Strategic Human Capital Management (HCM) Blog

Thursday, 17 November 2011

Youth Unemployment, #CIPD11 and #ConnectingHR

My favourite post from CIPD11 was probably this one from Graham Salisbury: Executive Pay: The Subject Which Must Not Be Named in which Graham questions the absence of discussion on today’s absurd levels of executive reward and obscene differentials between the highest and lowest paid in UK society from the CIPD conference’s agenda (possibly due to the CIPD’s own differentials perhaps?).

But for me, the other even bigger issue that was missing from the conference, not unlinked to the above is the truly dreadful level of youth unemployment which reached 1 million yesterday. And it doesn’t look like things are going to get any better – the CIPD’s labour market outlook suggests that employers are continuing to hedge their bets on all employment related decisions leading to a slow, painful contraction in the jobs market. It’s even leading to concern about creating a permanent underclass excluded from the prospect of employment.

This also came up at a session organised by Demos (and supported by the CIPD) on youth mobility which I attended yesterday morning (you can see my write up of this at Social Advantage).

Well even if the CIPD aren’t going to do anything about (though they have published some useful insights youth employment here), ConnectingHR will! Following the community’s focus on graduate unemployment at our last unconference, we’re now planning a more serious intervention to help a number of grads get jobs, or at least get more prepared to be part of the workforce, My own hope for this is that these largely individual actions will lead to some great community-wide conclusions, and we can perhaps put together our first ‘research’ report half-way through next year – and therefore have an even bigger impact outside of the community as well.

If you want to know (or do) more, particularly if you’re in London / the UK, check out connectinghr.org over the next few days, and join us there as a member too.

Picture credit: The Telegraph

Technorati Tags: connectinghr,youth,graduate,unemployment,uk,labour,market,social,mobility,mentoring

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Saturday, 12 November 2011

Blogger blogging #CIPD11

Just four years ago there was hardly any focus on social media on the CIPD conference’s agenda, and only a few of us blogging and tweeting from the conference. This year, the CIPD invited a sizeable blogsquad (‘blogger-bloggers’) to attend, and there were a number of other people blogging and tweeting too – making quite a loud backchannel (on Twitter at least).

Here are all the blog posts I’ve been able to find.

On social media:

Engagement:

Innovation:

Business:

The conference:

The CIPD also has some blog posts here.

Plus there’s also the blog we set up in the ‘how to blog’ session (pictured). Perhaps next year some of these attendees will be blogger bloggers too?

If you want more traditional reporting, check out People Management (including day 1 and day 2 live blogs), HR Magazine, XpertHR and HR Zone.

Thanks to Martin for the prompt to do this post. And most importantly to Tony Chapman and Rob Blevin for their invites to the conference.

Technorati Tags: CIPD,conference,2011,summary,social media,blogger,blog,posts

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Friday, 11 November 2011

The human and the machine

The best session at CIPD11 by far was on efficiency and performance and was delivered by John Greatrex, Group HR Director at Unipart, and Franceso Mereu, Director, HR, Corporate Planning and CSR at Toyota Motor Europe.

For Greatrex there is a growing perspective that there needs to be more of the Human in HR. He described the need not just to be lean and efficient, but for this to be combined with employee engagement too. These are both central to the Unipart Way which includes beliefs about there always being a better way, that no problem is a problem etc, but also that engagement drives performance.

Unipart have some great approaches to support this, eg the communication cell providing a framework for daily 10-15 minute briefings ensuring that structured communication takes place every day.

I also liked the way their engagement survey is dealt with in work teams with the results only being passed up to group level if the team can’t deal with them, or the survey process needs to be improved.

More generally, they attempt to measure the process, not the score. Eg they don’t compare everyone’s engagement score but look for and spread best practice. The objective is to identify problems – they don’t want people to disguise them.

For Greatrex, all this is about combining lean tools with an engagement philosophy.

In a similar manner, the Toyota Way is based on continuous improvement and a respect for people with a big focus on teamwork. This needs mutual trust and respect:

Setting goals together
Involving in decision making
On-going sharing of information.

For example, business planning is based on the concept of ‘nemawashi’ or consensus building. Toyota seek to prepare the ground gradually, building opportunities to work as a team through 20 group discussions with 50 managers walking about – looking at documents, asking clarification questions. If someone doesn’t feel involved properly they can register their desire to be consulted. It’s then the relevant department’s responsibility to do this. This encourages the mindset for people to be involved from the beginning.

Also middle and senior managers’ ratings are aligned across the organisation, ensuring that rewards are based on company-wide vs just departmental interactions and ending a clear message that managers are part of a wider team.

I loved the way that people were so central to business strategy in these two examples.

The point came up again later in a session on leadership for the future with John Burgoyne who suggested that leadership shouldn’t be either human relations or management science but a mixture of both - the human and the machine.

And it’s what Marcus Buckingham was talking about in his point about organisational leaders’ challenge being to take what is unique in their people, and themselves, and make it useful (he’s been reading Strategic HCM!).

I also thought it was interesting to see this today as well: How social media can make your organization stronger:

“For centuries, we have been intentionally creating organizations that are machinelike — rigid departmental silos, detailed policies and procedures, strict roles and responsibilities, detailed strategic plans, etc.

Becoming a human organization is hard mostly because you’re going against centuries of tradition that have a track record of success. We accomplished amazing things in our mechanically inclined organizations, yet becoming more human requires that we change the way we have been doing things.”

Technorati Tags: John Greatrex,Unipart,Franceso Mereu,HR,Corporate Planning,Toyota,CIPD,conference,lean,management,science,human,relations

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Thursday, 10 November 2011

No innovation from asking customers

I guess I should really be posting on the rest of the CIPD conference, not just my own interactive sessions (1,2). There are a couple of reasons that I’ve not been doing so – firstly I was really struggling to find anything to blog on during the first day of the conference (I think I would have liked Robert Potter’s stuff on Individual Career Equations if I hadn’t tuned up late), and then secondly, I heard so much I could blog on during the second day that I didn’t get any time to post (ie this was a much better day). And today…. well that will probably be the hangover.

Once of the best sessions yesterday, or one of those that sparked the most controversy was the keynote panel with Vance Kearney from Oracle (and Heather Corby from BT, Jane Marsh from IBM and Samantha Austin-May from ESO – but we’re going to focus on Vance).

And the piece that I want to pick up on from a fairly wide-ranging discussion on innovation was Vance’s comments that you can’t (radically) innovate by asking customers, but instead need to step back and think things through yourself (not through individual brainstorming, but by connection people with different perspectives together – so there was a social media aspect to this conversation too).

This comment seemed to produce a fairly shocked reaction, which I must say surprised me, as I’ve always worked on this basis, and it’s not as if it’s not come up at conferences before. Anyone most people did seem to accept the point, being unable to think of any innovations which had resulted from talking to customers. Vance did get challenged by one man, resulting in what some people thought was the first CIPD conference on-stage use of the word ******** - sorry for the deletion, but it would have been the first time I’d have used the word on my blog too (anyway, Vance says he didn’t say it).

Why I thought this was interesting was that it connected, for me, with the point made by Natalie Woodford at GSK on the previous day: that HR’s got too close to its customers and needs to step back in order to be more strategic.

Because maybe this is one big reason that HR’s not having the impact it would like - we’re too busy understanding the business, talking the language of the business, etc, etc, that we’ve lost the ability to innovate. And hence why all organisations end up following the same ‘best’ practices, and then have to deal with the consequent low levels of engagement.

And actually this was the main thing that was missing from the whole session for me – there was a lot of sound advice on developing a culture of innovation across the business, but hardly anything on innovation within HR. Yet if you believe the stuff coming out of the MIX, one of the main opportunities for innovation lies in HR.

To capture this opportunity we need to step back, reflect, connect, discuss and create some new approaches. I’m not suggesting not asking your customers what they want – of course you’ve got to do this. But that’s not where radically better processes and engagement (which I what I think we need) are going to come from.

No innovation ever came from that.

Henry Ford quote picture credit: Vovici

Technorati Tags: Vance Kearney,Oracle,CIPD,conference,CIPD11,innovation,panel,keynote,swearing on stage

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#CIPD11 Bloggerversity

There was much more on social media at the CIPD conference yesterday.

Eg Matthew Hanwell and Neil Morrison did a session on social media and Sarah Beauerle from KFC an interesting one on social recruiting at the same time.

I also did another twitterversity, and by chance, a ‘bloggerversity’ as well… Neil had been a superstar in supporting both of the twitterversities, helping to coach people on their tweeting, so I thought I should support his ‘how to blog’ session. I turned up 5 minutes late and although there were about 20 people waiting for some inputs, there was no Neil – it turns out that the CIPD hadn’t told him he was supposed to be leading the session! So Gareth Jones and I ended up taking this one too.

Particularly since we hadn’t prepared anything I thought this worked well. We answered some of the attendees’ questions then set up a blog – you can see this here.

The key principle for me behind both the twitter and bloggerversities is to get people over that first hurdle of updating. That once people have done this a few times – tweeted some tweets, posted some blogs, it won’t feel so scary anymore. Actually, I think it’s a broader habit that social media teaches as well.

I was talking to someone about this last night (drinks, tweet-up, drinks, curry… I can’t quite remember where or who - sorry) and they suggested that tweeting was like putting your hand up to ask a question – that you’ve got to be prepared to do this. And it’s true – it’s like when I asked for volunteers to do a short video for the blog we were setting up, only one person volunteered.

I think social media teaches you that it’s OK to put up your hand, and to say what you think - whether this is in a conference room, on twitter, a blog, a video, or whatever it may be – even stepping in to present a session when someone else hasn’t turned up.

It’s an important requirement that we were talking about at the press dinner on Tuesday night – that HR needs to be prepared to loose their job by standing up for what we believe in. And Arviunder Dhesi, now with RBS, said something similar on Thursday – suggesting that the original cause of the recession was that we have all been too willing to follow – and that HR needs to be willing to be the lone voice.

And this is why I’m so pleased to see more on social media on the CIPD agenda. It’s not just that it’s such a big enabler for social recruiting (and social communication, learning, recognition etc etc) or the social business, it’s that it teaches more social behaviour too.

(Not necessarily like this photo from the tweet-up!:

)

Social media is about social behaviour (a focus on participation and relationships), it’s not about social technology. And it’s generally HR which is most knowledgeable about changing behaviour – so this is an agenda which HR has got to take on.

Signs are, it’s starting to understand that’s the case as well.

Technorati Tags: CIPD,conference,exhibition,twitterversity,twitter,blog,social media,how to,CIPD11

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Wednesday, 9 November 2011

#CIPD11 / #CIPD11Tw Twitterversity / 2

The most interesting thing at the conference yesterday (of course) was obviously the twitterversity session that Gareth Jones (@garelaos) and I (with help from Rob Jones, Neil Morrison, Natalia Thomson, Laurie Reutimann and others) ran.

We were a bit challenged by the technology (the fail whale made a couple of appearances), but this was probably the best large group twitter training I’ve run (eg vs this) – largely I think because of having pre-prepared some twitter usernames to hand out to people (though twitter had decided to suspend a number of these in advance of the training – grrr!).

Anyway, here’s an overview of the session:

We’re running a Twitterversity again today (1.00pm GMT) and tomorrow (10.15am GMT) so do join us then (at the CIPD exhibition or on the twitter stream - #CIPD11Tw11) if you can.

And I may add some updates from these additional sessions later on too.

Technorati Tags: CIPD,conference,social media,twitter,twitterversity,CIPD11

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Monday, 7 November 2011

#CIPD11 / #CIPD11Tw Twitterversity

I’m up at the CIPD conference for the next three days and will be blogging from a few of the conference sessions. But I’ll also be delivering a Twitterversity session together with Gareth Jones, my co-founder at ConnectingHR.

The Twitterversity sessions are really for HR practitioners who are not yet using Twitter, but we’re also hoping that we’ll be joined by a few Twitter pros – maybe even Laurie Ruettimann who’ll be over from the States, and of course has delivered her own twitterversity sessions in the past (and the slide above is one of hers). Our twitterversity will be rather different, for example, we won’t be using any slides (it’ll all be on Twitter instead).

So if you’re at the conference, please do pop down to join us at one of these sessions in the Interactive Zone, and help us provide some smaller group coaching to Twitterversity attendees. Or at least drop into our stream - #CIPD11Tw (we’ll be dropping into yours, ie #CIPD11).

And if you’re not at the conference at all, please try to join us on the #CIPD11Tw stream at one of the following times:

1.00pm Tuesday 8th November
1.00pm Wednesday 9th
10.15 Thursday 10th

(all times GMT)

Technorati Tags: CIPD,ACE,annual,conference,twitter,social media,interactive,twitterversity

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Julian Birkinshaw on Human Centric Management

And while I’m on the subject of human centricity, let me point out that I, and ConnectingHR, are not alone in prioritising this. For example, it’s interesting to see that Julian Birkinshaw’s latest research is on “Employee Centred Management”. And in a session at MLab recently, Birkinshaw encouraged everyone to see management through the eyes of their employees.

Basically there are two ways of managing people – as a resource to support the business (HR), or as the driver for business success. This is what I’ve been calling strategic HCM (human capital being based on employees’ latent skills and enthusiasm):

Birkinshaw concludes that to become a better human manager by seeing the world through your employees’ eyes you should

Spend time in their shoes, in their space
Package work - even routine work - into projects
Work yourself out of a job.

You can find further advice on this blog, or my book.

Technorati Tags: Julian Birkinshaw,MLab,Employee,Human,Centred,Centric,Management,HR

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Sunday, 6 November 2011

#HRTechEurope Human-Centric HR Technology

My other current interest, other than integrated talent management, is human centricity (see this post on the recent ConnectingHR unconference).

So I had this article published in the HR Technology Europe conference guide:

“One hypothesis that I will be testing out is whether Europe’s generally more progressive approaches to HR (versus the hire and fire culture in the US) results in a different focus for HR technology use.

I believe there are three different ways that organisations can gain value from HR technology. The first, and I think least significant, of these is through the provision of a single (or at least a clearly defined) system of record. This type of technology gives HR robust and accurate data about the people the organisation employees and means that HR can start to take more sensible decisions about the workforce.

The second way that HR technology provides value is by informing the decisions of line managers and business leaders. This value is provided by talent or human capital systems, particularly the new integrated platforms, that allow managers to interrogate data for themselves, to gain better understanding, and as a result of this, better leverage, of the people they employ. I think this is where most HR technology professionals, at least in the US, have been most focused over the last five years.

But the third way that HR technology provides value, which I think often provides the greatest benefit, is by enhancing the productivity and performance of individual employees. This is where office systems have long been focused but it is where some HR systems have acted too. For example, well over a decade ago I was involved in setting up a self-scheduling system for a train operating company. Because this allowed individual employees to enhance their own productivity, it had a much more significant impact on the performance of this business than anything we could have done to give managers more oversight of the way that shifts were being set.

The opportunity to provide HR technology for the workforce is currently being enhanced in two main ways:

Firstly, there is the very rapidly increasing ubiquitousness of mobile devices which are starting to be used by HR system vendors for their applications, and provide a very real opportunity to give employees much more input and control over the way that they work.
Then there is the similarly exponential increase in the use of social media tools, often used by people on their mobile devices, to connect people together and offering a new opportunity to significantly impact the performance of organisational networks, communities and teams.

Why I think this is interesting is that the key to these latter opportunities is an understanding of the people in a particular organisation, and the way they work. This is about HR technology becoming more people-centric in order to find those key needs that technology can support. It is also an almost direct contradiction to much of what is said about HR technology and the need for this to be more business-centric (see for example, this recent article at TLNT, ‘Why HR Technology needs to focus on being more business-centric’).

It will be interesting to see whether this different, people-centric technology approach comes out through the HR Tech Europe conference at all.”

Well, I can’t say it was a huge theme, but again, maybe that’s due to the general lower stage of maturity. My hope is that the new HR technology conference will help Europe catch up a bit more quickly, and maybe evolve to a different, more human-centric, approach as well.

Also see:

Technorati Tags: HRTechEurope,human,business,centric,HR,technology,conference

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Saturday, 5 November 2011

#HRTechEurope Integrated Talent Management Technology

There were a couple of differences between HR Technology Europe and an unconnected US based conference of the same name that I attended recently. One of these differences was that there was more focus on core HR management systems and less on talent / human capital management and particularly integration between these systems.

I suspect that this was simply due to the lower state of maturity in Europe, shown in the CedarCornerstone research, and not much of a surprise to anyone (I will admit through that one surprise for me was the number of HR technology people who attended this conference – HR Tech is clearly a much more advanced profession in Europe than I had thought). Eg there was some suggestion that the key need is data integration, not technology integration, which I think reflects this more transactional focus.

I did however want to address integration in talent management technology, simply because I’ve been looking at integration in talent management recently, and technology is obviously yet another aspect within this.

And it was addressed at the conference, eg Katherine Jones from Bersin noted their research which found that 33% of organisations would trade functionality for higher integration (but this was 2009, and US data, and will have changed a lot since then, and in Europe). Katherine also noted the importance of an integrated employee profile as the new employee system of record (ESR) – something that had also come out at the Social Workplace conference – the other conference that I was chairing this week.

Lexy Martin wasn’t able to attend the conference but the CedarCrestone provides good up-to-date and localised findings with sound recommendations:

”In order to use technology to truly optimse the workforce contribution to the organisation, it is imperative that all functionality needs to be unified end-to-end and integrated within an ecosytem.
For the integrated talent management arena, we see two predominant approaches:

European organisataions are utilising the talent management capability provided by their core syste, of record vendor, with PeopleSoft the dominant choice.
The other approach is the use of a best-of-breed integrated talent management solution of multiple talent management components provided by vendors such as Cornerstone On-Demand, Lumesse, and SuccessFactors.

CedarCrestone’s main conclusions are drawn from their worldwide survey report. These include:

Standardise processes where it makes sense
Standardise data handling (minimise number of HRMS instances)
Adopt an integrated talent management approach

In 2011, that need not be an integrated talent management solution built on the same platform as your underlying ERP-based HRMS. It can be an integrated talent management suite. But one hallmark of the most successful organisations continues to be pervasive integration among processes, solutions and systems. So if you choose an integrated talent management suite that is from a vendor other than your HRMS vendor, be prepared for integration activities.

Also see:

And