HR Strategy
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HR Service Delivery: Question 2
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Which of our customers need vastly more service than others? Sometimes there will be a specific business unit or group of individuals (salespeople or executives for example) who simply require more time and attention. The first question is obviously to identify who those people are. The necessary follow-up is determining why the extra attention is…
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HR Service Delivery: Question 1
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What follows is literally 3 weeks of questions around HR service delivery. These are questions that we can ask ourselves that can help diagnose porblems, solutions and opportunities. Hope you enjoy. ho uses our services and technology in ways we didn’t expect? In the most obvious case, this may be managers who have found ways…
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SystematicHR’s Thoughts for 2008
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I suppose that I do need to put together a list of things I’m especially interested in this year. Many of these are already trends. Some of these will never be, but are things perhaps only I am interested in. Other ideas might actually emerge in 2008. The War for Talent: People will realize that…
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Making Your Average Employee Your Best Employee
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The world is made up of C players – those where are totally average in performance. Let’s face it, most of us have to be C players, and your organization will always be made up of them. However, even though someone has to be average, we can always hope that the average keeps getting better.…
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How To Coach New Managers
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I think it was Pat Riley (basketball coach) who once said that the best performers are not usually the best coaches. They often don’t understand why it’s so hard for everyone else to be a top performer when it came so easily to them, and therefore are rendered ineffective at managing others. You’ve wisely promoted…
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Failing your Employees Through Mentoring
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Harvard Business Review’s article “The Set-Up-to-Fail Syndrome” places the blame on failed mentorships squarely in the hands of the mentor, not the mentee. You start with a positive relationship. Something—a missed deadline, a lost client—makes you question the employee’s performance. You begin micromanaging him. Suspecting your reduced confidence, the employee starts doubting himself. He stops…
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The Fear of Feedback
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I once worked for an organization where feedback was deemed as critical to the success of any project. In this case, these projects were sales cycles, but the general principle is transferable. This organization had a group called “Afterburner” in to speak with the entire sales force. Afterburner was made up of ex-military pilots and…
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Social Media in the enterprise – best practice #4
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Speaking about a client who never got anything done, an associate of mine once told me, “they are too in love with the process.” TOC (the other systematic) stated in best practice #3 that governance is critical in the implementation and management of social medias in the enterprise. I have to agree. In fact, I’d…
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Gen X: The Bridge to Gen Y
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There’s much speculation and conversation these days about Gen Y (or the millennial generation). Who understands them, how do they work, what makes them tick, and how do managers manage them? Much of the conversation is centered around the basic idea that this generation is fundamentally different and that “we” don’t get them yet. While…
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Pride and Shame in Employee Engagement
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We generally hear about employee engagement being defined as that intangible quality which exists within an employee that stimulates him or her to work that additional discretionary hour beyond what is required for the basic performance of his or her job. In the Western world, we usually think this comes from having “cool work” or…
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The Top Role of Brand in Recruitment
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A recent Tom Peters entry criticizes the characterization of the “war for talent” as a competitive endeavor as opposed to an internal problem. He’s right, but this is nothing new. The HR world including systematicHR has long been talking about the importance of the EVP or employer brand in attracting and retaining employees. It’s true…
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The Role of Change Agents in Change Management
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All too often, change management is thought of as a few communications to announce a change, and the accompanying training to selected end users. This is not what change management is about. While communications and training are critical parts of change management, the organization’s ability to create behavioral change in the group of end users…
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Collaboration is Innovation
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When it comes to innovation, the myth of the lone genius dies hard. Most companies continue to assume that innovation comes from that individual genius, or, at best, small, sequestered teams that vanish from sight and then return with big ideas. But the truth is most innovations are created through networks — groups of people…
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MIT Sloan’s 5 Steps to Filling the Talent Gap
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Sloan’s take of the talent gap is a bit different that the one we usually talk about. Instead of the impending crisis in the U.S. from all the retiring baby boomer’s Sloan instead identifies the troubles that global companies face from not being able to develop leaders abroad, or not having the leaders domestically ready…
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Driving Innovation by Creating Culture
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This entire year I’ve been talking about topics that most HR people don’t talk about. Innovation and collaboration are often thought of as the domain of the business side. It’s really the guys in production or R&D to figure out how to innovate, or so we thing. We’re dead wrong. I finally found a whitepaper…
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Building the Employer Brand
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When we think about the employer brand, we often think about it from the recruiting perspective. A healthy employer brand does indeed make it much easier to attract potential employees, and it saves a business significant dollars in other ways as well. Great brands allow you to hire employees at a lower cost premium than…
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Driving Quality by Creating Culture
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ISR (now Towers Perrin) has an interesting case study on the creation of culture. Specifically in this case study, they focus on building a culture that is focused on quality, but the principles they share could really be used to develop a culture to support any strategy whether it be quality, innovation, or anything else.…
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Creating the Employment Brand
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Earlier this year, John Sullivan wrote a great piece on employment branding that I thought I would bring back to life. In it, he describes some great steps to creating a brand as well as advertising that brand once developed. I’d like to highlight just a couple of points here and then send you along…
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Social Media Best Practice #3
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As part of the other systematic’s (Systematic Viewpoints” series on social media: Best practice #3: Collaboration requires a balance of freedom and governance to thrive. ((Systematic Viewpoints, September 11, 2007. “Social media in the enterprise – best practice #3.”)) In the post, he uses a Sharepoint example where “employees had been given broad access to…
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Social Media Best Practice #2
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Best Practice #2: Show direct business value by aligning social computing to real-world work. ((Systematic Viewpoints, September 11, 2007. “Social media in the enterprise – best practice #2.”)) The other systematic (TOS) continues by saying: If you’re thinking of deploying a form of social media, it must have a defined value proposition, be aligned to…