Fleming Europe - Gamification in HR

 

On most topics in HR I'm pretty sure what I believe, and although I do sometimes shift on this slightly, my learning tends to be more about how I argue my position, and case studies, pro and con, etc. 

However there are a few other topics I find I touch a lot but don't feel as confident in my perspectives.  One of these areas is gamification.

I know that some companies do find benefits from these approaches but I know there are a lot of nonsense being promoted too.  Eg "most of us want to earn points, gain badges and move up levels" is firstly just rather bizarre, and secondly, complete tosh.

Gamification is more than pointsification for a start.  But as to exactly what it is, I want to be more sure than I currently am.  So next week I'm off to Paris for Fleming Europe's Gamification in HR 2014 Summit.

I'm looking forward to some good debates as there's a pretty amazing list of speakers presenting, representing a broad diversity of roles:

• Mario Herger, Founder and Partner, Enterprise Gamification Austria
• Willy Christian Kriz, Chairman, SAGSAGA, Austria
• Tom Chatfield, Author of ’How to Thrive in the Digital Age', United Kingdom
• Phaedra Boinodiris, Global Serious Games and Gamification Program Manager, IBM; Founder of WomenGamers.com
• Roman Rackwitz, Deputy Chair, International Gamification, Germany
• Tim Ackermann, Senior Director, Talent Acquisition, PAREXEL International, Germany
• Déborah Lasry, COO - Services, Brand Communications and Quality, BNP Paribas, France
• Anja Andersen, Employer Branding Leader, Maersk, Denmark
• Laura Hugonnet, Competencies and Training Project Leader, Suez Environnement, France
• Fredrik Tukk, Head of Communication, Marketing and Branding, Maersk Drilling, Denmark
• Noemi Biro, Talent Attraction, Recruitment and Employer Branding Leader, PWC, Hungary
• Eric Gueronniere, Head of Competencies Development and Training, Suez Environnement, France
• Magnus Kobke, Head of the Cargo Dynasty Project, Transport Sector Educucation Trust, Denmark
• Martina Mangelsdorf, Founder and Chief Engagement Officer (formerly Head of Talent Management and Staffing at Novartis), GAIA Insights, Switzerland
• Pascal Picault, Director of Formaposte, La Poste Group, France
• John Pugh, Director for Innovation, Boehringer Ingelheim, Germany
• Tuba Surucu, Vice President, Training and Development Support Services, Yapi Kredi Bank, Turkey
• Helene Michel, Senior Professor, Grenoble Ecole de Management, France
• Christian Harpelund, Learning Architect, Grundfos, Denmark
• An Coppens, Chief Game Changer and Gamification Design Expert, Gamification Nation, United Kingdom

It's a three day long event (based on three levels!) so by the end of the event I should have a clearer focus on what I think.  I'll be blogging from the event too, so please join me to comment on my posts and we can learn about this still fairly new, and potentially important, aspect of HR together.

Or if you want to join me in Paris, you can book for the event here.  I'll even throw in a couple of points for you!

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Most of us want to earn points, gain badges and move up levels. - See more at: http://www.hrmagazine.co.uk/hro/features/1143732/game-afoot#sthash.pj2hUdc9.dpuf

Most of us want to earn points, gain badges and move up levels. - See more at: http://www.hrmagazine.co.uk/hro/features/1143732/game-afoot#sthash.pj2hUdc9.dpuf

Don't blame the Ulrich model

I’m looking forward to chairing Symposium Event’s Successful HR Business Partnering Summit on 5th November. We tend to focus on the problems often involved in business partnering (I know I can do this too) but given the title of the event it’ll be great to find out what different companies are doing to make business partnering work. 

I expect to hear a lot about best fit. Well, maybe not quite these words… but examples of businesses that have identified and developed business partnering approaches which make sense for them – their sector and organisational context, business strategy, capability of existing HR staff and line managers etc. To me, this focus on a specific business is a major part of driving success in business partnering.

And where things do go wrong – something that thankfully we won’t be hearing that much about (but which I do review in the Business Partnering workshops that I run for Symposium), it’s often due to the opposite of this – the complete lack of attention to what makes a particular organisation unique.

The biggest and baddest problem of course is due to organisations trying to implement Ulrich’s HR business partner model – the (in)famous three legged stool.  But note, I said the problem is organisations trying… – not the Ulrich model itself. I think this is often misunderstood!

I’ve even been to one session given by the head of a major global HR consultancy focusing on what’s wrong with the Ulrich model – whether the Ulrich model is inherently flawed or if the problem many organisations have in implementing it is down to sheer poor management and implementation. (They concluded it was generally a bit of both.)

It’s completely nuts!  The idea that you can just take any organisational model and just apply it to a particular organisation is just bizarre – and it completely the opposite of what really needs to happen to develop an effective organisation – whether in HR or in any other area of the business (I talk a lot about this in the Organisation Design workshops I run for Symposium.)

The Ulrich model has only ever been promoted as a description of what a lot of organisations have been doing (starting in the 1990s), or possibly a straw model to benchmark your own HR function and ask useful questions about how it can be improved. There’s never, ever been a suggestion that you should turn your own team into any stool of any number of legs, but that is unfortunately what a large number of businesses still tend to do.

Don’t! Instead, do design a best fit solution that meets your particular needs. Consider the full range of alternatives and pick the one that best meets the needs you’ve identified. It’s really not too hard. And if you do that, you’ll be much better positioned to develop a successful approach to business partnering yourselves.

Oh, and don’t think it’s all about stools and legs anyway. Embedded advisers, service centres, centres of excellence, etc, etc, may be part of the solution, and can make a big difference.  But actually the things that really count (which Ulrich writes and talks about as well) are:

• Strategy. Do you have an ambition, objectives and processes that are going to make a difference to your business through your people?

• Technology. Are your processes supported by good and effective HR systems that enable you to implement the processes you’ve designed? (also see details on Symposium’s Leveraging HR Technology Forum)

• Capability. Do your business partners understand what partnering really means, and do they have the skills to achieve this?

• Measurement. Do we know how well we’re doing – in partnering and in delivering enhanced business results.

On this last point, it’s also often a specific focus on the particular organisation which makes the difference in measurement as well. Measurement is generally not that hard – the problem is understand what we need to do. Once we understand who we want to achieve through HR business partnering, it’s often a lot easier to identify the appropriate metrics to use to measure it. (I could perhaps also mention that we focus on this point a lot in my Symposium Measurements and Analytics workshops.)

So if you do come to the conference, do remember to pay attention to what speakers are doing in these areas, not just to the numbers of and how they’ve arranged their legs!

And remember that the speakers are only providing examples and descriptions of potential best practices. Some of these may be useful thinks to adopt yourselves, but most of them will not. However, they should help you to consider what would drive success in the above and other areas of HR business partnering for yourselves.

Originally posted at HR Review.

#SAPForum Doing Ulrich – or a return to the flexible resource pool?

 

   Today I was at SAP Forum in London.   There were a couple of interesting technology oriented sessions (which to me, more than anything, showed the similarity of issues faced by IT and HR departments) and a few good HR ones (with a couple of less good ones too).

The best of these I thought was one on Ulrich – and beyond, presented by Accenture and providing some early insights into some research they’re doing currently (there’ll be a book).

Let me come clean on my perspectives before I start my review- I think Ulrich’s work largely makes a lot of sense (though I don’t agree with outside-in) and am looking forward to seeing him in Dubai and at HR Performance.  But I also think ‘doing Ulrich’ is an awful idea and that organisations that do this have only themselves to blame when things don’t work out.  More on my perspectives at the end of the report…

 

So, Accenture do see an issue in the model (or in execution of the model).  Those clients looking to stay with Ulrich are seeking to refine and optimise it as follows:

• Joining up, connecting and providing more governance across the model
• Assessing and developing business partners – often the weakest link
• Bringing in a COO as an overlay on top of the model to make HR more commercial
• Tailoring the model as one size does not fit all, eg using concierge services for investment bankers who aren’t going to do employee self-service are they? (just getting them behaving like decent human beings would seem to be enough of a challenge for most)
• Unfudging global / regional / local activity splits
• Moving more work into shared services and offshore to increase efficiency
• Making hybrid the new market, eg a company might outsource to support growth in emerging markets but keep activities in-house elsewhere, or develop other, lower services to support the rising contingent workforce.

 

But how can it be that everybody is implementing the model badly?  Perhaps the model itself needs to change.  Accenture suspect the next new model will involve:

• Focusing more strongly on operational excellence to deliver lower quartile costs
• Keeping numbers of business partners to a very small number
• Putting everybody else into a flexible, agile resource pool
• Making all this work through ‘ruthless measurement and analytics’.

 

The last point seemed to get a lot of stress (this is Accenture!).  So for example:

“If HR can’t measure what it does and prove the value of what it does then it shouldn’t be doing it.”

 

This to me is absolute garbage – worse than that in fact as it’s not just useless, it’s also hugely dangerous as it’s just going to drive HR’s focus to more measurable activities which are generally less valuable.

 

I was pleased to see, however, that Accenture is stressing the need for HR to help their organisations rather than just support general austerity in their organisations by cutting their own numbers (which XpertHR suggests is what’s happening currently), so:

“HR can have a lot more impact by improving sales performance even 0.002% than it can through functional operational improvement.”

 

The biggest point for me though is that actually the whole debate is a red herring.  Ulrich never proposed ‘his’ model as a solution organisations should implement.  And it should never be one.  All organisational transformation, including HR’s, should begin with clear organisational principles, the identification of potential options and the comparison of the pros and cons of these options against the organisational principles.  The best solution may end up looking like Urich’s straw model or it may not.

So to me, it’s Accenture’s finding that “blanket ratios and sizing of the function were applied” that is pretty much the root cause of the problem – not the model nor the execution actually.

 

Technorati Tags: Accenture,Ulrich,research,SAP,forum,London,2012

 

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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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The Growth of Digital HR

 

  I’m missing the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston this year.

Last year, I found it such a key event that as well as the Boston conference (see my posts), I went back again to present on E2.0 and Culture in the follow-up event in Santa Clara (and these posts too).

But things are changing quickly.  This year, there’s so much taking place on HR 2.0 in the UK that it’s much harder for me to justify the transatlantic flight to myself.

Take today for instance.

One event I would have loved to have been at is this one organised by Consult HR and hosted by Sarah Vardey at American Express, focusing on Digital HR:

“Digital is an evolving approach to business practice, customer interactions and employee behaviours.  It is present throughout any business and in the everyday lives and interactions of employees.  The impact of the rapid growth in digital has meant that organisations have had to adapt to new market expectations.  Business functions, where communication and customer dialogue is crucial, have been early adopters of digital technology such as marketing, communications and customer service.  Slower to come to the table have been support functions such as risk, procurement and HR.

Given that HR had lagged in this revolution, how then can we step up and simultaneously transform ourselves, whilst transforming our business partners and organisations?”

Good point!

 

Anyway, instead of this, I’ll be attending SAP’s HR Transformation Summit, where I’ll be speaking on much of the same thing: Social Media in the Modern HR.

“Social media is playing an increasingly important role in business and can give employees a voice beyond that of existing corporate portals.  In this session, Jon explores how social media technologies are providing new opportunities to influence the connections and relationships between employees, revolutionising collaboration and innovation.  This type of transformation provides a new strategic agenda for HR and emphasises the need to adopt social technologies within HR’s own processes (social recruiting, social learning etc).

 

You might also be interested in my panel discussion yesterday, which also included the HR 2.0 agenda – focusing on social media for employee engagement.

And I’ve got more events coming up on this topic over the rest of the year and beyond.

One of the best of these is definitely going to be Europe’s new HR Technology conference which I’ll be the MC at.  With a great agenda, and with one day focusing on the role of social media in HR, it looks like this event will quickly become an equal of of longstanding US conference in terms of its prime role within the HR Technology agenda.

The conference is taking place on 2-3 November in Amsterdam and details can be found at http://www.hrtecheurope.com – including the agenda and list of speakers.

You can even get a 10% discount by entering ‘Jon Ingham’ in the promo code box when you book!

 

Update, 11.00pm Thursday 23rd.  I posted this early this morning before heading off to the SAP Summit, and one thing occurred to me while on the way to the conference venue – and this is that ‘growth’ may be the wrong word for the increase in conversation I’m seeing.  To be clear, I’m still not seeing much actually happening in digital HR.  The summit made it even clearer that there’s still a big gap between talk and action.  I’ll blog on this later on.

Secondly, I just wish to point out that there’s still going to be a sizeable gap between HRTechEurope and the HRTechnConference (US).  For one thing, that event has already been going on 14 years.  However, HRTechEurope is clearly in a different league to existing HR tech shows in the UK and Europe, eg Softworld and the CIPD’s Software show.  It’s a conference we’ve been badly lacking for a long time and should contributing to the development of HR IT as a (sub-) profession, in the same way that I think it’s seen in the US.

 

Technorati Tags: Digital,HR,technology,social media,Enterprise,2.0,SAP,transformation,Consult-HR,Sarah Vardey,American Express,HRtechEurope

 

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SAP HR Transformation Summit

 

  I’ll also be presenting at this event on Thursday 23rd June organised by SAP:

 

No-one knows better than HR professionals that it's people, not organisations, that make business happen. HR is shifting from an employee management cost centre to a highly strategic business function.

The question is, how can you equip yourself to handle the challenges and opportunities this transformation entails?
Now's your chance to find out.

Join us for our inaugural HR Transformation Summit. With the feature-packed agenda, delivered by a stellar line-up of HR visionaries and people-process experts, attendees can expect to receive thought leadership on the following topics and more:

• The People Management view – Rob MacLachlan, Editor, People Management Magazine shares the results on their latest poll and its latest insights in HR
• The changing face of HR – how the macroeconomic climate is influencing HR strategies with Dr Anthony Hesketh
• Social media in modern HR – managing social technologies to enhance recruiting practices and employee collaboration with Jon Ingham
• Interactive panel sessions with customers, HR gurus and Partners – discussing how HR departments can: provide the Business with necessary tools in order to be agile and flexible, demonstrate effective Talent Management and utilise HR data to contribute directly to the business
• Compliance in a changing workplace – keeping pace with the legislative landscape in HR with Kemp Little LLP

 

PLUS hear first-hand how to solve an HR challenge like the Olympics and discover how SAP's own People Agenda Journey is impacting directly on the business.

Visit the event website to register early to avoid missing out on this essential free of charge event as places are limited! Also click to view the full agenda and speaker biographies.

Alternatively, if you wish to register now, please submit your details here.

 

Technorati Tags: Rob MacLachlan,Anthony Hesketh,Teri Ellison,SAP,HR,transformation

 

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Thoughts on the HRO Europe Summit: Social Outsourcing?

 

  So as I wrote on Friday, last week I was in Amsterdam for the HR Outsourcing (HRO) Europe conference.

I was there mainly to catch up with people and see how the outsourcing market had changed since my last involvement in it (working on GSK’s HR outsourcing to ACS).

But I also caught some of the sessions, and was on a panel together with:

• Consultants Andy Spence and Jane Owen Jones
• Nigel Perks from one of my old clients, BT Global Services
• Peter Cappelli from Wharton.

 

I’ll come back and write this up later on.

But next week I’m chairing another panel, this time at Social Recruiting, talking about social media and employee engagement.

So I had social recruiting in the back of mind when attending the Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) summit within a summit at HRO.  After all, if you believe, as I do, that social recruiting, as just about the most significant new driver changing the recruitment industry right now, then one of the key questions must be is how is it changing RPO.

What then did I hear about it at the RPO Summit? Largely, nothing. The chair talked about it a few times, and encouraged people to tweet, but none of them did, even though I was challenging them to do so via my tweets displayed on the backchannel projected behind the speakers.

For example, Zurich Insurance did a presentation about their outsourcing deal with Alexander Mann Solution, and showed us some slick videos, but didn’t mention social once. Now I know AMS do have an angle in this area (they were down to speak at the other Social Media conference I was due to chair next week). But for whatever reason, it didn’t feature in this case study.

And I started to think further about the impact of social on outsourcing (and in learning, if not in payroll too). Is there such a thing as social outsourcing, or are social sourcing and out sourcing two different and exclusive things? How does an outsourcing provider participate in, contribute to, and even facilitate a conversation between internal employees and external targets and candidates, when they’re not within the conversation – ie not part of the organisation (other than providing the technology). Can they do this? And if they can’t, does it reduce the organisation’s incentive to be social?

Perhaps a topic for HRO next year… And before then, your comments please…

 

Technorati Tags: Outsourcing,RPO,social,recruiting,Alexander Mann,AMS,April Samulewicz,Talent Acquisition,Zurich Financial Services,HRO,Europe,conference

 

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IBM’s HR transformation story

 

   My favourite session at the CIPD’s HRD conference was provided by Tim Ringo, head of IBM HCM consulting, talking about HR transformation at his biggest client: IBM.

One of the things I found particularly interesting was how IBM’s focus on collaboration has supported its HR (and broader business) transformation.  Collaboration is culturally expected, and takes place across geographies, timezones and divisions.  IBM is therefore a “globally integrated enterprise” or a “post multi-national” and feels the same wherever you touch it.

This culture itself has been supported by social networking (‘same time’ instant messaging, blog central, wiki central, podcasting, social networking and tagging), jamming and knowledge management, and IBM’s opportunity marketplace, allowing employees to access self-service HR information, but also other jobs within IBM (managers finding people and people finding managers).

More recently, the HR transformation has also shifted focus to facilitate increased global collaboration:

• Region HR model based on client locations, allowing high touch engagement with business units
• Globally integrated teams of skilled HR professionals and subject matter experts
• New global teaming and collaboration regardless of business unit
• Workforce programmes matching employees to opportunities.

 

Also see this post on IBM’s matching process.

And these articles on Tim Ringo’s session:

• http://www.peoplemanagement.co.uk/pm/articles/2010/04/hrd-2010-hr-praised-for-role-in-business-turnaround-at-ibm.htm
• http://www.personneltoday.com/articles/2010/04/23/55343/ibm-crowd-sourcing-could-see-employed-workforce-shrink-by-three-quarters.html

 

Technorati Tags: Tim Ringo,IBM,HR,transformation,CIPD,HRD,conference,2010

 

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