#E4S case studies - BT, Capital One...

 

   As well as hearing from academics, we’ve got a couple of sessions from practitioners today. In fact, we’ve also got a session on ‘how can academic research help practice?’, which I’m really looking forward to, later on today.

But after a couple of these I was beginning to worry whether these case study sessions were going to live up to the challenge that E4S provides and David Guest described earlier - if there’s been such as huge management cock-up as there certainly has, we don’t get out of it by a slight shift in management as usual.

 

As it turned out, I didn’t need to worry as there were a couple of impressive case studies:

Firstly, BT, which has an interesting approach which was presented well by their head of engagement, Sharon Darwent.

But I still think their approach fits too much within existing management paradigms.  Eg Sharon was talking about how data obsessed their people are and therefore emphasised the need for her to provide data. So she took us through more of the data from the ‘Nailing the Evidence’ report and some of the key data points from within BT too. Both of these are powerful. In BT in particular Sharon is able to show that the company’s 34% disengagement costs them £2 bn in salaries. This really got the accountants’ attention.

Yes, but does approaching engagement from an accountant’s perspective ever work? Or do we need to change the way many accountants think? (see for example this post on Mohan Pai’s move from Finance to HR.) I think it’s this accountancy mentality that often gets in the way of engagement and that providing data can sometimes add to the problem rather than provide the answer. An example is BT’s policy of giving feedback on their team’s engagement levels to every manager of more than 50 people. That certainly shows how important the company believes engagement to be, but I believe it can also put more focus on the transactional vs transformational approach to engagement.

I was also bemused that the presentation didn’t include anything about BT’s journey to organisational health which to me provides the most important context for engagement within that company currently.

Having said all this, it’s an impressive case study, and does show some signs of moving to a more human approach as well – eg in that half of BT’s engagement survey questions are now qualitative so that they don’t lead peoples’ responses.

 

However, I thought a rather better demonstration of the transformational opportunity for engagement was provided by Karen Bowes at Capital One. That’s partly just because of the improvement in engagement levels they’ve see there – see the graph at the top of this post. (And OK, I realise it must have been relatively easy to improvement engagement from their previous level of 26% particularly as these were exceptionally low as they followed a downsizing of the organisation from 2,500 to 1,000 employees following the failure of their earlier business strategy.  But building this up to 83% is highly impressive regardless of the low start.)

But I also thought Capital One’s approach demonstrated what I was suggesting is important before - ie a sound logical framework, executed with emotional understanding.

The thing which was most important for Capital One was what E4S define as a strategic narrative (one of the four enablers). This is articulated in the company’s new vision, ‘Let’s Make Lives Better’ which come from the heart of their CEO. For employees, the company has committed to ‘dare to be the best’. Making this real has involved admitting they’ve had a problem in the past (a bit like being an alcoholic) which has included assuming that call centre staff, particularly in an outsourced environment, don’t care - they now realise they got that wrong.

The second priority has been engaging leaders and managers first (E4S’ second enabler) and the third has been sorting the basics eg IT and free milk???

Capital One have got data too, but it’s the qualitative kind that Karen spent most time on - the fact that they’re now the UK’s second highest Great Place to Work - and this quote:

 

“Capital One is part of my life, not just a pace I work. I love it and it’s made me a better person.”

 

OK, we can’t expect everyone to engage like this but we’d all benefit if we recruit people who can, and then provide the environment in which they can do so.

 

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#BersinIMPACT: Agile HR

 

   As well as career development, performance management, recruiting and learning, the two key themes of the conference were probably big data, and agility.

This is Josh Bersin on agility:

“In today’s fast-changing business environment, organizations tell us that their #1 goal is to improve their “business agility” – their ability to understand market changes, rapidly adapt, and operate as a globally integrated business. How can your HR, learning, and leadership programs help make this happen?

Well unfortunately, many existing HR and L&D programs are getting in the way. A recent Economist Intelligence Unit study (Fall of 2010) found that Human Resources is the ‘least agile’ function in most businesses, less change-ready then even finance and administration. The old fashioned processes for training, performance management, succession, and compensation are just not keeping up.

And to make matters worse, HR teams are not always aware of modern solutions. Chief Human Resource Officers tell us that their #1 challenge, after partnering with their CEO, is modernizing the skills and capabilities of the HR team itself.”

 

Supporting Josh Bersin’s presentation on agility was another from Matt Milbrodt at Walmart.  After having performed the Walmart cheer (including squiggley – well, as a Brit, I took photos of everyone else doing it instead [and I bet Asda staff don’t do one!]) – we learnt about Walmart’s agile approaches to keep up with some amazing growth projects – from a base of 2m employees today, Walmart needs another 4m people by 2013 to cover growth and replenishment!  So recruiting, development, retaining processes have to keep up with this pace.

I particularly liked the example of a group selection process from Walmart Canada in which 9 managers interview 18 associates in one 1.5 hour session.  The process includes role plays and scenarios, benefits, including career etc, and speed meetings and interviews.  Oh, and the Walmart cheer of course.  The process is completed by a collaborative hiring decision.

 

 

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#BersinIMPACT: Mentoring for Career Development

 

   The other process area that seemed to get a fair amount of focus at Bersin Impact, other than performance management, learning / leadership development, and recruiting, was career development.  This is perhaps not surprising given that Bersin see “talent mobility as the new competitive advantage”.

For example, in the keynote from NBC News, Dana Tomechko suggested that one of HR’s main opportunities is to inspire and support employees in career development, eg helping them try something new and even stumble.  Employees often don’t have time to consider the next career move and HR can help them explore the ambiguity, understand their next steps and foster their career narratives.

To support this, NBC News HR:

• Embraces positive irritants (people)
• Suspends their attachment to structure and processes
• Embraces change – even when this is undefined.

 

Their most interesting strategy is probably the team’s support for connecting people – often using electronic media.  Even when they meet an employee that try to share a name and make a virtual connection with another employee.

Employees are working harder and connecting less and often have no time to understand the larger team and across the HR profession we are loosing out ability to network too – but this should be at the front of the HR agenda.

NBC News seek to ask as many question as the company’s journalists, and to understand these individuals’ histories – where they have excelled, where they’ve stumbled – and to draw their stories out.

These connections and stories provide a great basis for talent mobility and career development.

 

However the main presentation on this topic was provided by Don Kraft, Director of Learning & Development at Genentech (Roche Pharmaceuticals).  Their career development focus has been built upon an exiting mentoring initiative, as the need for mentoring has fallen from the top three list of why people leave Genentech, being replaced by people looking for career development opportunities in the new era of flat growth in pharmaceuticals.

However, the fact that mentoring has already been in place helps.  And the success of the mentoring programme is due partly to it being confidential, levels of trust, matching being done from different organisation structures, and the mentoring action plan being focused on mentees’ learning goals.

Genentech’s CareerLab was introduced three years ago and consists of career conversations (45 minute sessions up to 3 times per year); learning labs, mentoring and career readiness assessments.

The mentoring services consist of formal mentoring programmes; eHarmony type mentoring matching and a mentoring toolkit which employees wanted to create their own self-directed informal mentoring partnerships.  The toolkit consists of tools and resources and supports a mentee driven process.  This has benefits to both the individual and to Genentech (in particular being much less time consuming than the formal programmes).

I think I was most interested in Don’s inputs on this toolkit - partly because I do think technology can provide the critical enabler that makes both mentoring and career development work, as physical mentors and coaches can often be too expensive, and paper based guides lack the easy to use functionality and retainability of an electronic toolkit.

And also because I’m currently working with a start-up vendor; Careergro; providing a new career development system which I believe will help other organisations capture the same benefits from career development as, and more easily than, Genentech.

Give me a call if you want to know more about this system, or how you can develop your own approach to career development:

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#BersinIMPACT: Blowing up performance reviews

 

   I only managed to catch the final session yesterday but it was a good one.

We started with Bersin’s research suggesting that 70% of companies follow a coaching and development vs a competitive assessment approach to performance management.

It’s a potentially useful focus given that organisations with high quality development plans generate twice the revenue per employee as organisations with poor or ineffective development plans.

Plus moving away from focusing on the performance ‘score’ makes the process more relevant for people.  Bersin see this, together with simplifying the process and bringing more people into the process eg through the use of social tools, as the key opportunities for improving appraisals.

 

I largely agree that this is the / an opportunity for performance management, though I’m surprised by Bersin’s findings that 70% of organisations are already focused on this track.  I certainly don’t think many are as advanced as Kelly Services which provided the session case study.

Kelly had previously put too much focus into PMP – performance management ‘process’.  Ratings took over from authentic discussion.  But actually, this didn’t even mean that the ratings themselves were particularly sound – eg some managers never gave a ‘5’, whereas others only gave this out.  It also took a huge amount of time.

The organisation therefore removed compensation decisions from this process and instead developed an employee led process in which employees call for performance review meetings (employees are also responsible for maintaining their own employee profiles and Kelly mine these so they can look for people internally before they have to look externally).

Pay is now based upon talent reviews and subsequent total reward reviews in which group leaders come together.  These leaders know each other and know each others’ employees.  And they talk about each others employees.

 

I though the most interesting question in the Q&A was one directed back at HR – suggesting that the HR function itself may be the main barrier to ‘blowing up’ performance management, and how organisations can best engage HR in making this sort of change. 

Terry Hauer who was delivering the Kelly Services presentation didn’t have an immediate answer for this.  I think I do, but it will have to wait for another time.  And I agree it’s likely to be a key issue for organisations that want to make performance management work.

 

More from Bersin Impact 2012 later on today / tomorrow….

 

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#CIPDSocial11 Bill Parsons (ARM): social media and why business needs to take notice

 

   The CIPD’s social media conference has kicked off with a session from Bill Parsons, EVP HR at ARM Holdings.  I met Bill at ARM in Cambridge earlier this year, so this post is a combination of his presentation, and my earlier notes.

I’ll start off by saying ARM is one of my favourite companies – and in fact it’s one of the world’s favourite companies too.  ARM’s vision is to be an effective innovative company (not just a wacky one) – a creative productive machine – and it has been consistently judged as one of the most innovative companies in the world.

However the reason I like the company is that it’s one of the very few that I know about which isn’t just using social media, but has focused on becoming a truly social organisation.  Rather than following ‘the Chelsea Model’ of simply having the very best people / access to the best human capital (‘human capital is about a group of smart people who don’t talk to each other’), ARM focuses on the best social capital – ie having the best networks, relationships and trust.  Human, social and intellectual capital (the explicit stuff which they sell) are the company’s differentiation.  Social capital has been at the centre of their HR strategy for the last decade – it’s the rocket fuel of the innovative organisation.

 

 

This starts with the company’s values which focus on things like teaming and selflessness (unusual in such a profitable company) – and are definitely not vanilla.  They were developed and evolved from the organisation’s founders and focus specifically on ARM as a unique organisation (rather than the things which every other organisation does).

Part of the reason that ARM focuses so much on social relationships is that their strategy is about connecting, collaborating and hence innovating and their model for innovation is primarily about open innovation.  They therefore need everyone to behave selflessly – for the greater good of ARM - in external as well as internal networks.  It sounds idealistic but Bill says this really works at ARM (and I think I believe him).

It’s an unusual business model – ARM sees itself as being at the centre of an ecosystem of 500 competing companies collaborating.  ARM itself only employees 2100 people – vs Intel, its main competitor, with 100,000 people.  Their model only works by having a high surface area which it achieves by having its employees talking directly to customers.  The company’s values and culture makes this easy – it’s clear what provides value.

These values are then used as the basis for HR practices eg assessing promotability, fast tracking etc.  In fact the whole HR strategy is about creating the magical ingredients supporting the development of social capital.  Eg rather than the Accenture corporate model in which people are fighting to get to the top, in ARM if anyone is seen to be overtly trying to be promoted, ARM will fire them!  Rewards come to people who do things for the greater good.

So ARM does identify high flyer potential management talent and provides them with coaching and training to help them build their legitimacy.  If you don’t have the buy-in and support of your peers and the people you’re going to manage you’ve got a problem.  ARM ensures that these individuals have good business relationships and networks.

Compensation aligns with ARM’s social strategy as well.  Ensuring justice is an essential part of a social strategy and ARM provide their staff with more equity than any other European company.  This makes employees’ feeling of ownership more meaningful too.  The corporate bonus is largely collective too (just a small proportion is individually driven).

Recognition also focuses on what people do together – they hardly ever celebrate individual success.  Eg the company celebrated its 20 year anniversary last year (its been the highest performing company in the world over this time).  But the celebration was really one of international collective being eg they gave everyone an ipad (they were founded as a child of Apple and Newton Computer).  It was a 27 hour global party revisiting their global successes – not individual stories.

Leadership selection and development is aligned with the values too.  Their CEO is probably the most understated CEO in the FTSE – the one with the highest humility.  He works full time at ARM and keeps a low profile outside.

More generally ARM seek to grow leadership internally – ensuring cultural fit, and fit into the team based environment.  Their feedback and development system also focuses on the company’s values, providing 180 degree insight about what employees think of their bosses.

Social media does have a role in all of this of course, in fact they’ve been using social media for at least ten years.  This includes Skype, Linkedin and Facebook for external use, and blogs and forums internally.  In addition, it uses:

• Internal YouTube – ARM TV
• Yammer has taken off in a big way.
• Video conferencing is the norm (rather than something which would be perceived to be not quite as good.)
• And wikis are the predominant tool for collaboration.

 

 

They also run a Exec Q&A once a year in which their exec answer any question on anything from anyone.  And it’s videod and podcasted so that everyone can see it.

Interestingly a lot of this, eg Yammer and their wikis, were started unofficially and took off from there, rather than being introduced by IT.

However, in Bill’s view, social media can become antisocial media – a barrier to effective communication. So you need to do face-to-face meetings to help people get to know each other. Arguably in advance of social media.

So in ARM, traditional communications plays a part as well eg ARM run twice the number of events (with a corresponding impact on travel budgets) than they need to – these are overtly opportunities to create social networks.  Eg they have a 80 person forum in which they invite people who don’t know each other well to get together (some of which is done unconference style) to work on a range of OD topics eg on the organisation of the future.  This ensures the organisation is constantly questioning its culture.  To get round the biggest organisational barrier of any organisation which is not having the best ideas, they often invite internal customers along, and sometimes external customers too.

It all starts with dinner and drinks in the bar, and then the next morning a discussion on the topics – but what matters is the relationships and new networks that are formed.  The same in their engineering conferences, code tests, transistor tests etc etc.

ARM have tried to measure their social capital through approaches like social network analysis, and they also measure engagement, though what they’re really concerned about is organisational citizenship behaviours – do staff understand that networking is part of their day job, and that they need to help the organisation rather than just doing their own thing.

It’s an impressive case study and it’s paid off too.  ARM’s market value is £4m per employee which Bill argues is down largely to the company’s social capital and use of social media.

 

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My Zappos tour

 

   Just back from Zappos.  Definitely wow!

This is a trip I’ve been wanting to do since seeing Tony Hsieh speak at the HCI Summit in 2009.  I’ve not got much information to add to my previous post, but you can take a look at these:

 

View Full Album

 

Technorati Tags: Zappos,Las Vegas,customer,service,employee,engagement,happiness,tour

 

It’s Customer Service Appreciation Week at Zappos this week and Superman Day today, so we saw lots of Zapponians wearing capes.  And to show my support for Zappos way of working I thought I’d share this photo from HR Technology with you too:

 

 

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John Boudreau transforming HR at #HRTechConf

 

   John Boudreau is another one of those not-such-a-favourite-of-mine academics, but my HR blogging friend in Singapore, Abhishek Mittal, has been singing his praises, so I’ve been looking forward to his session in Las Vegas.

Boudreau has been encouraging us to think more like scientists – to get between the ears of our leaders.  We need to ask are we using the evidence that exists in our organisations, in the scientific world ie evidence that already exists, and how do we look beyond the evidence to influence decision making.

1.   We need to move from having lots of information to putting this information to use.  Rather than giving our leaders lots of information and hoping they’ll invent a system to use it. 

 

2.   We need to retool HR by learning from the dilemmas facing other disciplines.  And we need to learn the  business models or our organisations, not just the businesses themselves.

And we need to push back a bit (create value) – not just agree to reduce time to fill requisitions, surpluses and shortages but to identify how to optimise these.

For example, we need to learn from Supply Chain Management how we can improve the supply chain of talent.  This is what IBM did bringing in their second top person in SCM to design their approach for talent – including a governance model for skills etc.

 

3. We need to segment our talent eg Starbucks segmentation into five groups including ‘I work to live, not live to work’ (the surfer dude) – sorry my picture didn’t take, and this one from Ben Brooks is the only one I’ve seen (please let me know if you’ve got a better one!):

 

We need to understand things like the theory of constraints – asking better questions to inform decision making.

 

4. We need to get better at using risk management as the basis for workforce planning, rather than seeing it as just stopping something bad from happening.  There are links between uncertainty, risk and opportunity.  We need to use tools like portfolio analysis.  And we need to plan for a largely unknown system rather than using the job titles etc which exist today.

 

5.   We also need to ensure that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts eg that our systems integrate with each other.  Less best of the art systems and more that fit together and deliver what we need (see the Executive Guide to Integrated Talent Management)

Eg Shanda Games, based in China which is the fastest groing online gaming system in the work has built its HR architecture as a massively multi-player online game with a 100 level staffing system to help people see progress.

 

 

Well, I don’t know Abhishek: there’s not a lot of new stuff in there (I certainly think it’s time Boudreau moves on from his “there’s only one Mickey Mouse” spiel).

I did like the Shanda example, and would have preferred a whole session focused on that.

But my bigger concern is with this whole scientist thing.  If Boudreau was talking about social science rather than physical science then perhaps I wouldn’t be so worried.  But I don’t think he is.

And actually, I don’t even think that social science takes us far enough.  Let me be blunt.  HR’s an art.

OK, it’s a science as well, but the magical stuff that makes organisations wonderful places to work doesn’t have anything to do with Boudreau’s five needs.

If you look at any of the case studies I’ve featured in my blog, eg Mahindra & Mahindra which I wrote about last week, or Zappos, where I’ll be on Thursday, none of these have anything do to with science.

Let’s just grow up, understand that HR is different from other business disciplines, and start to act differently, not just the same, as our business colleagues.

That, to me, is transformative HR!

 

 

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Learning from India

 

   Peter Cappelli (or Peetr Kappalli) hasn’t always been my favourite academic, but I did very much enjoy his recent book, The India Way. So I thought I’d take a chance and attend his session today, and listen to a couple of organisations which participated in his research.

We kicked off with Peetr describing some of his research.

 

The one thing which I think came out most strongly was the importance of having a social purpose.

 

Ed Miliband may now recognise that “we need a more ethical capitalism in which we recognise that business has real responsibilities. Business is not just about making money.” (though he doesn’t seem to be getting much support for these views) but in India that’s long been the way things are done.

Social purpose drives the business and making money certainly won’t be what you want to lead with. This approach pays off – employees will be more motivated when they see and believe there is a social purpose.

 

We then had a presentation from Rajeev Dubey, President at Mahindra & Mahindra.

M&M are creating Tomorrow’s Company. This is a business transformation created from a cultural transformation (creating value) – about moving people from the subtext to the headlines, and aligning behaviours in support of the triple bottom line.

 

The transformation requires a mix a logic and intuition, in which people are in the flow – and can go deep into any situation, and trust through authenticity.

M&M run fireside chats to connect young employees with senior execs (these are also streamed virtually).

 

And they provide ESOPs but these are employee social (vs share) options –facilitating employee volunteerism in social activities.

I thought this was a great presentation – absolutely the way that companies should be run.

 

Technorati Tags: Peter Cappelli,Rajeev Dubey,Mahindra & Mahindra,India,Asia,talent,strategy,Singapore,human capital,summit

 

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Finding a human capital niche: Haier’s horse race

 

  I’ve been chatting to a couple of clients over the last fortnight about the importance of developing a unique proposition for people management.

We tend to think that there is just one best way of doing HR, whereas in fact there is a broad variety of potential approaches open to us.

The key point is that people are all different.  This being the case, organisations can choose which sort of people they’re going to focus on employing and supporting.  The challenge then is aligning HCM strategy and HC / HR processes around this strategy in a way that will appeal to (deliver the deal for) the chosen group of people.

There’s a good example of this in Paul Evans and Vladimir Pucik’s book, The Global Challenge, which also emphasises the need for differentiation supported by internal consistency, along with the balancing of dualities (local and global) in international human resource management.

This is Haier, established as a refrigerator factory in Qingdao in 1920 and now a multinational consumer electronics and home appliances company which with over 6% share of the white goods sector is the market leader.  It is also credited with being mainland China’s (vs Hong Kong’s) only truly global brand.

Haier models its HR strategy on a race track in which case all employees, including managers, need to keep racing, and winning, in order to access rewards and responsibilities etc.  The company explains:

“Haier provides its every employee opportunities to develop and demonstrate talents.

It is not able people, but the mechanism to encourage able people development, should we be concerned about. The responsibility of a manager is to establish a ‘race track’, ie. personality development opportunity, for every employee to become a SBU.

The ‘Horse racing court’ requires three principles, firstly, fair competition; secondly, ability-based appointment; thirdly, reasonable job rotation. Under the contract labor system policy, employees are regularly evaluated and classified by performances, and the managerial personnel do not work at the same position permanently but rotate regularly in a fixed period. The significance of Haier’s human resource management is to stimulate the enthusiasm of employees. In this system, every employee can feel the pressure from both inside and outside the company and convert the pressure into creative motility. This is the key to success.”

 

Some of the main features of Haier’s approach include:

• Each employee’s targets increase by 1% every day.
• Every employee is subject to frequent and transparent performance appraisals (going against the traditional Chinese culture in which saving face is so important).
• Low performers are ‘put on medication’ which means remedial training.  More serious cases are put on ‘IV use’ which includes demotion.  Three negative reviews placing an employee in the bottom 10% of the workforce, leads to ‘hospitalisation’, ie dismissal.
• All employees can compete for job openings and promotions (‘races’) but have to keep on winning these to retain the title – there’s no such thing as a permanent promotion.
• Managers performance is also reviewed every week with the results being displayed every month in the entrance to the company’s cafeteria.  This includes green or red arrow indicating whether the manager’s score has gone up or down that month.
• Every quarter, those being judged ready to move are transferred into the company’s talent pool – but for that quarter only. Evans and Pucik note ‘there’s no philosophy of once you’re in, you’re in at Haier’.
• Promotions and demotions are published in the company’s internal newspaper.
• Chinese employees don’t receive a salary, but a share in the company’s profits, based upon their individual performance.

 

There’s also a good description of Haier in ‘OEC Management-
Control System Helps China Haier Group Achieve Competitive
Advantage’ (Thomas Lin, Managing Accounting Quarterly, 2005).

This notes, for instance, that:

“Each employee receives a daily grade for actual performance and progress toward achieving his or her target. Daily evaluation results are shown to workers the next day on the bulletin boards in the factory. The employees who are acknowledged as the best workers for three consecutive days have the honor of telling their experiences to fellow workers…

Small yellow 6-S squares are painted on the factory floor. At the beginning of each workday, team leaders stand inside the squares to give a briefing on that day’s work and relay any news to the employees. At the end of each workday, some workers will be called to stand on the footprints inside the squares to criticize themselves for making mistakes and share corrective actions taken during the day or to share some of their good work…

The company adopts a point system for production workers using the 3E card, and, if an employee earns more points, he or she makes a higher wage and bonus (this way, both management and employee know the daily wage and why).
The company also uses quality-check coupons to provide an additional incentive mechanism. Each employee has a quality-check coupon booklet with red and yellow coupons for rewards and penalties. The booklet lists all quality problems the firm has detected and provides guidelines for checking each defect. If an employee failed to self-check a quality problem that was later found by his or her team member during a cross-check or by the superior during a managerial check, the employee will lose a red coupon and receive a yellow coupon that will be counted against that day’s wage and bonus…

At the end of the day, all workers conduct a selfcheck of their own work with the OEC criteria, fill out their 3E (Everyone, Everything, and Everyday) cards with seven OEC criteria items, and submit them to their supervisors. All employees fill in a form daily and calculate their wage using the following formula: wage = rate 5 quantity + award – penalty.”

 

Now, we do need to be careful about stereotypes.  So for example, Evans and Pucik note that ‘while China has been a high power distance country, characterised by high in-group collectivism, young urban Chinese exhibit a considerably higher degree of individualism and a more modest level of power distance.  They are also more assertive than the previous generation.’

However I think most people would still agree that the US still has a more individualistic national culture and China a more collective one.

This makes it even more remarkable that Haier has managed to develop such a competitive company culture that it even strikes its newer US workforce as overly competitive (meaning that the company has had to adapt some of its HR practice such as giving out a brown bear or a pink pig, rather than assigning a red or yellow face to high / low performing employees).

 

I think this indicates very nicely and quite powerfully what can be achieved through differentiation.

The point here is that even a company as large and global as Haier (or GE or Aviva) can find a basis for differentiation, and enough people who will fit with this differentiated approach.  We don’t all have to implement the same ‘best practices’.

 

Contact me if you’d like to develop an approach that is best fit!

 

Technorati Tags: Haier,China,horse race,HR,International,Global,Paul Evans,Vladimir Pucik,The Global Challenge

 

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HR Transformation at SAP

 

  My favourite presentation at last week’s SAP HR Transformation summit focused on SAP itself.  Roger Bellis, their European SVP for Talent, Leadership and Organisation Development (and a former client from Barclays) explained that SAP is now a mega company, and its people management challenges are a bit like a teenager moving into adulthood.

For example, the average age of employees in its head office is 41 and turnover is just 1% (so the average age will be about 50 in ten years time if nothing changes).  But of course in China it’s completely different.  Averages tell you nothing – you need to look at the detail.

And with over 50,000 people it’s difficult just to keep some control, particularly as SAP wants to maintain the same freedom and entrepreneurial spirit it had when it was a young company. 

Innovation is key and the networked nature of SAP is an asset.  They want to maintain and develop this connectedness, through technology, and through their culture, and reduce the way this is inhibited through some of their control systems.

To balance these requirements, SAP needs to motivate people, but within a frame.  The paradigm is still to specify what they need to do, but give people responsibility for how they do it.

But some things need to change and Roger is working with SAP’s co-CEOs to help leaders lead differently.  Managers often have 20+ reports, often working at home, so supervising them tightly is impossible.    Instead they need to focus on continuing to win employees hearts and minds.

To do this, SAP have five main change drivers:

 

In organisation design, the challenge is to support people as they move from project to project. SAP has had 300 reorganisations in the last five years! and many people have had 5 managers in the last two years. Again there’s a balance – SAP needs to be mobile / flexible and adaptive in terms of its organisation whilst still being stable.

There’s also a process, Ignite (a small p process) to develop people in a different way, through leadership and engagement.

Not surprisingly, SAP use SAP to support these practices. They’re able to provide feedback to their developers through this too. For example. they're using an updated performance management tool that better reflects the very different way managers need to lead today.

All of this is measured through a series of metrics including bench strength and turnover etc.  Where it makes sense, these metrics are combined into indices.  For example, they use the wisdom of the crowd to provide an ongoing pulse check, and a people management index comprising pride (up) and engagement (down due to the organisational change).  But Roger is most interested in the chats over coffee – chewing the fat and getting feedback.  It’s really the the conversations you have that tell you how you’re doing.

 

Technorati Tags: SAP,Roger Bellis,talent,hr,leadership,transformation,networked,intrapreneurial,organisation,SAPHRSummit

 

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#ECTalent - Recognising Individuals: GE vs. Aviva

 

  OK, this was only a competition in my own mind, but after the previous panel session I was still feeling just a little… well, bored is the wrong word, but you know what even the best conferences (of which this is one) are like.  Let’s just say I was a bit last energised than I had been in the morning, so I thought it’d be fun to imagine these two separate sessions running as one – and seeing which company / approach came out on top.

And I do think that doing this provides an interesting competition between two different perspectives:the inclusive and exclusive approaches to talent management, and particularly between these two companies, as almost polar opposite examples of the two approaches.

 

  John Ainley, Group HRD at Aviva, kicked off first.  For him, developing an Employee Value Proposition depends on recognising the individuality of employees.

Aviva’s Customer Value Proposition is based on the concept of significance. Everyone needs to feel significant as a human being. The CVP is ‘no-one recognises you like Aviva’, differentiating the company from its grey competitors, and they want to do something similar internally as well.

For Aviva, everyone is talent.  It sounds trite but is quite fundamental. If you’re focusing on that top 10% cadre, this means you’re neglecting the bottom bottom 90%, which doesn’t feel right to him.

Reward doesn’t have a particularly important role in significance. Everyone wants to feel fairly paid, that’s all.  So they have a twice a year conversations about their own needs.  These use Real Deal cards to help understand how the company is doing in delivering what the employees value.

The skill of the leader is about recognising the significant needs of the individual.  Aviva isn’t perfect at it.  What’s perfect (John suggests) is their focus on the significance of individual in everything they do.

 

    Second round: Susan Peters, CLO, GE talking about GE’s Session C.

Susan talked mainly about social media and the way it’s changing the way we work. You’ll need to pop over to Social Advantage for that.

Linked to other conversations earlier in the agenda, GE also takes a long-term view of culture, thinking about how they’re going to attract and retain people in their business in another 10 years time: three to four years isn’t enough – you need to be able to leapfrog in order to be effective in the future.

So, Session C.  This, as you probably know, is GE’s annual review of HR – of peoples’ performance , strengths, career aspirations etc.  And they do this review in aggregate too – in the Session C Wrap.  They sit and talk about people and their succession planning as well.

It’s what provides GE’s magic – that ‘we know our people and we talk about them’.  Note it’s not really about the 20 / 70 / 10 thing (which they’re not forcing as much as they used to historically - and even in the past they never really took 10% out, although the higher you went the higher % went eg it was about 7% at senior levels).

Like BSkyB, the model gives as much weight to demonstrating the values as to performance.

 

So, both great submissions, I’m sure you’ll agree.  But which will be the winner of this contest?

Now, I love Aviva’s focus on significance.  But I’ve never really been able to understand their talent thing.  How can calling some talent top talent, and other talent slightly-less-good talent be any better than saying you’re excellent or average?  It feels a little bit like spin and therefore comes over (to me at least) as unnecessarily inauthentic.

But I’ve always had problems with GE’s competitive focus too.  And although I understand why being robust and honest is likely to be in lower performing employees’ benefit longer-term, I’ve always felt this has smacked a bit of process for process sake.  Certainly, the greatest benefits from stack ranking come in the first few years of using it, so GE’s determination to keep forcing it for as long as they did seems overly fixated (even if they never really used it as robustly as they said).

 

But then, these are both minor points.  One of my key beliefs about HCM strategy is that you can make a wide range of approaches work if you’ve got the ambition and determination to make your’s work, and you’re able to align your strategy, your processes, and the people you employ behind it.

The people who are going to work at Aviva are, I’d hope, a very different lot to those who’d work at GE (to the extent that this can ever be the case in such large companies).  I suspect the different processes make the different groups of people feel about equally recognised and significant.

I like the way each of these companies processes are so strongly linked to their way of thinking, and I love the clarity of these thoughts.

So I think I’m going to have to award top marks to both companies (well, say 9.5 out of 10).  Still, if you’ve got other thoughts on marks, let me know, and I’ll think about adjusting!

 

 

Technorati Tags: Economist,Talent Management,#ECTalent,EVP,Employee Value Proposition,Aviva,John Ainley,significance,Susan Peters,GE,Section C,leadership

 

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The Winning Entry: Christine Kelly / HR Challenges at Brady Corporation

 

  I promised that I’d award a ticket for the Economist’s Talent Management Summit to one of the people responding to my recent survey on HR’s challenges and I’m delighted to announce that the winner of this ticket is Christine Kelly from Brady Corporation.

I managed to catch up with Christine last week and asked her about the responses to her survey.  First, just to let you know about Christine – she has been at Brady for 9 years and is HR Director for the EMEA region, leading 4 senior HR leaders and site teams across the region.  Brady Corporation is a $1.4 bn US owned company that you may not have heard of because its focus is in niche markets, with a particular focus on identifying and protecting premises, products and people (making for example safety signs, such as the green running man for emergency exit signs, high performance labelling systems and identity badges).

We started, as did the survey, with Brady’s business challenges.  This was all about achieving an ambitious business vision in a still uncertain economy.  One major theme was getting better organised as a global organisation.  Brady’s EMEA team has already consolidated its focus into three business streams, and the challenge now is working effectively and efficiently in these streams – using the right systems and technology, implementing best practice and clarifying responsibilities for processes – who does what etc.

The HR challenges fall out of these business challenges (I would write ‘of course’, but it’s not always the case!).  Brady HR’s first challenge is about culture and values – taking the temperature of the organisation during change and engaging employees in the company’s vision.  They do this in different ways but I particularly liked the use of what are called skip level meetings.  In these the Directors talk to the people who work for their direct reports (without the direct report being there) etc.

There’s also a strategy deployment process which sounded very empowering.  This starts with business leaders setting challenging goals for teams which will lead to the achievement of the company’s goals.  But then the teams are left to go away and find the best way of delivering against the objectives and will report regularly against the consequent improvement projects.

My third set of questions were around the preparedness of HR to deliver against these challenges, and it sounded as if Brady Corp’s HR teams are set up quite well for this.  Their processes still need work because of the recent change in business structure and processes etc (and because of the ongoing challenge of operating in a global way across the different languages and legal jurisdictions in Europe).

HR technology’s in a good state as Brady Corporation implemented Workday a year ago (and Christine says she can’t want to see the new additions in version 12).  They also use a performance and career system that they built themselves and which they see as one of the key things that support their way of doing business.  They’re also looking at a recruitment system, but the question is still whether they can justify a single system operating across the various countries they’re in, available in all the different languages that would be required – or whether they can meet their needs in a different way.

The capability of the HR team is good, partly because Christine’s been able to recruit her HR leaders herself, and has recruited them for the environment they’re working in – so understanding how to make business partnering work – which still seems to be a major challenge for many organisations, doesn’t seem to be an issue here.

Probably the biggest need is to focus on HR’s operating model – particularly given the high standards and expectations of their internal customers.  And here the issue is mainly about the time-lag between strategy and execution.  Christine explains this best herself in her response to my survey:

“The typical dilemma for HR is that the function must not only deliver the strategic support but must also manage a number of administrative tasks.  The requirement for lean teams, means that a high level of technology is required before the proportions of strategic and admin work can change.  Systems are, however, slow to be implemented and complex to standardise globally.  Pressure of work and demand for a responsive customer service demands that urgent, admin tasks suck up resources and this prevents the move to more strategic activities (and means that HR continues to maintain more administrative headcount, who are less capable to pick up the strategic work).  In practice, HR is not able to change its operating model quickly enough to meet the demands being placed on the function.”

 

I also asked Christine about the Talent Management Summit we’ll both be attending and she’s obviously looking forward to this, as in her view, in addition to the normal benefits about getting new ideas about best practice, The Economist has selected some influential thinkers, all from respected organisations for this conference - and they’ve also picked topics that are very relevant to today’s world.  I agree!

 

Also see my post on the results of the survey, and this one of my conversation with Matthew Hanwell about HR’s challenges at Nokia (Matthew will also be joining me at the Economist Talent Management Summit).

 

Technorati Tags: HR,challenges,Christine Kelly,Brady Corporation

 

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My best hacks and stories at the MIX

 

  Actually, it’s not just that HCI / the MIX didn’t select my hack, that’s OK (everyone makes mistakes!).  It’s more that I don’t think the best of the rest have been selected either.

However, some of the stories (suggestions rather than ideas) that have been selected are very impressive.  Here are my favourites:

• Setting up self managed teams at Masco Corporation
• Reviewing performance management at Atlassian (also see Atlassian’s blogs – 1 and 2)
• Working without managers at Kessels & Smit
• Creating a social networking system at IDEO (a Thought Farmer system repackaged by Moxie Software as Spaces – see these posts – 1 and 2)

 

Definitely some good examples to join the ranks of other mavericks!

My favourite story of all though isn’t on this list, and is one describing celebrating failure at NixonMcInnes.  The entry refers to the company’s blog and a really interesting post describing their measurement of happiness through the use of a sophisticated analytical system which could otherwise be described as three buckets on the floor (see picture).

I also really like this post: What if a company is a community?:

“I like the idea of viewing ourselves as a community because that speaks so much more to our human-ness than the idea of a company or corporation. Community implies a group of people operating as individuals with individual needs and wants, but connected together through common interests. Company suggests a single entity into which individuals have been incorporated.”

 

This obviously relates to what I’ve been writing about in my recent posts on Social HR and I’ll be covering in my webinar in a week on Tuesday (3.00pm GMT on 15th March).

 

PS it’s interesting how many of the MIX / HCI’s stories come from companies outside the US and particularly from the UK!

 

Technorati Tags: Management,Innovation,Exchange,MIX,HCI,Masco,Atlassian,Kessels & Smit,IDEO,NixonMcInnes

 

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Social Media in Public Sector HR (talking to Graham White, Westminster Council)

 

  Today’s big event in the Social Media Week London programme is: How is the public sector transforming communication using social media with a broad range of audiences and what's next?

 

One very good example of how public sector bodies are doing, or at least can do, this is Westminster City Council.  I recently talked about the experience there with their HR Director, Graham White.  These are my notes on the conversation (not necessarily his exact words):

 

Early adoption

We started by discussing the initial introduction of social media at Westminster, using a Sharepoint based platform to support engagement of staff around a cross-Council pay review (see this article from People Management last year).

I asked what had made Westminster’s experience a success, when many organisations have actually struggled to develop much in the way of community or conversation. Graham said that for him, take-up is to do with the organisational culture, and whether people are openly engaged. People are naturally avid readers, hence the power of the medium - although you do need to build confidence of people who have never gone to print before. He also suggested not worrying about the number of comments but focusing on the numbers of people looking at the sites.

It helped Westminster that had a new CEO who was enthusiastic about getting the workforce on side, believing that the way they treated customers, and treated each other, was critical to the Council’s success, and therefore wanted to know what they were thinking. People have a right to have their say and provide different opinions. So Westminster developed a programme called ‘You Said – We Did’ which was very powerful. Staff started to understand that if they said something it would be accepted and that the organisation would do something about it.

 

Ongoing approach

I also asked about the combination of ‘bottom up’ with ‘top down’ approaches that was described in the CIPD’s case study. Graham confirmed that this was still Westminster’s strategy but that out of these, it’s the inputs from, and conversation between, staff that’s been most useful. Social media has given Westminster the ability to never have ‘empty space’ – conversation is always taking place. Even the predefined topics are really just prompts to help get people thinking. And the prompters ask – if this isn’t the real issue, tell us what is.

They also allow an unfettered debate. In the early days, the conversation was governed by editors. But doing this didn’t help – individuals are used to expressing themselves freely in their personal lives so they didn’t feel the managed approach was that useful. So Westminster has unregulated much of what they do with social media – and the level of communication is now much more real. It’s helped developed trust, and confidence in the message, and this grows all the time.

Doing this has required their managers and staff to get out of the box. They now have video blogs just about every week from different senior managers who would have never considered being video’d talking about their business and what their plans are.

 

Latest developments

I asked how the use of social media had developed at Westminster over the last year. Graham explained that the use of social media had accelerated. It’s like a volcano, he said – once you start using it you see more benefits on an almost weekly basis.

The UK’s public sector is going through the most austere period for the last 50 years. Westminster has taken out 300 jobs and is about to remove another 200. Staff are feeling afraid, nervous and uncertain. So social media has been a critical tool – one of a small number of critical tools – that has helped the Council hold onto its staff, and helped them feel as secure as possible and be well informed. And Westminster is now integrating all of their communications with 2.0 media tools, forums etc so that staff can be better engaged.

And life goes on – not every debate is about the difficult future in the public sector. People post on things which are important to them – asking what to name their dog or who stole their milk. And the Council doesn’t interfere with this.

Westminster can see the impact of their use of social media in the fact that most people leaving the Council feel they have been fairly treated, and where there have been appeals and litigation the evidence has also suggested that they have been more than fair. Plus the unions are working alongside the Council’s management to help reduce the number of people who need to leave and how this is managed, as well as helping to pass on information to members, rather than screaming for strikes.

Westminster is now using social media for attracting future employees as well. They’ve introduced social media pre and post the induction programme too so that applicants can view warts and all interviews with staff and get a feel about what it’s like to work for the Council before they actually start. And social media has been used to support other activities, for example Council wide recognition programmes.

They’re also using the tools to support the current borough mergers – implementing a tri borough forum site for staff from across the three Councils to use any technology to see what the views of other staff are, what’s topical, what people are commenting on.

 

Culture change

Although Westminster’s initial objective for using social media was simply to get people engaged (initially around the pay review) they have seen other benefits since then. One has been a change in Westminster’s culture - Graham noted that 5 years ago no-one would have thought the Council would have allowed its staff to say anything other than how great things are at Westminster.

I asked about whether the use of social media had helped develop better relationships between employees too, helping to bring the diverse parts of the Council together as one organisation. Graham confirmed that, in his view, it had (although again this wasn’t the original objective) and that this was becoming increasingly important now. Previously, Councils have operated with some major silos and little integration within one organisation. But the Big Society and the importance of community involvement is removing the idea of silos. So for example, Westminster is creating new central support teams bringing together different functions into one place.

 

Lessons for other organisations

Graham has concerns about organisations that try to control these sites very tightly as it shows they have a level of mistrust in their workforces. In his view, you don’t need to control it if you’ve got values and these are integrated into everything that you do.

We also discussed the relevance of Westminster’s experience for other Councils. Graham comes from the private sector but he’s not one of those who advocate that everything in the private sector is great and everything in the public sector is awful. He’s seen to many great private sector people fail spectacularly in the public sector for that. But there is a problem in the speed of change and aptitude for change. So the standard responses of absorb and neutralise every new opportunity – and to confirm why you can’t do something new – has got to change. The recession isn’t helping – people are using this as the next excuse to delay change. The Public Sector needs to change if the general population isn’t going to continue seeing managers in the sector as boring old farts!

I finished the conversation by asking whether, if Westminster weren’t already using social media, would they start now? Graham confirmed that they absolutely would.

 

Thanks very much to Graham for speaking to me about this.

 

Public sector / other organisations that want to gain some of the same benefits of Westminster may want to check out:

• Employee Voice, the social ideas system provided by Organised Feedback, the sponsor of this blog, which is already busy working on a range of Council and other projects.
• My posts on Enterprise 2.0 on this and my other blog.  Also note my webinar on HR 2.0 on 15th March.  Or contact me to discuss how I can support you to develop the sort of culture Graham describes.

 

Technorati Tags: Graham White,HR,Westminster,Council,public sector,local,government,2.0,social,media

 

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Nokia’s HR Challenges + survey still open!

 

  One of the consequences of not having been blogging for a while (having been pretty ill the week the HR Directors Summit was on, and travelling since then) is that I’m going to keep my short survey open for yet another week!  Sorry to those who have already completed this, but I’ve just not had any time to analyse the results as yet.

So – you can still win a ticket to come to the Economist’s Talent Management Summit with me – and with Matthew Hanwell from Nokia who I was presenting with – who’s coming with me too.  I made Matthew complete the survey as a price for giving him a ticket, and here’s his explanation of his responses (or at least my recollection of these) – which also relate to the presentation we gave together (I’ll need my ticket winner to undergo a similar conversation too!).

 

Key business challenges?

• Transforming the business, especially from a cultural point of view.  It’s like the iceberg metaphor, people only think of the things they can see above the surface – the systems, processes etc.  But we need to look below this too – at peoples’ attitudes, behaviours etc – particularly the new leadership behaviours required to support a move from a product centric focus to one based on service attributes, and one based on a wider ecosystem of partnerships.

 

Key HR challenges arising from these?

• There’s a shift needed in the culture – and HR owns this.  We need to change the attitudes and behaviours to support the new strategy in the business.  This means actions to build capability, in reward, holding people to account, collaborating between teams etc.
• Engagement is also important – especially in light of this transformation.  People are uncertain given the disruption.  They want more clarity about their role.  We need to make the strategy relevant for them – what it means they are not doing, or are also doing now.  And where the company is going – and where they’re going to need to go to support it.
• Also HR agility.  Our processes and systems were built for a certain way of doing things – managing product marketing.  Now our focus is much more on agility.  We’re learning from agile and lean software development methodologies and their focus on two week sprints, the use of co-located scrum teams etc.  And this is an attitude too – one that HR needs to embrace.  So we’re changing the organisation, and HR itself.  Our processes aren’t as agile as possible and need to change to support that way of working.

 

What would you say are going to be the major challenges for your business and HR team this year? (yes, OK, I know it’s February already, but what can I do?).  Complete my survey here.

 

Technorati Tags: Matthew Hanwell,Nokia,HR,strategy,challenges,survey

 

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