HR Strategy
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Management as a Productivity Barrier
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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…
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The Toyota Way: Principle 4
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Level out the workload (Heijunka) I love what we do to some of our departments. We engineer processes so that they are optimal for us, but certain downstream participants in the process are not always considered. In many organizations, January…
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The Toyota Way: Principle 3
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Use “pull” systems to avoid overproduction. As I read “The Toyota Way” I constantly tried to think about how I could apply these principles to what I do, HR. Reading the chapter on Principle 3, I repetitively came back to…
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Asynchronous Communications, HR 2.0 and the Future of Work
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We seem to want real time everything. We schedule meetings when and where the most of us can be together in the same room. When that fails, we schedule conference calls. I’m a definite culprit of this as I will…
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The Toyota Way: Principle 2
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Create continuous process flow to bring problems to the surface. This really goes to one of the core Toyota principles that they are best known for – Just In Time. One of the key principles is the discarding of waste…
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Enabling versus Empowering
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In HRIT we spend so much time implementing and rolling out systems that we implicitly know that change management is an important part of any implementation. Vendors usually provide training, and communications are a well known part of any roll-out…
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Driving Pet Peeve’s and HR Technologies
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Some lessons are just universal in life. Others are not. Here are a few that I came up with while extraordinarily bored: 1) If you don’t know how to drive a big car, don’t buy and SUV Corollary: Sometimes you…
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The Toyota Way: Principle 1
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Base your management decisions on a long-term philosophy, even at the expense of the short term financial goals. Basically this is a lesson not in profits, but in behavior. It is the “do the right thing” lesson, but in Toyota…
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Organizing for Innovation
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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…
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HR Needs to Be Scared
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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,…
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Creating Effective Collaboration Networks
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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,…
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1 Jerk = $160K
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I first heard about the “Jerk” effect during a verbal presentation at a conference. Robert Sutton apparently did a study and found that for every “jerk” in your organization, they are costing you $160K of productivity and profits each year….
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The New Collaboration
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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…
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How Talent Networks Increase Profits
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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…
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Keeping Your CEO’s Sleep Deprived
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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…
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Leading Top Talent
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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…
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Over Managing Top Talent
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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…
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Why Payroll Hates HR
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Generally, I find that any time payroll reports to Finance and not HR, there is a pretty strained relationship. After all, these are organizations that work closely together because of their relationship with the employee data, but these are organizations…
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The Self Service Experience
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Every vendor you ever meet will tell you how much time and money your organization will save by implementing self service tools and workflow automation. It’s definitely true that the initiative to go paperless has shifted work, but whether or…
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Shifting from Higher Education to the Workplace
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So you get in college these days, and in addition to the great classroom experiences, you have great on-line discussion tools where you can post questions and solve problems with other classmates. You turn in all of your assignments on-line…