Personnel Today: Social Media at Work

 

   Just back from delivering a workshop on social media in HR in Kuala Lumpur, I’ve been speaking at a webcast on the same subject broadcast earlier this afternoon.  (If I didn’t look jet lagged on the video it’s because it was recorded a bit earlier.)

The archive is available here.

As well as me, the discussion included Matthew Hanwell at Nokia, Ofer Guetta at IBM and Rob Moss, Editor of Personnel Today (chair).

 

I thought the session went quite well, and we certainly covered a lot of ground – from social media policies to social media in recruiting and other areas of HR to HR’s role in supporting the use of social media in the rest of the business (the social business).

Of course, if the session had been live we’d have been able to talk about some more recent news articles too.  For example, these two separate, but linked, stories which appear at the top of Personnel Today’s news update today:

 

 

Firstly, Lack of skilled candidates is biggest recruitment challenge, say employers:

The biggest recruitment barrier that employers faced during the last 12 months was the poor quality of candidates, a new survey reveals.

According to theXpertHR recruitment trends survey, 95% of employers that faced problems in their recruitment processes over the last year cited the low quality of candidates applying for posts as a barrier to recruitment.

Rachel Suff, author of the XpertHR report, commented: "Just because unemployment is at its highest point for many years does not mean that employers can always recruit appropriately skilled individuals.

"The increase in unemployment often means an increase in the number of applications for vacancies, which can make it difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff."

 

Secondly, HR directors believe social media is ineffective for recruitment, survey finds:

More than half (55%) of HR directors believe that social media platforms are an ineffective recruitment tool and a further 15% are unsure of their effectiveness, according to a survey by recruitment firm Robert Half.

HR directors were also found to be pessimistic about social media's potential to change recruitment processes in the future, with 63% saying that they believed profiles on social networking sites, such as LinkedIn, will not replace the traditional CV in the future.

Phil Sheridan, managing director of Robert Half, commented: "Social media's popularity has grown dramatically in recent years and, while many organisations have leveraged it as a successful commercial or employer branding tool, its effectiveness in recruitment has not been realised amongst the majority of organisations.

"While professional networking sites, like LinkedIn, will continue to connect business professionals, our research shows that hiring managers still prefer more traditional recruitment methods, such as using online job boards, employee referrals and recruitment consultancies. It seems most employers still believe this to be the most effective approach for screening candidates and assessing competencies."

 

See the link between these? – I do.  Organisations are finding poor quality candidates because they’re using poor quality approaches.

Social media doesn’t need to result in lots of poor candidates, it can involve things like hosted external talent communities which produce a low number of very high quality candidates.  I suspect most HRDs in Robert Half’s survey don’t understand, and certainly don’t use, these more targeted social approaches.

I like Gareth Jones’ comments on this:

He said: "My experience tells me that there are a lot of in-house recruitment teams using LinkedIn for sourcing. The organisations that were surveyed probably nearly all still rely on traditional methods like just advertising jobs and letting either the consultancy select the shortlist or simply manage the response themselves. I suspect that because of the audience, and because the survey lumped LinkedIn with other social media platforms, the results are not representative."

He added that employers that see social media sites as simply "another place to advertise jobs" will fail in their social media strategy and need to realise that it is actually a way of engaging potential candidates and building brand awareness.

 

Also see my last blog post providing some of Bersin’s research on the same issue.

 

Technorati Tags: Personnel Today,social media,social business,social recruiting,HR,Matthew Hanwell,Nokia,Ofer Guetta,IBM,webcase,webinar

 

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Bersin Impact 2012

 

   I’ve got a couple of great conferences coming up over the next few months.  First up will be Bersin’s Impact 2012 in St Petersburg, from 10 to 12 April.

I love Bersin’s research, having been introduced to this about five years ago whilst working for an elearning group in the UK when their research was mainly focused on learning too.  Since then, they’ve expanded into other areas of talent management, and into Europe and the UK too.

So for example, I recently met up with Josh at the Lumesse conference, and since them have attended one of their webinars (organised by Linkedin) on UK Recruiting (on their 2011 Talent Acquisition Factbook) too.

There were some great insights in this, including that UK companies spend over £5300 per new hire – over twice as much as US companies.  The cost differential is due, in part, to a difference in sourcing strategies – and that in the UK, companies spend two-thirds rather than one-third of their recruiting budgets on agencies!  And that’s despite the fact that it’s not even particularly effective (see the percentage of jobs filled) and it’s certainly not cost effective!!!.

 

 

Sometimes I despair!

 

Josh is one of the very few people I’ve had guest post on here, and have posted on them and their research quite often too:

• Top 22 Programmes for Talent Management
• The Strategic HCM Suite / 2
• The New Disciplines of HR
• Tours through the blogosphere: B is for Bersin
• Josh Bersin on informal and social learning
• Bersin: Measuring HCM in financial terms?

 

However, it seems that I forgot to post on last year’s Impact conference, which I did attend virtually, and was well impressed by.  In fact I remember there being so much great research being presented that I was pretty much tied to my computer screen (and the print screen button too).

So this year, I decided that I needed to be there irl.  If you’ve got a few spare days in mid-April, you might want to try to get along there (I’m told it’s a great time to go to Disneyland as well, and I may even see you there too?).

If you can’t get to the conference, I will be blogging on key insights from the research (learning, recruitment, and other areas from within the talent management agenda too) – meaning lots of posts, I expect.  So follow the action here!

 

Technorati Tags: Bersin,Impact,2012,conference,St Petersburg,Florida,UK,recruiting,sourcing,factbook

 

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Trust and Social Responsibility

 

   I’ve been reading the recent research on trust completed by CASS on behalf of the CIPD and am posting a half-way review in the hope that Changeboard will include it in their HR carnival focusing on social responsibility coming out tomorrow.

The research focuses on the need for trust with a variety of different constituents including the mission of the organisations, its customers, leaders, line managers and each other (se my recent post on people like us).

The research strikes what is to me a rather naive and apologistic tone, suggesting that employees need to cut senior leaders some slack:

“The crisis in trust many organisations are facing can be repaired, but not if we continue to blame the economy and focus solely on senior leadership. In reality, we all need to recognise that we each have a stake in the future success of the organisations in which we work. That’s according to new research published by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), which found that the crisis in trust predates the economic downturn and is a function of a breakdown of five types of trust relationship within an organisation*. The report’s authors are warning that relying on any single one of these relationships will not suffice to build the climates needed to enable the economy to grow and innovate.”

 

So for example, we find out that when leaders started to make decisions which revealed lack of ability, integrity, predictability or benevolence it was down to the pressures of the recession (cop-out!) and that employees should avoid having unrealistic expectations and show benevolence towards senior leaders who are trying to do the right thing in the face of adversity (Chairman Mao couldn’t have said it better!!!).

The report therefore suggests that HR needs to ensure that approaches to management and leadership within an organisation do not undermine genuinely good intentions, eg by balancing its stewardship and business partner roles.

I have to admit, I’m not convinced…

 

Personally, I don’t think the issue is that the right intentions are being diluted by misaligned policies and practices, I think it’s our intentions which are out of kilter with what they need to be.  In particular, I think we need to start treating employees as the prime stakeholders in their organisations.  Until we do this, until we start seeing employees as people and not as chattels I don’t think trust is going to improve.

I also argued this point last week in my post on HR’s need to focus on employees, not just the business.  Or see a variety of my other posts, for example on HCL’s employees first approach.

 

The reason I think this is important for social responsibility is that the same argument applies to customers and other stakeholders etc.  Businesses aren’t going to restore levels of trust until they truly put customers and society, as well as their employees, at the heart of what they do.  Not just shareholders.  And particularly not just the fat cats at the top.

But it all starts with the employee.  And I liked the way that John Ainley at Aviva described this in the last edition of People Management in an article linked to one on the ICP’s trust research:

“One of the ways in which we want to distinguish Aviva is by being the company that you can trust,” he says. “We’ve all seen examples of banks putting posters up saying ‘You can trust us’ – well, that doesn’t count for much; people need to feel it. And, in order to do that, we have to have the same feeling among the people who work in the business.”

 

Those feelings are then supported by people focused action:

The “culture of recognition” that Ainley is attempting to instil is based on the idea that we all need to feel significant. “It’s a human need – like food or air,” he says. “If you don’t feel significant, you look to other ways of becoming so; when you see riots, or crime, it’s often people seeking to be significant. So recognition is about recognising the ‘you in you’, getting to know you as a person. If we do that for all our employees, then our belief is that we’ll have a better engaged workforce, and a better engaged workforce means better engaged customers.”

Practical examples of this approach include… Aviva’s talent management process. “In contrast to a number of other organisations who have ‘star’ talent programmes, we have a very clear statement that says ‘If you work for Aviva then you’re talented.’ Everybody in Aviva will have the same conversation about their development, so all our colleagues, wherever they are in the world, are now covered by the same process.” According to Ainley, this has resulted in annual employee engagement scores rising from 64 per cent in 2009 to 68 per cent in 2011, while recognition scores (in response to the statement, ‘At Aviva I am recognised for who I am; what I contribute matters’) have gone from 67 per cent in 2009 to 74 per cent in 2011. “Every company has a process, but the difference is the level of conversation that you have with people,” says Ainley. “We spend a lot of time encouraging our people to have authentic, honest conversations about their development.”

 

For me, it’s creating this sort of attitude that will lead to increased trust, and more effective social responsibility, not naively hoping employees will start cut their leaders more slack whilst their existing attitudes remain in place.

I’d be interested in your thoughts…

 

By the way, I’ll be hosting the HR Carnival here on Wednesday 11th April.  Potential theme, given that it’s Easter: change and renewal?  If you’ve got a blog, please send in a recent post by Monday 9th.  If you’ve not got a blog, what better time to start one?

 

Technorati Tags: CIPD,Veronica Hope_Hailey,CASS,trust,collective responsibility,John Ainley,Aviva

 

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#EQSummit Paul Ekman on emotional intelligence

 

   I'm at the Leadership and Emotional Intelligence Summit today. The highlight is a session from Dr Paul Ekman (anthropologist, father of the field of emotional research and friend of the Dalai Lama and 'Danny’ Goleman) which I'm live blogging....

First, the knowledge base...

Our emotions are important - and can even override our basic drives - eg disgust of sex can override our sex drive.

Each one is a discreet categorical module with a separate circuitry. So how many are there? Between 6 and 7. Everyone agrees on the top 5: anger fear sadness disgust happiness.

But where is surprise? Surprise is neutral - not positive or negative and can't stay surprised very long - you move onto another emotion.

Ekman also adds Contempt which he has found  around the world and in other primates. And possibly excitement - eg extreme sports participants seem to be after the state of excitement itself. A still unresolved problem.

Another debate is whether facial expressions based on these emotions are a cultural specific body language or universal? Mead suggests they're culturally learned. But this would mean you can't work inane other culture unless you've learnt their facial expressions too...





Where do people learn to translate facial expressions - from the media?, other people or is it genetic. Ekman needed a culturally isolated group of people. He took lots of film but never saw an expression he hadn't seen before. And his interpretation seemed to fit what people were doing.

He then went to New Guinea in 67 to find the last few visually isolated people.





He did two experiments - firstly asking people to stand in front of a camera to see their facial expression in response to a story eg about a smelly dead pig (disgust).





Each emotions has:

- A signal. In anger, the blood goes to your muscles in your hand preparing you to hit somebody. When you're afraid the blood goes to your legs preparing you to run. Anger fear sadness disgust surprise contempt happiness have universal signals. What about envy? It's an emotion but doesn't have a signal. Love isn't an emotion however, it's a state of commitment.

- A trigger theme - a variation on a theme - most of these are learned. Eg things you are afraid of are learnt whilst growing up. They relate to who can show what emotion to whom eg the only beauty contestant is the one who wins.

- Physiology
- Likely actions


There are also display rules and attitudes about each emotion. Eg in some societies any display of anger is taboo.

But what is an emotion? - an automatic appraisal attuned to universal antecedent events (triggers), and a learned trigger eg when you brake whilst driving to avoid an accident. But can be dangerous too eg if you mistake a coiled snake for a rope. So we have a bias to see danger, even when it's not there, as that is safer than the reverse.

Each of these emotions can be found in other species (primates) too. They capable of quick onset and can be brief in duration. They are involuntary and inescapable once they begin.

Other characteristics include:

- Distinctive thoughts memories images

- Distinctive subjective experience

- Refractory period filters information - you'll only be able to remember things which support the emotion.

- Target of emotion unconstrained - you can be angry at anything

- Can be constructive or destructive. We're social animals. If emotions lead to us not talking to each other again that's a destructive emotional episode.


Emotions are different to moods (can last all day vs fleeting, can't always be linked to a trigger even after an event) / traits (eg someone who has anger high in their response hierarchy will after be angry, lasting for years) / disorders





Happiness - there are 5 sensory pleasures - amusement, relief, contentment, wonder, bliss. Ekman suggests the terms happiness should be banished from the English language. Are you amused or relieved? - totally different (as different as fear and ager).

And rejoicing, altruistic joy, fiery (when you express yourself to the maximum), nachos (pride in your offspring), schadenfreude (just because we don't have an English name for these doesn't mean we don't feel them).


Next, onto the skills... (this is what I'm really looking forward to as I use some of Ekman's tests in my sessions on emotional intelligence).

- Aware of other peoples emotions (online training tools include Micro Expression Training Tool - METT)
- Using information constructively (online tools available - RETT)
- Impulse awareness through meditation or exercises
- Behavioural awareness (through the capacity to observe yourself so you never learn your head).


METT came about when working with patients liable to commit suicide and with this guy, Kato Kaelin who was angry with Marcia Clarke:

Micro expressions can be either deliberately concealed or unconscious.


A final point: I liked Ekman's confidence in talking about what he believes but doesn't have any evidence for (take note, HR).



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HCI Summit: employees and the business

 

   I’m back at the HCI Summit in Arizona, virtually again – engaged by the content though not quite so much by the experience as when I last managed to attend there irl.

The best sessions for me from the first day were the early ones – and (see the tweet stream) for me, these were the most thought provoking too.

Because we started with Doug Conant, former CEO at Campbell Soup talking about touchpoints – those back-to-back meetings, endless emails and chance encounters in the hallway which most people feel keep them from doing their ‘real work’.  But Doug suggests these are often overlooked opportunities to expand our influence and deliver measurable better results.

At Campbell’s he made the best use of these touchpoint opportunities through various activities, including sending 10-20 personal thankyou cards per day (30,000 of them during his tenure):

 

Very nice, very human.

Which is why I disagreed with Michael Gregoire, CEO at Taleo, in his observation that HR is about managing business, not employees.  Not at Campbell Soup it’s not (wasn’t).  There, talent management is about inspiring each individual in each opportunity a leader has.  And it works…

 

It’s not not about the business.  But it’s not not about employees either.  I’ll say again: ignoring employees is the problem – it’s not the solution.

 

Technorati Tags: HCI,Human Capital Institute,Summit,2012,Michael Gregoire,Taleo,Doug Conant,Campbell Soup,touchpoints,employee,business,HR

 

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HR Analytics – HCI Talent Strategy and Workforce Planning conference

 

   As well as the books, I’ve been re-reviewing the Human Capital Institute’s recent Talent Strategy and Workforce Planning conference (which I’ve also already posted on here).  Although this was mainly focused on, as the name suggests, talent strategy and workforce planning, it included a lot of broader stuff on analytics too.

I particularly liked SuccessFactors’ description of their analytics process, eg this phrase: “Unless an indicator is aligned with either HR or
corporate strategy, it is unlikely to be valued by management.”

The need is therefore to start with an understanding of strategy (what matters), and measurement (how are we doing), before undertaking analytics about the issue.

 

Ie, for me at least, it’s the development of the people management strategy and its measures which triggers questions about organisational working which provides a context for analytics.

That’s why my HR metrics workshop focus mainly on HR strategy mapping and scorecarding as a means to describe people strategy before going on to focus on the use of analytics tools.

It’s this that gives you the focus on what you need to be doing analytics on, enabling you to produce compelling analytics which truly support more effective decision making – eg I particularly liked the presentation by Conagra on their analytics and reporting approach:

 

The danger if you don’t do this, as SF point out is that you just end up drowning in data:

 

Another great HCI conference – and hopefully I’ll be able to do some posting from the HCI’s Annual Summit next week…

 

Also see:

• HR Analytics – Transformative HR
• HR Analytics – Calculating Success
• The Five Most Important HR Analytics

 

 

Technorati Tags: Human Capital Institute,talent,strategy,workforce planning,HR,analytics

 

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HR Analytics – Transformative HR

 

You may have thought from my last post that I’ve got quite worked up about ‘Calculating Success’.  Well I haven’t really, but I am feeling quite irate at John Boudreau’s latest, ‘Transformative HR’.

First of all: “Talent management is not an imprecise art form.  Rather, it is a rigorous science based on solid numbers.”

It’s complete nonsense of course, and I don’t understand how Boudreau gets away with it.

He makes the comment in particular relation to a case study of Deutsche Telekom introducing job families to support succession management.  Let’s check the details shall we:

• Job families – a common taxonomy of 60 job families with a number of subfamilies.  For example HR was a job family with subfamilies such as HR Development and HR Business Partner.  OK, so if I’m an HRBP this means I’m going to be doing exactly the same job as every other business partner in an organisation with 260,000 people working in 50 countries.  I doubt it.
• Competency models – were tailored to local business units through the use of additional competencies – so not quite an apples to apples comparison is it then?
• Performance ratings and readiness categories – based upon perfect assessments in every case no doubt?  What rot.  Unless DT managers are different to just about every organisation I’ve ever been involved in the readiness assessments in particular will be little better than finger in the air estimates.  Not the sort of stuff that informs rigorous science I’m afraid.

 

I’m not saying it’s not a good example of an analytics based approach, I sort of think it is – better than most of the examples in Calculating Success anyway.  But a rigorous science???!!!  I think not.

Actually, what makes it an interesting and useful case study is the creativity of the approach (and there’s no evidence that the creativity has been generated through learnings from using analytics either) eg the way that readiness is judged for vertical or horizontal movement.

 

Secondly: the focus on pivotal talent.  This is a complete red herring.  It’s all value for money stuff.  OK, if nothing is changing it makes sense to invest more in sweepers than it does the Mickey Mouse(s – you’ve heard the joke lots of times by now, right – there’s only ever one Mickey Mouse) because the sweepers are more pivotal – ie a certain investment can produce a bigger shift in performance than it can with the MM(s).  But what organisation isn’t changing these days?  A much better focus is on the organisational strategy.  If this requires change in the role of either the MM(s) or the sweepers, then these are the most important group/s.  Importance just doesn’t make sense on its own, it all depends upon what the organisation is trying to do.

Pivotness is bad logic and it leads to bad decisions eg “An organisation might do well to acquire a 90th percentile performer in the R&D scientist role and be satisfied with a 50th percentile performer in the controller role.”   It’s the sort of logic that Beatty uses too and it’s just wrong.  You don’t necessarily want to pay over the odds in all these positions but that’s only a bother if pay is the only element in your employee offer (in which case you’re definitely not doing transformative HR).  You still want the best person you can get in all your different roles.  Deliberately seeking out or even just being satisfied with anything less than this is just nuts.

 

Boudreau’s favourite question, “Where would improving something make the biggest difference to success?” results in then same, value for money results.  You can get benefits out of this, and particularly out of making the improvements.  But you’ll find greater benefits in asking “What do we need to improve to support our strategy?” (adding value) or even “How could we develop new capabilities which would enable us to set new strategic objectives?”.

 

Other than these things, the book is actually very similar to Calculating Success, including some of the same case studies (particularly IBM and RBS) which you could take to indicate this isn’t yet that popular an area, or that most organisations have a more nuanced approach to the use of analytics.

There are a couple of bright points – I love the example of Shanda Games and its 100 point, gamified grading system which I first came across in Boudreau’s presentation at HR Technology North America last year, and still rave about.

In the book, Boudreau also writes about Shanda providing each employee with a virtual city.  Employees are awarded virtual objects for completing tasks or projects and these can be used to decorate their cities.  Each city owner is also able to decide on what their city’s weather for the day is going to be, and Shanda intends to measure the mood of the organisation by scanning how nice the weather is each day – nothing to do with analytics though (although presumably Shanda could do an analysis on the number of virtual clouds?).

And there’s a good chapter on risk management too.  I do quite a bit of work in this area myself but I’ve never used anything like Boudreau’s inverse heat map which I think is a really good idea.

So do read the book, but keep that pinch of salt close by as you do.

 

Also see my criticism of Beyond HR.  (I never got around to reviewing Retoooling HR but I didn’t like this much either.)

 

And: The Five Most Important HR Analytics

 

Technorati Tags: John Boudreau,Transformative HR,analytics

 

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HR Analytics – Calculating Success

 

   I’ve been re-reading a couple of books in preparation for another workshop on HR Metrics.  One of these has been Calculating Success by Carl Hoffmann, Eric Lesser and Tim Ringo.

It’s a pretty turgid book, but then it does focus on measurement, which isn’t the most naturally entertaining topic area (I always struggle slightly to make my measurement workshops as stimulating as my other trainings).

But there are also a few other things which really irritate me about the book, for example I think the authors define analytics a bit too widely: “We see workforce analytics as a set of quantitative approaches that answer a simple, yet often overlooked question: what do we need to know about our organisation and workforce to run the company more effectively and (perhaps most importantly) how do we turn this knowledge into action?”

This definition leads the authors to including things like engagement surveys as example of analytics whereas to me, these are clearly measurement approaches rather than analytical ones (the analytics then follows the measurement of engagement).  And scenario planning?  It’s certainly a way of better understanding strategy, but its not an analytical approach!

Perhaps a better definition would be the process of asking and answering questions, to gain a better understanding of an organisation (ie being about the question, not the approach used to answer this)?  Like these asked within the book:

• Based on the organisation’s strategy, what is the work that needs to be done, and are the processes, structures and roles designed to efficiently and effectively accomplish it?
• Is the human capital supply chain filling those roles with people capable of doing the work at the quantity, quality and cost required of the business model?
• Once in place, is the workforce fully engaged and motivated to meet or exceed performance standards?
• Finally, since change is ubiquitous, how can we detect the need for change, test innovations in the organisation and workforce, and disseminate those throughout the organisation?

 

I also dislike the complete absence of any focus on people strategy in the book. For me, analytics isn’t simply about developing insight into how people support a business, but how they support the people strategy which supports a business – a small but crucial difference.  So analytics is about asking questions which provide a better insight into how people strategy leads to better business results.

And I’m largely unimpressed by the book’s case studies.  Many of these are really about things completely unconnected with analytics, eg:

• Strategy (eg Circuit City –which really shouldn’t have needed to do any analytics to know that laying off 34,000 of its highest paid people wouldn’t be a good idea, Qantas, which also didn’t need analytics, just a little more ambition and determination to change, Sunglass Hut which was just about experimentation, and IBM which was about the need for a common language)
• Process and job design (ABC, the community college)
• Change management (the oil company).

 

However, there are some good examples too, eg I liked the CORP case study which concerns a case where measures showed a negative relationship between performance of the supervisors and the sales of a team, and a positive correlation between sales and team turnover.  But ever here, the organisation only used surveys and focus groups to get a better understanding of the causes of these findings – not really something I would call an analytics based approach.  The PHARMA case study is better – again involving an interesting situation in which some of the best people were being lost but also involving the use of regression analysis and stochastic modelling to gain a better understanding of the situation.  This is the only example of what I would call a true analytics based approach in the whole book, but it is a good case study, so the book may be worth reading just for this (it’s in chapter six).

 

And then one of the most interesting aspects of the book, to me, is its discussions on people as widgets which concerns the importance, but yet also the perhaps over-hyped perception of importance, of this whole field:

“Other companies have a cultural bias against adopting a disciplined analytics approach to people, believing that people are not inanimate parts.

 

The authors quote from Boudreau’s Retooling HR:

“Is it because people are not widgets, and out of respect for their free will and humanity it’s unfair or wrong to use the same logic for workforce decisions as we use for decisions about more inanimate objectives like inventories and machines?  No.

In fact, it’s arguable more unfair and disrespectful to employees and job applicants to make important decisions about where to invest in their development, performance and careers in less rigorous ways that those applied to more traditional resources.”

 

I don’t disagree with this, but I also think it misses the point.  The reason why we don’t want to treat people as widgets isn’t about humanity and fairness, it’s about practicality.  People are different to widgets.  We talk to each other creating a complex and messy system in which it’s often difficult to disentangle cause and effect and in which a small change in inputs can have a large impact on outputs.  It’s why HR analytics are so useful, but also why we must not overestimate their usefulness.  We should never say this investment will result in this, just that it may…

So I dislike examples in which organisations seem to think they’re developed a full understanding of something which is actually impossible to wrap up this way.  For example, an Asian airline apparently managed to develop a ‘clear picture’ of where instant messaging and other forms of social networking could have a significant impact on productivity.  Well, I’m not so sure they did.  There’s nothing wrong in trying to predict where the best use will be, but that’s very different to believing you’ve got the whole thing sewn up.  Particularly with social networking, most case studies show that organisations will find a whole slew of emergent benefits that their people make up which they hadn’t thought about before.

 

And in fact the authors seem to come round to this perspective later in the book (in a chapter perhaps written by a different author?):

“However, we also believe that organisations sometimes take an overtly simplistic view of the complexities and interdependencies inherent in developing an ‘on demand’ workforce.  People are not widgets; they cannot be comprehensively described within a ‘bill of materials’ or an ‘ingredient list’.  Individuals come with a set of distinctive skills, preferences and requirements that motivate them to achieve well beyond their ‘specifications’ or that hinder achievement of their potential…. Given these differences, organisations should be wary of claims that they can manage the supply and demand for talent with the same precision as other commodities.”

 

Well quite, and in other areas of analytics too.  This is all useful stuff, but let’s keep it in perspective – it’s the development and then implementation of a creating value people strategy that’s the most important – as well as difficult - thing, not the measurement of this, and not the analytics which may play a role in the strategy’s formation.

I like the point where the authors write “The value to the organisation and workforce of the access to these networks cannot be underestimated”.  Right, and if that’s the case, let’s not go to the bother of estimating or analysing it.  If it can be underestimated, you may need to use some analytical tools, but I’m afraid you probably won’t find them in this book.

 

Technorati Tags: Calculating Success,Carl Hoffmann,Eric Lesser,Tim Ringo,HR,analytics

 

Also see: The Five Most Important HR Analytics 

 

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

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The Five Most Important HR Analytics

 

   I’ve been down in Johannesburg for a few days, delivering a workshop on HR metrics and analytics. And it was analytics, not too surprisingly (as this is such a rapidly becoming an extremely important and popular topic), which gave rise to the most interesting discussion in the workshop.

For me, both HR metrics and analytics need to cascade from a company’s HR strategy / strategic risk assessment. The analytics a particular company will want to use will therefore depend upon its context and strategy, and in particular on what questions about how HR impacts the business will be most useful for it to answer.

I think that this is actually a fairly common view held by a good proportion of commentators in this area. And I think most of the participants on my workshop understood this too, but I was still pushed to provide a list of best practice analytics.

I’m not keen to do this, as I worry that many companies will simply add to their lists of generic metrics with these generic analytics and hence completely miss the opportunity to align with their business and HR strategy and therefore to maximise their impact on the business.

However, I like to do what my clients, and workshop attendees, want, and this is such a rapidly developing area, I don’t think any of us have a fully developed understanding of how this field will evolve. So here you go:

Oh, one more thing. I’d already explained that I think the most important metrics, and therefore analytics too, are those focused on the outcomes created in the human capital value chain. And they obviously need to be focused on the higher levels of value in the value triangle (I’ve written about these models before). Therefore the ‘best’ analytics will most likely be those focused on these areas highlighted above.

Let’s start at the very stop in the ‘creating value’ space:

 

1. Creating value in human capital

Many organisations will have some element of human capital, probably around engagement / passion / pride / wellness (/ love?) that they know they need to develop, not just to meet short-term business needs but to support their ongoing success.

The most useful question to ask about these capabilities will relate to how they can best be further developed, and because the drivers of engagement can vary significantly within any one organisation, should be analysed by segmented groups. However, the important thing to note is that to create value through engagement, rather than simply to use it to support business needs, the segmentation shouldn’t be about organisational unit / level etc, but type of individual, ie using a range of demographic or sociographic factors to identify groups of individuals with similar –graphics who can therefore be engaged in a similar way. Doing this will help a company target its engagement activities much more effectively.

 

2. Also social capital – the greatest new opportunity

I had already explained in the workshop why I think social capital is often one of the greatest opportunities for developing new organisational capability in a business (because in most organisations, how people work together is more important than the quality of the individual involved; and also because this area receives so little attention in many organisations).

The broadly equivalent tool to the engagement survey is a social network analysis, However, once again to make this an ‘analytic’ rather than simply a measurement, I suggest that this needs to be used together with other measures of activity to understand correlations and ideally causations between these.

Doing this can help answer questions such as what type of people are most able to be effective facilitators of a community, and also what else makes communities and networks work effectively.

 

3. Sources of performance

Moving down to ‘adding value’, the next main opportunity is probably to better understand what leads to good performance – looking at how a range of actors from leadership, organisation design including length of management spans, competencies and general career factors eg tenure, numbers of promotions etc, impact upon employees’ performance. A good example of this in a retail environment would be modelling an onboarding programme against impact on sales per square foot.

 

4. Leadership performance

A build on this could be analysis of what makes the leaders of an organisation effective, and also perhaps of what effective leadership looks like in the first place.

 

5. Human capital supply chain

Widening this out, many organisations will want to review how they are doing in providing the right people with the right competencies at the right time in the right place, eg whether they are optimising their selection of the 5 or 6 Bs (buy, build, borrow, balance, bind, bounce) appropriately and integrating across the approaches that they use.

Note this analysis will link to an organisation’s workforce planning, but I also think it takes place at a bigger and broader level than this.

 

Even with this focus, there are still a broad range of analytical approaches available to organisations (from correlation and causation analysis to complex models of organisational dynamics) and it’s even more difficult than the above to recommend the particular tools an organisation should use. My advice would simply be to probe as deep as you need to go to answer the question you’ve defined based upon the above.

 

 

Technorati Tags: HR,metrics,analytics,top,best practices,value

 

• 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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Personnel Today webinar: Social Media at Work

   I’m going to be speaking on this Personnel Today webinar next month:

 

Our next webinar is on the hot topic of social media in the workplace. Not only will we look at the ubiquitous question of whether HR should control employees’ use of social media, but we will also focus on increasingly social ways of working and the impact these will have on organisations. Our expert panel will look at how companies are using emerging social tools and will examine the numerous ways they can benefit HR.

Our expert panel will look at how companies are using social tools and will examine the numerous ways they can benefit HR.

Stay informed with this FREE webinar, register here

Our discussion will include:

• How much trust should you put in your employees?
• What are the ramifications of banning social media?
• How are social tools changing the business landscape?
• Why social media can boost recruitment, retention, L&D, engagement and more…

Personnel Today editor Rob Moss hosts the discussion and is joined by Matthew Hanwell, HR director, communities and social media at Nokia; Jon Ingham, HR consultant, author and blogger; and Ofir Guetta, social collaboration leader for IBM.

Register for the FREE webinar here to find out how social media can work for your company.

 

Technorati Tags: Personnel Today,webinar,Rob Moss,Matthew Hanwell,Nokia,Ofer Guetta,IBM,social media,HR

 

• 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

.