{"id":1446,"date":"2010-08-16T01:00:00","date_gmt":"2010-08-16T09:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/?p=1446"},"modified":"2010-06-11T15:40:09","modified_gmt":"2010-06-11T23:40:09","slug":"lack-of-use","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/?p=1446","title":{"rendered":"Lack of Use"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>It\u2019s been a while since I was on a bike.\u00a0 All for good reasons, I haven\u2019t actually been home in about 3 weeks.\u00a0 I mean, you do need to have a bike available to you and decent roads to go for a ride.\u00a0 I\u2019m not sure that 3 weeks in NYC qualify.\u00a0 First, I\u2019m afraid of the incredible dust in the city \u2013 while I\u2019m not afraid of traffic, I am extraordinarily afraid of dust and allergies that stay with me for days.\u00a0 Back to the point though.\u00a0 This morning, I went on my first bike ride since May 15 when I rode a meager 52 miles.\u00a0 (yes, I have a diary of all this stuff, and yes, it\u2019s fully GPS\u2019d)\u00a0 Just 3 months ago, I was riding about 80-90 miles without really suffering too much.\u00a0 But this morning, I rode an easy 48 miles, and I swear my legs were about to fall off.\u00a0 In what amounts to about 3 weeks, I have gone from barely competent to completely incompetent.\u00a0 What is worse, in about 3 months, I have gone from decent to my current state.\u00a0 There is good news though.\u00a0 With hard work and training, I can get it all back.<\/p>\n

The problem with HR competencies is not that most of us don\u2019t have them, it\u2019s that we\u2019ve consciously decided to let some of it go.\u00a0 Back in the day (all of 7 years ago), during the first major wave of HR outsourcing, organizations decided to outsource functions and thought that they didn\u2019t need to retain the competency and roles.\u00a0 After all, we were giving up these activities and people to someone who was going to take care of us.\u00a0 These HRO organizations were going to be more efficient, save us money AND provide better service all at the same time.<\/p>\n

Somewhere down the road, we realized that maybe it wasn\u2019t all true.\u00a0 As HRO organizations’ matured for the second wave of HR outsourcing, they realized that mentioning a retained organization might be a good idea.\u00a0 The problem is that we didn\u2019t really understand what the retained organization was all about yet, and there really weren\u2019t leading practices around it.\u00a0 So we kept a few people around in strategic capacities, and didn\u2019t assume that the vendor was going to be the \u201cbe all, end all\u201d for each of the outsourced functions.<\/p>\n

Problem is that it took us a pretty long time to figure out what we were missing.\u00a0 For example, it was often when we had a major PeopleSoft or SAP upgrade that we realized nobody was looking after HRIT in quite the same way we did ourselves.\u00a0 We realized that as much as a vendor\u2019s vanilla processes for performance management were nice starting points, real process design by people who knew the organization just wasn\u2019t available.\u00a0 We realized that we had gotten rid of a few too many people and the HRO didn\u2019t pick up the slack they way we thought they might.<\/p>\n

Not only did it take us a while to figure out what was missing, but after 3 or 5 or 7 years, we often didn\u2019t really know how to fill the void that we felt within our organizations.\u00a0 Writing job descriptions was hit and miss.\u00a0 After all, these roles may have existed prior to outsourcing, but more often than not, they existed within multiple people, and figuring out what pieces of which people was getting pretty challenging.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re still struggling with this problem, but I think we\u2019re struggling in the wrong way.\u00a0 We\u2019re writing job descriptions in the traditional way.\u00a0 We are writing roles, tasks, responsibilities, etc.\u00a0 But these roles are really more about competencies than tasks and responsibilities.\u00a0 These roles used to be filled by a few people, and so many times they are cross functional, don\u2019t require huge depth in subject matter expertise, and break down communication barriers between vendor\/client, HR\/technology, or functional areas.\u00a0 Retained counterparts to outsourced organizations become communicators and translators, but it will take time to create these new roles and for us to understand and mold how they fit with our organizations and our vendors.\u00a0 Luckily, we are finally at the point where we probably do get what we need, and how to fill that void, but it might take some time before we get it just right.<\/p>\n

For me, I just need to get back on the bike\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s been a while since I was on a bike.\u00a0 All for good reasons, I haven\u2019t actually been home in about 3 weeks.\u00a0 I mean, you do need to have a bike available to you and decent roads to go…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1448,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8,17],"tags":[441,201],"class_list":["post-1446","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-strategies","category-hro","tag-hro","tag-retained-organization"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1446","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1446"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1446\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1447,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1446\/revisions\/1447"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1448"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1446"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1446"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1446"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}