Symposium Events - Analytics for Employee Engagement

Symposium Engagement Analytics from Jon Ingham

My own presentation at Symposium Events' Critical HR Analytics conference was on Engagement.  The topic was Symposium's suggestion but I was happy to respond, having recently contributed along with Dave Ulrich to this article in HR Magazine about new engagement tools.

And understanding engagement, like lots of things in HR, is increasingly about smart use of tools and technologies.

Rather that just list the tools mentioned in the article (though I have added to them) I attempted to use the levels of value in the value triangle (see my last post) to help explain how organisations can best use all these different tools.  I think this is important as the consequence otherwise is likely to be one of two things, neither of which are helpful!

• Either we pick tools at random.  For example I hear a lot of claims these days that we don't need to run engagement surveys any more as we can either just do mini pulse surveys or rely on semantic analysis of our enterprise social networks.  But actually whilst these tools are useful, it's important that we understand they're not direct alternatives to an engagement survey, they're complementary to this, acting at different levels of value.
• Or, we just add more and more tools to our portfolio of measures.  This tends not to give us any more insight and reduces the chance that we'll see the real signal in all of the additional noise.

The key to making best use of the available tools, in engagement, and in other areas of HR, isn't about understanding the levels of value in the technologies (though this is important), or in the data and analytics, but in the attributes we want to understand ie the type of engagement.

This is why I used Gary Hamel's triangle about different types of engagement on slide 5.

As I explained in my last post, if we're tying to measure the sorts of things that will give us value for money at the bottom of the triangle - eg compliance, diligence and obedience, we'll probably be able to get lots of objective, reliable data, and can use appropriate analytical tools to explore these.  Eg this is where big data fits in.

And as I explained at the conference, the main issue with value for money big data is the trust factor - that employees probably won't want you using their data.  The key here of course is therefore to give the data to them.  So I like the idea of I am Not a Widget (which I cam across in the comments to the HR Magazine article.)

In contrast, when we're dealing with Creating Value at the top of the triangle - eg passion and pride, creativity and zeal, we're more likely to need qualitative measures, and richer types of analytics and tools that help us understand these things.  Nick Kemsley talked about this at the conference suggesting that strategic workforce planning would involve qualitative measures a bit like is often the case in marketing.  So the best thing to do is to go and talk to people.

That's true in employee engagement too. Focus groups still have a lot of value, particularly before or after an engagement survey.

But you can get similar levels of creating value insight from social recognition tools like Workstars (which sponsors this blog,) or from tools like Alan Watkins' Universe of Emotions (which he demonstrated at Changeboard's conference recently) or Michael Silverman's tool from Unilever (links are in the slideset.)

In summary, the tool we pick to use needs to depend upon the insight we're trying to create, which will depend upon the type of data we can access or generate, which depends upon the way we're trying to engage our staff.  Understand the value of this and the rest follows.

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#seAnalytics - Levels of Planning, Measurement and Analysis

Yesterday was Symposium Events' Mission Critical HR Analytics conference.  There were a couple of consistent themes I will blog on into next week, however the main (and very positive) one was the use of three level triangles!

Peter Reilly from the IES kicked off the event.  His triangle shown at the top left here was about moving from data to analytics.  He described how the triangle builds up with each layer building on the layer below, ie that you need good quality data before you can do reporting before you can do analytics (well yes, partly, but actually you can do a lot with shoddy data and technology - see my post on roadmaps next week.)

Paul Smith from LV= had his own version, dealing again with the analytics agenda at the top of Peter's triangle, but shown the wrong way up (so I've rotated the photo so you get to see it the way it's supposed to go!)  In case you can't read upside down, this triangle moves from operational to tactical to strategic.

They're both interesting models, that both relate to my Value Triangle, but the key issue which both Peter and Paul's models miss is that it's not analytics we need to worry about, it's not even the data we analyse, but the insight we're trying to provide.

In fact quite a few of the speakers sort of referred to this, suggesting it's not the data or analytics which are important but the question you're trying to answer.  Also see Peter's blog post for the conference:

"It is important to note that HR analytics reverses the approach that characterises so much HR work of producing data then trying to find a problem to solve; instead, you start with the problem and look for the data to answer the question."

Yes, exactly (though not all of the time), so let's put the question in the triangle!

This is what the Value Triangle does which I used in my own presentation and you can out more about here.

Anyway, just before me, Jo Taylor spoke about TalkTalk's approach which used the categories of value for money, adding value and creating value to identify the type of talent the company was trying to develop.  Not actually a triangle but clearly the categories from the Value Triangle!

It turns out that TalkTalk's consultant was previously a partner in another consultancy working with a guy who used to work with me and where we first developed this model.  I think that TalkTalk's version has been corrupted slightly since then though as Jo suggested the idea of Future Back(starting with the end state in mind) requires thinking about the business whereas Creating Value is actually a very people centric perspective ie it looks at what people will be generating for the business, rather than what the business needs its people to do.  But that's a relatively minor quibble in this context.  In general, what better introduction could I possibly have got?

This is the value triangle from my own session (thanks Jo) which I also linked to one of Gary Hamel's models to illustrate the approach I recommend in the context of generating employee engagement.

I'll explain what I discussed regarding engagement in my next post, but the point I'd like to make now is to explain that it's not the level of data or analytic we need to worry about, it's the nature of the thing we're trying to measure.

So if we're tying to measure the sorts of things that will give us value for money at the bottom of the triangle - eg compliance, diligence and obedience, we'll probably be able to get lots of objective, reliable data, and can use appropriate analytical tools to explore these.  Eg this is where big data fits in.

In contrast, in we're dealing with Creating Value at the top of the triangle - eg passion and pride, creativity and zeal, we're more likely to need qualitative measures, and richer types of analytics and tools that help us understand these things.

Nick Kemsley from Henley talked a bit about this in his session on workforce planning, suggesting that if we want to create organisational capability (which is a great example of creating value), we can't look at WFP in a transactional way.  We need to deal with the ambiguity which will exist at this level and be prepared to make subjective judgments about it.  But actually this applies to anything we deal with, across the full range of HR and OD activities, which support creating value.

It's something we still forget far too much (or perhaps sometimes don't realise to begin with.)  Yes, we will generally want to start with the question we're trying to answer.  And the nature of that question will influence the nature of the data we need to collect.  And this will impact the nature of the analytics we need to perform.  And as you'll see in my next post, this also influences the nature of the technology which can help us performance the analytics, visualise the insight and answer the question!

And all from using the right triangle!

By the way, the triangle also explains why I've been slightly hedging my comments about starting out with a question. For adding and creating value that's absolutely the right thing to do.  But for value for money, you may be able to access big data.  And that gives you the ability to probe the data and see what answers it will give you (even if you don't know the question!)

If you want to know more, the above slide from my presentations highlights one of the training courses I run for Symposium - on planning, measurement and analysis, where I cover all of the ideas I outline above, and a lot more!

I can run it in-house as well if you'd be interested!

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Performance Snapshots at Deloitte

Buckingham dealt less with the more formal aspects of performance management but it’s this that was covered extensively in the Harvard Business Review.

This project at Deloitte started with simple counting of hours - which for Deloitte added up to 2 million hours completing performance reviews and ratings.  I know Adobe’s project started like this as well but in general, it’s unlikely to be that helpful for most organisation as it’s only the time and costs of performance management which can be measured so objectively - you’ve still got not basis to compare the benefits in the same way, so you might as well stick to a high level subjective comparison.

The second input was a review of research in the science of ratings.  A free this is useful and would extend it to the science of feedback and coaching etc - which is all part of the evidence based approach HR needs to take on board (though I’ll also be commenting on ‘evidence based HR’ shortly.)  The key piece of data for Buckingham and Deloitte was that 62% of the variance in the ratings could be accounted for by individual raters’ peculiarities of perception. Actual performance accounts for only 21% of the variance.  So traditional performance reviews are clearly very unlikely to work.

The third input was a carefully controlled study of their own organisation - this is the critical piece for me.  And Deloitte did do what I recommended in my last post which is to develop clear objectives for the project and their performance management process or practices.  Their objectives were to be able to recognise (pay) for performance, to truly understand that performance and to fuel or develop the performance (which they do through their check-in process).  These are fine, and all organisations will or at least should have different objectives, but they do need to recognise that rewarding and developing for performance are largely irreconcilable and find a way around this, which I’m not sure they have.  And in fact the case study notices this suggesting that Deloitte wanted to tell people what they’ve been rated (to help development) but couldn’t do so as this would inflate the ratings (and hence reduce the ability to make good decisions about pay.)

I’d also argue that at the very least, even if you’re not going to separate the assessment and development sides of performance management, that reward shouldn’t be the top priority objective.  Organisations can generate a lot more impact on performance by developing their people to perform than they can from the potential but complex impacts on motivation that might but might not follow from bonuses, incentives and salary increases.  At the very least it is putting the cart before the horse.

The most interesting part of the case study is the way Deloitte has tried to neutralise the idiosyncratic rater effect by having raters rate their own actions, rather than the qualities or behaviors of the ratee (it’s also interesting that Deloitte still uses the terms rater and ratee even if it wants to get away from the importance of the rating!):

“People may rate other people’s skills inconsistently, but they are highly consistent when rating their own feelings and intentions. To see performance at the individual level, then, we will ask team leaders not about the skills of each team member but about their own future actions with respect to that person.”

So in their annual, performance snapshots, they ask managers to provide four ratings - for pay, talent identification, poor performance and readiness for promotion.

Doing this may be better than providing just one rating but I’d be interested in the correlations between them i.e. whether they’re all measuring the same thing, or at least whether the halo effect means they all end up wit the same level of assessment.  In addition, my own experience is that often the higher the number of assessment scores, the higher the potential for disagreement and conflict, pulling people down into debate over the numbers rather than enabling good conversation about the real things the numbers represent.  It’s why I’m also not overly in favour of deletion’s desire to use big data to provide some of these ratings in future:

“And these conversations are best served not by a single data point but by many. If we want to do our best to tell you where you stand, we must capture as much of your diversity as we can and then talk about it.

We haven’t resolved this issue yet, but here’s what we’re asking ourselves and testing: What’s the most detailed view of you that we can gather and share? How does that data support a conversation about your performance? How can we equip our leaders to have insightful conversations? Our ques-tion now is not What is the simplest view of you? but What is the richest?

We want our organizations to know us, and we want to know ourselves at work, and that can’t be com- pressed into a single number. We now have the technology to go from a small data version of our people to a big data version of them. As we scale up our new approach across Deloitte, that’s the issue we want to solve next.”

 

Please note I’m absolutely not against using big data to inform the conversation between the manager / team leader and employee, as this helps reduce the inherent bias in the process, but that’s different to arguing the overall assessment be based upon big data.  The main problem with this is that by its nature the information contained in the big data is likely to be very transactional in nature, highly reliable but with low validity and meaning.  So it’s not what you want your performance assessments to be based upon.

I’d also question whether Deloitte really need its four ratings.  Wouldn’t it be easier just to discuss each individual and if someone needs a higher salary, to pay them; if they need to go on a talent programme, then develop them; if they’re not performing then exiting them and if they need a promotion then promoting them?  In his SHRM presentation Buckingham argued that big complex organisations will always need ratings as otherwise how does the HRD sitting in HQ make decisions about all their talent?  That’s a pretty easy question to answer - they shouldn’t - at least for everyone who isn’t in a form of corporate interest group, all of these decisions should be taken locally where managers know the people they’re discussing.  No form of rating is ever going to make the HRD doing this for all their locations etc a valid way of managing their talent.

More importantly, I don’t get how Deloitte thinks assessing the rater’s actions rather than the ratees themselves will be an improvement.  Managers may assess their own future actions objectively but these actions will still be based on their inconsistent and biased interpretations of their people.  Deloitte try to get round this by suggesting that as team leaders are closest to the performance of ratees and, by virtue of their roles, they must exercise subjective judgment.  Deloitte are therefore interested in what these subjective judgements will be.  As Buckingham explained: “We want to know this.  It’s called judgment.  So how do we measure their inherently subjective judgments about one another.”

But the change hasn’t really shifted the dynamics of the way people are paid and promoted etc, it’s just got rid of the single rating of the rater’s performance as a stepping stone towards these ends.  But the whole process is as riddled with bias as a more traditional approach.

My final criticism of the approach is that Buckingham is at pains to stress leaders need to act in ways which suit their strengths (“there is no perfect profile there is only practice which fits your profile”), but recommends check-in as a one-size-fits-one approach within an organisation.  I suspect that when businesses have developed the right best fit approach for their company, this will still need to be tailored and adapted by different teams and potentially individuals within the organisation.

Also see: Marcus Buckingham on Performance Management at SHRM15

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Marcus Buckingham on Performance Management at #SHRM15

Yesterday I delivered another training day on re-engineering performance management via Symposium Events.  Although actually, as one of the course participants suggested, it’s not so much training as knowledge sharing i.e. I don't train people how to do, or even design, performance management as much as provide them with the information and hopefully motivation they need to go and do something transformationally different to how most performance management is done today (and I do provide some process suggestions for making improvements too).

So we talked about Adobe, Juniper, Kelly and most of the other case studies of radical change, and we reviewed some of the key technologies eg Work.com, BetterWorks, CultureAmp, ReviewSnap, Bonusly etc which these and other organisations are using to facilitate the change.

We also talked quite a bit about the case study of Deloitte’s performance management changes in April’s Harvard Business Review, mainly as one of the participants brought it up, although I’m not a huge fan of it.  That’s mainly because some of it is based on a proprietary tool available from Marcus Buckingham and I’m not in business to promote products.  But I also don’t think organisations should get themselves tied into a proprietary approach.  In fact one of the learnings I shared with participants yesterday was that the future of performance management (if it's going to be different / effective) is probably going to be about best fit rather than best practice, and I don’t think moving from one old set of ‘best’ practices to a new set if really going to help.  Organisations need to think through their own context, challenges and opportunities, develop clear performance management objectives and principles, and then design an approach which will work for them.

I'm also unconvinced that Deloitte / Marcus Buckingham’s approach is totally sound.  So when I got home and was catching up from the tweets from SHRM’s annual conference, I was pleased to be able to review a very useful Periscope of Buckingham’s session, recorded by Joel Peterson (thank you.)


Check-ins

Buckingham dealt mainly with the first, more informal part of his approach to performance management.  This is mainly about moving from an ongoing update on progress to a more specific check-in.  It is a check-in, not a check-up, ie it’s not about the to do list but is designed to demonstrate attention and raise engagement and therefore performance.

It focuses on two or three key questions - what are your strengths?, what are your priorities? and how can I help?  The key differences to a more standard update are that the check-in is about coaching for the future rather than feedback on the past, and also on strengths rather than leadership competencies.  For Buckingham, the best team leaders are those who do this every week, 52 weeks of the year.

That’s all great, I like the check-in approach, and wish more organisations and managers would do something like this.  But I do need to point out that it doesn’t deal with everything performance management needs to, ie there will still need to be objective setting, development planning and probably some feedback.  And I think you can do feedback in a way that it will be accepted, for example I like Sears approach of encouraging people to ask for feedback, rather than give feedback.  Their finding is that everyone who is asked for feedback then asks several more people for feedback on themselves, creating a reinforcing cycle that creates asking for feedback as a core aspect of the organisation’s culture.


Big data / smart data

I'm also unconvinced by some of the rest of the session.  For example Buckingham suggests moving our current focus on data onto smart data.  Eg he suggests that the 9 box grid is based on logic that you can retrain a team leader to be a reliable rater of another human being, but you can’t.  And if you combine bad data and more bad data you just get big bad data, not good data.  But actually that’s not true.  Bias does average itself out, crowdsourcing feedback will result in a better, more valid view of an individual.  And 360 degree reviews are not just noise but facilitated or adopted in the right way, can also provide a signal.  Ie it absolutely can be valid and useful.  And for goodness sake, most HR functions haven’t even started the journey to using big data yet, and although the benefits of this are definitely over-hyped, we absolutely don’t want to create the impression they don’t need to get on the train.


Team leaders

In addition, Buckingham's absolute focus on team leaders makes little sense.  Team leaders are important and one team leader in Google can be very different to another team leader in Google but to suggest that there is no Google Way is quite frankly rather silly.  There are lots of reasons why two team leaders may see different levels of performance from their teams, even in retail operations (as in the graph in the Periscope screen.)  And most other sectors are even more complex than this.  

Also, people increasingly work outside Buckingham's single teams - for example Amy Edmondson has been speaking at SHRM about how increasingly people from different areas of the business need to come together and do work, and Gary Kushner suggested that attendees throw away their organisation charts (which I also don’t agree with btw) for similar reasons.  Even without this shift, not all the factors informing performance are limited to the team.  Leadership style, culture, communication, values, competencies, so many things including HR - all make an impact on performance.


For example, Buckingham asks about learning agility - what will team leaders do with this, and what is it anyway?  Well, I’d agree its a somewhat complex idea to get your head around, but if it’s important (and it is) the fact it’s complex isn’t enough of a reason to ignore it, or not to enagge team leaders around it.

Also Buckingham suggests we drop engagement survey questions if they don’t impact the performance of teams.  This, to me, is completely wrong - if the areas that these items represent are important in generating individual engagement, and you know that engagement does inform business results, then these areas are important, and you will want to ask about them. 


Buckingham is right about the value of technology and also that we need to move away from tools we have to co-erce people to use towards consumerised ones team leaders will thank us for:

"To support both people in these conversations, our system will allow individual members to understand and explore their strengths using a self- assessment tool and then to present those strengths to their teammates, their team leader, and the rest of the organization. Our reasoning is twofold. First, as we’ve seen, people’s strengths generate their highest performance today and the greatest improvement in their performance tomorrow, and so deserve to be a central focus. Second, if we want to see frequent (weekly!) use of our system, we have to think of it as a consumer technology—that is, designed to be simple, quick, and above all engaging to use. Many of the successful consumer technologies of the past several years (particularly social media) are sharing technologies, which suggests that most of us are consistently interested in ourselves—our own in- sights, achievements, and impact. So we want this new system to provide a place for people to explore and share what is best about themselves."
 

But the good news is there are an increasing number of these tools around (and some of which I mentioned previously) - we’re not just limited to Buckingham’s.


Snapshots

Buckingham dealt less with the more formal aspects of performance management but it’s this that was covered extensively in the Harvard Business Review.  I’ll come back to this tomorrow... (see here.)


However, in summary it was an entertaining and provoking session, but to me no amount of humour can compensate for some significant holes and mis-directions in the approach.

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#SSPerspectives the Self Developing Organisation

Yesterday I was at Skillsoft's EMEA Perspectives event where I was chairing a 'think tank' on the skills gap.

The best session for me was John Ambrose on 'the self developing organisation', being firstly what Skillsoft and SumTotal are trying to create through their integration of content and platform (and the demo of this looked compelling) but secondly, a response to the difficulty getting people to engage in learning as much as they're going to need to, and having organisations sponsor this.

Learning needs to be consumerised and collaborative - pervasive, multimodal, provided in the way that learners like to learn.

A key part of this is understanding the audience.  People undertaking learning need us to know, entice, improve and reward them.  The reward part of this attracted a few comments - I think the idea was mainly around making the consumption of learning easy and stimulating ('so good that people want to eat it') but the demo also showed how someone might be promoted to sign up for an additional 2 days vacation, as well as volunteering to be a mentor in their new skill area.

This understanding of the individual helps personalise the learning.  We talked about this in the think tank too.  That we don't have to think in terms of stereotypes like millennial etc, and develop learning pathways we suit particular groups, the technology is starting ot help us recognise individual needs and respond to these.

It's then about pushing content for you to use, recommending additional courses or other learning, a bit like sites like Coursera, Udemy, Lynda etc do if you use these.  Karen Moloney spoke about this in her session too, suggesting the key was to trouble people as little as you can.

One reason I liked the approach is that is seems to respond to one of the other things I've been blogging about which is the need to align not just with the business, but with the individuals engaging in learning.  See my posts on this (1, 2, 3) and Nick Shackleton Jones shared this post too - business alignment is killing you.

That's not the prevailing view, but as James Caan suggested, the future often isn't about doing more of the same and sometimes you have to go in the opposite direction ('observe the masses and do the opposite.')

Caan also provided a great example of doing some opportunistic recruitment and I thought it was a shame, though understandable, that one of the questions suggested attendees would be laughed at if we tried to do this back in the corporate ranch.

Because the same applies to opportunistic development - finding those hooks that can enable someone to move themselves forward and potentially transform their own capabilities.

I think the self developing organisation has the potential of being an important part of this people centric future.

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#EconTalent Developing Digital Savvy

So after covering the way the world of work is changing we moved on to a final couple of sessions looking more specifically at the employment and skills challenges of the ‘new machine age’, building on Charlie Mayfield’s points in the morning morning.

But first, another summary of the change.  We’re moving into the third age of computing: tabulating, programming and now cognitive (eg IBM Watson.)  80% of people are going to be connected using digital devices by 2030.  And billions of these devices will be connected together.

We need to take advantage of these technologies - as Sir Clive Woodward has noted, talent is not enough - whoever wins in IT tends to win.

Ram Sundarajan from HCL Technologies suggested the main impact of these changes is about speed, and in particular the use of data to help us make decisions differently.

Kim Wylie from Google for Work suggested the number one goals for using them is improved efficiency.

Personally, I think the big need is Collaboration - the network performance piece of CEB’s enterprise contribution which is why I think the role of enterprise social networks is so key (link to venn diagram post)

I thought Kim got closer to the mark later on when she started talking about Google’s culture and needing to ensure all their employees have a sufficient level of Googliness.

“Technology enables transparency.  Our founders participate in hangouts every week  and there’s no question which is out of bounds.  Everyone shares their OKRs and employee feedback surveys - through technology - using our Google+ social networks.  Everyone knows who are our good managers, the people meeting goals.  Also voice - everyone can ask questions, challenge, provide feedback as a gift.”

Some of these changes are about culture, some of them about technology.  But they all involve some of both, i.e. OD, culture and technology all merge together.

But as Charlie Mayfield was suggesting, digital technology is also going to have a profound impact on jobs.  40-50% of jobs are threatened to disappear.  And Adrian Wooldridge from the Economist also suggested that as machines get smarter, more of the jobs open to people will be stupider than the machines, rather than smarter than the machines as has been the case in the past.

Despite this, panelists were optimistic about the new jobs appearing in the future.

Obed Louissaint from IBM Watson suggested that the key need is to develop the digital skills for the future.  These aren't all about technology and people don’t need to learn to code, it’s understanding the context which is key.

But it’s also about mindset eg openness, agility and focusing on experimentation.  And also understanding that traditional approaches around business cases, ROI etc won’t enable companies to evolve.

We need to look for these new skills in our workforce, for example what are candidates’ digital footprints - have they been blogging and tweeting?, what is their social eminence? (like Glassdoor, but for the employees.)

It’s about understanding the skills needed for the future and giving people the tools.  But it's their obligation and responsibility to keep themselves fit, i.e. to learn the digital skills they need.


HR needs to invest in our digital skills too, and I thought the conference made a strong contribution to the development of all conference attendees.


Also see:

• CEB on enterprise contribution
• Glassdoor and employer branding
• Charlie Mayfield on digital talent

And if you do still want to learn to code: Code in a day

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#EconTalent CEB on Enterprise Contribution

I've been following the CEB's findings on enterprise contribution for several years, often through presentations at previous Economist Talent conferences.

So in 2012, I think, they first noted that the proportion of work which is collaborative rather than individual in nature had increased over the previous decade from 20 to 50% - regardless of job level, job type or industry.  Given this shift, we now need people to be enterprise contributors rather than individual task performance.

Enterprise contribution is a combination of individual task performance and network performance.  Network performance isn’t about having 1000 friends on Facebook, it’s not the same as networking, it’s using and contributing to the success of others and the broader organisation.  It’s about the extent to which people use ideas, best practices, the insight of others for their own performance.  And contribute their insight to drive the success of others and the broader enterprise.


Brian Kropp at CEB has also been talking about this recently, suggesting that “The formula for great employee performance has changed forever. It is no longer just a case of doing well against your individual tasks. Those who work with and through others effectively are able to achieve far better results than those who work hard but with their heads down – ignoring what happens around them”.

His suggestion is that focusing on individual employee performance will only achieve a 3-5 percent improvement. However, enabling effective collaboration can boost profit growth by 11% per employee – with the average revenue per employee rising by £10,500.


So I was pleased to have another presentation from Clare Moncrieff at this year's Talent conference.

The level of contribution has apparently now gone up slightly since 2012, though the bigger shift has been the proportion of the workforce who are acting as enterprise contributors - up from 17 to 23% globally (but just 11 to 13% in EMEA!)

This includes a 50% increase in involvement in decision making compared to even three years ago.  A half of us collaborate with at least 10 people and one third with 20.

The issue is that we’re not holding people accountable for network performance eg 83% of employees’ performance objectives are based on individual tasks.  And two thirds of people receiving the highest performance ratings aren’t enterprise contributors.

A lot of this is down to leaders as they have a particularly critical role - 37% of people don't think they have the leaders needed for the required contribution.

I agree with all these points and also think they are important though I am probably a little less focused on leaders who I think are less critical to network than to individual performance, or at least the leaders need to act in a different way.  But perhaps that’s why people are saying they don’t have the right leaders.


I also talked to Clare at the end of the session.  During the panel she’s been talking about millennials and I remembered one of her comments from Changeboard’s Future Talent conference earlier in the year.  Apparently millennials are more not less competitive than older generations eg they are more keen to compare their performance agains others.  That has to put an additional challenge onto network performance.

Clare suggested millennials can still support network performance but they need to see the impact of their contribution on others eg to have a unique position in delivering to a bigger outcome and with others responsible for other parts of the outcomes.  Yes, although I still think there’s an issue here.  Although actually, I think they’re probably just so competitive because that’s what they think businesses expect from them.  Once we explain it's collaboration that's important, I think we can influence their perspective.

It’s a bit like with Matthew Schuyler later.  He suggested millennials won’t want to stay with them for long.  I think that’s more about them not expecting to be able to.  if companies used more of the new practices discussed by Fiona Cannon from the Agile Future Forum later, I think they’d be able to shift this.  The same for collaboration vs competitiveness too.


Also see:

• Sir Charlie Mayfield presentation
• My HRPA presentation on the New HR for ideas to develop enterprise contribution.

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#EconTalent Glassdoor and Employer Branding

It's just after lunch and Diarmuid Russell from Glassdoor has been leading a session on employee branding in a social media world.

He kicked off by mentioning Sir Clive Woodward's suggestion from the morning that it should be everybody's responsibility to be involved in social media.  One of Glassdoor's surveys suggest:

• 78% of people use social media as part of recruitment
• 41% (13% of millennials) thinks it is important to stay in a job for at least 5 years
• 77% of millennials value culture and fir with prospective employer
• 76% of people change their perception of an employer when it is actively involved in responding to comments.

Most people in the room suggest they do check their company reviews on Glassdoor, though Diarmuid still explained it for at least one attendee who didn't know what it is.  Basically it's about putting the power to make decisions about employment into the hands of the people - based on the fact that people today trust the opinions of people like them rather than experts and company websites etc.  In fact two thirds of applicants are more sceptical about claims made by employers than they were three years ago, and that rises to 65% for millennials.

This supports the increasing focus on transparency implicit in Glassdoor founder's three laws of the web:

We also looked at Brandon Hall's definition of employer branding as a combination of reputation and image.

• Image - an employer's public portrayal of the various elements of its unique employee value proposition - from the language used in job postings and advertisements to the message conveyed by recruiters across various channels and mediums.

• Reputation - the combined sentiments of candidates, employees, customers and clients (past, present or future) regarding an organisation's viability as an employer of choice - usually (but not always) based on first-hand experience.

In todays' environment of transparency, Glassdoor helps employers manage, or at least inform, their reputations, which together with image provides the employer brand.

Glassdoor also supports employer branding through a free employer account, providing great analytics for companies:

Also see:

• Pay transparency - on Glassdoor and in your organisation too
• What's Microsoft UK doing right? (Glassdoor Employees Choice Awards)
• Why men won't ask for Shared Parental Leave

Also see my first post from the conference: Charlie Mayfield on digital talent challenges

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#EconTalent Sir Charlie Mayfield on digital talent challenges

I’m at the Economist’s Talent Management summit, opened by Edward Carr, Deputy Editor of the Economist who suggestsed that AI and robotics will have a transformational although traumatic and disruptive impact on businesses and talent.

The first speaker has been Sir Charlie Mayfield, Chairman of John Lewis and also of UKCES who developed this theme.  John Lewis have been looking at existing hints in today’s world which may indicate business changes through to 2028.

This has been quite difficult as the technology, and roles and skills people will have then are very difficult to imagine today.  It's therefore very difficult to develop new technology products but once you have one it's very easy to take it to market.  Your firm will also be very high profile as many people will be using the new systems.  But hi tech alone will not play a large part of the required solution to economic and talent challenges eg Facebook only employs around 6,500 people

Also tech commoditises roles eg you can now use a John Lewis coffee machine and produce the same results as baristas in Starbucks.  There's the same shift in advanced manufacturing plants etc.

There is a positive too - tech frees up labour which may be very important given the aging workforce.  But anyone can do these commodity  roles so wages are likely to remain low.  There's a nbig difference between the bullseye and those people around the edges.  So the trajectory we’re on is one of rising inequality.

But there will be new exciting and different jobs emerging between the edge and the bullseye.  Uber and Taskrabbit creating something quite exciting - providing flexibility and opportunity for people to use their skills in different ways.

We'll also see the emergence of greater and greater personalisation.  Eg we'll see more people who can afford it having personalised nutrition plans vs weekly shopping trolleys - formulated individually for them and changing dynamically with their level of health.

One problem of our human characteristics is inertia which hasn’t mattered up to now, but as pace of change quickens, our innate skills and core ability to contribute may become redundant.  Eg men with elementary qualifications are already finding it increasingly difficult to find employment.

We need to work to create a meritocratic society where the workplace is part of a progression of social mobility.

There are three areas where we need a course correction:

1.   The deal around employment - 8 out of 10 people who will be in work in 10 years time are already in work.  By 2025, this may be 9 out of 10.  These people will need to learn more in the next 10 years than they have in the last 20.  We need not just jobs, but learning jobs.  Training and development is millennial’s top demand from employment.  So we need to deal with these people differently.

2.   Training will be delivered via online platforms.  All of John Lewis’ development is now online.  Needs a much more serious focus on development and progression, and more people practices pulling on insights from data and analytics.  For example John Lewis has looked at the last 7 years of pay data.  We need to bring in practices used for customer relationships into employment.

3.   The worlds of work and education need to become more integrated.  Academic qualifications are only losely aligned with the world of work.  And the placit assumption is that they’re all achieved by age 20 and then there’s no more need for learning.  There needs to be a much closer link between education and the more attractive parts of the dart board.  Employers therefore need to collaborate with government to plan the supply side of workforce.  And government needs to be a convener rather than just a deliverer.

We therefore need to focus on what we need to do to move from where we are now to where we need to go - setting the agenda for talent management, and today’s conference.  

More shortly...



Also see my recent post on Digital HR. 

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No Ordinary Disruption - Labour Market Challenges in the Digital Age

I've been reflecting on the the 'new work order' in preparation for the Economist's Talent Management summit next week.  As part of this, I've been reading McKinsey's new book, No Ordinary Disruption, and today, got to talk to one of the book's authors, Richard Dobbs, Director of the McKinsey Global Institute (their research arm.)

MGI look at various long-term trends and you, like me, may have seen some of their previous reports on the labour market, social collaboration, technology and other areas.  However their clients wanted to know how these fit together.  And basically there are 4 forces, each one larger than what we’ve ever seen:

• A shifting locus towards the East (taking HSBC with it of course)
• The acceleration in the scope, scale and economic impact of technology
• A dramatically aging global population, growing less fast than in the past
• Flows of capital, people and information (increasingly South South.)

Sometimes the forces build together, sometimes they pull apart - leading to increased complexity and additional challenges.

Executives typically have a sense that the world is changing, but don't understand enough about how the change is working so we need to reset our intuition about the world going forward.  People don't reset enough.  The current changes are a bit like the British Industrial Revolution but ten times as fast, and 300 times the scale.

For example, Richard talks about Tianjin in China, which most Westerners have never heard of (I hadn't, despite spending 3 weeks in China last year) and compares its economy to that of Stockholm (but how will it compare by 2025?)

Resetting Intuition

I was pleased that even though McKinsey is well known for being very data based (and you can certainly see this focus in the book) the firm still sees a role for intuition.  To me, this is particularly important given the complex mix of forces suggested in the book.  I also think extrapolating data into the future is increasingly dangerous to do.  And in fact, the book notes that the 4 forces can "play havoc with forecasts and pro forma plans", but of course that's exactly what MGI has had to do.

Richard also described a balanced approach to using data and intuition:

"However data or analytically driven, many executives still reply on intuition.  And numbers never prove it 100%.  That can mean that executives leave a decision a bit or plan make it later.  The point is are they happy to make a decision on the basis of the data that they're getting?  It's a bit like what we think house prices are going to do.  Data underpins it in a way we're not even conscious of.  Over the last few years, asset prices have appreciated, driven by interest rates and global GDP.  We've got used to it.  So I won't make a good decision if I don't get a forecast, or by suppressing my intuition."

The idea of needing to rest this intuition recognises that our intuition which still underpins much of our decision making has been formed by "a set of experiences and ideas about how things worked and are supposed to work."

The difficulty is that this acts a bit like recency bias and the anchoring effect in psychology, or inertia in physics.  "However we identify it, there is a powerful human tendency to want the future to look much like the recent past."

So "if we look at the world through a rearview mirror and make decisions on the basis of intuition built on our experience we could well be wrong.  In the new world, executives, policy makers, and individuals all need to scrutinise their intuitions from first principles and boldly rest them if necessary."

I'm not quite sure about the suggestion that intuition anchors people to the current state - surely it depends on what people pay attention to?  And although I think Richard used the Tom Watson quote about there being room for 4 computers in his session at LSE this week, there are also plenty of examples of forecasts being well over the top, for example ones suggesting that we’d all be flying around with personal jet packs by now.  

However the book does provide a couple of good examples of anchoring, for example companies allocating the same resources that they had done in the previous year, even when things change drastically, for example in the global recession.

My remaining worry is that 'boldly resetting' is likely to be a bit harder to do than the words might suggest.  So I think the book is probably right in referring to executives needing to develop the capabilities to rest their own intuition.

Skills Challenges to meet the 4 Forces

Given that I've been blogging about digital, we focused mostly on the trend / force around technology:

"HRDs are seeing the impact of cloud systems like Workday.  They're not taking 5 to 10% out of their transaction costs but by a factor of 2 or 3 times as they move towards self service vs forms and people.  It's a strategic issue because it costs less and people get better service.   Employees find it more convenient. 

But as technology disrupts more jobs and people have to refocus.  How prepared is HR to help in that journey?"

That led us onto a conversation about employment and skills.  As noted earlier, global labour market growth is due to start falling, and finding talent in skilled positions will become yet harder.  However as robots and computers take on a growing role in performing activities, and undertaking knowledge work, less lower value roles will be needed.

This means that by 2020 "businesses could be short of 85 million workers with college degrees or vocational training; at the same time, 95 million lower-skilled workers could be unemployed."


Part of the solution to this problem is about better use of online talent platforms (see McKinsey's new research report on this.)

However there needs to be more action too, including better links between business and education.  I mentioned an earlier McKinsey labour market report I'd seen which described how South Korea (where Richard has just returned from) transformed their whole eduction approach to provide the skills that country needs.  But this is harder in a Western democracy like the UK.

Richard didn't have a complete solution to this but suggested that whilst the UK isn't as bad as other places, we need to do more to develop STEM skills, particularly in numeracy, computer programming and confidence in technology.

"I find it extraordinary that people can give up maths at 16 and go to university with just a maths GCSE.  But the coding in schools curriculum is great - every policy maker around the world I've mentioned it to has asked 'why aren't we doing that?'"

We talked about three other needs supporting this as well:

1.  Much more external focus.  Many execs are very internally focused.  That may have made sense during the last few years, to drive performance and productivity. But now they're still not spending enough time with customers, understanding the disruptions.  They need to go round Silcon Valley and meet the disruptors. 

2.   Ability to make companies agile.  It's difficult to get actions exactly right so you need to be able to respond.  It's amazing to see how some companies respond - for example long debates about cannibalisation. 

3.   Attitudes.  It's easy to see the four forces as a perfect storm where everything is negative.  but some of the changes will be very exciting, for example taking a billion people out of poverty, creating a consuming class of another billion people, creating a cancer drug that be tailored to your genome and so on.  We think the winners will be disproportionally the optimists.

I finished by asking about income inequality which I had noticed Richard had described in a session at LSE earlier in the week but didn't seem to come through that strongly in the book. 

Partly because of the impacts on employment that I described above, inequality is going to grow further too.  Some cohorts of the population have done badly from the changes.  In fact Richard suggested that because of automation, de-unionisation, immigration and trade or offshoring, male school leavers have seen salaries decline since 1995.

Well inequality isn't in the book because McKinsey are still working on their first research report on it but Richard agreed with me that the impact will be important to society and to businesses too.  If we're struggling for skills that last thing we want is more people with-holding their discretionary effort too.

I'll be posting on some of the additional challenges of operating in this complex, digital environment, over the next few days and weeks.

In the meantime, thanks to Richard for his time and insights - I do think the book presents a compelling outline of the need to reset.

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