Blogging from Tucana People Analytics

I'm taking a short break from training and speaking to attend Tucana's People Analytics conference (22-23 April) as a blogger.

We all know analytics is increasingly important to HR, so even if, like me, you struggle with expressions such as 'data-driven HR' and suggestions that 'analytics is the future of the HR function' then you'll still know you can learn heaps from quality speakers such as:

• Placid Jover VP HR Organisation, Performance & Analytics Unilever

• Oliver Britnell Global Head of Workforce Analytics Experian

• Randy Knaflic VP of HR & Internal Operations Jawbone

• Neil Parkinson Senior HR Analytics Specialist Diageo

• Mark Porter Corporate Workforce Strategy Manager London Borough of Havering

• Neal Barnes Group Head of HR Services Tullow Oil

• Max Blumberg Founder The Blumberg Partnership

• Mark Berry Ex-VP of HR, Workforce Planning & Analytics ConAgra Foods

• Michael Cook VP of Workforce Analytics Credit Suisse

• Tracey Smith President Numerical Insights

• Jonathan Ferrar VPIBM Smarter Workforce

• Ian O'Keefe Senior Director, Head of Talent Analytics Sears

• Alicia Scurr Head of Talent Analytics SABMiller

• Anthony Hesketh Professor Lancaster University

• Cole Nussbaumer Founder Storytelling with Data

• Paolo Balboni Founding Partner ICT Legal Consulting

• Alex Rammal Group IT Director Wolseley

• Luk Smeyers CEO & Co-Founder iNostix

There's also a data visualisation workshop with Cole Nussbaumer and the HR analytics masterclass with Bernard Marr before and after the main event.

If you want to attend the conference with me, you can use code BSQJON for a 20 % discount on your registration.

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What's Microsoft UK doing right? (Glassdoor Employees Choice Awards)

One of the things I'd meant to post on before Christmas was Glassdoor's Employee Choice Awards - the only awards which rely on the perceptions and commentaries of employees.

My desire to do this is partly because of my press relationship with Glassdoor as their UK HR Expert, and partly because this is the first year the awards have been made in the UK and this is an important new activity here.  But mainly just because the rankings are really interesting!

No surprise about the top two companies in the UK - Google and John Lewis, sitting on their own short tail with 4.3 and 4.3 points out of 5 respectively.

In 3rd place, just at the start of a rather denser distribution, with 4.1 points, is Microsoft.

Microsoft?  That's Microsoft whose technologies increasingly belong to the last decade, which is cutting 18,000 jobs, whose CEO wants women employees to let karma take care of their careers and whose organisational culture is so competitive that collaboration is almost impossible - see the Bonkers World visual about Microsoft's and other tech firms organisation structures (though Microsoft has restructured since then).

In the US Microsoft didn't even manage to join Chick-fil-A on the awards list.  So what's happening in the UK?

I could of course contact the couple of people I know who work at Microsoft here but probably the better, more accurate, way to assess the company's culture is to consult Glassdoor:

The site summarises positive comments as:

• "Really good work-life balance compared to other tech companies of the same caliber" 
• "You will get the opportunity to work with smart people solving real world problems"
• "Great benefits that are truly 1st class when compared to other companies in the industry"
• "Lots of opportunities to move around in the company to try new things"
• "Generally good benefits (though they've been cutting back in recent years)"

And the negatives:

• "Work life balance is not good in some places but it really depends on your role"
• "Performance review system basically encourage competition inside the team"
• "Stack Ranking poisons team work (you're only as good as your last performance)"
• "Review process focused too much on politics rather than actual accomplishments"
• "Typical big company disadvantages that are uncommon for most tech companies"

These comments give some idea of the culture of the firm - the same great benefits which are common on the tech sector but also the particular issues around competitiveness which I referred to above (though Microsoft has abandoned its stack ranking too now.)

Individual ratings add support to this analysis as well:

• Compensation and benefits 4.0
• Career opportunities 3.6
• Work-life balance 3.5
• Culture & values 3.4
• Senior management 2.9 (though this seems to relate more to the leaders reporting to the CEO than Satya Nadella himself - 82% of approvers approve of him.)

But these comments and ratings are based on the 8,900 all time reviews for the company (which give it a rather lower ranking of 3.7) rather than the 52 reviews that contributed to the 4.1 and the award.

Looking through comments from the UK over the period of the award calculations does give some insight on what may be happening in the UK - people complain about senior management, but also suggest that in the UK employees tend to be further away from them.  This presents some problems in terms of projects being cancelled and timezones slowing down decision making, but in general it's a good thing.  If your senior management is poor it's better to be less impacted by their leadership.

Ie it's not actually something Microsoft in the UK is doing right - it's just that we're further away from what the more generally excellent company in the US is doing wrong.

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Employee Training Isn’t What It Used To Be

I've also got some comments on human centric learning in this article in The Atlantic:

Employee Training Isn’t What It Used To Be

The human resources industry is in the midst of a huge shift in how it thinks about employee training and learning. “A lot of other areas of business have already been transformed through technology, but HR, as is often the case, hasn’t had the same level of investment until rather recently,” says Jon Ingham, a UK-based consultant in human capital management...

Ten years ago, says Ingham, HR technology was mostly meant to be used by the HR department, whereas now companies are more focused on employees themselves as the primary users. In the future, Ingham would like companies to use technology not to control employees, but to enable and liberate them to increase their own performance. “The opportunity is not to use analytics to control but to give employees meaningful data about the way they’re operating within an organization so that they themselves can do things to improve their working lives and their performance,” he says.

It's employees themselves who learn, and we need to shift focus to enabling, supporting and curating - not directing and training.

It's just one more area in which to progress we need to start putting employees first.

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Speaking on Human Centric Learning at ATD MENA, Saudi Arabia

I'm also speaking in Riyadh at this ATD MENA event in early March.

Talent development rests upon people being able to learn. Unfortunately real learning is very rare. We often do not design our interventions well: people only take on board a small proportion of what we cover; most of which they forget; and that which gets remembered very rarely gets translated into practice; and even more rarely will it have anything like the anticipated impact on the business. Attempting to deal with this we have become increasingly business focused - aligning learning programs with particular business needs and embedding learning within business processes.

However this session will argue it is only by focusing on individual employees/learners that we can make learning take hold and stick. We need to increase our understanding of individuals (which isn't just about neuroscience) and groups - particularly how they can be motivated and how we can ensure deep learning takes place.

You can read more about this idea in Learning Technologies magazine.

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Speaking on Gamification at HR Transformation Summit, Brussels

I'm also speaking at IQPC's HR Transformation Summit in Brussels in February.
This time, it's on gamification.  I will be referring to points, badges and leaderboards but focusing mainly on opportunities to make HR transformation, and operating shared services, a bit more fun.

• Understanding how to use gamification to transform HR strategies, raise engagement and support transformation.

• Determining how you can change employee behaviour by using gaming elements

• Analysing how you can encourage employees to have a clearer understanding of what level they are at and improve low engagement levels through gamified HR development strategies

• Examining how you can use gamelytics in a variety of HR   contexts, for example to measure aptitude and give you a broader understanding of the types of applicants you are looking to hire

If you're there, do come over and say hello!

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Speaking on HR and Social Capital at HRPA 2015 in Toronto

I'm speaking on the new, social HR at HRPA's annual conference in Toronto in January.


The New HR: Innovating Activities for Connections, Relationships and Conversations

50% of successful business performance now depends on collaboration, up from 20% just ten years ago. So why is it that most of what we do in HR focuses on the individual or on the whole organisation?  Why don’t we focus more on the white space between these levels–the relationships between our people?  Find out how the value of relationships, or social capital, potentially provides the largest source of competitive advantage within your reach.

I'm looking forward to three really useful days - and in particular to seeing sessions from Nick Bontis on Information Bombardment: Rising Above the Digital Onslaught, and reconnecting with HR blogger Kris Dunn, speaking on the 9 Faces of HR.

If you're there, do please come to the session and if you see me around, please do say hello!

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Why Men Won't Ask for Shared Parental Leave

Last month also saw the introduction of new regulations for Shared Parental Leave which will apply to children expected or adopted after 5th April.

Also subject to some criticism from the usual places, eg the IOD call it a nightmare, this is clearly a great move forward.  Firstly because it doesn't mandate the change which is required (at least in terms of enhanced pay) but simply encourages a more progressive response, much more effectively than additional paternity pay managed to do.

And secondly because if we're ever going to achieve equal pay, we've got to have more equal treatment in businesses and in the home as well.  So policies for things like parental leave obviously need to be more equal too.

I talk about all of this in the Sky Sunrise interview embedded above.

But the other thing we discuss is Glassdoor's recent research suggesting only 23% of men agree that both parents should share leave with 40% expecting that the mother should take the bulk of the leave and 20% suggesting that the leave would be taken by the lowest earner, which means the mum in the majority of cases.

Just 10% of the men would want to take the bulk of the leave themselves and 15% would want to share it between the partners.

This means that there are still some entrenched attitudes in place.

My worry is that whilst men are generally the best paid they'll tend to opt out of childcare, and the continuing split in childcare responsibilities will act to keep pay differences as they are (I know time off for childcare isn't the only factor behind this, but it certainly is a contributor.)  So despite the new regulations we end up in a repeating cycle which keeps things pretty much as they already are.



The survey findings also only leaves about 15% of mean who would want to have a proactive conversation with their partner about what they want to do - reflecting not only on their salaries and career prospects but also on what they want to do - their life ambitions and what sort of role they want in the upbringing of their child.  And ideally of course what would be in the child's best interest too.

Having a child is bound to result in big life changes and has got to be worth more in-depth conversation than the research suggests is likely.


We're going to need employers to put some proactive support and promotion behind the new regulations if we're going to break through these difficulties.

In particular I point back to some other Glassdoor research which suggested that women are nervous about asking for information on maternity benefits.  If women are nervous about this then men are very unlikely to want to ask about something they don't feel particularly comfortable about anyway.

Employers need to promote the policy and ensure that organisational cultures are supportive to men, as well as women, asking for, and taking off, shared parental leave.

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HR Business Partnering with Symposium Events

There was one other great HR conference last month - Symposium's Successful HR Business Partnering.

This was the second year of the conference and I had high hopes for a great session after a really excellent first year.  I didn't get to blog on that as I was chairing, but I particularly remember some provocative comments from Graham White at Brighton NHS Trust and Irene Stark at ATS Euromaster.

Graham had shared some comments from a manager blog:

"I've never had a positive interaction with Human Resources... it starts with annoyance and ends with infuriation...  HR are empathetic strangers.  HR rings false and no bond is created."

Irene noted what can be achieved - "In my business, HR is not a support function. It's central to business planning and strategy."  She also shared a brave challenge to her MD basically suggesting he hadn't been doing his job adequately.

I thought it was brilliant.

So in opening up this year's conference I referred briefly to this being a sequel, mashing up Jaws and Star Wars to label this conference as the return of the shark (and next year's as the severed limb fights back.)

You can read more on the conference sessions in this post from Chloe Green: Successful HR business partnering: Return of the shark.

Rather than repeat any of this, I just wanted to refer to the comments I tweeted and have shown in the picture above.  Especially as, to me, this short input was more meaningful, more powerful than any of the other things which were said during the day, or at the event last year.  It was very actually very similar in many respects to the conversation we'd been having at Art of HR.

Where ever it's done, we need more of this.  More challenge.  More discomfort.  More pushing back on our businesses rather than worrying about fitting HR into a model of business which clearly doesn't work.

We'll have more impact if we do this, though like Irene we do have have to be willing to be fired!  But I bet it would deal with many of our managers' negative perceptions of our support.

Bravo HR!

Also see:

• Don't blame the Ulrich model
• How do you know if you're a business partner?
• Symposium training courses

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Still a Top 50 HR Blog

I'll be down to something just over 50 posts for 2014 by the time we get to the end of this year.  That compares to nearly 250 posts in 2009.  Sorry about this - I've been busy and there are so many other things to do on social media these days.  But I do have plans to do better in 2015.

Anyway, it's great to know that even whilst I'm blogging less than previously that my blog posts are still valued.

So thanks very much to HR Software Insight for including Strategic HCM as the 3rd of their top 50 HR blogs, and Realising Potential for including this as one of 11 UK-based Human Resource blogs that you'll love.

You still love me!!!  Well, I still love HR too!

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Art of HR, Dubrovnik, Croatia - conference summary

Here are the tweets from the Art of HR conference last week which I helped organise and chaired.

Do take a look - it was awesome!:

Or see: https://storify.com/joningham/art-of-hr 

We'll hopefully be doing it again next year - see you there!

And in the meanwhile, join in the discussion in our LInkedin group: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/Art-HR-7493331/about.

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