HR Strategy
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TCO in the Context of Risk
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Many regular readers of SystematicHR know that I conducted a Total Cost of Ownership study to determine the cost of benefits administration. The results were released last December. Double Dubs commented on it here, and it is how I originally came to find his great blog. Generally, TCO is a means at getting at hidden…
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Stopping the Talent Drain
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This site has many recurring themes, but here are 2 of the most popular: There’s a talent drain and it’s only getting worse. Compensation is no way to retain your highest performers. Obviously I was struck when I read “Stopping the Talent Drain” in Business 2.0 magazine. ((Pfeffer, Jeffrey, July 2006. “Stopping the Talent Drain.”…
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The True Costs of Unionization
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In an attempt to be apolitical (which is truly difficult for me), I was reading a New York Times article about United mechanics entering into a training program after layoffs. The success rate of returning those mechanics was dismal if the measurment was to get them into a job with similar pay. The success factor…
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Relationship Management – Measuring Satisfaction
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How do you know when an outsourcing initiative has been successful? At what point can you sit back, look at all that has been done and actually congratulate yourselves on a successful implementation, transition and effective and stable ongoing processing environment. I think back to the system person I dealt with on a 401(k) conversion…
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Retaining Your Senior Talent
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I (and many others) keep talking about the major reductions in senior level talent coming our way. Retirees will make up an increasing percentage of our population in the coming decades, and there are too many large shoes to fill. One of the major challenges is to understand how we as HR organizations can enhance…
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TCO and the Line Manager
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In the jobs I had before I started my own business, I always felt an important part of my responsibility was to develop the people who reported to me. In fact, I always went a step beyond and looked to develop one person to the point at which they could do my job. Of course,…
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6 Traits of the Next Generation HR Leader
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(A response to Jason Corsello) Usually I would say rebuttal instead of response, but Jason has this one right on. If you don’t read his site, start now by going there to see his comments on all of the below. Anything in bold is a direct quote from his blog, but as always I’ve added…
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TCO: A Case Study
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Some time ago, a fortune 500 company acquired another fortune 500 company. At the time, the acquiring company was a PeopleSoft shop for payroll and HRIS. The acquired company had been outsourcing payroll and accessed a hosted HRIS system for their HR needs. Both companies were roughly the same size and a decision needed to…
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Peter Drucker on the Manager’s Major Problem
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What’s the major problem? It is fundamentally the confusion between effectiveness and efficiency that stands between doing the right things and doing things right. There is surely nothing quite so useless ad doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all. Yet our tools – especially our accounting concepts and data all focus…
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Peter Drucker on the Manager’s Job
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What is the manager’s Job? It is to direct the resources and efforts of the business toward opportunities for economically significant results. This sounds trite – and it is. But every analysis of actual allocation of resources and efforts in business that I have ever seen or made showed clearly that the bulk of time,…
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Creating Strategy
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I’ve always thought of strategy as a single, focused concept. The strategy might be philosophical or there might be a concrete goal at the end of it. For example, philosophical strategies are things like “Employer of Choice.” You probably have quantitative ways of measuring “employer of Choice” but it’s primarily what I’ll call philosophical. On…
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The Keys to Employee Motivation
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At systematicHR, we sit around talking about (reading about) ideas like employee engagement and employer brand a lot. These are quite simple concepts to understand, but actually quite difficult to implement and achieve successfully. In terms of talent, the employer brand is a key environmental concept that directly impact talent acquisition and employee engagement is…
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So You’ve Been Retained: Part 1
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Who are you? With the recent glut of HRO and other outsourcing deals, it’s obvious that some employees are going to be invited to stick around, and others will be given the pink slip. With over 100 HRO deals out there (defined as fully outsourcing at least 5-6 processes), there have been a fairly large…
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An Introduction to TCO
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Earlier this week, Elaine commented on my article from last week How Much Can Outsourcing Really Save. Elaine writes: “Frankly, there are so many articles published stating different outcome of offshoring and outsourcing ventures. More often than not, people are confused on which side to believe in and which is telling the truth or lying.”…
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On Engagement and Learning
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The following is heavily plagiarized from Fortune Magazine (reference below) Francis Upton was a Princeton-trained mathematician. Working for Thomas Edison, he wrote to his father, “The strangest thing to me is the $12 that I get each Saturday, for my labor does not seem like work, but study.” It was Upton who bought the Instruments…
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How Much Can Outsourcing Really Save?
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I set this article aside some time ago with the intention of commenting on it at some point. Now is as good a time as any. The story, “Survey: Outsourcing saves less than claimed” is based on a survey conducted by TPI. The gist of the story is summed up in the lead: “Outsourcing of…
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To Engage Employees, Let Them Go
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The Edelmann blog highlights a New York Times article analyzing the affect of vacation time (or lack of) on employee engagement and turnover within the younger generation of workers (not quite phrased that way of course). Many young people in the workplace are finding that quitting their job is becoming the satisfying new alternative to…
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Great Brands in Action
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Creating a great brand is difficult. Often, the external brand and the internal brand are either not synchronized, or they are simply distinct strategies. Beyond the difficulty of creating a great brand, the difficulty of creating a single brand that communicates internally and externally is even more challenging. In the ongoing discussion about employer branding…
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A Checklist for Leadership Development
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We all hate this talk about “HR having a seat at the table.” It’s a tagline that getting old and perhaps a bit insulting. The truth is that HR has the influence to spearhead initiatives such as leadership development, but that influence is effective only when combined with the ability to mobilize the senior executives…
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Growing Talent as if Your Business Depended on It
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Talent management is clearly one of the morst popular strategies in HR today. Getting the most attention are components of talent management that can be systematized through software vendors like Taleo, SuccessFactors, Vurv, Authria and many others. Talent Acquisition, performance management, learning maangement and compensation management are quicker hits because implementation of process and success…