HR Evolution through HCM Technology

 

  I’ve had, and have made, a couple of comments on my recent post about Westminster Council relating to the value of technology and the need to focus on behaviours – and I also commented on a very similar point at last week’s social business jam. So I thought it might be a good time to discuss my perspectives on the role technology can play in supporting HR to create value.

Actually, you’ll already find these perspectives in a couple of places, including this podcast and this webinar, but I’ve probably never posted on them in detail before.

The perspectives rest on the value triangle, as a lot of my thinking and consulting does. As you’ll probably know, at least if you’re a regular reader of this blog, this suggests HR can create value in three ways: value for money or efficiency, added value or effectiveness, and created value – new value.

 

At the base of the triangle, HR provides value for money by improving the quality of HR processes (reducing cost or time taken, or improving customer satisfaction).  Technology has a key role in providing opportunities for this level of value.  As an example, a performance management system will allow you to enter and capture performance reviews.  Doing this doesn’t change the quality of the reviews but it does mean they can be compared with those of other staff, and with reviews from different time periods, more easily.  This can therefore improve the quality of calibration.

You can identify opportunities for increasing value through money from technology by thinking about your HR processes and how technology can best support them, or by looking at new technologies, and thinking about how these can be incorporated within your HR architecture.

 

The next level is adding value. This is about helping the business achieve its strategies by supporting these requirements through people management activities, again often supported by technology.  For example, a business may want to enter into a new market.  A performance management system may be able to enable this if it can help identify who are the high performers in the organisation who also have certain capabilities linked to the new requirement.  The value available from technology has been increasingly rapidly at this area.  Integrated systems and tools being developed in new areas are providing HR teams with new opportunities that can provide significant amounts of extra (added) value.

You can identify opportunities for adding value from technology by focusing on the needs of your organisation and thinking about what functionality would enable you to meet particular objectives.  Would new systems allow you or your talent managers to make better decisions or take more appropriate actions?

 

In creating value, value comes from the organisation’s employees, rather than how these people can be managed to meet existing business needs.  Technology can create value by pointing to particular potentially valuable capabilities, but it is more likely to have this impact by helping employees to increase the value they can provide.

This is why I’m so interested in social and mobile technologies – they get beyond HR’s system of record and the line manager focused talent management system to actually increase employee contribution.  So for example, a social performance management system can help employees get feedback from the people they work with, to share the reviews with these people and to participate in a review of a whole team.  It helps them take ownership of their own review and hence is likely to have more impact on their performance.  Of course, social technologies aren’t the only way of doing this – for example, I was involved in a self rostering system for train operating company staff a good ten year ago which had much of the same effect. 

You can identify opportunities for creating value from technology by focusing on the people in the organisation – their engagement, capabilities and other aspects of their human and social capital – and thinking about how these capabilities can be extended.

This is why I’ve been commenting on the need to focus on people and behaviours, not on technologies or tools.

Of course, it’s also possible to see technology creating value through itself, rather than by how it leverages human capital. This is what was behind my comment on the jam – that web 1.0 often did create new value through new business models and commercial opportunities, but I don’t think there is a similar opportunity for web 2.0. Social applications lead to value creation by leveraging human – and more importantly, social – capital which is what then creates value. It doesn’t create this value by itself.

 

So – what’s the overall impact of this analysis?  Well, the main thing is to emphasise that value does occur at three levels, and each of these types of value are useful to have.  But secondly, note that the source of value changes at each level.  To maximise the value that an organisation achieves, it needs to be looking at activities, business impacts and human / social capital outcomes – and how each of these three levels in the organisation’s value chain can be supported by technology most effectively.

However, this post is written with an eye on HRevolution, and there is an evolution from the base to the apex of the triangle.  Fully evolved HR teams will want to ensure that focus on making direct improvements to the contributions of their employees through the provision and support for social, mobile and other tools, not just that they themselves have adequate HR MIS and in addition to ensuring that their business colleagues the information they need to support decision making.

 

This is Jon Ingham's entry into the 2011 Nobscot HR Evolution Scholarship Competition. Nobscot Corporation is an HR technology company specializing in key areas of employee retention including exit interviews, onboarding surveys, and corporate mentoring programs.

 

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Roffey: Management Agenda

 

    My favourite report on HR’s, or really management’s challenges in 2011 (so far) is Roffey’s Mangement Agenda 2011.  This has also been out a few weeks, but is a very comprehensive report, so I think I’ve got a good excuse for delay in my reporting.

The major finding of the research is that UK mangers are “still not yet sure whether to be cautiously optimistic” about the future, which is about as equivocal as you could get.  I still think there are signs of more optimism, but the report certainly provides good reasons to ignore Vance Kearney’s call to ignore the recession.  Roffey finds that 77% of organisations will be negatively affected by the recession this year.  The majority of these have been making redundancies but handling these well means operating in accordance with the organisation’s values, attending to fairness and consistency, and communicating openly (see my post on Westminster re this).

Roffey suggests addressing the impact of this climate on managers should be an organisational priority.  Many are feeling they are getting less backing for new initiatives and job security is down.

One of the report’s conclusions that I find surprising is that despite the above, there’s been no fall in levels of employee engagement.  Of course this is supported by other recent surveys too but I still think the CIPD’s got a point in its description of the ‘fixed grin’.  It depends how you define and measure engagement, but just because staff are pleased to have a job doesn’t mean that they’re passionate about doing their jobs or supporting your organisation.  Plus of course, when engagement’s already on the floor, it can’t fall much more.

There’s clearly a problem in the public sector anyway.  Employees values are increasingly out of alignment with their organisations.  Roffey note:

“One interpretation is that the financial pressures on the public sector have resulted in a sense of disillusion such that public sector employees have come to feel much less identification with the values enacted by their organisations.  Another explanation could be that the political nature of the public sector means that managers will have to implement government policies that may conflict with their own values.”

 

Which ever it is, it’s not a very positive situation.

A group that comes in for particular criticism is people at the top of organisations who seem quite out of touch with the organisations they run (Vance included, perhaps?).

In terms of HR, nearly two-thirds of managers believe that HR adds value to the business, experiencing HR as credible, influential and in touch – but this proportion has fallen nearly 10% since the previous year.  (The picture is also less rosy if HR manager responses are excluded).  Roffey suggests one thing HR should do is concentrate more on its employee champion role – to be more human basically.

The most surprising finding for me was that nearly half of managers suggest their organisation’s talent management schemes are secretive / non-transparent, though this has fallen slightly.  I’ve never believed that closed schemes can work, and in the wikileaks era am truly shocked that so many organisations still seem to think they can keep this sort of thing a secret.

 

Look out for the results from my own survey next week.

 

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i4cp: Critical Human Capital Issues 2011

 

  A lot of other summaries about HR’s issues and challenges have already been published over the last few months – obviously mainly associated with the turn of the year.

So of course was my survey initially, but with work and illness, I’ve not been able to analyse the results until now.  But I’ve now had a look through the initial results (the survey actually only closes at the weekend) and I think you’ll find them interesting.  And I’ve also been comparing the results to some of the other pieces of research published recently.

One of my favourites is i4cp’s list of critical human capital issues in 2011.  These are those where there is the greatest discrepancy between what organisations consider important an what they say they are able to manage. 

Apologies if you’ve already seen these results as they’ve been out for nearly a month, but I thought they were still worth commenting on.  Among the most interesting findings are:

• The changes from 2010 to 2011 – with ‘measuring and rewarding results’ having the greatest decline in criticality, and ‘innovation and creativity’ increasing the most.  I link this to the increase in optimism I’ve posted on previously (especially since the survey sample will be largely US based).
• In the first category of leadership issues, the most critical issue is leadership development.  This supports what I see but I think many organisations focus this development on the wrong things.  What I think is becoming important is developing leaders at all levels, and leading from the middle of the organisation, not just from the top.  I don’t think enough organisations have got this focus yet.
• Under cultural issues, it’s managing corporate culture.  I agree with this – it is the main issue for HR (as well as E2.0), although what I really think we’re talking about are two or three different things – and organisation’s big idea / mojo, and its people relationships and conversations supporting this.

 

So, some interesting results although my main criticism of the research would be that these are all best practices, not next practices.  My own survey, being more open ended, is designed to capture some of these.

I really am closing this research up at the weekend this time.  So please do complete it for me if you can.

If you’re an internal HR person in the UK, you’ve still got a really good chance of winning a ticket the Economist’s Talent Management Summit (see here for details on the draw and here for the conference).

 

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Last call for your HR challenges

 

   I’m finally going to have some spare time for a few days so will (finally) close my HR challenges survey this weekend and do the analysis early next week, with a blog post next week too.

So there’s still time to complete this for me.  It’s only 17 questions, so won’t take you that long.

Internal HR practitioners who are in or can get to the UK this Summer have the opportunity to win a free ticket to the Economist’s Talent Management Summit in London on 9th June.  (The winner will, however, need to be wiling to engage in a short discussion about their responses which I will publish here along with the overall summary.)

If you can’t get to London for the Summit then you’ll still have my gratitude for completing the survey for me!

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Early adoption

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

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

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

 

Ongoing approach

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

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

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

 

Latest developments

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Culture change

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

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

 

Lessons for other organisations

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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Social Media Week London

 

  This week is Social Media Week in many cities around the world, including London.

It’s great to see lots of participation from Connecting HR folk on this:

• Monday includes a Social Recruitment Panel Debate with TRU’s Bill Boorman, and taking my place on the panel (as I couldn’t make the date), Andy Headworth.
• On Wednesday, Abi Signorelli will be speaking at media140 Futures: A guide to how social technologies can maximise your work force.
• Thursday includes a session on Building the Future of Communities including Heather Taylor from GiffGaff who I presented with at the Social Recruiting Summit recently.  I’m attending this session.
• Thursday also includes Social Recruiting Seminar & Networking, hosted by BraveNewTalent & Viadeo, and including Connecting HR members Lucian T and Matt Alder.  And again, I’ll be attending and tweeting from this.
• And also on Thursday is a Social Influence Panel Debate with Andrew Gerrard, Joanne Jacobs and Connecting HR member Benjamin Ellis all of whom I met at SMIB in 2009.  I’ll be trying to follow the tweets from this (see @smwldn) while at the social recruiting seminar.

 

Who have I missed?

If you still want to know more about social media in HR, read this series of posts from Personnel Today’s social media week last year, or register for this webinar on 15th March.

 

Technorati Tags: Social Media Week,London,HR,Recruiting

 

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Symposium Events: Employee Engagement Summit

 

  On Thursday 3rd March I’ll also be attending Symposium Events’ next conference – the Employee Engagement Summit.

Speakers include:

• Nampak Plastics, Eric Collins, Managing Director
• Kent University, Professor Katie Truss, Head of Kent Business School at Medway
• Unilever, Michael Silverman, Former Head of Employee Research
• IPA, Nita Clarke, Director
• London Borough of Lewisham, Elizabeth Theobald, Employee Engagement Project Manager
• London Borough of Lewisham, Mandy Shackleton, Senior Management Development Advisor
• IES, Dilys Robinson, Principal Research Fellow
• Centrica, Lindsey Oliver, Senior Employee Engagement Manager
• The Co-operativeLiz Bramley, Head of Employee Engagement and Diversity.

 

Again, do let me know if you’re a reader of this blog, and you’re going to attend - you can book for the event here.

 

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Symposium Events: Performance Management Forum

 

  The other event I’ll be attending (as a blogger) the same week as TRU is Symposium Event’s Performance Management Forum.

Speakers include:

• Chartered Management Institute – Ruth Spellman OBE, Chief Executive
• Polycom – Marc Weedon, EMEA HR Director
• Home Group – Peter Stott, Executive Director, People & Performance
• Santander – Caroline Curtis, Head of Talent, Development and Performance
• Threshold Initiative – Les Venus, Chief Executive
• Lloyds Banking Group – Richard Wade, Head of Organisation Effectiveness, Group Operations
• Northern Rock – Bernadette Bruton, Head of Strategy & Organisational Development
• eBay Inc. – Peter Vogt, Senior Director, European Employee Communication and Engagement
• Birmingham City Council – Richard Billingham, Head of Organisation Development & Learning Human Resources
• Sony UK & Ireland a Division of Sony Europe Ltd – Christoph Williams, Senior Manager-Talent & Performance

 

Let me know if you’re going to be there – it would be good to say hi.

You can book here.

 

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TRU London 3

 

  So I blogged yesterday about HR 2.0, or Social HR, and why I didn’t think it got enough focus at the recent HR Directors Business Summit.

Let me be clear – I’m not just talking about social media. Yes, this has got a place, and is probably the sharpest, and certainly newest, tool we’ve got to bring in more social ways of doing HR. But there are other tools as well – including a lot of things that HR knows well – though applied in a rather different way.

But of course, the main difference between 1.0 and 2.0 HR isn’t anything to do with tools, processes or activities at all. It’s a difference of focus. About moving from one aimed at developing people and their human capital, as well as sometimes the organisation they work within - to one that includes an emphasis on relationships between people, as well as the individuals, and the various groups of individuals, themselves, ie the organisation’s social capital too.

(And social media supports other benefits than this, including empowered customer service, social CRM, enterprise 2.0, employee engagement, knowledge management – it’s just that I think social capital is the greatest benefit it provides.)

My next opportunity to talk about this will be in the TRU London masterclasses taking place on 16th February, just before TRU London 3 on the 17-18th (you can read some of my previous posts on TRU London 2 here).

In this session, I’ll have ten minutes to provide an overview of Social HR: what it is, why it’s important, and what HR can do to put it into practice.

But the main focus in this, and the other masterclasses, will be on responding to three questions put to me by some of the unconference attendees (which is why these are sort of un-masterclasses I suppose).  I’m hoping we can make at least two of these nothing to do with social media!

So if you want to know more about Social HR / HR 2.0, come along on the 16^th, and ask me some questions. There’ll be some other great people speaking and answering questions too.

I’ll also be at the TRU unconference itself on the 17^th.

 

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Top Leadership Influencer

 

  Well I was going for 10 posts today which I’m not quite going to be able to manage!, but I thought this would be a good one to finish on.

I was chuffed as usual to be recognised last week as a top global online influencer in leadership (at #16).  One more gong for the cupboard.

Thanks to John and the HRexaminer team.

 

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