mickcollins
The daily pitch
Think about all the times in your daily work that you are required to sell or market your organisation – yes, there’s formal marketing campaigns and new business proposals, but what about conducting interviews to ensure you attract the best candidate? Or walking into a client meeting to be faced with a senior executive you’ve never met? Or bumping into an old friend on the way home and they ask who you’re working for now?
In all these instances, your employer will be relying on you to sell, sell, sell! But how many of us have the skills to “close the sale” in our daily interactions? More importantly, are we motivated to sell?
Risk has a Human Face
I sometimes shudder when I hear HR professionals ask ‘why should HR consider risk management?’ ‘Doesn’t HR have enough to do putting out operational fires and managing their day job?’ Sure, ok, but it is also the role of HR professionals to focus on the key priorities of the organisation. HR is clearly missing a key ingredient if it believes risk management is someone else’s job.
During the past month, Inform ran their Insight Series across Australian capital cities on this very issue. The latest series, entitled ‘The Risk Revolution – Strategies that generate business impact’, highlighted the fact that HR is in a prime position to ensure that organisations can deliver on business strategies.
Performance Reviews, Challenges, and SuccessFactors – an employee’s view
Around three months ago I had my regular catch-up with my manager on performance objectives. Shortly afterwards I shared a less formal version of this meeting with my CEO who keeps in personal touch with each individual employee. On both these occasions I offered that I love what I do but I was looking for a new challenge within the company.
Now some three short months later all staff received news that has literally handed me my request on a plate. Infohrm will be acquired by SuccessFactors and the deal will settle in the third quarter of 2010.
It seems that if you hanker after something you might just receive it.
Workforce Planning in the Federal Government
A new GAO report on workforce planning in the federal government illustrates several critical components of effective forecasting that profiled agencies are tackling, with varying degrees of success. These include:
1. Aligning workforce planning with strategic plans and budgets
2. Involving managers and other stakeholders in the forecasting process
3. Creating workforce plans that focus on critical roles, occupations, and skills
What makes an education ‘revolution’?
Leading up to the 2007 federal election in Australia, the Labour party used reforms to the Australian education system as a key policy offering to the Australian public. Dubbed the ‘Education Revolution’, these reforms consisted of a $14.7 billion investment in education over the following three years. Much attention has been paid to these reforms; they will have fundamental impacts on the future Australian labour force, with flow on effects for workforce planners globally. Since the election however, the government has also promised over $40 billion in response to the global financial crisis, and is facing rising health care costs related to population ageing. In this context, are the proposed education reforms efficient, and how can they be improved?
Many academic studies have demonstrated that although investments in the public education system may encourage income growth and equality, these outcomes are dependent on student attendance and completion of schooling. Despite the compulsory nature of primary and secondary schooling, Australia currently ranks 20th amongst OECD countries in terms of school completion – overall, 72 percent of 19 year olds had completed year 12 in 2006. Only just over one third of ‘very remote’ students had completed 12 years of high school, while a similar proportion had not even completed year 10. In this case, rather than simply providing more financial input to the education system, a real education revolution would target the underlying factors which prevent children from attending school, the most prominent being the requirement in some families for children to earn an income. One simple suggestion in the literature is to schedule school holidays at a time when a child’s labour is most required in the family business (harvest time for farming communities, for example).
We’re Going to Turn This Team Around 360 Degrees
Every so often, I come across sports-related phrases that make me pause to say..“huh?” This is certainly the case for those related to measurement. In a moment of light-heartedness, I thought I’d take a moment to share some oddities with you; please feel free to suggest your own.
1. When asked how much effort they put into a particular activity, an athlete replies “I gave 120%”. While physically possible to give more than whole, mathematically it seems infeasible.
2. Related to this is the answer of “11” (thereby indicating a superlative) when asked “On a scale of 1-10, how would you rate that game?” Would answering “10” failed to properly convey the game’s excellence?
3. When it comes to length, many such measures are depicted in terms of the “number of football fields”. Similar to TV commercials for fitness equipment (which must always have two requisites – you can use it to exercise in front of the TV and it must fit under the bed for storage), length and distance must be convertible to football fields in order to appeal to our practical thought patterns. For example, the Titanic was 882 feet in length. Which doesn’t seem that long until you find out that 882 feet is the approximate equivalent of 3 football fields. Now I get it. Wow, that’s pretty long.
Risky Business
As an Operations Team Leader, one of the questions I get asked most frequently is why an issue arose in spite of a rigorous, dedicated Quality Assurance (QA) process. Quality Assurance is reviewed regularly at Infohrm and sometimes the obvious conclusion is that a more comprehensive QA checklist is needed. More often though, the issue is not the QA process itself; rather, it is a case of the QA-er missing the signs. Signs that, in hindsight, can seem as obvious as walking into an abandoned house, in the middle of the woods, late at night, with spooky music building to a crescendo in the background. The probability is high you are going to stumble into a room with a saw wielding psychopath. In moments of weakness, I am very tempted to imagine how a less than diligent QA-er might respond. ‘Oh, I didn’t expect you to be here. Are you going to cut off my limbs now? Okay, I’d prefer if you could start with the left side as I am right handed’. Such is the outcome of their seeming passivity to performing the designated QA checks.
It should be noted though, that this response would be completely a-typical of any Infohrm employee; and particularly uncharacteristic for people that are hired into the Operations team. Characteristics like intelligence, perfectionism, consideration and just a touch of pedantic-ness. In other words, people that I would trust with my iTunes library (it must be neat) and you should trust with your data.
What to Expect for Strategic Workforce Planning in 2010
In the spirit of forecasting, and taking a cue from colleagues, I’d like to offer some thoughts on what will happen with Strategic Workforce Planning (SWFP) in 2010. There’s good reason for me to be confident to prognosticate, but if these predictions miss the mark, I’ll borrow a policy from TMQ, a favorite sportswriter of mine: “All predictions wrong or your money back.”
SWFP is going to be a big deal for more organizations, and more HR groups will get involved. Why? Libby Sartain, former HR chief at Yahoo and Southwest Airlines, on Workforce identified Strategic Workforce Planning as the biggest opportunity for HR in 2010. As well, the Infohrm Global Workforce Planning Survey shows that the percentage of respondents that conduct SWFP grew by a 20% rate from 2008 to 2009, which should continue into this year. Furthermore, despite the tremendously difficult economic conditions, more organizations indicated that they are going to increase their level of investment in SWFP in 2010. If that doesn’t prove the point, look at the vast array of knowledge published lately that highlights executive thinking around making workforce reductions more strategically focused. That’s the strongest recent business case for SWFP: proactive talent alignment and workforce flexibility minimizes the risk of workforce reductions hurting a firm’s strategic position. The recommendation here is to start Workforce Planning (for a longer forecast than two years) if you’re not already doing it.
Preparing for tomorrow when the spotlight is on today.
Anybody who has attempted to embed strategic workforce planning (SWFP) into their business planning processes will attest that it can be an uphill battle at times. I recently saw an organisation make great strides with SWFP only for the process to be somewhat de-prioritised before its roots took hold and the true benefits were realised. This is not to say the WFP team failed to create a burning platform, didn’t attempt to embed the process, or did a generally poor job. The business planning and HR departments still saw tremendous value in SWFP, but found themselves perpetually fire fighting and decided their resources were better allocated to more operationally focussed initiatives in the short term. If this scenario rings a bell, here are a few tips to make sure you are prepared when your organisation is ready to re-focus on tomorrow:
1) Refine operational reporting and planning – In order to be successful with SWFP, the business must trust your workforce data and planning processes. You can use this SWFP downtime to build or further solidify that trust by supporting the business with their operational reporting and planning needs.
Project Commitment
I have seen many project managers with all the best intentions of meeting project objectives and delivering on time… Until they begin to meet roadblocks with people.
Generally, across the life of a project, a project manager deals with various stakeholders. Each stakeholder group has varying levels of engagement, generally motivated by the nature of their involvement in the project. For some stakeholders, this may be a chance for them to provide guidance in relation to business strategy, for others this may be a chance for them to show their boss that they can cope with additional responsibility. These variables can make it difficult to use a standard approach to stakeholder engagement when managing projects.
We all know that at the beginning of a project it is essential to plan. This includes planning everything from schedules and scoping through to resources. An essential element of planning is to work out how you are going to engage stakeholders. The most overlooked step in this process is assessing individual’s motivation towards the project and implementing strategies to manage each stakeholder. Unfortunately, there is no amount of preparation that can remove that one stakeholder who actively resists the project, but there are a few of steps that can be taken to help achieve a smoother project.
Human Capital Measurement Predictions for 2010
Following the lead of George Sandford at Praski Publishing, who offers his own blog of HR predictions for 2010, I thought I’d share 5 of my own thoughts (I don’t have many more to give away!) on where human capital measurement/metrics/analytics/planning is heading in 2010. Would love to read feedback on these*:
1. Headcount lists will finally be replaced with strategic reports that managers actually use. We’ll know that they do by using feedback loops to gauge the “actionability” of each report.
2. All-encompassing workforce scorecards will focus more on the “wow” factor – what can we teach a senior executive about our employees that they did not previously know? – and less on measuring everything under the sun.
3. The story will become as important as the data.
4. We’ll identify the 2010 version of the Sears’ Employee-Customer-Profit chain, a landmark model linking workforce and financial metrics. What’s the next great breakthrough in human capital measurement frameworks? (Infohrm certainly has some ideas…)
5. And finally, we’ll see human capital data become a more integral part of public companies’ external reporting activities. Analyst call comments along the lines of “We just need to hire more sales staff” will be replaced by “Our data analysis indicates that sales staff with X skills, from Y source, and having gone through Z training modules are 32% more productive than their peers. As such, we are putting a premium on building a sales force consistent with these parameters.”
Energy & Utilities Consortium 2009 Critical Jobs Research and 2010 Forecast
Infohrm has several Consortia that provide networking and benchmarking in specific industries – Retail, Financial Services, Healthcare, Global Technology, and Energy and Utilities. I have personally been involved with the last one, and learned that most of the Partner organizations we’re working with have a higher level of Workforce Planning experience than North American firms seem to, on average.
Recently, we finished a research project on Critical Roles in the industry, and came up with some interesting findings, including:
- Many organizations care about their most critical roles and job families, but a high percentage have no formal framework for critical roles and/or lack a comprehensive integration with HR/Talent Management programs and processes
- Definitions and criteria for critical roles vary widely – over 30 different jobs and job families are labeled as critical by research participants in a common industry
- Organizations that conduct Strategic Workforce Planning are more likely to have criticality of roles embedded within their job families, HR and talent management practices, and data
- Engineers are the most common critical job family across E&U industry sectors, with “shortages” driving costs up and creating difficulties, particularly in achieving gender/diversity targets
Achieving Workforce Gains in the Downturn
Many organizations have noted in some public forum how they leverage the downturn to save money, reorganize, strengthen infrastructure, develop talent, or overall improve organizational performance. Some do it purely focused on the dollars saved, as suggested in this WSJ article, while others claim no fear in investing in the workforce. To be sure, it’s as [...]
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Is there a relationship between profitability and attitude?
When it comes to Human Capital data, I’ve noticed that organizations can be grouped into one of two categories. The first can be described as reluctant, uncommitted participants who simply seem to be going through the motions of searching for insight. The other would be those organizations who readily recognize that Human Capital data can [...]
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WF Analytics and Planning Implications of Social Networking
Social Networking (SN) media has exploded in recent years as an outlet for information delivery. Blogs, wikis, Facebook and LinkedIn, Twitters and Yammers, you name it – almost everyone is reading and writing without the traditional media in the middle. I’ve been watching on the surface to determine which directions the various forms have taken, [...]
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