HR Strategy
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Web 2.0 Networks and HR
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This is an increasingly featured topic on this site. Innovation networks and collaboration networks are of great interest to the business community because it ties together how work and product actually gets done. Sure we have our formal organizational hierarchies, and we have process flow charts that rout our activities to each other, but the…
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Real Lesson From Despair.com: Motivation
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If a pretty poster and a cute saying are all it takes to motivate you, you probably have a very easy job. The kind robots will be doing soon. ((Despair.com)) I found this despair.com entry quite interesting on several levels. First, it draws from the realization that there is more to motivation than a poster,…
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Innovation Software and HR
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Do I ever get sick of being the only one who talks about innovation and preaching that HR should be involved? Sometimes I feel like I’ve spent the last 6 months spewing on about collaboration and innovation and how HR should be part of the lead for figuring how that stuff works. After all, it’s…
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Real Lesson From Despair.com: Get To Work
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You aren’t being paid to believe in the power of your dreams. ((Despair.com)) Somewhere I needed to write one of these despair.com pieces and disagree with the message. Sometimes, we are paid to believe in the power of our dreams. I’ll take myself as an example. If you read enough of systematicHR.com, you’ll have noticed…
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Three Unpalatable Truths
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Rob posted his three unpalatable truths a couple weeks ago and applied them to the creation of strategy. As I thought about my definition of HR strategy as “the shaping of the workforce” Rob’s unpalatable truths hit me pretty hard. 1. THE FUTURE IS UNKNOWABLE 2. RESULTS ARE OFTEN RANDOM AND UNPREDICTABLE 3. NOT EVERYBODY…
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Some HR BPO Conventional Wisdom
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With the next generation of HR BPO taking shape, companies are learning from past mistakes and employing new conventional wisdom around the process of migrating to an HR BPO solution. ((Christie, Mike and Wright, Mike. “Lessons Uncovered: The New Conventional Wisdom Around the Second Generation of HR BPO.” Hewitt Associates. Retrieved from www.hewitt.com on December…
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Real Lesson From Despair.com: Dysfunction
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The only consistent feature in all of your dissatisfying relationships is you. ((Despair.com)) I often see organizations who have many vendor relationships that are either marginally successful or complete failures. What these organizations never enjoy hearing is that they are partly to blame for these failed relationships. While I’ll always admit that failure is an…
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Plateauing, Multiple Career Ladders, Engaging Employees
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Knowledge@Wharton wrote a few months ago about a “new” phenomenon within middle manager ranks. A number of men and women in middle management are increasingly reluctant to take the next step in their careers because the corporate ladder is not as appealing as it used to be, and the price to climb it is too…
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Employee Engagement Improves Organizational Agility
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The Mckinsey Quarterly survey of barriers to agility and speed related to behavior and attitude ranked “employees lacking a sense of purpose commitment, motivation” as the number 1 factor inhibiting business speed and agility. ((Miranda, Thiel, 2007. “Improving Organizational Speed and Agility.” McKinsey Quarterly 2007 Number 1. Page 14)) With over 1500 business executives surveyed,…
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Real Lesson From Despair.com: Disservice
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It takes months to find a customer, but only seconds to lose one… the good news is that we should run out of them in no time. ((Despair.com)) This is as true in HR as any other part of our organizations. Our recruiting processes often takes weeks if not months to find a good employee.…
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Quantifying Competency’s Effect on Productivity
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A recent McKinsey survey published in Mckinsey Quarterly ((Reineke, Spiller, Ungerman, 2007. “The Talent Factor in Purchasing.” McKinsey Quarterly 2007 Number 1. Page 6)) highlighted a study on the purchasing organization and the correlation of core competencies to an organization’s bottom line. While the purchasing organization has a clear and direct line to total costs…
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Real Lesson From Despair.com: Demotivation
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Sometimes the best solution to morale problems is just to fire all of the unhappy people. ((Despair.com)) As mean as it sounds, it may be true. We all know the famous method that Jack Welch popularized at GE – remove the bottom 10% of the workforce each year. The idea here is that there almost…
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HR Versus Finance – Influence, Power, and a Seat at the Table Part 2
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Lowell Bryan wrote in the McKinsey Quarterly that there is a new metric around: Times have changed and ROIC is no longer important – the new metric is profit per employee. ((Bryan, Lowell, 2007. “The New Metrics of Corporate Performance: Profit per Employee.” McKinsey Quarterly 2007 Number 1. Page 56)) Again, we look at the…
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HR Versus Finance – Influence, Power, and a Seat at the Table Part 1
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I had an interesting conversation with Jeff Hunter a few weeks ago where he was pondering why HR did not have the executive “power” that the likes of finance does. Well, he was not so much wondering as pointing out that the emphasis was misdirected. I completely agree that with today’s shift to a knowledge…
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Virtual versus Physical Communities
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The advent of virtual communities and their influence on shaping the workforce in undeniable. What started ages ago with people talking over the phone but perhaps never meeting has turned into true communities where people can identify themselves with groups of people based on semi-unique traits. Within our organizations, this can simply mean “I belong…
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Quantifying the Customer Experience
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Hewitt has a lovely article in their Hewitt Magazine Online entitled “The Science of Customer Experience.” ((Volume 9 Issue 2. Retrieved from www.hewitt.com on December 18, 2006.)) While I’m really going to stick by my guns in the proclamation that they are an outsourcing company and no longer a pure consulting company, their outsourcing experience…
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Real Lesson from Despair.com: Conformity
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When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other. ((Despair.com)) There really is a lesson in here. It’s about change management and how you decide to select your core change team as well as how they influence others. One of the keys to change management is who you select to…
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Defining Talent Management
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Talent management is a true buzz word around HR these days, has been for a few years now. We all know the components of talent management: performance, compensation process, succession, recruitment, learning, competencies. All of these are major components to an overall talent strategy. Inclusive in this list should also be technology. But what really,…
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Defining Culture
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In a recent edition of AON’s “AON Consulting Forum” they had an article entitled “Leading Change: Creating an Energized Organization.” ((October 2006. Retrieved from www.aon.com on December 18, 2006.)) My first reaction was a rather uncalled for scoff. My thoughts were that the article reflected my opinion that AON is a second tier HR consulting…
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Operational Innovation – Guidance from the Top
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IBM’s global survey of CEO’s briefly mentions operational innovation as one of the keys to mitigating external threats and maximizing organizational agility for new opportunities. In HR we constantly talk about operational efficiency and effectiveness, especially on this site where technology applications to business are of particular interest. However, most of the time we’re internally…