systematicHR

It seems to me that there has been a renewed focus on core HR.  Now I need to tell the truth, I really thought core HR was dead.  I mean, it will always be around, but with the whole industry moving on to cooler things like analytics and talent management, who cares about core HR anyway?  Seriously, core HR is core HR, how many ways can you present an employee transfer or termination process?  How many different vendors can effectively pitch OSHA functionality and expect to win?  Within reason, all the core HR vendors are pretty much on an equal playing field, for one reason or another that I won’t bother going into.

So the industry if focused on talent and analytics.  The problem is that nothing seems to work if you messed up core HR.  People deployed a nice, automated performance process 3 years ago, and they got themselves away from paper.  But at the same time, the industry told them that they didn’t get where they needed to go, and a number of reasons went into this.  First, deploying a talent process just wasn’t enough, and the vendors are madly working on the next level of functionality that will actually help us manage talent as opposed to automating a process.  Secondly however, talent management did not work the first time because we implemented it assuming our core HR systems were already healthy, and they were not.

First, Job.  There seems to be a renewed effort around job these days.  I think we’ve realized that even with all the focus on competencies as a foundational building block of talent, job is still the foundational building block of HR.  Without job, nothing else seems to work.  The problem was that we’ve been neglecting job for eons.  Ok, so that’s a stretch, but it’s certainly not uncommon for many of our organizations to have 5 times as many jobs as we need.  They are not standardized, they are redundant, and they have mismatched naming conventions.  They appear differently from country to country and business unit to business unit.  At the end of the day, a corporate organization can’t make any sense our of our jobs.  So we’ve gone back over the last few years and tried to start tightening up our job tables, which will in turn enable tighter competencies, performance, recruiting, succession, etc…  Not to mention that your analytics are worthless if you can’t use Job as one of your core dimensions in your datamarts.

Second, Organization.  We don’t often think about how we think about org.  Is it a financial hierarchy? Operational? HR? People manager?  When we first implemented organization in core HR years ago, we may have tied it tightly to the payroll engine, and cost centers were the priority at the sacrifice of supervisor chains.  Or we decided that an operaitonal structure made better sense and we sacrificed how HR generalists needed to interact with employees in the structure.  Whatever the tradeoff we made, we didn’t realize that a couple years later, this thing called talent management was going to assume that core HR could provide a clean structure to talent.  I’ve been to organizations where the performance, compensation, succession, and hiring managers were all different.  Who the hell was going to think of that 5 years ago?  huh?  The point is, that we’ve needed to go back to core HR and make some sense of our initial implementations.  And oh yeah, if you’re org is not clean enough to be a dimension in your datamarts – worthless again.

So the moral of the story is this:  if you’re late the the game and just getting to talent now, learn from those before you – fix core HR.  If you are not late to the game, but have not fixed core HR, go do it now.