Great to see my new book, The Social Organization , out in the UK. Use code AHRTSO20 on the Kogan Page website for a 20% discou...
For the third year in a row, Evan Carmichael has rated this blog as one of his top 5 HR blogs. This year I’ve even made it to the top of the post, just below Kris Dunn (pictured) and his team’s blog, Fistful of Talent – star billing indeed! Thanks Evan!
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The second big HR technology conference I’ll be speaking at this year is this one, HR Technology Europe (http://www.hrtecheurope.com), taking place in Amsterdam in November.
Speakers include:
If you’re going to book for this, you can use the discount code JIHCM11 for a 10% discount on the booking fee.
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I thought that was an amusing title from the new Changeboard magazine. But HR software really is getting more ‘sexy’ too.
Part of this sexiness is the look and feel of HR systems which have been improving dramatically over the last five years.
Part of it is the information and analytics that can now be extracted from the those systems with integrated functionality.
And part of it is the amount of change that’s happening in this space. In fact it’s actually felt quite strange that there have been no major announcements about new systems and mergers of providers for a week or so now (although it’s quite possible that there have, and I’ve just not seen them!). After all, here are some of the recent activities:
Phew!
All this change is one reason why I’m particularly pleased to be presenting at the two major technology conferences this year.
First up this October is Bill Kutik’s HR Technology conference in Las Vegas in October. For further information on this, visit the site or download the brochure.
I’m sure there’ll be lots of other changes in the HR technology space by October, but I’m also aware how much happens, or is announced, during the conference too. I’ll be doing my public service thing so you’ll be able to follow a lot of news from there right here.
And if you do decide to join me at the conference, use the Promotion Code STRATEGIC (all caps) when you register online to get $500 off the standard rate of $1,795. The discount expires on September 19.
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Wally Bock (of Three Star Leadership) is one of my favourite bloggers, so I’m always encouraged when I see him commenting favourably on my blogs. But I was amused to see this latest remark at Envisia Learning:
“Wally’s Comment: John Ingham is doing a public service reporting on various HR conferences and seminars. Here’s one about engaging those high potentials.”
Now I have to admit that public service isn’t my intent in posting to this blog. In fact I’ve probably been though a number of phases supporting slightly different objectives in the four years that I’ve been posting to this blog.
Initially, Strategic HCM was simply (or at least mainly) an experiment enabling me to understand more about this strange new thing called social media (and ensure that I didn’t embarrass myself when a client mentioned their leadership ‘wiki’).
I suppose fairly quickly after this it also became clear that blogging provided a good opportunity for promotion, and conversation – initially aimed at supporting my Strategic HCM book, but fairly quickly for its own sake (I’m sure that a lot more people have read this blog than will ever take a look at my book).
And now the blog is pretty much at the heart at everything I do. So one reason I blog from conferences is that this helps ensure that I get invited back and then to more conferences in future. And that’s important to help me keep up to date with the latest case studies and more importantly to develop my own thinking based upon these and my own experiences to ensure I can offer the best possible insight to be clients.
The blog is also sponsored and this makes a small but really useful contribution to my overall business portfolio.
But actually at least as important as all of this has been that throughout these four years, I’ve found blogging an important part of my own learning. I’d previously kept a learning log and my blog is basically my summary of my major learning. I find that positing on the things I find most interesting / provoking firstly helps me link them into my existing schema, or on occasion to challenge these. And the process of posting about these experiences helps me to remember them too.
I think this is especially the case at conferences. I find that if I don’t blog I forget most of what’s been covered within a fairly short time. But if I do, and particularly if I live-blog, I find that I remember much more content, and more newly created insight too. And even if I don’t live blog, which is usually the case when I’m more focused on talking to people than I am in listening to the speakers, I find the additional time it takes to go through my notes and post based upon these (probably about an additional 20% of the time spent at the conference) to be a useful investment.
I’ve also found blogging easier to maintain than a learning log because I know that you’ll be expecting regular(ish) updates from me. And I’ve often found your comments to be really useful in opening up different or additional insights too.
I’ve also found that as time has gone on that I’ve started to increasingly rely on these summaries of my major learnings. My blogs act in a sense a bit like an extension of long-term memory, a detachable disc drive or USB stick I can use when my own long-term memory runs out of capacity or if a particular learning hasn’t been saved properly.
My blog provides me with a bigger brain, and that’s the main reason I keep it going, rather than any sense of public service. But of course it’s great when you find it useful too.
So, if you blog, what benefits do you find you gain from this?
And if you don’t, don’t you think it’s about time you did?
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I’ve mentioned this previously but would like to formally confirm the publication of this new book from i4cp and ASTD, which includes a chapter written by me:
People are the most important asset in any organization, yet managing talent as a cohesive strategy is surprisingly rare.
Far too many organizations are stuck in the tradition of letting human resource “silos” separate the components of talent management, rather than encouraging communication, cooperation, and effective integration of these functions.
Guidance from 20+ experts
This breakthrough new book - an immediate sellout at ASTD's International Conference & Exposition - paves the way to integrated talent management by assembling the collective experience and insight of 20+ experts who examine research-based theories and current practices in highly successful enterprises. The following contributors provide practical advice about how you can adopt effective, state-of-the-art methods in your own organization:
- David Ulrich
- Marshall Goldsmith
- Peter Cappelli
- Noel Tichy
- Edward E. Lawler
- Jon Ingham
- Beverly Kaye
- Sharon Jordan-Evans
Insights from the world's top companies
You’ll benefit from the different perspectives of these world-renowned thought leaders and practitioners as they explain how to develop a comprehensive strategy that aligns big-picture organizational goals with the challenges of finding and keeping talent. You’ll also learn firsthand about the best practices of corporations who have pioneered efforts to make their organizations perform better through people, including:
- 3M
- Cisco
- GE
- Hertz
- Agilent
- Edwards Lifesciences
- Deloitte
- Cincinatti Children's Hospital and Medical Center
- General Mills
- Novelis
The book was co-edited by Kevin Oakes, CEO of i4cp, and Pat Galagan, Editor of ASTD, and features a foreword by Tom Rath.
“The Executive Guide to Integrated Talent Management brings together essential disciplines to help companies to implement best practices holistically, concretely, and effectively, and with a strong return on investment.”
Michel Taride,
President of Hertz International
“As businesses continue to evolve, it is an absolute necessity to attract, develop, and retain the strongest talent throughout an organization. This book provides seasoned insights and practical application that will help make this journey smoother, faster, and successful.”
Michael Mussallem,
CEO of Edwards Lifesciences
“Makes a compelling case for integrating talent management across silos and advancing its practice beyond succession planning and executive development - a much needed occurrence if companies hope to acquire, engage, and retain the best talent.”
Dr. John Boudreau,
Professor and Research Director,
USC Marshall School of Business
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I was delivering a training session on employee engagement today (focusing on ‘total engagement management’ rather than ‘kaizengagement’) and then this evening, catching up on the HCI’s Engagement and Retention conference again.
But I’ve also been sent a copy of some new HCI research on engagement, due to publication in September, ‘Connecting the Dots: Comprehensive Career Development as a Catalyst for Employee Engagement’ and am pleased to see the overlap with some of the key points I was making in today’s training.
Defining Engagement
A agree with David Zinger that there’s no need for a common definition of employee engagement – a point I also made at my presentation along with David Macleod. But I also support the idea that each organisation should define for themselves what they mean by engagement. This is how the point is made in the HCI’s report:
“William Costellano of the Center for HR Strategy at Rutgers, pointed to the pitfalls associated with improperly defining and assessing engagement: ‘If one does not know what one is measuring, the action implications will be, at best, vague and, at worst, a leap of faith.”
Social Engagement
Along with declining levels of trust and engagement post the recession, I think the other key change in business and society is an increasing focus on social connection. This may not appear as a key focus in all engagement survey vendors’ summaries but it’s clear to me that it is having an increasing impact on engagement.
Here’s HCI:
“Typically, when we think about employee engagement and the drivers associated with it, we consider the traditional elements of compensation, benefits, and perks to be the most meaningful levers of engagement for employees. Not only does our research demonstrate that this is untrue, but it is increasingly difficult for organizations today to maintain these types of ‘perks’ given the fragile economic environment that we now live in, even in the postrecession economy. Taking these two factors together, we aimed to identify the true levers that impact employee engagement the most, especially through the lens of Top and Poor Performing Organisations to gain valuable insights about best practices and differentiators from our respondent organizations.
This finding implies that engagement may be best created through the use of ‘holistic’ strategies that interconnect an organization’s talent with accentuating supportive interpersonal relationships, as well as working to foster a connection between employees and the strategic goals of the organization. Further demonstrating that Top Performing Organisations have a comprehensive understanding of what drives employee engagement in their organization, our research found that they are better prepared to implement several of these strategic offerings rather than relying on just one or two.
How effective are the following in regards to impacting employee
engagement in your organization? % Who Responded ‘Effective’
Furthermore, while the importance of fostering positive relationships to impact engagement has been frequently highlighted in past research studies, the fact that this is a significant differentiating feature for TPOs in our current study underscores the efficacy of this practice to impact employee engagement and retention. One research study remarked, “As organizations battle to get the most from their existing people in an environment characterized by skill shortages, the role of human resource practices in fostering employee engagement and commitment is paramount.
As mentioned above and perhaps a bit surprisingly, our survey uncovered that the least effective means for impacting employee engagement was ‘compensation, pay and benefits.’ While these benefits are certainly important to an employee, it is the “interpersonal relationships” and “ability to connect work to the organization’s strategy.”
Career Development
But HCI makes a point that I largely missed. This is about the importance of career development (which I did discuss) and of the way this development has changed (which I didn’t). But I agree with the research that this does now provide a new opportunity for engagement:
Leveraging Multi-Directional Career Movements
The final compelling distinctive element of TPOs versus PPOs relates specifically to career pathing or advancement. This is a particularly complicated process to define for today’s modern organization mostly because organizations are flatter than they once were, and the traditional concept of ‘moving up the career ladder’ is no longer something that is necessarily possible or even straightforward.
There is an emerging belief that effective career advancement is not limited to a linear progression up the ‘corporate ladder,’ and is rather defined by a series of lateral, as well as upward, moves to impact an employee’s career development. The increasing interconnectivity among organizational functions calls for a more interconnected method of movement within an organization and within individual career advancement, and ‘muti-directional career movement’ offers this flexibility.
The survey results indicate a prevalence of these “multi-directional” moves is taking place more regularly among TPOs. A combination of lateral moves and upward moves were mentioned more frequently by TPOs as a means for career advancement within their organization, as opposed to the standard ‘corporate ladder.’
This trend was first observed in 2001, and was described in the following excerpt, ‘Organizational career development programs started being developed in response to the changing nature of employees’ career expectations and desires. The traditional psychological contract between employers and employees in which lifelong employment was guaranteed has ended. Employers focus more on helping employees build employability so that they are able to make any number of career changes — vertically or laterally. The hierarchies that once made straight career paths simple are disappearing, and organizations have become flatter.’
It is paramount for organizations to embrace and capitalize on this shift if they aim to ensure that career development opportunities remain a key lever for increasing employee engagement and satisfaction.
By contrast, nearly 1 in 3 PPO’s continue to utilize the ‘corporate ladder’ to describe career advancement in their organization. This failure to change the development strategies to align with current workforce trends will arguably impede these organizations in the future and likely result in lower employee engagement and increased rates of turnover. As top talent continues to look elsewhere for opportunities and organizations that allow them to move more freely and advance their knowledge and skills more readily, organizations would be wise to adapt.”
It’s a good point, and I should have made more of it today.
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I’ve been dipping into some of HCI’s Engagement & Recognition conference in Chicago (and streaming) today.
There have been a number of great sessions including from Stuart Crabb at Facebook, and Joris Luijke at Atlassian – I may post on these later if I get time. But I was particularly impressed by a session from Leah Haunz Johnson at the Corporate Leadership Council: The Disengaged Star: re-engaging your high potentials.
Stars? Hi-po’s, the people who can be leading our organisations tomorrow, add nearly twice as much to company revenue and are 75% more likely to be successful in stretch assignments.
And disengaged? Well in the past five years there has been a significant decline in hi-po’s emotional and rational engagement and in their performance. One in five hi-po’s are considering leaving their current company within the next 12 months.
The key point is that hi-po’s are particularly difficult to engage emotionally. They tend to be uncertain about their career opportunities and unsupported in stretch assignments.
Leah Haunz Johnson listed four specifics managers can do to raise hi-po’s engagement (from HCI’s blog):
All good stuff but I do have concerns. Firstly, over whether Hi-po’s really do have such a disproportionate impact on their organisations (vs Boris Groysberg research etc), and secondly, that even if they do, whether it’s really effective to try to engage them disproportionately.
Now don’t get me wrong, there are some easy and certainly effective things organisations can do to make their Hi-po programmes more effective – eg Leah’s point 2: asking Hi-po’s to commit to the organisation, as well as the organisation to them (as BT do) is a pretty obvious strategy. But shouldn’t the deal always be two-way, regardless of the type of employee?
I’m struck by the fact that we didn’t mention Hi-po’s at all during David Zinger’s session last week. And I suspect David’s belief is that organisations need to focus on engaging all their people to the best extent possible. After all, people are engaged through other engaged people, so simply trying to engage one particular group in isolation is unlikely to work.
And I was also struck by Joris Luijke’s comments about teaming at Atlassian. They’ve replaced their individual bonus programme by a common 8% addition to salary. In Joris’ view, the previous arrangement just wasn’t worth the ‘disruption to society’. Perhaps we’d get a bigger impact on engagement if we didn’t have Hi-Po programmes at all?
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I recently wrote this article for HRO Today (Global) and I thought I’d include it here as well. Any thoughts?
What’s the Role of Social Outsourcing?
Attending HRO Summit Europe in 2010, I was interested to see that, other than the ongoing display of the Twitter back channel, there was little conversation and almost nothing in speakers’ presentations about social media. I found this odd because I see social media as one of the main influences on the HR function at this point in time. The omission got me thinking about the opportunities for, and threats arising from, using social media within an outsourcing environment.
The use of social media within business is not just about introducing new technology; it involves a new social approach and culture too. It necessitates a new mindset – one which is less focused on broadcasting information from a company to its employees, and instead is more committed to enabling productive conversation between all the people that the company employs. And it requires a shift in focus from the efficiency and effectiveness of individual transactions to the quality of relationships between these people too.
Taking recruitment first of all, the move to social media focuses on more than just seeing these platforms as another advertising or sourcing opportunity (for example simply seeing Linkedin as the world’s largest jobs board). The greatest benefits of social recruiting come from changing the whole paradigm of recruitment from one in which an organisation looks for people when it has a particular need to a more proactive stance in which it seeks to build relationships with key talent who might be valuable employees at a later point in time. The approach is based upon getting company representatives and potential recruits talking with each other. And the key people that these candidates will want to talk to are not recruiters but the people working in the relevant business area.
And in learning and development, the move to social learning prioritises the role of individuals sharing and collaborating together to support their own learning, often by using an enterprise-wide social collaboration (termed ‘enterprise 2.0’) system. This learning can be supported, where appropriate, by learning professionals orchestrating and shaping conversation and acting as ‘wiki gardeners’: pruning the content that employees have provided.
So social media implies significant change in the roles of these and other HR professionals. And to make these changed roles work, the existing requirements for these professionals to be in touch with the business, to understand what is going on and to be able to interject intelligently become more important than ever.
But what is the role of an outsourcing provider in this? There clearly are opportunities for outsourcers to make good use of these tools, for example by using them to improve dialogue about the outsourced service with client staff in charge of the outsourcing contract, and with users of the outsourced service too. Outsourcing firms can also use social media to improve the way they are managing their client relationships (an approach which is being termed ‘social CRM’). Another key opportunity for some firms will be in providing the technology that clients will use to conduct and enable the conversations between their staff.
But how will employees of outsourcing providers seek to intervene in the sorts of conversations that I described above when they are yet another step removed from what most of these conversations are going to be about?
And how will providers manage the cultural, procedural and contractual challenges of moving from an environment which priorities efficiency about all else to one which balances this with a focus on relationships – on proactively seeking to spend time with employees to improve trust and the quality of conversation rather than always looking to push this down to the place of the least transaction cost (usually to employee self-service or a low skilled call centre operator with little understanding of the particular business context).
I am still not clear what the answers to these questions should be, or even whether there will ever be good answers.
It is certainly true that social media helps to bring different groups together. One of the main reasons that social technology is being implemented in so many businesses now is to help them cope with the increasingly virtual, dispersed and contingent nature of their organisations. These social tools help people communicate together more effectively, especially when they can no longer see each other face-to-face. So social media may help integrate outsourcing providers within a more loosely defined organisation – one based on stretched-out boundaries and including more diverse groups of people operating within them.
But the other way of looking at this is to note that social media involves more than just growing the number of people who are connected together. It also focuses on building deeper relationships and more powerful conversations within a particular social unit, whether this is a team; a community of practice; some other form of network or community; the whole organisation; or part of the organisation and the outside world.
Whatever this social unit is, outsourcing providers are often going to find themselves outside of it. The threat to outsourcing is that just as social media enables organisations to build tighter social units; it will also lead to increasing isolation and marginalisation of those left outside of these.
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On Tuesday I spent the afternoon with David Zinger, founder and host of the Employee Engagement ning community. I feel David and I go way back as he was one of the few ‘HR’ people blogging when I started up, just over four years ago. I also started my Human Capital ning group shortly after his, but mine peaked at about 50 people, whilst David’s has over 4000 members!
For David, the path to exceptional employee engagement travels through engagement mythology to the concrete grounding of tactical engagement (kaizengagement)
Debunking 21 myths of employee engagement
David's in-depth research has discovered that employee engagement has a number of myths attached to it (5 of them are here). My other favourites, some of which I agree are myths, and others which I still believe are true are:
Myths
Truths
Kaizengagement: 6 tactical engagements
Kaizengagement, a term developed by David Zinger, is a fusion of kaizen and employee engagement. In the workplace of the perpetual busy we need small, simple, and powerful tactics to continually improve our engagement.
David outlined six simple yet powerful research based approaches to improving employee engagement within an organisation.
I agree with these points, though I still think there’s more to do. Engagement can involve big steps and strategic approaches as well. After all, Kaizen is only effective when it’s part of a bigger approach to TQM. And I think that given the engagement deficit in most organisations today, we need Total Engagement Management (TEM) too. I might come back to you on this over the next couple of weeks, so check in again soon. And I’d be interested in your thoughts (comments) too.
Anyway, a great session and wonderful to meet David irl.
Also see Doug Shaw’s write-up of the session here.
And my other posts on Engagement.
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My interview with Siân Harrington of HR Magazine is now up at HR Vision:
Social media: business transformer or the latest business bubble?
In this month’s interview on social networking Jon Ingham, blogger and consultant, at Strategic HCM, talks to Siân Harrington.
Most businesses are using social media externally, but increasingly they are using it internally – and there is value in deploying it to help employees engage and collaborate, according to Ingham.
He says: “It is very early days, but there are starting to be some really valuable case studies which show improvements to efficiency and effectiveness of recruits [linked to social media].
“As soon as you put people into a social group and allow them to have conversations, it becomes much easier to learn and the learnings that staff develop through such a process are far more meaningful. But developing social media is about a culture change and if IT takes the lead in developing these tools, they are going to have less likelihood of success. And I don’t believe you can outsource the implementation of social media – it needs to be based on authentic conversations between organisations and employees.
“It takes time, but organisations are seeing the benefits and in any sector there are employers large and small taking advantage of social media.”
To view the video, go to http://www.hrvision.tv and select ‘click here to watch this feature’ (or if my interview is not at the top, you can select Jon Ingham from ‘select a speaker’, or Social Media from ‘select a topic’):
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