Talent Mgmt
-
Understanding the Contributors to Employee Engagement
.
The May 2007 issue of HBR gives us a broader view of employee engagement and defines some of the contributors for it. Not surprisingly, employee engagement is not made up of one huge event that makes the employee committed to work, company and co-workers. Instead, each workday event has marginal immediate and downstream effects on…
-
Choosing the Right Talent Strategy to Drive Profits
.
So how much does it cost to drive up revenues by 1%? There are many possibilities including: Cost of acquiring new talent versis: Cost of developing new talent Cost of rewards versus: Cost of 1% increase in engagement So which of these has the largest actual impact to the bottom line? It’s not as if…
-
Management as a Productivity Barrier
.
Peter Drucker: “So much of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to do work.” A while back I had a post around “1 Jerk = $160K.” We’ve all experienced managers who are either idiots or just complete jerks. The fact of the matter is that these types of managers are…
-
An Interview with HR Smart
.
A while back, I had the opportunity to speak with HR Smart, a talent management software vendor and service provider. As with many vendors, HR Smart has had applicant tracking since 1996 and they have been slowly building a suite of talent products around that ever since. The conversation intrigued me mostly because they have…
-
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…
-
Organizing for Innovation
.
You manage talent for a large organization that needs to innovate in order to stay competitive. How do you know what types of innovations are important and how do you attract the types of innovators that your organization needs? Some research coming out of Harvard has once again given us some answers: Based on in-depth,…
-
HR Needs to Be Scared
.
Why? Because we’re not doing our jobs and our bosses know it. Workforce Magazine published an article saying “Business Leaders Don’t See HR as Key to People Strategies” and Thomas Otter asks a bunch of us this question: “HR-HCM folks, does this concern you?” Absolutely yes it does concern me. And this isn’t the first…
-
Creating Effective Collaboration Networks
.
If having the best talent is almost useless if you can’t get them to collaborate, then to some degree our mission in HR is assuring that we jump to the next step after we acquire and retain that talent. However, the technologies I’ve pointed to don’t really work yet for HR. Creating and mapping talent…
-
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…
-
How Talent Networks Increase Profits
.
Getting the right people and retaining them is the start of building a great workforce. Engaging them to your brand is the next step. But the true work of optimizing the workforce is going to be in defining how the individual talents collect and relate to each other to produce value. Talent is the scarce…
-
Keeping Your CEO’s Sleep Deprived
.
One of the favored questions going around the vendor circles the last few years is “What keeps you awake at night?” Obviously they only ask this when they are in front of VP’s of HR or C-suite executives, but the answers really do exemplify what’s going on in a person’s head. The old question of…
-
What is SuccessFactors Doing?
.
It’s probably time for me to get back on the phone with these guys and poke around a bit. After all, it has been a very long while since my last official conversation with them as the writer and publisher of systematicHR. Until then, Bill Kutik’s excellent analysis of his impressions from their user conference…
-
Leading Top Talent
.
In a prior post, I noted that talent management’s role in engaging top talent was not related to the processes that are so popular in systems and magazines today. Instead, managing the most talented has more to do with changing how our managers relate to talent, and ensuring a collaborative culture that exposes talent to…
-
Over Managing Top Talent
.
So who is your top talent? Basically it’s those few people who feel like they don’t really work all that hard to out produce 95% of your workforce. That’s of course a simple definition, but this group of people are not just more efficient at what they do, they are much more effective. It’s because…
-
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…
-
Wyatt Gets into Talent Software
.
Mercer once had a benefits administration offering that they ended up selling to ADP. Then they partnered with SynHRgy (spelling?) to get into HRO. That didn’t pan out so well either. Towers Perrin has a partnership with Excellerate HRO (EDS) in the HRO space. Hewitt went full bore into HRO and that’s been a mixed…
-
Innovation in Human Capital Management
.
In my existential search for meaning in HR, I’ve tried for a very long time to understand what HR could really do for the business. Certainly talent and our ability to contribute to directing talent’s growth through talent management is very important to our organization’s viability and competitiveness for the future. But this doesn’t change…
-
HR Strategy – What Really Matters?
.
Harvard Business Review recently published that “Most traditional HR performance metrics – such as employee turnover rates, average time to fill open positions, and total hours of training provided – don’t predict organizational performance.” ((Bassi, Laurie and McMurrer, Daniel, March 2007. “Maximizing Your Return on People.” Harvard Business Review. Retrived from http://www.hbr.com.)) Instead, they correlated…
-
Workstream Talent Update
.
The mid-market is an interesting place to be. Depending on how you define that market, it is either a place where services and products are converging, or is grossly underserved. My take is that the mid market is somewhere around 2500 employees to perhaps 15K employees. This is sort of the sweet spot to me…
-
We Don’t Have the Infrastructure to Develop Talent
.
A recent New York Times article ran a story about the increasingly large volumes of college applicants and the decreasing rates of admittance rates for college bound high school students. While this trend has been going on in the U.S. for several years, many of us in HR have been having a concurrent discussion about…