HR Strategy
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Universal Best Practices
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It’s funny to me that these are even called best practices. First of all, there really are no “best practices”. Perhaps these should be called “leading practices” or even “common practices”, but something that does not state that this is the way to go all the time. It is simply not true that we have…
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The Right Metrics
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Knowledge@Wharton had a great article recently about performance drivers. Here’s a brief excerpt: As the Dean of a business school, you decide that the best reflection of winning is BusinessWeek’s rankings. These are prominent reputation scores created by a third party that directly pits business schools against each other every two years. Essentially all MBA…
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How Do You Identify High Potential Employees?
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The Institute for Corporate Productivity (is there an institute for everything?) recently conducted a study on high potential employees and the practices of organizations around them. If you want to be groomed for a leadership position, then it pays to be viewed as a “high-potential” employee, or “HiPo,” for short, according to a recent study…
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Game Theory and HR
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If you haven’t figured out by now, I have a degree in Economics. Game theory as published by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosohy is “the systematic study of interdependent rational choice. It may be used to explain, to predict, and to evaluate human behavior in contexts where the outcome of action depends on what several…
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Queueing Theory and HR
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I’ve always been interested in business theory and its possible applications to HR. Unfortunately, many HR practitioners (or business practitioners for that matter) are not well educated in many business theories. Even MBA’s get a minimal schooling in these. One theory that has caught my attention lately is queueing theory. Best briefly described by From…
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Thoughts on HR Strategy
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We’d all like to believe that we think strategically. But the reality suggests that nobody else believes that about us. Take a couple of cases. First, if a large acquisition is happening in your organization, how much does HR collaborate in the decision making process? Is HR simply there to evaluate the workforce, or does…
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Is The Cornerstone of HR Job or Performance?
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HR is certainly changing. The trend over the last few years is that we are organizations focused on the strategic (over the administrative). This has manifested itself in numerous redesigns of the HR function for shared services, HRO/BPO, and the HR Business Partner. This has also included a shift of thinking as we are all…
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Give Me A “Sexy” UI Any Day
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Jason and I might have to disagree on this one. Can we please stop saying “…and the user interface is sexy”! User interfaces should not be “sexy” nor are they! User interfaces should be clean and simple, presenting only the information necessary for the task at hand. The user interface should be designed with the…
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Evil HR on Social Networking
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Evil HR being the well know Evil HR Lady of course. She and I share something in common – we work for prominent organizations, write a blog, and are anonymous about it. When it comes to social networking and the roles HR plays, there are 2 types of social networking to really consider – the…
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Talent Management in a Knowledge Economy
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A recent issue of the Economist highlighted talent management in Big 4 accounting firms. This is especially interesting because while the rest of the economy is heading towards greater levels of knowledge work, the Big 4 are arguably at the leading edge. In truth, their work is almost 100% knowledge work and the trends they…
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Sometimes Being Strategic Is Not What’s Next
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February 11, 2008 A long time ago (I’m behind on my reading) the HR Thoughts blog had a piece about not trying to be strategic all the time. While it’s nice that managers, directors and VP’s of HR get to think so, the reality on the ground is not that simple. The state of network…
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HR Service Delivery: Question 11
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Are there breakthroughs in other parts of the business that we can use? The first time someone in HR decided to try using the customer service call center as an HR call center, this was the most innovative idea in ages. Then someone came along and thought that with all the internet stuff happening in…
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HR Service Delivery: Question 10
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What do our customers needs look like in the future? Everyone is talking about the aging of the workforce. We treat this on two obvious levels: first, how do benefits need to be shaped to handle this older or retiree population. Second, how do organizations attract, retain and develop younger talent to quickly fill the…
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HR Service Delivery: Question 9
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What has changed? You may have put in your current call center or service delivery model several years go. Since then, you’ve had 2 major acquisitions, entered several new markets, and your workforce demographics have aged and changed in geography. Have you truly reevaluated your service delivery model to see if it still fits? This…
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HR Service Delivery: Question 8
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If we changed our service delivery so that it was perfect for every customer, what would that look like? In reality, this is probably a little bit too broad. What it does though is it puts together a list of features and possible changes that would improve your HR Service Delivery from its current state.…
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HR Service Delivery: Question 7
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What is the biggest obstacle to using the product? So you work for a design firm and 80% of your population uses an Apple Mac. Somehow in the procurement process, you forgot to ask your talent management vendor if they support Safari. Turns out that your vendor only support MS Internet Explorer. While I honestly…
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HR Service Delivery: Question 6
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Who hates our product? Who loves it? Who is indifferent? Let’s hope everyone loves our approach to HR Service Delivery. More often than not, the large majority of your population will either hate it or be indifferent. While you don’t want pure hatred, it’s good to know why this happens. Perhaps the technology you have…
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HR Service Delivery: Question 5
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Are people spending money to alter our tools? Good ‘ol performance management is a nice scenario here. In the old days when we had a staff of people creating spreadsheets, sending them to managers, getting them back for data scrubbing, aggregation, approval, and then upload to the HRMS, we’d often find that the spreadsheet we…
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HR Service Delivery: Question 4
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Can we cut our costs significantly? We’re not talking about simply cutting costs and eliminating services. We’re actually talking about discovering the current levels of service utilization and comparing that against a future service delivery scenario. Let’s say you could cut costs by 20%, but still effectively provide 95% of the current level of service…
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HR Service Delivery: Question 3
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Are there any customers for whom support is extraordinarily high or low? Let’s face it, sometimes the support costs for a group of people catches you off guard. When there is more support required than you expected, you know how to react. Most of the time you can develop a clear path of corrective action.…