#HRCongress Designing People-centric Organisations

As my bog tagline says, HCM is all about people centred HR.  Therefore I'm really pleased I'm going to be speaking at Stamford Global's new HR Congress in Amsterdam.

Other speakers include:

• Dave Ulrich, Professor of Business, Ross School of Business
• Lynda Gratton, Professor of Management Practice, London Business School
• Erin Meyer, Professor of Organizational Development, INSEAD
• Paul Sparrow, Professor, Director of Performance-Led HR, Lancaster University
• Tampa Chandler, CEO & Author, PeopleFirm
• Konstantin Korotov, Director of the Center for Leadership, London Business School
• Rob Briner, Professor of Organizational Psychology, University of Bath
• Paul Turner, Professor of Management Practice, Leeds Beckett University Business School
• Ian Bailie, Global Head, Talent Acquisition and People Planning Operations, Cisco Systems
• Peter Baker, CHRO, Damco
• Marie-Pierre Defoin, HR Director EMEA, Rockwell Automation
• Dominique Ben Dhaou, Senior Vice President HR Talent Developement, SGS
• Sandor Janosi, Head of HR Europe GE Global Operations, GE
• Charles Kidd, Global Direct Learning and Talent Developement, Belmont
• Mark Levy, Global Head of Employee Experience, AirBnB
• Nigel Miller, CHRO, Edelman
• Hala Morcos, L&D Professional
• Martin Oest, Former Head of Strategic Workforce Planning and Analytics, Metropolitan Police
• Miriam Ort, VP Head of HR, PepsiCo
• Angelique Plugge, Innovation Driver, ING
• Nienke Schaap, Founder & CEO, Inukzoek
• Rob Schokker, General Manager HR, 3M
• Ido Shikma, VP HR Europe, Prologis
• Luk Smeyers, CEO & Founder, iNostix
• Andrew Spence, CEO, Glass Bead Consulting
• Mark Vlaanderens, Sr. Director, Head of Leadership, Talent & Learning, Philips
• Joy Jinghui Xu

That's quite a line up!

I'll also be involved in a couple of other things at the conference, including working with Lynda, Mark and Ingrid Eras Magdalena, VP, Global HR at Belmond as judge for the new HR Excellence Awards.

Ticket pricing for the conference will start at just €595 for the first 100 seats! (corporate HR leaders only.  So do book and I look forward to seeing you there.

• Consulting   Research  Speaking  Training  Writing
• Strategy  - Talent - Engagement  - Change and OD 
• Contact me to create more value for your business
• jon [dot] ingham [at] strategic [dash] hcm [dot] com

Symposium Mission Critical Analytics

I'm back at Symposium's Mission Critical HR Analytics conference in September.

My session is on:

Focusing analytics on HR strategy using evidence based insights

• Understanding what questions to ask to ensure analytics has a major impact on the business
• Using data and other evidence as the basis for insight creation
• Simple but strategic approaches for descriptive and predictive analytics

Ie I'll show you how you can do simple but strategic analytics, and without the need for great technology, clean data or having to wait 10 years until you've got these.

(If you want more detail around this I"m also doing a training session the following week.)

You can also see a summary of my session on employee engagement analytics last year.

Other speakers include:

• Peter Reilly, Principal Associate, Institute for Employment Studies
• Edward Houghton, Research Adviser, Human Capital and Metrics, CIPD
• Julian Thornley, Global Head of People Experience, Travelex
• Tim Cowley, Head of HR , FirstGroup
• Neil Parkinson, Senior HR Analyst, CBRE Limited
• Ben Hawkes, Advisor, HR Analytics, Shell

Sound good?  Come along...

• Consulting   Research  Speaking  Training  Writing
• Strategy  - Talent - Engagement  - Change and OD 
• Contact me to create more value for your business
• jon [dot] ingham [at] strategic [dash] hcm [dot] com

Let's stop the 'generation blah' blah

One of my most fun pastimes on Twitter is tweeting about generations.

I don't know if it's just the people who follow me but I always attract a couple of responses complaining of over generalisation and stereotyping.

People do make too much of generation differences and often misrepresent the research.   My favourite worst example of this was a presentation in Saudi Arabia using generic suggestions about generations from the USA.  If you understand that generational differences are based upon very different experiences people have in their lives, particularly whilst they were teenagers and their brains for rapidly changing, then you'll recognise that's nonsense.

Sorry but a Saudi teenager has a very different teenage experience from one in the States, particularly if they're a woman.  Indian teenagers will have had a different experience again.  It makes no sense to extrapolate from one (usually the US) to another.

Here's a good summary of the issue.

At TechHR it's happened twice (actually several responses to two tweets).  Once in response to a tweet about someone else's presentation and comment, and once a retweet of an HR magazine article about graduates.  Well sorry the presenter was talking about generations and the article was about graduates.  What can I do?  Particularly in 140 characters.

As well as being vaguely annoying the responses are unhelpful for two other reasons.

Firstly we have to be able to talk and tweet about things,  You might not agree with what I or another speaker are saying but its important I'm able to state it without snarky responses.

Secondly - and again, you might not agree - but generation differences are real.  It's just that they're not the only difference which exists.  People of different genders are different, different national cultures are different.  So are people of different religions, experiences, perspectives, orientations and all sorts of different things.

Actually you put all of that together and the only way to respond to people and their differences is to treat each person as an individual.

That doesn't mean it's wrong to try to disentangle the differences between gen y and baby boomers, or men and women etc etc.  So let's just not do the generation blah blah thing.  Please.

Photo credit - Satya Sinha

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• jon [dot] ingham [at] strategic [dash] hcm [dot] com

#TechHR16 - Why you should listen to gurus

I'm in Gurgaon in India for People Matters' Tech HR conference.

Gurgaon is the 'village of gurus' and People Matters has done a great job in assembling an amazing line up of speakers.

Just from an international perspective we've heard from gurus Gerry Crispin, Josh Bersin, China Gorman, Jonathan Campbell, Steven Ehrlich and Laurie Ruettimann.  And me.

The local Indian speaker panel has been excellent as well - I'm only not listing them as they will be slightly less recognisable for most of my readers.  I will note my regret in not seeing Gautam Ghosh who remains the greatest of Indian HR gurus as far as I'm concerned.

I've been keynoting, huddling, unconferencing and panelling - in a panel with Gerry, China and Laurie, and chaired by Prashant Bhatnagar.  And one of the questions (which I didn't get to answer) was why people in the audience (HR practitioners) should listen to us (none of whom work in HR).

I forget Laurie's and China's answers but I've been thinking about mine.  There are three:

• We may not be in HR but we talk to a lot of people who do - we try to summarise and generalise from their experience.

• Sometimes you need to be able to stand back to understand what needs to change.  It's easier for HR practitioners to lose sight of the forest for the trees.

• We're only suggesting you may want to listen to us, we're not asking you to do what we say.

For me, we want to talk with and listen to as many people as we can.  It's then up to us to decide what we want to do about it.

As I suggested in my keynote, all organisations are different, particularly when comparing across sectors, countries etc.  Companies in India are very different from those in the US (I suggested their processes may be a bit more clunky but they are often underpinned by a much more progressive, humanistic approach).

We also want to avoid being seduced by best practice or equally unhelpful ideas like the future of work (for example I still question whether many organisations will ever move away from hierarchical structures to Josh's networks of teams).

The only way to square this circle is to be clear about what we want doc create in our people and organisation and then innovate our HR processes and activities to support this.  That may look like some of the gurus' or speakers'  ideas you've come across and it may not.

All that we can offer as speakers is offer challenge and provocation.  The rest is up to you.

• Consulting   Research  Speaking  Training  Writing
• Strategy  - Talent - Engagement  - Change and OD 
• Contact me to create more value for your business
• jon [dot] ingham [at] strategic [dash] hcm [dot] com

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