Symposium Training: Employee Engagement

 

   Just before my short series of recruitment-oriented posts (see at the bottom of #SRConf: Social Recruiting conference), I’d started posting on employee engagement (Using technology and social media for engaging relationships).

One of the other things I wanted to note was that I’m also running a series of training sessions on engagement this year:

The importance of ensuring an engaged workforce is rapidly increasing as more work becomes virtual, as well as team and knowledge-based.  However, in most organisations, particularly in the UK, engagement has been falling for some years.  (Where surveys show engagement increasing recently, this is largely a result of people being worried about losing their jobs and should not necessarily be taken to indicate an increase in their desire to do their jobs or a passion to help their organisations succeed!)

Businesses, governments and academics are now getting worried about this.  Gary Hamel, for example, refers to the fact that organisations are more likely to ‘douse the flames of employee enthusiasm than fan them’ as management’s dirty little secret.  This secret is now increasingly being openly discussed and this is therefore the right time for HR to offer some alternative solutions to other business leaders.

Attend this seminar to learn and reflect on what does inspire people at work and how some successful, maverick organisations are generating true passion from their employees.  Then plan how to adapt these experiences to your own organisation.

 

Dates:

13 July 2011 – London
30 September 2011 – Manchester

 

If you wish to attend, you can book here, or let me know if you’d like to do something similar in your own organisation.

 

Technorati Tags: Symposium,Events,Training,employee,engagement

 

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#SRConf: Social Recruiting conference

 

  My next recruiting event will be the Social Recruiting conference in London on 30th June.  I’m looking forward to hearing from:

• Alan Whitford, Founder RCEuro.com & Chair, #SRCONF
• Paul Maxin, Global Resourcing Director, Unilever
• Quezia Soares, Recruitment Marketing Manager, Accenture UK
• Maayan Zusman, Recruitment Marketing & Branding Lead, Intel Europe
• Matt Jeffery, Head, EMEA Talent Acquistion, Autodesk
• Michelle Rea, CEO & Founder, Social Honesty
• Stéphane Le Viet, CEO and Co-founder of Work4 Labs
• Katie McNab, Talent Acquisition Manager (UK, Ireland & South Africa), PepsiCo
• Franck La Pinta, Employer Marketing Manager, Societe Generale Group
• Doug Fraley, Talent & Marketing Director, The Challenge Network
• Gareth Jones, Co-founder, ConnectingHR & inmate, BrubakerHR
• Julie Cochrane, Delivery Manager, Capita Resourcing
• Wolfgang Brickwedde, Director, Institute of Competitive Recruiting

 

Check out these recent posts if you can’t wait until then:

• Evolution of the sourcer
• Just because you can do it doesn’t mean you should...
• Hard times and poor responses in Recruiting

 

And these posts from #SRConf last year:

• G4Social
• Relationships in social recruiting
• People first, social second.

 

I’ll also be speaking at SRConf’s sister event, the Social Workforce conference #SWConf, and chairing the Social Learning conference #SLConf in 2012.

 

Picture Credit: slide from Paul Marchand, Pepsico at HCI’s Strategic Talent Acquisition conference 

Technorati Tags: Social Recruiting Summit,Conference,#SRConf

 

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Evolution of the sourcer

 

  The Recruiting Innovation conference provided a great overview of the need for a more talent-centric approach to hiring, and also of the social and other technologies that support this.

But the recent conference that I think provided the best overview of new hiring approaches, corresponding to this talent-centric model, was the Human Capital Institute’s Strategic Talent Acquisition conference last month.

I particularly like the slides presented by Ryan Cook at CH2MHill, including the de-evolution of the Recruiter from Master Networker through Job Board-Aholic to a Paper Pusher focusing on Post & Pray, coupled with the evolution of The Sourcer from Recruiting Admin to Community Architect and Social Engineer (pictured above) as I think these do capture a very significant shift in the roles of recruiting professionals.

We talked quite a bit about the role and tools of the Sourcer in my Barcelona workshop.  We talked less about the role of the Community Architect / Social Engineer, but I agree this one is increasingly important too.

A very good example was provided by Kevin Shigley at Coca Cola who discussed Coke’s dual stage talent acquisition process consisting of sourcing (of external, internal and contract talent) providing a set of talent pools for the later hiring activities:

 

 

Coke’s vision is that the company’s Talent Acquisition team knows the best talent ready to fill its jobs at all times, globally, in advance of need (they hire 1500 people per year so they need relationships with 3000 people in external FMCG).

 

I don’t know if, in general, this role is really about community though.  With the exception of graduate recruiting, where the pool is big and diverse enough to bring people together to share information and help each other, candidates for a job, or even targets for a career, aren’t often going to be keen to talk to one another.  So the community is of a particular form: the community of ‘me’ ie of the recruiter, not one in which each individual shares in developing relationships.

Still managing that is as much a new relationship management skill in the sourcer / recruiter as much as it the sort of contact management system that Kevin described.

 

Technorati Tags: Recruiting,sourcing,Ryan Cook,CH2MHill,Kevin Shigley,Coca Cola,Human Capital Institute,Strategic,Talent Acquisition,Conference

 

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Just because you can do it doesn’t mean you should! (true, but, it also doesn’t mean you shouldn’t)

 

  I had a good couple of days with a small group of recruiting leaders in  Barcelona.  I think they enjoyed the workshop, though they didn’t agree with me on everything  eg my suggestions on career sites in my last post.

One of the resources I’d suggest this group, and others, look at if they want to know more is the slides and videos from the recent Recruiting Innovation Summit in the States (successor to the previous Social Recruiting summit I attended irl last year).

I love the presentation from Nilofer Merchant on curating performance and culture.  This is beautifully presented case for a more talent centric focus in organisations, and I also love Nilofer’s recent post on the same agenda: ‘People Are not Cogs’ (you might remember one of my early posts on this point too).

And I think Amy Wilson provides a great review of the evolution of some of the key tools in recruiting technology too.

But my favourite session is the one on location-based mobile recruiting from Craig Fisher.  I’ve also seen Craig present at TRU and HRevolution and the importance of the tools, and particularly the approaches, he describes, are starting to get through to me now, so for example I’m trying to put more focus into tools like Foursquare than I have to date.

I’m also trying out the SocialCV (pictured) which aggregates data from social profiles to provide a more social media oriented, and therefore real-time, search tool on individuals / potential employees.

At one point in his presentation Craig suggests that even if these tools seem creepy at the moment, their use is going to spread.  Plus there’s nothing dark going on here – all the information that these tools use, and Craig is suggesting that recruiters and sources should tap, is available in the public arena.

I’d agree.  I do sort of understand recruiters’ / HRs’ ethical concerns about using social data for background checking (I still love Enterprise Rent-A-Car Donna Miller’s quote that using social media for recruitment checking is like “going into somebody's house and searching through their bedroom drawers”) though I suspect even this is going to change.  But it is already forming a major role within selection, and clearly has a key role within sourcing too.

So you may think you shouldn’t do it (even if you can) but of course, this does mean other recruiters are going to be doing it, even if you’re not.  No prizes for guessing who’s going to find that active or particularly passive candidate the first.

 

Technorati Tags: Recruiting,Innovation,Summit,Nilofer Merchant,Amy Wilson,Craig Fisher,theSocialCV,sourcing

 

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Hard times and poor responses in Recruiting

 

  I’ve already noted that I’ve not been attending the CIPD’s co-located recruiting or HR software conferences this year.  In fact, I’m out in Barcelona delivering my own smaller recruitment focused event.  So I’ve been trying to keep an eye on the UK show – but it’s not been than easy to do given the very low amount of social media usage there (more on this shortly!).

One thing which has been made available is the CIPD’s new Resourcing and Talent Planning survey which I’ve been looking through.  It’s not good news, and in fact if contrasts strongly against other research which I’ve already referred to in my workshop – for example this study by Aon Hewitt for the European Club for HR which found that:

“HR professionals across Europe expect revenues and investment to grow at a much better pace in 2011 than in the last two years with only 2% of respondent organisations forecasting a decrease this year.

The more positive outlook for the year ahead is confirmed by the employment prospects. The proportion of companies foreseeing a reduction of their workforce is significantly smaller now at 26% compared to 44% last year and 71% in 2009. Meanwhile, the proportion of companies that expect to add new jobs has increased to 28% in 2011, up from 20% in 2010 and only 8% in 2009.

The difficulty of having a suitably qualified labour force, or in finding the right talent in the right place, emerges as this year's most influential factor when designing HR policies. Talent shortage jumps from fifth to the first position in 2011.

Cost sensitivity loses its first place but remains a highly influential factor together with changes in the company culture and organisation.”

 

In contrast, the CIPD report (which focuses more on the UK than the rest of Europe) notes:

“On average the number of vacancies organisations attempted
to fill in 2010 remains as low as in 2009, during the recession.  The number of vacancies in very large organisations, particularly in the public sector, has dramatically reduced over the past three years.

Changes in resourcing and talent practices in 2011 compared with 2010 reflect a stronger focus on costs and reductions in budgets. More organisations anticipate they will be focusing on developing talent in-house, retaining rather than recruiting talent and reducing their reliance on recruitment agencies and external consultants for resourcing and development.”

 

There does seem to be agreement that the ‘war for talent’ is stoking up again though:

“Despite high unemployment over the last two years, more than half (52%) believe that competition for talent is even greater as the pool of available talent to hire has fallen sharply (2010: 41%; 2009: 20%).”

 

So what’s not so great to see is the rather uninspiring response of organisations to this situation, for example:

“One in three (31%) organisations report that the length of their recruitment process has led to the loss of potential recruits. This issue appears to be exacerbated by organisation size. Nearly half of organisations with more than 5,000 employees report that the length of their recruitment process has led to the loss of potential recruits.”

 

And:

“While the effectiveness of methods to attract applicants varies according to organisation sector and size, the most effective method overall is reported to be through organisations’ own corporate websites, as was the case last year.

Despite the popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook, they are not seen to be particularly effective for attracting candidates.  Professional networking sites, such as LinkedIn, are more popular, particularly in the private services sector, although there has only been a small percentage increase in their reported effectiveness compared with last year.”

 

The reliance on career sites is frankly bizarre, particularly so shortly after John Sullivan has announced their demise!

And the effectiveness of social recruiting?  Well, if you’re just advertising your vacancies on Linkedin, you’re not doing it right.  But as you can see from the low level of tweeting at the conference (pretty non-existent really once you’ve taken out the ‘visit my stand’ messages from exhibitors), UK based recruiters generally still aren’t into the social aspects of social networking sites (despite the great case studies which have been and will once again be discussed at the Social Recruiting conference in two weeks time).

The focus on career sites seems to be linked to the desire of organisations to improve their employer brand (and if that’s the case, I again think they’d find more effective use of social media to be a better way to achieve this benefit):

“Nearly three-quarters of organisations have made efforts to improve their employer brand over the past year. The larger the organisation, the more likely it is to have undertaken one or
more activities to improve its brand.

The most popular approaches to improving employer brand are employee surveys and developing online careers sites, with larger
organisations most likely to have adopted these methods. The public sector is most likely to have introduced or extended flexible working / homeworking, whereas the private sector is
more likely to have made efforts to improve its brand through working with charities or corporate sponsorship.

 

Bizarrer and bizzarer! – none of these are core to an effective employer brand.  See REC’s recent report instead.

Other news includes:

“Overall, a third of organisations report they have reduced their use of recruitment partners; however, one in five report they have formed a closer business partnership with them over the past year and one in ten that they consider them integral to attracting top talent.”

 

This at least is good news – recruiting technologies (including social media) allow organisations to do much more recruiting for themselves, so perhaps this is taking place after all.  And I don’t see the proportion forming closer partnerships with their suppliers as something that’s opposed to this – as you reduce the numbers of suppliers you’re working with, it makes sense to work more closely with those it’s still sensible to use.

There’s also:

“Competency-based interviews (70%), interviews following the contents of CVs/application forms (63%) and structured interviews (56%) are, as last year, the most common methods used to select applicants. Two-fifths of organisations report they use a strengths-based approach to recruitment.

Over three-quarters of those who use a strengths based approach to recruitment believe it brings benefits in terms of increased individual performance (78%). Two-thirds believe it improves retention (67%) and increases engagement (63%).  Two-fifths (39%) report it results in greater diversity of skills in the workplace.

Many organisations that use a strengths-based approach to recruitment also use a strengths-based approach for other people processes. More than half use it for performance management processes (59%), succession planning (55%) and learning and development (53%). Two-fifths use it for talent management (42%) and a third use it for workforce planning (32%). Just under three in ten (29%) also use it for redeployment.

Many organisations that use a strengths-based approach to recruitment also use a strengths-based approach for other people processes. More than half use it for performance management processes (59%), succession planning (55%) and learning and development (53%). Two-fifths use it for talent management (42%) and a third use it for workforce planning (32%). Just under three in ten (29%) also use it for redeployment.

 

I do like this.  A focus on strengths is one obvious way to move from a more business-focused, to a more talent-focused approach to recruitment (and other HR activities), and am not surprised at all about the benefits organisations are finding from using it.

 

Technorati Tags: CIPD,Recruitment,Resourcing,Talent,Planning,survey,2011,technology,social media,#REC11

 

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Using technology and social media for engaging relationships

 

  There’s been quite a bit in the HR press recently on HR technology and especially social media, perhaps in the run-up to the UK’s HR Software Show today (I’m not going to this as I’m holding on for the USA’ much larger HR Technology conference in October, and the new European one in November).

HR Magazine has a quite nice article on social media, and notes a number of its major benefits including communication, recruitment and learning.  However, whilst the article notes that there is more to social HR than appeasing Generation Y it largely seems to focus on this.

For example (and it is only an example), the article includes a comment from Nick Holley at Henley suggesting:

“Social media is here to stay.  We need to understand how to use it and educate managers not to be scared by it.  We have to embrace it and understand Gen Y’s obsession with social media – and gen Gen X to embrace it too.”

 

Well yes, and I certainly agree with the first half of the quote.  But I generally blog most days of the week, tweet a fair among and use other tools more sparingly too.  That’s pretty obsessed and I’m no Gen Y.  The generation thing really isn’t the point.

If you want to know what is the point, you might like to tune into HR Magazine’s HR Vision interview with me: ‘Why should HR directors use social media in their business’ (see the lines on my forehead if you don’t believe I’m a fair bit past the Gen Y mark).  This is also trailed in the HR Magazine article – though it’s not yet up on the website at the time of writing.

 

There’s another good article over at People Management which includes a broader review of HR technology in the cloud as well.  For example, it includes CedarCrestone’s finding from its 2010-11 survey that HR generally prefers pay per use provision, supporting Could based delivery (see here if you wish to participate in the 2011-12 research).

This article emphasises the benefits of social media for employee engagement, including a comment from Patricia Eyoma at Unit4:

“Employee engagement has become a top priority now because there’s been no opportunity to offer salary increases.  If we can enable employee surveys or screen sharing, things that promote a culture of information-sharing or having an input into decisions, then we can offer a way of enhancing relationships within an organisation.”

 

Let’s leave aside the idea that screen saving is going to compensate for a salary increase for a moment and focus in on the point regarding relationships.  Social media does help people build relationships, there’s no doubt about that, though again, I think there are probably more appropriate tools than screen sharing to do it.  And relationship development definitely improves engagement (even if Kenexa argues with this).

I just wish that more organisations would value relationships for themselves rather than a means to something else, eg engagement.  Relationships are a vital aspect of social capital which is probably a more direct source of competitive advantage than engagement or other aspects of human capital (and a greater competitive opportunity than strategic positioning and core competencies too).  You can see more about this over at my Social Advantage blog.

Actually, my last post there referred to some work I’m involved in developing a management hack for love.  As part of our discussions on this, Lisa Haneberg at Management Craft sent me this quote from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and his book, Flow:

“It is in the context of intimate friendships, however, that the most intense experiences occur.”

 

This is why relationships drive employee engagement, but they also support people achieving the state of flow too.  And that state is where people perform at their best, and develop towards their full potential – individually and together too.  This is the main reason why social media‘s impact on relationships is as important as it is.

In fact, it’s ‘the point’ I refer to in the HRvision interview as well.  Pop back in a week or so to see if it’s up there if you want to know more!

 

Technorati Tags: CIPD,Software,Show,HR,Technology,Social Media,Recruitment,Learning,Communication,HRSS11,REC11,HR Magazine,HRVision

 

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Being the authority on talent

 

  Plateau Systems are organising the following webinar with my HR blogging counterparts Kris Dunn, Mark Stelzner and Steve Boese:

Are you the authority on talent?

An authority is defined as the undisputed expert in a particular field. And, just as the CFO is the authority on finance and CIO the authority on IT, HR leaders are emerging as the authority on their organization's greatest variable expense — its people.

 

It’s an fascinating statement.  But the point that really interests me is the suggestion that HR isn’t currently seen as the authority on talent or people management.  Surely this should be, and should have always been, the case?  But of course my own experience as an HR Director, and that of my clients, tells me that it’s not.

I also understand that there is an opposing view – one which suggests that line managers should be the authority on their own people, and that HR’s objective should be to do itself out of a job.  But that’s not a viewpoint that I hold.  After all, you find the same requirements in Finance and IT as well – the need to upskill managers in managing their own finances and their own information – but you don’t see the same suggestion that organisations can do without a CFO, or an CIO.

The difference of course is the belief that managing people is easy, and that good HR (perhaps without the legal aspects) is simple to do.  I don’t think it is.  There’s actually a deep and rich skill set involved in doing HR well.  The problem for me is that HR doesn’t always have these skills, or put them to good use.  So I’d suggest the following three actions are needed for HR to become, and to be seen to have become, an authority on talent:

 

Developing strategic talent management skills

HR need to ensure it does have the skills it needs.  These skills go beyond an understanding of the design and execution of HR processes.  And they go beyond the business and financial skills HR needs to have credibility as a business player too.  Yes, we definitely need this understanding but we’re never going to have more of it than our colleagues in the rest of the business.  Having better business skills isn’t going to make us an authority on talent.

The key skills instead, for me at least, are those involved in motivating and influencing people – skills from psychology and sociology – and of their application in business and business-like organisations.  There are skills involved in this application too – for example in segmenting the workforce, in setting appropriate metrics, and in making effective long-term decisions etc.  These are all vital requirements for HR to be an authority on talent.

 

Taking a talent-centric view

However, I don’t think skills alone are enough.  We need to use these skills to put forward proposals about the importance of talent in our organisations.

This includes the identification of which people are included as talent.  Businesses are often very poor at identifying the right people who are going to generate their competitive success.  And it’s not always the most senior people that other business leaders are likely to suggest.  (For example, social network analysis suggests we tend to overlook those who have more subtle but often greater impact on an organisation through their network and influence.)

It also includes the management of talent which may require sourcing from previously untapped pools, and developing talent’s full potential to retain them in the organisation as well as to full leverage the key skills which are most relevant to the businesses’ success.  This is about developing the organisation as an employer of choice for this talent – being somewhere individuals identified as talent know that they’ll get developed and deployed in better ways than they will elsewhere.

And behind each of these two requirements is a talent-centric view – a perspective which puts talent first, and looks at what talent can provide for a business, rather than simply how talent can be used (ie in which the talent strategy influences the business strategy rather than simply the other way around).

This for me is where talent management technologies really come into play.  The enhanced functionality and increased integration within these systems are definitely allowing organisations to gain a better understanding of which people really drive business success, and also of how these people can be managed and developed well.

So identifying the right people, and managing them differently, based upon a talent-centric perspective, and aided by the use of technology are all aspects of being an authority on talent too.

 

Being accountable for talent

These last two actions allow HR professionals to say, “We understand the way that talent can be influenced and motivated, and based upon this understanding, we believe talent needs to be managed like this…”.  Talking like this takes HR some of the way towards being an authority on talent.

Yet this talent-centric and informed perspective still isn’t enough.  The piece that is still missing is about taking ownership for the way that talent is being managed within a business.

I believe that HR needs to shift from being an advisor about talent to having a real stake in this resource.  And this requires us to take accountability for the results that we achieve.

The difference that makes the difference is being able to say “We will commit to achieving these outcomes in our talent (capabilities, engagement, connectedness etc) within this period of time…”.

And then doing it – and delivering the outcomes we’ve described.

This is how I think we’ll become the authority for talent.

 

Those are my views, but I’d also recommend joining Kris, Mark and Steve and learning more about their perspectives too.  So here are the details on Plateau’s webinar:

 

Panel Discussion: Authority on Talent

Thursday, June 16th, 2011 at 12:00 pm EST

During this webcast HR thought leaders and prominent bloggers Kris Dunn, Mark Stelzner and Steve Boese will discuss their ideas about HR’s role as the Authority on Talent in the organization, focusing on the following questions:

• What do HR leaders need to establish this authority?
• What’s different now from previous “seat at the table” moments for HR?
• What role does technology play?

REGISTER NOW for this webcast!

 

Plateau

This is the second of a series of posts at Strategic HCM sponsored by Plateau.

Plateau provides SaaS-based Talent Management solutions for developing, managing, rewarding and optimising organisational talent to increase workforce productivity and maximise operating performance.

Plateau software has been deployed by many of the world's most successful enterprises. Organisations such as GE, Royal Bank of Canada, Singapore Airlines and Thomson Reuters use Plateau to increase the productivity of their employees and partners.

Plateau delivers:

• Scalable, flexible and secure multi-tenant architecture
• 99.5% uptime
• 24 x 7 x 654 support
• Experienced experts to manage your system from implementation to ongoing support.

 

Contact Plateau here or call at +1 866 4PLATEAU (+1 866 475 2832) or in the UK at +44 203 1788 409.

You can also read updates from Plateau at their new blog: http://www.plateau.com/blog.

 

Also see: Passive job seeking still high in the UK.

 

 

Technorati Tags: Plateau Systems,webinar,Authority,Talent,HR,HCM,Technology,Kris Dunn,Mark Stelzner,Steve Boese

#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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#ECTalent: Leadership Behaviours for the Future

 

  We didn’t get as much focus on the future as I was hoping for in the session, but mainly a comparison of the how vs the what of leadership (and therefore I didn’t get my question answered).

 

Gareth Williams, HRD at Diageo talked about the development of leadership behaviours supporting the company’s Ambition.

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Geraldine Hayley, Group head, Leadership Effectiveness and Succession at Standard Chartered talked about their Whole Person programme based on these competencies: sensing the future; distributed influence; and sweeping and soaring.

These about about you as whole person –being self aware, authentic, ethical etc. So leaders are expected to talk about their life events, and how these have changed the way they see the world, or the learning they’ve been through. This shows they’ve had the experience and been aware; that they’re humble and willing to share – not perfect but flawed.

Standard Chartered’s performance rating system is based on performance, and how someone is perceived by themselves and others against the company’s five values. Someone’s bonus depend on living these values as much as they do on delivering the results (although we later found out that this mean 15% of the bonus is based on values).

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Deborah Baker, Director for People at BSkyB emphasised that leadership is key to business success. But leaders need passion if they’re to gain high levels of engagement.

BSkyB measure both what and how and both of these have equal weight in someone’s compensation.

 

A good session – though not quite as impactful as the others, and I think by the end that everyone was relieved to do some ball throwing with Stephen Carver from Cranfield.

 

 

Technorati Tags: Economit,Talent Management,Summit,#ECTalent,leadership,behaviour,Deborah Baker,BSkyB,Deraldine Hayle,Standard Chartered,Gareth Williams,Diageo

 

• Consulting - Research - Speaking  - Training -  Writing
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#ECTalent: Future Proofing the Business (Strategic Workforce Planning)

 

  The session earlier this morning from Hugh Mitchell at Shell focused on the need to think long-term about talent, and this focus was continued into the next panel.

 

Rafael Ramirez from Oxford’s Said Business School talked about some of the scenario planning he had been involved with at Shell and since. His perspective is that there is quite a bit of thinking about the 20-50 years time horizon. There’s also a fair amount of short-term planning, but there’s a gap in the middle – at least in HR (more so than in Strategy, technology, Risk Management etc). Companies are contracting this out to consultants. Responding to this environment requires moving from a “predict-assess-adapt” approach to one of “imagine-design-prototype”.

And we need understand the fragrance of the future – to think about what kind of futures can we manufacture that will challenge managers thinking, leading to better bets and hedges.

 

Jane Datta, Director of Workforce Strategy at NASA presented on NASA’s mission shift, putting more focus on research, innovation and partnering with commercial entities – presenting a challenge for workforce planning.

NASA traditionally ensure access to talent through attrition – and then bringing talent back in once it’s needed again. But this doesn’t work so well when people aren’t leaving – as in the current economy.

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Linda Seber, HRD EMEA at Boeing talked about their small Strategic Workforce Planning team within HR but working with the business. Their global framework for identifying gaps in talent provision is:

1. What is the business strategy?
2. What is our talent philosophy eg to acquire, grow from within, outsource / work with contractors etc – and therefore what is gap between now and where we want to be?
3. What skills are needed and what is the market situation for these skills ie environmental scanning – eg maths, science and engineering are all facing shortages currently.

 

(You can see my suggested process for workforce planning here).

 

Boeing plan for about 5 years out and the outputs of this feed into the business strategy (creating value?) as well as the HR, compensation & benefit and leadership development strategies etc.

It’s interesting that all these case studies (Shell, Boeing, NASA) clearly do need to think long-term. You could therefore say that they only need to think long-term about talent because of that. I don’t think that’s the case – my belief is that talent management is a fundamentally long-term issue.  It’ll be interesting to see whether other, later speakers from other sectors (especially Gareth Williams from Diageo in FMCG) agree!

 

Technorati Tags: Economist,Talent Management,Summit,#ECTalent,Jane Datta,NASA,Rafael Ramirez,Linda Seber,Boeing,Colin Sloman,Accenture,workforce planning,scenarios,future

 

• 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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