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.

.

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).

.

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

 

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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.

.

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

 

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#ECTalent: Setting a Talent Agenda

 

I’m at the Economist’s Talent Management Summit today.  the first set of sessions have all focused on setting a talent agenda for maximum business impact.

 

  As part of this, Hugh Mitchell, CHRO at Shell, talked about this company’s business and explained why many of their employees have specific vs commodity skills – they only exist in people within this sector.  The environment is also increasingly competitive and Shell’s competition will often want to be recruiting at the same time as them.  And a lot of the other companies are their partners, so Shell need to focus on developing their own talent.  Also if they carry some excess talent it’s not going to break the bank – people aren’t their biggest cost burden.  So they can take a long term view.

He then explained how this links to a globally aligned, co-ordinated talent strategy and approach to meet needs of today and tomorrow.

 

Recruitment

The key is understanding which skills are vital to the future of your organisation.  If you’re short of HR people you can recruit them from other sectors.  You can’t do this with non-commodity talent.

You need to ask - where do we need talent, what skills do we need and over what timeframe?  And ensure you are bringing in enough talent over 10 to 15 year outlook.  Shell try to ignore the economic cycles.  If they didn’t they’d feel the pain of that consequence 15 years later.

They form long-term relationships with key universities too – and look for ones that can do R&D and other activities with as well as hiring too.

 

Development

They know they have a huge bulge of projects over the next 5 years eg Pearl plant in Qatar using new technology to turning natural gas into vehicle fuel.  Over the next 5 years they’re spending $100m on major projects with 20 starting up across the world.  So in 2005 Shell set up a new academy to raise project management skills.

You also need to reprofile skills to get the right messaging in a company.  So Shell have raised project mangement to their executive committee – emphasising that project management and technical capability are vital to a company’s success by reflecting this in where they recognise power in organisational terms.

Success in project management is also an explicit part of reward strategy for all staff in the company.

 

Deployment on a global basis

Shell people need to be ‘smarter than the average bear’ – smarter than the generation above them.  There is a dedicated role looking at the health of Shell’s disciplines – ensuring that skill pools will meet the demands of the future.  This drives recruitment and development etc.

Shell carries over 5000 expats which is expensive but you need to be able to deploy a large number of people quickly.  In their business you either win the work or you don’t.  If you do you’d better have the people to respond to it.

 

HR – Creating Value!

HR’s organisation is also aligned to their business as well.  The function used to be linked to local businesses through country based structures but as they have become a globalised company, they have also globalised HR.  All HR people globally report to him.

A lot is driven through Centre of Excellences, driving coherence on a global basis.

And a 10 person Executive team makes all decisions eg on recruitment targets.  Shell has a 5 year strategy (they are currently looking at 2025) and the people strategy is part of this.  Once this is agreed it is his responsibility to translate this into HR planning.  He doesn’t need to go back every year for approval because he is working against an approved context for the strategic direction.

 

Interesting isn’t it, and although Shell clearly have a requirement for long-term thinking, talent is always a long-term issue.  I’m sure that a lot of organisations could learn from this approach (so much for talent on demand, Peter Cappelli?).

 

 

Earlier on we had an interview between the Economist’s Robert Guest and Phil Smith, CEO at Cisco UK and Ireland.  Phil emphasised that the next generation workforce will be very different to the current workforce.

Making a company a great place to work is the best way to attract people.  Cisco have a five interview minimum rule, and it’s not unusual for senior people to have 10 to 12 interviews.  Phil thinks this is a great thing to do – potential employees gain an overall sense of the culture of company and Cisco gets a great sense of them through a number of lenses too.

Phil also talked extensively about Cisco’s inclusive culture  - and another advantage of the company’s recruitment process is that some of this cultural magic rubs off on new employees early on.

Other aspects of this culture is about an environment where people can contribute to their development, and where people will see what they’re doing not just as a job but a career.  Cisco employees work for a big company but they do lots of different things (working on spin outs and innovation programme etc).

Phil also made a lot of interesting points about social networking which I will post on at Social Advantage later.

 

  In the later panel:

For Bob Bennett, Fed Ex Express culture is everything – winning companies sustain results over time.  Leadership development throughout needs to be build into culture and culture takes time to develop.  Strategic workforce planning is also vital to success.

A new performance management process should help develop the right culture.  FedEx also encourages story telling.

 

Roger Cude SVP Global Talent Management, Walmart is also focused on culture.  They have a new leader programme in which the CEO talks about priorities, a former CEO presents on 10 things which led to the company’s success when they were the CEO – very powerful stories.  And a Board member asks what are you waiting for?

They have a manager sponsorship (vs more passive mentorship) programme, ‘Develop to Lead’.

And their talent review programme includes a focus on who have you developed and what have they gone on to do?  For Rogerm talent management is like the balance of trade – as a leader you’re either a net importer or exporter of talent.

 

Satish Pradhan CHRO at Tata talked about their companies operating separately but in an aligned manner – which makes things challenging.

Like Roger, Tata focuses on net exporters of talent within the group. They have a talent review process operating across group companies to provide opportunities to deploy people into these. They support this through the rotation of talent across cars, chemicals, teas etc. This is very visible but quite small in numbers. People have to have the desire and seek the opportunity.  Net exporters of talent are celebrated (through peer and other recognition, not reward).

For Satish, talent management is no more important than it was in the past but is better recognised eg in the boardroom. We need to think about how we look at talent – our education focuses on things – this limits our ability to think of companies as human organisations.

When we talk about capabilities, and talent – look at creating outcomes not as an algorithm or an equation. Talent is about what peopole do. Cut through the clutter and focus on building source of competitive advantage eg seeing talent management as a pipeline vs quantities at different levels.

 

Technorati Tags: Economist,talent management,summit,#ectalent,Phil Smith,Cisco,High Mitchell,Shell,Bob Bennett,FedEx,Roger Cude,Walmart,Satish Pradham,Tata Sons

 

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#SBF11: HR as Humane Relationships

 

  I gave a short presentation on ‘The New HR’ to the Social Business (Enterprise 2.0) Forum in Milan today.

I wanted to make two main points to emphasise the importance of E2.0 folk involving their HR colleagues in Social Business projects:

1. That thinking about the cultural change required to support Enterprise 2.0 technology implementation (which is a good thing to do), is not the same as planning for the outcomes of cultural / social change – which may then involve technology, or HR, or something else.  From a simplistic perspective in the first situation, HR acts as the traditional support function.  In the second, HR is the main act.  (I still don’t think this change in perspective is widely understood which is why I tweeted about E2.0’s schizophrenia earlier today, and why I think that as a community, we’re still on a journey from Enterprise 2.0 to this bigger and more important thing, the Social Business.)
2. That they may need to help HR needs to step up to this new challenge and think about HR as Human Relationships, not just Human Resources (I’ve blogged on this before here).  The point on Human Relationships got tweeted and retweeted, and was then improved by Dan Pontefract, suggesting we should perhaps say Humane Relationships instead?  I think that’s a great build.

 

I also talked briefly about the opportunities for HR to use 2.0 tools, and 2.0 thinking - ie the same combination of technology and other physical, but social, approaches – within HR itself.  This was probably more content than I had time to deliver, but I wanted the E2.0 (technology) practitioners in the audience to also consider the opportunity that HR needs them as much as they need HR.

 

You can find out more about these two things, ie HR’s support for the social business, and then also social HR, in these two webinar archives:

• Social Business
• Social HR: archive / slides

 

I’ll be posting more general perspectives on the conference, and on my schizophrenia point, at Social Advantage over the next few weeks.

 

Technorati Tags: Social Business,Forum,Milan,2011,Enterprise 2.0,Open Knowledge,HR,culture,outcomes,#SBF11

 

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Innovating the L&D Business Partner role

 

  I ran a webinar for Citrix on Monday focusing on the role of the L&D Business Partner (and how this can be enabled through Online Training, including GoToWebinar which I was using).

I covered two main things:

• The need to focus on what L&D is providing – on the outcomes of L&D activities – and how this links to both human, and increasingly, social capital.  I suggested this focus on people shifts the conversation in organisations and within the L&D business partnering relationship as well.
• The need to focus on how L&D meets these challenges.  Here, I think the focus on people requires and enables a more human approach to learning strategy – one which recognises – and responds – to what we increasingly know about the way that people learn.

 

I suggested that combining these two needs results in a more complex picture (because L&D can’t just provide courses which align with the required human and social capital requirements).  So for example, one of the things that L&D can do is to sponsor and role model personal ownership of learning linked to these capital needs.

 

The archive of the webinar is available here.

 

Apologies if I didn’t get onto your questions, but I didn’t expect anything like the number that I had.  I will come back and post my answers to all these questions here within the next 2 weeks (and apologies that I am unlikely to be any quicker than this).

 

In the meanwhile, I have been pleased to see one attendee, Mark Lawrence, blogging on his experience at, and learning from, the webinar at Learning Intelligence.

Mark notes that:

‘Yesterday, I attended a virtual webinar from Jon Ingham, entitled "Enhancing the Role of the L&D Business Partner" (see his Blog, here).  On the whole, there was a lot of interest from the assembled audience upon how we define the term Business Partner, and consequently, what role should be played.  In short, however, Jon, with his usual eloquence, proceeded to explain how Learning organisations needed to partner with business stakeholders, to anticipate and resolve requirements - from planning events, to deploying tools, to supplying information.  Summarised by one attendee at the end of the session, the question was asked "How do we move L&D from a support function to a business partner?”

The answer is simple: Innovate, educate and create new value.’

 

I agree with this need for innovation – in fact that is the focus of my next webinar on 12 July.

You can book for this webinar here.

 

Mark goes on to discuss my points about the need to change the language in organisations:

‘Jon Ingham also touched on this, when he discussed a slide attributed to Prof Gary Hamel, that people do not respond, emotionally, to many business buzzwords of today: for example, why interface with someone, when you can talk?  (Did you ever go to the pub, to "touch base" with your friends...??)’

 

Absolutely!  However, I suspect I don’t fully agree with Mark on his next point:

‘Metrics and dashboards are all very well, but without ensuring that stakeholders understand the messages, they will continue to consider a learning organisation as a drain on resources.  Only when learning organisations talk to stakeholders in terms that they both expect and understand, will true partnership become a reality.’

 

Yes, we do need to speak to stakeholders in way they both expect and understand, but we need to be careful about this.  Firstly, I think there’s a widespread belief that L&D’s stakeholders mainly speak the language of numbers, and particularly of Finance, and that’s the way we need to speak as well.

I think we need to look beneath this.  Our stakeholders are people first, and business people with a focus on rational, analytical thinking second (which is what I meant by my reference to a focus on people).  We need to appeal to the first of these aspects much more than we do.

Secondly, and this links with the point above as well, it’s not always about communicating within existing expectations, but we often need to influence and change these expectations too.  That’s part of the learning and change journey many if not most of our organisations require.

The key need is to speak in a way that will have impact, even if' it’s in a way that’s not expected.  See my posts on trust, love and equality!

 

Technorati Tags: Learning,Development,Business Parter,Mark Lawrence,Innovation,Measurement,Analytics,language,Citrix,GoToWebinar,webcast

 

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Blogathons and Shillathons

 

  I’ve had a few comments on my recent post about a blogathon (blogging about a company for compensation) taking place at a couple of other places on the web.  Strategic HCM isn’t participating in this (but not really for any ethical reasons) and I had thought the activity would be worth discussing with you.  I’d now also like to respond to the generally critical comments and questions I’ve had about this to explain why I think the development is a positive one.

There are certainly a couple of potentially negative issues raised by this sort of arrangement, including:

• individual blogs losing their sense of authenticity
• the social media / blogosphere loosing its robustness and authority.

 

But there are also a couple of positives:

• blogs continuing to be published which might otherwise be withdrawn
• recognition of the shift in the balance of power from companies to individuals and from traditional sources of influence towards social media users.

 

I support Bill Boorman’s take on this last point (though I don’t think I’ll be commissioning Brandman for anything!):

• “Interestingly, Lumesse are looking to bloggers (me included) in every country they operate to carry their message and monitor feedback. It is perhaps indicative of the way those that are active in the social channels are recognised as being important message carriers in targeted sectors.Lumesse recognise that their story is going to be told and commented on, better tobe part of the conversation by giving access to the company and their products. I think this move is to be applauded, and demonstrates the part bloggers, and those active in social channels play in branding. While it might not be good news for the P.R. companies, it is clear that influence is seen as a little more than a Klout score.”

 

And there are some other reasons why this is probably just isn’t that important – including that bloggers are not professional journalists and there are always going to be multiple agenda influencing what they write.  Sponsors, or whatever sort, is just one more influence.

 

As I explained in my previous post, I decided not to participate in the blogathon, but not for any ideological reasons.  After all, this blog is already sponsored and although there are some major differences between this sponsorship and the blogathon (eg I agree topics with my sponsors that they and I believe you will find interesting, but I don’t – generally - blog about the sponsoring company itself), there are some significant commonalities too (in that they would both have some influence over what I post).

But there are some important aspects in both the blogathon and this blog’s existing sponsorship arrangements:

• (Nearly) everything written here is written by me.  (I have in the past included guest bloggers but these have been completely unrelated to any sponsorship arrangement).
• Everything I write is based on my personal views about HR.  (I may on occasion write about a sponsoring company but I will always provide my own views about it when I do.)
• Any sponsored posts will be identified as being sponsored.

 

(The blogathon opportunity fulfilled similar conditions too – which is why I think it was a blogathon, not a shill-athon).

 

Technorati Tags: HR,blog,sponsorship,blogathon,shilling

 

• 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 .

.

HR Technology, Las Vegas

   I’ll be speaking at Bill Kutik’s HR Technology conference for the first time this year – so will hear the results of Lexy’s HR Systems survey there.

But there’s are so many other sessions that I’m looking forward to as well.  Check out this phenomenal line-up of speakers:

• John Boudreau, Professor at the University of Southern California
• David Ludlow, VP, Line of Business On Demand Solutions HCM, SAP
• Jeanne C. Meister, Partner, Future Workplace
• Matthew Hanwell, HR Director, Communities & Social Media, Nokia
• Jason Averbook, Co-Founder & CEO, Knowledge Infusion
• Elizabeth King, VP, Global HR Solutions & Services, Starbucks
• Lacy Kiser, VP, HR & Administration, Shaw Power Group
• Karl-Heinz Oehler, VP, Global Talent Management, The Hertz Corporation
• Jackie Scanlan, VP, Global Talent Management & OE, Campbell’s Soup
• Jackie DeMaria, SVP, Global HR, Western Digital
• Jason Bibelheimer, VP, HR Operations, Western Digital
• Jason Blessing, SVP, Product & Technology, Taleo
• Bjorn Rother, Economist, International Monetary Fund
• Peter Louch, CEO, Vemo
• Jennifer Hall, VP, HR, Intuit
• Dave Duffield, Co-Founder & CEO, Workday
• Mike Grennier, Senior Director, Corporate Recruiting, Walmart
• Janet Manzullo, VP, Talent Acquisition, Time Warner Cable
• David Leigh, CEO, SHLPreVisor
• Nick Garbis, Workforce Planning Lead, GE Energy
• Howard Hambleton, COO, Flexi Compras
• Kathy Mandato, SVP HR, NBC Broadcast
• Dave Sutherland, Senior Director, Workforce Planning, CH2M HILL
• Glenn Feazell, VP, Store Operations Support, Lowe’s
• Aron Ain, CEO, Kronos
• Josh Bersin, CEO, Bersin & Associates
• Jason Corsello, SVP, Strategy and Corporate Development, Knowledge Infusion
• Jim Holincheck, Managing VP, Finance, HCM and Procurement, Gartner
• Steve Miranda, SVP Application Development, Oracle
• Naomi Lee Bloom, Managing Partner, Bloom & Wallace
• Randy MacDonald, SVP HR, IBM
• Larry Israelite, VP, HR Development, Liberty Mutual
• Adam Miller, President and CEO, Cornerstone OnDemand
• Kris Dunn, CHRO, Kinetix, blogger for The HR Capitalist and Fistful of Talent
• Mike Krupa, Technical Director, Charles Schwab, Infobox blogger
• Laurie Ruettimann, Principal HR and Social Media Strategist, Starr Tincup, The Cynical Girl blogger
• Steve Boese, Host, HR Happy Hour, Steve Boese’s HR Technology blogger
• Oliver Marks, Founding Partner, The Sovos Group, Collaboration 2.0 blogger
• Jac Fitz-enz, CEO, Human Capital Source
• Laurie Bassi, CEO, McBassi & Co.
• Gerry Crispin, Co-Founder and Chief Navigator, CareerXroads
• Ed Newman, The Accidental Entrepreneur, former CEO, The Newman Group
• Ahmed Limam, Independent Expert and Advisor, Global HR Technology
• Kerstin Wagner, Head of Global Talent Acquisition, Siemens AG
• Dmitri Krakovsky, VP, Global Product Management, SuccessFactors
• Molly Graham, Mobile, Facebook
• Bob Trahan, Director, Communications & Culture, Facebook
• Daniel Debow, Co-Founder & Co-CEO, Rypple
• Row Henson, HCM Fellow, Oracle
• Dr. Nick Bontis, Director, Institute for Intellectual Capital Research
• Jeremy Shapiro, Executive Director, HR Data & Insight, Morgan Stanley
• Christine Anderson, SVP, HR Operations, UnitedHealth Group
• Mimi Brooks, CEO, Logical Design Solutions
• Paul Hamerman, VP, Enterprise Applications, Forrester
• Lisa Rowan, Program Director, HR, Talent, and Learning Strategies, IDC
• Mike Capone, CIO, ADP
• Jamie Whitmore, Director, Executive Talent Development, Merck
• Matthew Parker, CEO, Lumesse
• Anne Berkowitch, Founder and CEO, SelectMinds
• Doug Berg, Founder & Chief Recruiting Geek, Jobs2Web
• Justin Jesser, Associate Director, Employee Experience, Verizon Wireless
• Neal Wendel, Managing Director, Credit Suisse
• Frank Wittenauer, Associate Director, Global Talent Solutions, Deloitte
• Trish McFarlane, HR Business Partner, St. Louis Children’s Hospital, HR Ringleader blogger
• Dan Jessup, VP, HR, Groupon
• Dan Finnigan, CEO, Jobvite.

 

The conference runs from 3-5 October and this year is being held in Las Vegas.  I’ll be blogging from the conference too and hope to be attending HRevolution-4 and visiting Zappos while I’m there as well.

Hope to see you there!

Technorati Tags: HR Technology,Bill Kutik,Las Vegas,October,2011,conference

 

• 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

.

HR technology survey

Strategic HCM invites you to participate in the CedarCrestone HR Systems Survey (until July 5)

   CedarCrestone is requesting participation in the 2011-2012 HR Systems Survey: HR Technologies, Service Delivery Choices, and Metrics Survey, 14th Annual Edition through July 5, 2011. The survey is a comprehensive research effort designed to provide organizations with important data to plan, justify, benchmark, and execute HR technologies. The survey questionnaire is available online at www.cedarcrestone.com/survey/strathcm.html.

 

The survey collects responses from HR and IT management with knowledge of the HR technologies in use and planned. We invite representatives from organizations with over 300 employees to participate. Responses will be kept confidential and only used anonymously and in aggregate results.
.

The first 100 completing the survey will receive a $5 Starbucks card. Prior respondents completing the survey will receive a $10 card. All respondents will receive an advance copy of the results in early October, 2011. See two more opportunities for completing the survey below.

The 2010-2011 HR Systems Survey covers questions about:

• Application adoption and the level of social, mobile and global today and planned
• Technology acquisition trends (licensed, SaaS, hosting, outsourcing)
• Process maturity – is it process maturity or technology adoption that drives success?
• The value of HR technologies.

“For seven years in a row,” says HR Technology® Conference co-chair Bill Kutik, “we have asked CedarCrestone to debut its survey at our event because it is the most thorough, highly respected and useful survey on technology usage in HR. Clearly, HR and IT practitioners know that, too, because it draws top session attendance every year.”

The survey questionnaire is available online at www.cedarcrestone.com/survey/strathcm.html.

 

Best wishes,
Alexia Martin, Director of Research and Analytics

PS: The survey results will again be presented at the HR Technology Conference in Las Vegas, October 3. CedarCrestone offers a special discount for our survey participants that complete all sections.  When you return your completed survey we will send you a special Promotion Code for a discount which is more than other discounts available anywhere. And, one respondent from among those completing all questions will win a free benchmark project – a $10,000 value (no cash value).

Technorati Tags: CedarCrestone,Lexy,Alexia,Martin,Technology,Systems,Survey