• Job Boards Refuse To Sign Do Not Resuscitate Orders. The habits of job hunters outweigh the push towards social media. Job Boards find new lives.
• Multiple Kafka Moments. People who wake in the new normal will write in their diaries, “On morning, as I woke from an anxious dream, I noticed I had been turned into an enormous bug.” The realities of an economy reset to 75% of the good old days will not sit well. Big mid-term victories for non-democrats.
• Shrill Voices Proclaiming The Worthlessness of HR Grow Louder. The fundamental problem is that no one has figured out how to use social media effectively. The evangelistas blame the institution and call for revolution in the streets. The institutions yawn and demand variable pay packages. ¹

I’ll admit that it has been quite a few years since I have read Kafka (hey, at least I’ve read him),  but this is absolutely brilliant.  I remember after “2001” it took HR until 2004 to get their budgets and spending habits back.  HR technology and many other areas of the HR function not only lost momentum as the economy shifted south, but they also lost great ground.  I predicted that this downturn was going to be short enough and mild enough that organization leadership would continue to see HR’s core strategies as valuable and maintain investments.  Boy was I wrong.  The problem is that not only did we see budgets plummet, but I agree with Sumser that we’ve seen some of the good old days come back.  Those of us who were planning in 2008 see ourselves replanning in 2010 because our old plans no longer fit the new organizational realities and models going forward.  We have new mandates and have to execute them with 25% less budget.

I hope that proclamations of HR worthlessness don’t get louder.  But it is true that we just can’t figure out social medias.  Part of the problem is that as we exit the days of ERP and inhouse IT kingdoms, CIO’s seem to be grappling with figuring out how to keep pieces of that kingdom.  We are in constant battles with IT and other groups with who social media technologies should be owned by, and we don’t always know how to play nice from a collaborative standpoint when the owner of such topics and technologies is largely undefined.  Marketing can do their own thing with customer social media technologies, but we really have to control our own destiny in regards to employee, candidate and alumni experiences.

One last thing, Sharepoint is a good start, but please, nobody tell me that it’s the be-all-end-all of social medias again!!

1. Sumser, John, December 18, 2009.  “What’s Next by…John Sumser.” [back]

You can take some core facts, and given those facts, you can make some assumptions, correlations, and logical guesses.  But at the end, assumptions, correlations and logical guesses don’t get you anywhere but a certain probability of correctness.  With John Lennon and the Beatles song, you have Lucy and the Sky with Diamonds (LSD) in an age where the Beatles were probably high every night.  For decades, this has been the thinking of what was behind this song.  In reality, the truth is more innocent.

Operational reports present the same challenges.  I define operational reports against analytics.  Operational reports are typically one or two dimensional in nature, present a set of data that is static in time.  While you can make some pretty good guesses as to what is going on in your organization, operational reports don’t present the type of deep digging that you can do in analytics to really identify root causes.

Turnover is often the easiest example.  If you have a turnover rate by department, you can figure out where your highest turnover is and do something about it.  But if you have trended analytics, you can see how turnover is shifting over time throughout your organizations, dig into each organization into a number of factors such as gender, age, tenure, and specific job types or look into the turnover performance of individual managers.  It’s not that you can’t do this with operational reports, but each report is run individually rather than sitting in a single “cube” of data.

Any reporting is great, and operational reports utilized correctly present a spectrum of facts that can then be further interpreted to a fairly close degree of statistical accuracy.  But it amazes me still, how many organizations are not going out there and spending the money to do real analytics and decisions support.

We’ve been talking about the “seat at the table” for too long – how talent strategies make HR a real business partner to the core needs of our organizational leaders.  But as much as we talk about that seat, 80% or more of the large organizations that I visit still don’t have good, detailed decision support tools in a comprehensive and coherently deployed manner.  You have to have a strategy around these tools, implement them well, and then actually know how to use them in a cross-functional manner with some business (not technical) sense behind it.  Let’s get moving already, people!

I am so pleased you took so much away from 3 little words. It makes me feel stronger than the 3 little pigs and I know some wolf can blow my 3 word structure down.

The words are all important to me and my work. I thought about the words quite a bit and waited until I found 3 that “fit.” When I looked at those three, they expressed me.

Authentic: I can only be who I am. I am getting to be more of who I am. I work at ensuring that I voice my authentic perspective as opposed to what I think someone might want to hear to what I “should” say. Don’t get me wrong, I won’t become Tom Peter and sound like I am shouting at you but I will be my caring, gentle, self. Of course, this is fused with gentle tenacity and I don’t confront, I “carefront.” I also never knew my voice in 2009 would start to express workplace poetry but I write a poem every week on Wednesday’s to express my view of work.

Connections: I believe engagement is connections not only to people but results, strategies, etc. This played a big role in developing the Zinger Model of Engagement that looks at the 14 elements that are all connected. I have also reached out around the globe to connect to people on engagement. We now have over 1800 members at the Employee Engagement Network. I have personally connected to everyone of them with a personalized welcome.

Engage. To me, it is all about engaging. My youngest son plays rugby and he is in the scrum and I love hearing “crouch, touch, pause, engage.” I especially like the engage part. I am 55 now and I think a lot of my life to date has been more about crouching, touching, and pausing. I am ready, willing, and able to engage. I think employee engagement is not an extra in working but the way we will work and lead and manage in this new decade. I often finish my writing with the line, “engage along with me, the best is yet to be.”

Just looked at the three words again and they spell ACE. I like that.

You got the 3 words in my mind for 2010.
They will be:

1. Engage
2. Mobilize
3. Produce

I want to foster and enhance my engagement and the engagement of others. This will be focus #1. Mobilize is my focus to start to transform the network into a community and into a movement. I have so many wonderful connections (theme last year) I want to help mobilize these connections. Produce is to engage and mobilize myself and others to produce richer and more helpful resources. We have done e-books and I would like to add print books, webinars, and a conference. I am indebted to you for bringing the 3 words into focus for 2010. Thanks.

David

I got to thinking about the very topic that he is an expert on, employee engagement and all its relationships with deploying brand to the employee audience.  I’ve done many branding exercises but perhaps this is the right way to address it.  Certainly when trying to brand and engage, we think about our mission, values, elevator pitches, etc… but when it can be boiled down to just 3 words, how much more powerful is that?  With Zinger’s 3 words, I was actually intrigued enough that I have sat around thinking about what those words mean to him, and to me, perhaps engaging the creative and curious part of my own brain even more towards his message than a 5 page manifesto would have.

I don’t know that this is a tool for all, and in reality it might just be a personal tool to help Keep Zinger sharp and focused.  For the masses, the impact is a broad range from brilliant to confusing depending on where you lie in the spectrum of already knowing David and what he does.  I’m sure this is not the only thing he deployed to reflect his 2009 goals, but at the heart of it, I think it’s quite well executed.  I don’t think this was the starting point, I think this was boiled down from an analysis of his key goals for 2009, in what was probably an excruciatingly time intensive process.  Once you understand your core values, then you can go ahead with the details of the media plan and how you’re going to execute.

If I remember, I’ll ask him to post a reply to today and get some of his thinking.

Thanks David!!

In Part 1 of Survey Design 101, we discussed two broad topics related to survey design – choosing the right topics and creating quality questions.  Survey design (or questionnaire development), however, is not complete until you can show that all or most of the redundant questions have been filtered out from the final set.  Moreover, this “redundancy” is often only visible through statistical analysis (i.e., factor analysis, discussed below) conducted after the data have been collected.  In other words, the initial draft of survey questions needs to be treated as just that – an initial draft. It’s only after the first data collection and subsequent revision that survey design can be said to be complete.  Beyond this, additional data should be used – collected on an annual or biennial basis – for continued refinement of the survey questions.

One common method used to refine survey questions is through factor analysis – a data reduction technique.

Factor analysis has been around for nearly a century (see Charles Spearman and intelligence testing); and although the mathematics involved – linear algebra – may seem intimidating, the concept is simple – it’s a technique used to reduce a large number of variables into a smaller set by examining the interrelationships among the variables. Fortunately for most of us, understanding how it can be used to improve the quality of our survey is all that’s necessary.

A key premise behind factor analysis is the idea that many can be reduced to few.  Imagine yourself in Munich for their annual Oktoberfest. You would undoubtedly see thousands people from all walks of life. Now, if I were to “group” these people based on some meaningful category – e.g., nationality, height, weight, or even the type of beer they are drinking – the resulting number of groups would be fewer than the thousands of individuals on which those groups are based. Factor analysis is very similar to this. Rather than people, however, we’re now talking about survey questions.

When you conduct a factor analysis on survey data collected from your employees, you’re asking the program “group” the survey questions in some conceptually meaningful way.  If you’re thinking to yourself that survey questions are already organized into meaningful groups or categories – e.g., training, benefits, supervision, and so on – you’re right.  In fact, if the survey was designed properly and the factor analysis done correctly, you may find that factor analysis results show a perfect match between your survey items and your survey categories.  Unfortunately, this will be rare. More often than not, you will find that a portion of the survey questions can be omitted, re-categorized or refined.

Bottom line here is that when it comes to employee surveys, factor analysis is an important tool that can be used to help answer the question – Which questions should I keep or drop?  It is an important step that will help to clarify the conclusions drawn from results of other advanced analyses typically conducted on survey data.

Stephen B. Jeong, is currently the Managing Director of Waypoint People Solutions – www.waypointps.com, a human capital consulting firm that focuses on high precision employee diagnostic surveys using cutting-edge measurement technology and methodologies. He holds Ph.D. in Industrial-Organizational psychology from the Ohio State University and has been advising private, public, and government organizations since 2000.  He can be reached at stephen.jeong@waypointps.com.

For some reason, this has be thinking about systems of record and why this is such a hard thing to implement well.  There seem to be lots of battles around system of record.  Should your employee address reside in your HR or payroll system?  Assuming they are actually different systems, some people will argue that all core employee indicative data resides in the HR system as the primary and gets interfaced to payroll and everywhere else.  In general however, if the address is not current in the HR system, the ramifications are relatively minor.  In the payroll system, local taxes can go awry, garnishments are not paid or are calculated incorrectly, and year end tax statement go to the wrong place.  Then there is the never ending argument that comes from Payroll departments.  HR just does not care as much about these things.  Let’s say things are still entered manually (god forbid).  HR departments might sit on an address change for a while, but Payroll departments are all over it.

I also think about competencies.  Do competencies belong with job data in core HR? or do they sit better with all the talent stuff in a talent system?  Wait, wait, you have multiple talent systems?  Which talent system?  Are the competencies designated with the job analysis?  And do we care where the competencies are designed if they are only utilized at the talent process level?

It really comes down to data governance (do we hate data governance yet?  We should, but we don’t because not enough of us are doing it well yet).  I was recently speaking to an organization who decided that the global employee addresses were owned by the legal department in the organization.  They decided it was not HR or Payroll simply because there were enough compliance issues from global safe harbors to payroll compliance and data privacy that it could only be owned by legal.  In turn, it would then be legal’s right to decide where the system of record would be.  When it comes down to competencies, who owns this thing?  Is it compensation?  More often than not it’s talent, but this is indeed one of those data elements that get defined in such a cross functional way that it’s hard to navigate the waters.

The hope is that with the continued evolution of real time API’s and middleware, integration of data elements keeps getting easier and the conflicts that arise due to systems of record ease.

Similarly, salary and benefits are not engagement tools.  The reason for this is that they are not differentiators.  Everyone offers competitive salaries, and anywhere you go, the salaries will be within 10% of each other for similar geographies, similar skills and similar work.  The same goes for benefits.  The 401(k) and the health benefits can be better or worse, but probably are not factors for employees sticking around.  Every employer is going to offer some form of benefits, and while the cost of benefits can vary greatly here, the value of these benefits is relatively lower now that most families have 2 income earners and so long as one of the partners has good benefits, the other can go wherever they want.

I write this as I read FoT’s post on the “anchors” that cause people to stay at your organization.  It focuses primarily on salary and benefits.  While I don’t argue that these are contributors, I think we have all know for years that salary and benefits are really just a commodity in the engagement equation.  So long as they are competitive with the rest of the employer market, salary and benefits don’t differentiate your organization at all.

From a talent management perspective, I now ask a similar question – “What would happen if the government eliminated the anchors that ‘most’ employees perceive as the reason they work for a firm?”

Those anchors in my mind are – health insurance, retirement, income and stability.  After those basic needs come the more esoteric, but important, elements of feeling recognized, feeling in control, feeling connected, etc.  I say importance – but the right word might be “fear” – employees do some things for survival and fear before they worry about engagement. ¹

Employee’s decide what company to join based on opportunity, salary, and benefits.  However, they stay for how much they love their jobs, if they are doing good work, if they like their peers, and appreciate their direct managers.  Salary and benefits has not been part of the employee engagement equation for ages.  IMHO.

1. Herbert, Paul, December 22, 2009.  “Answering Why Should People Want to Work at Your Company. Anchors Aweigh!”  Retrieved from http://www.fistfuloftalent.com/2009/12/anchors-aweigh.html on December 24, 2009. [back]

Consider the following scenario.  Let’s say you were going to buy a car and you were unsure which car to buy.  Maybe there are three or four that are in the size and price range you want (your short list, if you will).  You would likely go to dealers for each car and do a test drive.  You would get behind the wheel and drive the car and get a feel for how it operates and what you like and do not like (or would like to change depending on the options) about the car.

Now, let’s think about it how it would work if a car test drive was like selecting business applications.  In this case, you would have the car salesperson drive (demo) the car for you while you sat in the passenger seat and asked questions.  You could have each car salesperson drive the car along the same route (scripted scenarios) to see how each car handles the course you have outlined.  You would be able to compare “apples to apples” and probably gain some insight into what differentiates each car in terms of the driving experience.  However, you would not really know how well the car you select drives until you actually buy it and drive it home from the lot. ¹

But as is my way, I’m going to play devil’s advocate, and honestly I’m persuaded by my own argument.  Giving up the control to the demo is just too risky for an application vendor.  The main purpose of the vendor demo is no longer to evaluate feature functionality.  Most vendors that get short listed are going to be able to meet 90% of the feature functionality that any customer needs.  The remaining 10% is customization, workaround, or just called a loss.  It almost does not matter what the feature functionality is anymore, we’ve gotten over the functionality battles and are now in the usability battles.  The new purpose of the demo is that potential clients get to see the overall usability of the system and how end user employees and managers would interact with it.

Here is why the pre-contract sandbox is risky.  When you put an application in the hands of HR for evaluation, the entire tone of the evaluation shifts.  Now, HR practitioners and evaluators are sitting around looking at feature functionality.  And they are looking at it with the lens of what breaks and goes wrong without having the vendor SC sitting there telling them how it works or what other clients have done as a workaround.  Top it off with the thought that the SaaS system is not sufficiently configured to run through the potential customer’s use cases, and you have functional and process failures galore.

I hate to say it, but I think the proper IT resources get the fact that a sandbox is just a sandbox.  But your core HR practitioners don’t have the same application experience and can’t remove themselves from the core of their day to day functional activities.  I’ll echo a couple of Jim’s last words in his post:  “Am I way off base?”

1. Holincheck, Jim, December 10, 2009.  “The End of the Scripted Demo Era.”  Retrieved from http://blogerp.typepad.com/ on December 24, 2009. [back]

Hispanics, African Americans, Asians and Native Americans now constitute more than one-third of the U.S. population. By 2042, they are projected to make up nearly one-half of all Americans.  Given these rapidly changing demographics—and consequently, the rapidly changing U.S. marketplace—many organizations are recognizing that workplace diversity is a business necessity. Creating and promoting a diverse workforce is particularly essential for industries where a significant number of employees deal face-to-face with prospective customers, because the latter are more likely to buy from people like themselves. So retail, financial, legal, insurance, hospitality and consumer goods businesses may want and need staff diversity. Yet existing selection tools may not be up to the task. Here’s why:

1. Job tests based on outdated material

In the context of legal defensibility and employee selection tools, the concept of “validation” simply refers to accumulated “evidence” showing that a given selection is, indeed, a good (or valid) predictor of job performance.  Selection specialists (or those who design selection tests) typically gather validation evidence by correlating job applicants’ scores on a given selection test (e.g., on intelligence, job knowledge, values, personality) with their future job performance (predictive validation) or using incumbents (concurrent validation).  If the resulting correlation is relatively high, the test is considered to be a valid predictor of job performance.  Employment tests and other employee selection tools are judged on their “validation” strength, or the degree to which they can accurately predict future job performance. If there is a high correlation between an applicant’s score on a given selection test (e.g., testing intelligence, job knowledge, values or personality) and his/her future performance, the test is considered to be a good predictor.

One critical issue with the above approach is that the majority of the tests used in the U.S. today were validated primarily on a Caucasian pool. This means that while a given test may work well in predicting job performance for Caucasian job applicants, it may be biased, at a minimum, and in the worst case, invalid, when used with non-Caucasian applicants.  There are proven differences between Caucasians and non-Caucasians in terms of values, management and leadership styles, and general work-related preferences, and selection tests that fail to recognize them may be unhelpful for predicting job performance, retention, and engagement of non-Caucasians.

2. Differences between Western and non-Western cultures

Intercultural academics have been able to label what many of us have already known; that there are cultural variations that can differentially impact one’s thoughts, emotions, and behaviors in the workplace.  In addition to the more commonly known “individualistic” and “collectivistic” cultural differences, employees in Western countries (e.g., U.S., Europe, Australia, New Zealand) generally prefer a more equal power distribution in the workplace, while employees from Asian countries (e.g., South Korea, Japan, China, Taiwan) tend to be more accustomed to autocratic or paternalistic power relationships – or top-down authority.  They also differ in assertiveness, preferred levels of uncertainty and short-term vs. long-term orientations, all of which may impact one’s job performance, satisfaction, and promotion opportunities. For example, while assertiveness is generally a desired trait in Western societies, it is much less so and even frowned upon in countries such as Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. If a selection test assumes assertiveness as a desirable trait, a Taiwan-born applicant, who may have been a top salesman in his country, may be knocked out of the selection process here.

3. Difference Among Non-Caucasians And Acculturation

In addition to the Western vs. non-Western distinction, selection tools should further take into account differences among non-Western cultures – e.g., Hispanics, African-Americans, Asian-Americans and Native Americans, differences between foreign- and US-born, and differences among nationalities within a racial or ethnic group – which include customs, values, work ethics, body language, and communication styles. Ethiopians are very different from South Africans; Costa Ricans from Bolivians; Japanese from Koreans. The point here is that these sub-groups vary greatly with respect to normative values that guide their behavior in the workplace.

People also vary with respect to their degree of acculturation and assimilation to the mainstream. Naturally, attitudes and values of those individuals who have resided in the U.S. for longer periods of time are likely to be more similar to the general American population. However, more recent immigrants are less likely to be so. Hence, if an organization’s business and diversity strategy dictates the inclusion of more recent immigrants, it is critical to understand that current selection tools used in the U.S. would be least applicable to recent immigrants from non-Western countries.

It is important to make one thing clear:  I’m not suggesting that all selection tests must identify and include all unique cultural attributes in order to be useful – that would be impractical. Rather, one should simply consider the fact that the majority of the selection tests in use today are likely to hold less value when used on non-Western and non-Caucasian applicants.

So, what’s the answer?  There is no one simple solution. It depends on an organization’s industry, strategy, mission and priorities as well as its customer demographics.  If the goal is to sell to new immigrants, one should select applicants whose views closely mirror that of one’s prospective customers. If the future American market place—in which the current minorities add up to almost a majority—is at all a consideration, our current employment selection tools need to be revised to reflect both the common as well as those unique cultural attributes that can play out in the work setting.  For current and future generations of immigrant workers—whose primary identification is with a non-Western culture—a new measurement approach should lead to a more meaningful (and valid) performance prediction—one that addresses those attributes valued by their culture.

Stephen B. Jeong, is currently the Managing Director of Waypoint People Solutions – www.waypointps.com, a human capital consulting firm that focuses on high precision employee diagnostic surveys using cutting-edge measurement technology and methodologies. He holds Ph.D. in Industrial-Organizational psychology from the Ohio State University and has been advising private, public, and government organizations since 2000.  He can be reached at stephen.jeong@waypointps.com.

As a consultant, I’m always glad for the role I have.  To be completely honest, I’m a strategist (whatever that means).  I’m not good at the detailed stuff – testing and QA always drove me crazy, and I’m a really bad coder – because I like shortcuts and don’t like to figure out where I missed a semicolon.  In one sense, I’m really glad I don’t usually have to stick around for the implementation of what I come up with.  It’s nice to hand off to people at application vendors or system integrators to run an implementation because they are much better at that stuff than I am.  At the same time, it’s incredible to me the amount of strategy projects that get held up or never get going after I leave.

In most cases, organization’s are just not staffed well enough to handle additional project loads.  The realities of day to day operations cause them to lose focus, and these organizations also seem to have issues with using external consultants to do implementation work.  Granted it’s the most costly way to go, but it’s also the easiest way to maintain your focus on the plan.  Internal PMO organizations don’t usually like to play around with HR stuff, and that’s a shame.

Lexy Martin had a post a while back about unfinishable objects.

I’ve noticed, however, that in my studio I have a few UFOs — a quilter’s term for “unfinished objects.” I like to think of myself as not a quitter — as someone who finishes what I start. The UFO from that class, I’ve decided will never be finished as originally planned at that class. And, oh my…it feels good to recognize that. I declare it totally unfinishable! Of course, I will go through some doubts: 1. Is it unfinishable because my techniques are not up to it? 2. Is it unfinishable because I didn’t like the teacher and she did not help me to excel? 3. Is it unfinishable because…. You know what, I don’t need to know the reason. What I do know is that by declaring that one effort unfinishable,I feel ever so much more creative! Plus, it frees up one of my favorite fabrics that I want to use in another quilt project that is to be a gift for dear friends. ¹

The first is what I already mentioned above.  Sometimes I need to plan better for an organization that is just not willing to approve an ongoing project with an external implementor.  Organizations that really want to implement SAP on their own after deciding it’s the best fit for them…. Well… perhaps it’s my fault that I only told them 9 times and not 10 times that it’s really unwise to try to do it inhouse.  That’s a bit tongue in check, but the reality is that perhaps it’s my fault that even with the best intentions, internal project teams fail to get funding that they need and just can’t handle the workload themselves.  That comes to Lexy’s second point.  Consultants often don’t provide a backup plan.  We put so much time into preparing a business case that justifies the first option that when an organization can’t implement an ERP or global service delivery model (or whatever), that we didn’t tell them what’s next.  Maybe just putting their 15 different payrolls on ADP was the right way to go, and they would have gotten funding for it.  Not to avoid any mea culpa’s that should be coming my way, but consultants don’t always have the organizational knowledge to know how well you’ll be able to navigate through the approval and funding processes, we’re almost always guided by your judgment and the judgment of the executive sponsors.  If you say you can do it, we kind of believe you.

That brings us to the last point.  Sometimes, instead of blindly plugging along in the current state, or leaving a project on the shelf and pretending you’ll get to it eventually, you just need to get back to square one and start over.  Usually, it’s not really square one, most consultants will have brought a number of good models for you to go after, and it’s just a re-evaluation of the new best fit with the new funding realities in mind.  The point is, not to let anything sit there and fester while you do nothing.  There was a good reason to tackle a project to begin with, and that reason is still there, whether it be service delivery, technology, process or anything else.  Declare it a loss, and reevaluate the project so you can get going again.

1. Martin, Alexia, December 22, 2009.  “Giving yourself permission not to finish frees up energy – another quilting/work intersection.”  Retrived from http://lexymartin.blogspot.com on December 25, 2009. [back]