HR Strategy
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Tactical Talent Management Becomes Strategic
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Just a couple years ago, we always seemed to talk about outsourcing activities, processes and tasks that were administrative in nature. Part of the boom in Software as a Service (SaaS) was a re-visioning of outsourcing in a way that provided the scalability and cost efficiencies of traditional outsourcing to other services. (yes, broad generalizations…
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Connecting Employee Performance and Enterprise Performance
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Should Employee Performance Management be integrated and considered in Enterprise Performance Management? In an interesting twist, Thomas Otter and Jonathan Becher started a conversation here at exactly the same time that I was participating in the same conversation at Knowledge Infusion’s COE. Thomas states: One of my present irks is that both the finance community…
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Changing Management Culture to Improve Employee Creativity
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More and more of the literature that is out there (at least what I’m reading) is about innovation. Business thinkers are clearly over the fact that R&D, engineering and production is moving offshore. They realize that those tasks can go away, so long as we keep our edge where it counts – thinking up new…
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Happy Cows Come From California
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Where I live, the California Cheese people have an advertising campaign (I assume in competition with Wisconsin) that show miserable cows in the midst of blizzards followed by “happy” cows basking in the sun, almost frolicking in the California sunshine. The theory I suppose is that happy cows will produce better milk and therefore better…
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Your Workforce Bench Strength
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Jason Corsello has one of the most effective illustrations of workforce depth that I’ve seen. Every NFL team has a depth chart. Most are listed on their team’s website including the New England Patriots here. Every position on the team is critical and has a depth chart of at least three players plus a pool…
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The Toyota Way: Principle 9
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Grow leaders who thoroughly understand the work, live the philosophy, and teach it to others. A succession plan is nice. You in HR get to figure out how to grow your successors and shape their future. But if your current executives are engaged in the company, believe and act out the company philosophy, there is…
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Closing the Floodgates: Retaining Senior Talent When the CEO Leaves
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We’ve all seen it. A CEO leaves the organization and takes half of the senior management with him/her to their next gig. Then the new CEO comes in and brings in his/her team, and lets go of the rest of senior management that stuck around. You now have little or no organizational knowledge and perspective…
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How Social Networking Will End
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Colin Kingsbury wrote an interesting piece about the end of social networking (I’ve borrowed the title to his post as I’m getting much too lazy these days). He writes: Just to recap, Harry joined Facebook, and attempted to invite his entire list of contacts (all 4600 of them) to join him there. You’d think Facebook…
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The Truth Behind Asia’s Talent Markets
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You’ll never hear me contesting the idea that Asian talent markets are ripe to be the major force in the world economy. After all, when you have half the world’s population, it’s just logical to think you should eventually command half the world’s senior talent. However, decades of cultural and infrastructure problems plague them as…
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The Toyota Way: Principle 8
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Use only reliable, thoroughly tested technology that serves your people and processes. I heard a rumor that I’ll leave as a rumor that when Microsoft Windows was put into general release it had over 60K known and documented bugs. 60K thinks in the product that did not work, but that they knew about. Now, I…
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Labor Shortages: Myth and Reality
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There are two types of labor shortages currently under examination. The first is a shortage in the current labor supply, and then there’s the much feared future labor supply that is projected as the large population of Baby Boomers retire and fewer Gen X and Gen Y employees enter the workforce to fill those same…
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Does Talent Management Create Culture?
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Ron Lawrence writes in CLOmedia.com that HR shape a company’s culture by finding and developing talent. I’m having a hard time buying into that. My answer to the question “does talent management create culture?” is simply: “no.” In reality, creating a high-performing company depends on finding and hiring the right people, then nurturing, developing and…
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The Toyota Way: Principle 7
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Use visual control so no problems are unhidden. One of the best modern tools we have is the data warehouse and the dashboard. We have totally current metrics available to any of us, if we would just implement the technology. However, there are also tools that many of us use day to day ins some…
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Video iPods in Training
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“Training is now going to employees rather than the other way around.” ((Gronstedt, Anders. June 2007. “Employees Get and Earful.” HBR June 2007, Pg 26)) A few months ago I posted some podcast ideas that you could use in HR. Harvard Business Review recently listed a few excellent reasons to continue expansion of this format…
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Social Media Best Practice #1
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I don’t know whether the other Systematic (systematicviewpoints.com) intended for his first post on social media best practices to infer that this best practice (#1) is also the most important. However, I’m taking it that way and I haven’t even read the others yet (because they are unpublished – his is one of the sites…
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The Toyota Way: Principle 6
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Standardized tasks are the foundation for continuous process improvement and employee empowerment. There’s a quote in here that I love, actually written by Henry Ford in 1926. “Today’s standardization… is the necessary foundation on which tomorrow’s improvement will be based. If you think of “standardization” as the best you know today, but which is to…
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What’s the Difference Between Employee Engagement and Commitment?
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Thanks to Terry for pointing me to an article Regina Miller wrote. In it, Regina speculates at the different definitions of commitment versus engagement. It seems that the world has been caught up by this employee engagement fanaticism, in the process discarding the old world employee commitment paradigms. While it’s entirely possible that they are…
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The Toyota Way: Principle 5
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Build a culture of stopping to fix problems, to get quality right the first time. I think the key message here is not that we should operate like a shop floor and allow any employee to stop a process at any time. Instead, there simply needs to be a culture that allows people to comfortably…
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Understanding the Contributors to Employee Engagement
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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…
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Choosing the Right Talent Strategy to Drive Profits
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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…