back to London for another session on HR supporting social media in the business at HR Performance in London.

Other speakers include:

  • Sandy Begbie, Group People and Operations Director at Standard Life
  • Binna Kandola, Senior Partner and co-founder, Pearn Kandola
  • Vance Kearney, Vice President Human Resources, Oracle Europe, Middle East and Africa
  • Jez Lanhorn, Vice President People, McDonald’s UK
  • Darren Newman, Consultant Editor, XpertHR and writer, Equal Opportunities Review
  • Dean Shoesmith, Executive Head of Human Resources, London Boroughs of Sutton and Merton.
  • Liz Bramley, Employee Engagement and Diversity strategy, The Co-operative Group
  • Esther O'Halloran, Managing Director, Paul UK
  • Denis Barnard, founder of HRcomparison.com

 

I hope to see you there too.

 

 

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