Functional
-
Offshoring and Chinese English
.
We’ve all been dealing with call centers getting routed to India for a few years now. In the beginning, the experiences were horrible as people navigated the many communications, process and cultural issues. Things seem to begetting better lately though. We are more understanding of the hurdles we need to get over the have international…
-
The New Collaboration
.
So much collaboration used to happen around “water cooler conversations.” These may have been informal lunches, chats in the halls, and even chats next to the water cooler in the lunch room. However, as the workforce increasingly works from home and scheduled conference calls limit the possibilities of impromptu meetings, the opportunities to collaborate are…
-
Middle Market HRO Convergence
.
We’ve long talked about the large HRO organizations trying to go after the middle market. After all, how many companies out there can afford a 10 year contract valued at $500M? With large HRO contracts closing in on 200 contracts, there isn’t nearly as much high end opportunity left out there, but there’s no question…
-
Evolving from Knowledge Management to Innovation Networking
.
Knowledge management was all the rage a decade ago. People realized the need to maintain institutional and intellectual capital as employees filtered into an organization, created new knowledge, and then often left the organization leaving little trace of the knowledge they developed and didn’t share effectively. But knowledge management didn’t really take off as a…
-
Redefining HRO
.
Jason Corsello recently posted a great analysis of the state of HRO. His take is that the industry is on it’s 3rd generation of development, and the description of these 3 generations is so priceless that I thought I’d repost it word for word: I think we have officially entered our 3rd wave of HRO. …
-
Longer Term HRO Viability as Change Management
.
I’ve always been fascinated by HRO and it’s been a constant topic here on systematicHR since the beginning. While it certainly would seem to make sense that sharing resources across a variety of organizations would save some money, there’s always been a lingering question in the back of my head as to whether it made…
-
Generation Y Mobile Technology: The Future of Work
.
I’m not usually very interested in mainstream work technologies from the standpoint of systematicHR. However, I was listening to yet another ZDnet interview with a CIO (this time with Ray Gilbert of Alcatel-Lucent) regarding the next generation of technology. “…desire to watch convergence take place, to get people down to one cell phone or one…
-
Educating for a Lifetime
.
With rapid changes in technology, the business environment, and the dynamic nature of knowledge usability in the modern world, managing one’s career becomes increasingly difficult. Necessity dictates that employees not only change careers more often as their interests change and their knowledge becomes obsolete, but they need to retrain and re-educate more often as well.…
-
Some HR BPO Conventional Wisdom
.
With the next generation of HR BPO taking shape, companies are learning from past mistakes and employing new conventional wisdom around the process of migrating to an HR BPO solution. ((Christie, Mike and Wright, Mike. “Lessons Uncovered: The New Conventional Wisdom Around the Second Generation of HR BPO.” Hewitt Associates. Retrieved from www.hewitt.com on December…
-
Real Lesson From Despair.com: Dysfunction
.
The only consistent feature in all of your dissatisfying relationships is you. ((Despair.com)) I often see organizations who have many vendor relationships that are either marginally successful or complete failures. What these organizations never enjoy hearing is that they are partly to blame for these failed relationships. While I’ll always admit that failure is an…
-
Plateauing, Multiple Career Ladders, Engaging Employees
.
Knowledge@Wharton wrote a few months ago about a “new” phenomenon within middle manager ranks. A number of men and women in middle management are increasingly reluctant to take the next step in their careers because the corporate ladder is not as appealing as it used to be, and the price to climb it is too…
-
More Changes at Hewitt
.
In case you missed it, HRO Today recently reported the following: “A former president of national accounts at competitor ADP, Jay C. Rising, 50, has been named president of Hewitt’s HRO business. Additionally, former acting president Julie Gordon has been named president of client and market leadership, a newly created position.” The announcement isn’t surprising…
-
Real Lesson From Despair.com: Discovery
.
A company that will go to the ends of the Earth for its people will find it can hire them for about 10% of the cost of Americans. ((Despair.com)) I have argued many times that there is actually nothing wrong with outsourcing and offshoring. Let’s face it, offshoring manufacturing is good for developing countries, and…
-
Offshoring Disproportionately Effects the U.S.
.
Much of the talk about offshoring is about India and China. With good reason too. India and China both have over 1B people each, and if you think about the “law of large numbers” even a small increase in skills translates into a huge competitive advantage against other industrialized nations. The real story however, is…
-
The Evolution of the Workforce
.
It seems I make a point of talking about the millennial generation (those emerging into the workforce now), and how there seems to be a perception that they are less motivated than prior generations. It’s probably true that they were given broader opportunities than prior generations while growing up. This simply means that they generally…
-
Real Lesson From Despair.com: Demotivation
.
Sometimes the best solution to morale problems is just to fire all of the unhappy people. ((Despair.com)) As mean as it sounds, it may be true. We all know the famous method that Jack Welch popularized at GE – remove the bottom 10% of the workforce each year. The idea here is that there almost…
-
Upheaval in Time Management
.
Last week Jason Corsello noted that Kronos was being acquired by a private equity firm. I honestly didn’t take too much notice of it, but echoed his thoughts wondering why an ADP didn’t move first. ADP has had a very long relationship with Kronos, and if anyone was going to take them, I thought ADP…
-
Employee Morale and Uncertainty
.
The other day I was visiting a client site and was struck by how recent financial difficulties experienced by the client had impacted the workforce. As part of my job, I had to interview personnel at different levels, and as a result was able to get some great insight into the morale level of the…
-
Top HRO Deals
.
Who’s paying attention? Did the value of HRO deals go down in 2006? Sure, there were much fewer $1B deals, but what was the cause of that? Were there overall fewer deals as well? I’m thinking that deals are starting to move into the mid market and we’re seeing less of the multi-line multi-process deals…
-
Globalization, Economic Scale, and Talent – The Realities of Asia
.
Michael Specht pointed me at this video link where he drew out the following thought: “the 25% of China population with the highest IQ is larger than the total population of North America.” ((Specht, Michael, February 11, 2007. “The Growth of Our Planet and its Impact.” Retrieved from http://www.specht.com.au/michael/ on February 24, 2007.)) I’ve speculated…