HR Strategy
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The CEO and Company Culture
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The other systematic asks: In a recent interview with one of our analysts, a Fortune 500 company’s HR director said (not verbatim) “It’s not HR’s job to define our culture. It’s the CEO’s job. It’s our job to communicate that culture.” While I understand the position I have to say it doesn’t sit fully well…
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I4CP: Retaining Hi-Po’s
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The following was contributed by Erik Samdahl from the Institute for Corporate Productivity and highlights results from a recent stufy of theirs. The Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp), the company I work for, recently did a study on how companies gauge and retain high-potential employees. These “HiPos” are the bread and butter of organizations, as…
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ROI and Sensitivity Analysis
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I’ve written before about how often HR does not speak the language of finance that executives need when presenting business case. Often, HR’s projects are on the backburner or are not approved because HR simply can’t articulate to the same degree what all the possibilities are when they need money. A simple ROI or TCO…
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Why HR Can’t Implement Web 2.0
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Joel Cheeseman wrote an interesting piece on Web 2.0 a couple months ago in the Industry Insider. An outsider is led to believe such cutting-edge tactics in the employment space are the rule. In reality, it’s the exception. The percentage of companies publishing blogs full of embedded YouTube videos, Flickr photos, a roll call of…
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Pet Peeves Translated to HR 3
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When you’re angry, it’s still better to be nice. Sometimes, I see people who are not angry over anything, yet they are still not nice. Here’s my message: some of the people we interact with in HR can have huge impacts on our workforce. My main example is interactions with consultants and vendors. I’ve seen…
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Pet Peeves Translated to HR 2
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When at a door, train, bus, or anything else, people going out exit before anyone else goes in. This is a simple process rule. In the example, it makes good sense. You can’t get in a train if people have not left the train yet. If it’s full, you’re not getting on. If people have…
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Pet Peeves Translated to HR 1
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So it’s obvious that writing a daily blog is weighing heavily on the writer. What does one write about…? However, my daily grind is weighing even more heavily and there are a few things that bug me that I really want to write about. However, since this blog is about HR, I have to tie…
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“Talent” as Marketing?
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Seth Godin’s recent post on Talent and marketing HR hit home on may fronts. What if you started acting like the VP of Talent? Understanding that talent is hard to find and not obvious to manage. The VP of Talent would have to reorganize the department and do things differently all day long (small example:…
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Competencies and Collaboration Models
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Does HR participate in the identifying who is in a project team and who collaborates? All too often, project teams are identified by people knowing other people and thinking that skill sets exist. The problem with this is that collaboration models and the internal professional network can stagnate without necessarily new ideas or practices being…
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Rejected Applicants and External Brand
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Say you are Google. You have a few hundred thousand people sending you applications and resumes on a weekly basis. Therefore, you have to reject a few hundred thousand people on a weekly basis. Even is this is the nice postcard that says “thanks, we’ll keep you on file for 6 months” everyone realizes this…
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Changing the Numbers Game
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Recruiting is an equation of numbers. So many candidates = so many applicants = so many interviews = so many new hires. This is a well known strategy in many sales organizations that the number of leads eventually results in a certain number of sales. And of course there are great parallels between recruiting and…
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Why Technology Projects Fail 2
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Your technology project is completed. Your go live date is imminent. You have committed serious time and effort to changing your processes, and making sure they get implemented in your new technology appropriately. Your delivery method is changing and people will need to use the new processes, portals, and workflows starting tomorrow. Suddenly you realize…
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Why Technology Projects Fail 1
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You take on a project to change something in your organization. If you’re reading this, often you’ll be implementing some sort of technology. Why do projects fail? Often, it’s because there is no change in processes prior to implementing technology. After all, why would you implement technology to change your underlying delivery model, but not…
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Competencies are the Resource, Not Humans
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Human Resources. Are we? I’d suggest that we’re not. The building is a resource. The forklift too. You and I? I think not. We’re operators of resources. My theory is not that we are the resource, but we have the KSA’s (in old school terms) that can be resources. In today’s terms, I think we’re…
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On Blackberry Use and Bad Governance
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Not to offend anyone in particular, but I’ve noticed a trend among companies I visit: Organizations where (under the table) blackberry use during meetings runs rampant tend to have really bad governance models. Conversely, organizations where people are engaged and participate in meetings they attend tend to have good governance models. This is not to…
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Gen Y’s Entitlement Employment
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What do we do with these kids? They are high maintenance, operate in a different model, and often leave our organizations before we get much value out of them. I myself exited college in a rather severe economic downturn. Waiting 5 months before I scored a commission only job, there really wasn’t much around for…
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Making HR Indispensable
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When we talk about employee engagement, we’re talking about the employee’s willingness to work an additional discretionary period of time to complete a unit of work. This basically means the employee is committed to the organization, the project, the job, or the team – and hopefully a combination to more than one of those. When…
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HR as Sales
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I often think that senior HR practitioners don’t think about sales as often as they should. Too much of the time, HR thinks that their performance in the delivery of services is enough. Even if those services are the delivery of strategic reporting (such as detailed workforce analytics helping to chart the future direction of…
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Developing Change Agents
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When in any project, making sure that change management occurs with the proper focus on strategy, effective communications, and facilitation of behavioral change, is possibly the most critical task outside of creating a good governance process. Great behavioral change is best facilitated with a carefully selected group of change agents that are artfully instructed in…
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The Hype Around Facebook and HR
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I mean really, what’s the big deal? This is yet another social networking tool that has invaded our work spaces. First it was personal access to e-mails during work hours. Then it was dating sites. (I once worked with an organization that noted some administrative staff were spending as much as 30% of their time…