Showing posts with label KenexaEuro. Show all posts
Showing posts with label KenexaEuro. Show all posts

Thursday, 3 June 2010

Connecting HR tweet-up #2 (June 2010)

 

   June already, and that means it’ll shortly be the event of the Summer – the second Connecting HR tweet-up on Thursday 24th June.

We’ve got an amazing group of people already booked to attend.  But if you want to join us, there’s currently still space to join us.  Don’t leave it too long though!

 

 

Event Details

We're now organising the second Connecting HR Tweet-up (a London based meet-up for HR people using or interested in social media including Twitter).

The first event, held on the 29th March was very well received with some 60+ attendees from organisations including Betfair, Pizza Express, Sega, Leonard Cheshire, BT, Symantec, Talis, Mayborn Group, CM Murray and London Overground.  The CIPD also attended as did most of the major HR journalists and websites including Personnel Today, XpertHR, HRZone and Changeboard. 

To get a flavour for the event, take a look at the independent reviews from Mike Morrison, Donald H Taylor, TheHRD and HRZone (The Editors Blog: Charlie Duff) on their respective blog posts.

Photo's of the event can also be seen here and here.  For those of you already using twitter you can catch up on some of the many comments by reviewing the hashtag stream at #ConnectingHR.

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VENUE

Once again, we'll be meeting in a private room in The Square Pig just North of Holborn Station.

And once again, the event will be free to attend, including drinks, sponsored by Courtenay HR.

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The event is open to:

  • Individuals currently working inside an organisation as an HR, Recruitment, L&D, OD, Internal Communication Professional.
  • Journalist, Academic or Representative of Professional Body.

Suppliers please check note on the eventbrite site.

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EVENT STRUCTURE

The event is designed as an informal networking and sharing opportunity.  We are hoping to include a few short 'open mic' sessions at intervals during the evening to give the attendees a chance to ask questions and share their experiences.  Further details will be posted nearer the time.  We will also be sharing more details of the first HR 'Unconference' to be held in the UK.

We're sure this will be a really great networking event and we look forward to seeing you there!

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Event Organisers:

@joningham & @garelaos

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Attendee List

 

  • Nicola Texeira, Recruitment Business Partner, easyJet Airline Company
    Twitter name: nicky_recruit
  • Vasiliki Ntasiou, Human Resource Service Centre Europe , Chevron United Kingdom Limited
  • Marc Weedon, HR Director, EMEA, Polycom
  • Donna Halkyard, Head of Diversity & Inclusion, BAE Systems
  • Jon Weedon, Internal Communications, Betfair
    Twitter name: j0n1
    Blog address: http://www.j0n1.com/
  • Emma Baker, HR Manager, ea Consulting Group
  • Nigel Marsden, HR Manager, UBS
  • Marguerite Norval, HR Administrator, Hays Recruitment
  • Martin Tremaine, Various, Various
  • Denise Binks, HR Business Partner, Experian Plc
    Twitter name: hikingcharlotte
  • Jenny Simnett, Director, Workplace Transformation, Great Place to Work Institute
  • Paul Massey, Solicitor, n/a
    Twitter name: paulmassey
  • Darren Hockaday, HR Director, London Overground Rails Ops Ltd
  • James Brook, MD, Titan Talent/Strengths Partnership
  • Amanda Warwick, HR Manager, Proximity London
  • Andrew Currie, Director, L &D, Burger King
  • Natalia McDonald, Head of HR & Development, Parliament
  • Debbie Brooks, HR Director, Lexis PR
    Twitter name: Dbrookslexishr
  • Peter de Vere, Head of HR, Baigent digital
  • Catherine Mayo, Recruitment and Talent Attraction Officer, Talis
    Twitter name: catherinmayo
  • Rob Moss, Online editor, Personnel Today
    Twitter name: @robmoss
  • Sophie Theadom, HR Advisor, Financial Times
    Twitter name: Sophie
  • Jennie McClymont, HR Officer, Melli Bank plc
  • Wasim Benharch, Training Executive, BSkyB
    Twitter name: WasimB1
  • sarah foster, Chief People Officer, talis
    Twitter name: HRWPB
    Blog address: www,ocelotchatelaine.blogspot.com
    Other blog / community etc: talis sharedinnovation
  • Noel O'Reilly, Editor, XpertHR
    Twitter name: noeloreilly
    Other blog / community etc: Linked In
  • Nikki White, Talent Attraction Co-ordinator, BSkyB
    Twitter name: @workforsky
  • John Rason, Consultant, John Rason Consulting Solutions
  • Karen Furminger, Independent HR Consultant, Karen Furminger MCIPD
    Twitter name: KarenFurminger
  • Colin Minto, Head of Resourcing, G4S plc
    Twitter name: @colinminto
  • Louise Curtis, Recruitment, Courtenay HR
  • Jenni Wheller, Internal Communications Manager, SSP UK Limited
    Twitter name: @jenniwheller
  • Klothilde Ganzer, Global HR Manager, epay
    Twitter name: kganzer
  • Georgia Evelyn, SHRM, Revlon
  • heather spencer, Programe Manager for the UK-China programmes, GTI solutions
  • Cherilyn Milner, Senior HR Advisor, PR Newswire
  • Claire Schueler, HR Manager, The Financial Times Ltd
  • Suzie Garth, HR Advisor, Financial Times
  • Mary Appleton, Assistant Editor, Changeboard
    Twitter name: @Changeboard
  • Mok MOK, MD, Innovation Beehive
    Twitter name: Mokbeehive
  • Kirsty Devine, Senior HR Manager, Financial Times
    Twitter name: ftvacancies
  • Anna Birtwistle, Associate (Employment lawyer), CM Murray LLP
    Twitter name: AnnaYoshica
  • Gary Franklin, Recruitment Manager, Symantec

 

 

Sign-up here: http://connectinghr.eventbrite.com/

 

 

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Monday, 31 May 2010

Social recruiting training

 

    I was asked by Katie at the Kenexa Summit about training opportunities in social recruiting.  Rather than reply individually, I thought I’d link to some people and resources here.

Firstly, courses and workshops:

 

There’s also Bill Boorman’s TRU unconferences (see my posts).

 

None of these are provided that regularly so secondly, people – in addition to those above (you can learn an awful lot just be following peoples’ blogs and tweets in this area):

 

(sorry to those others I’ve very temporarily forgotten.)

 

Also see all my blog posts on social recruitment.

 

It might also be worth including that Amparo Díaz LLairó is currently writing a book on Recruiting 2.0.

 

And of course, although I focus on broader social HR / HR 2.0 requirements, I’m always ready to help any client with social recruiting (as well as social learning etc) too…

 

 

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Sunday, 30 May 2010

Confidence, engagement and human capital

 

   Indy replied to my recent post on engagement, and my question about why Kenexa’s, and other, engagement surveys don’t seem to pay as much attention as I’d expect to the social aspects of engagement.

His view:

“Who's right and who's wrong? That's a big discussion - but my instinct is to take the middle road and say rather that you and Jack are talking about two different things.


Assuming the picture shows some of his results, he's talking about the commitment of an employee to an organisation - or possibly a "job." The social stuff is about how connected someone feels about the work that they do. The decisions people make are a mixture of two axes...

Actually, now I've typed that, I don't know if there's a clear divide, the axes are not orthogonal. My experience is that even if someone really enjoys their work in a social sense, they may move if some of Jack's factors are a problem. And vice versa...

One thing I'd throw in is that there are different situations, but a lot of the time, individuals in a job are choosing between staying, or moving to one that is essentially similar. Social engagement is often a tipping point issue..”

 

I think Indy’s right.  These are different, albeit interconnected, things.

And actually, something similar was thrown up at the conference.

So Kenexa define their engagement index as the average level of agreement for:

  • I am proud to tell people I work for my company
  • Overall, I am extremely satisfied with my company as a place to work
  • I rarely think about looking for a new job with another company
  • I would recommend this place to others as a good place to work.

 

But in one session, we looked at another survey on employee confidence.  I’m not sure if this survey focuses on activities or outcomes, but Thomas Rasmussen from A.P. Moller Maersk certainly defined it as the end people outcome of:

  • Employee Engagement
  • Good leadership (leading at the right level)
  • The right organizational setup (large enough roles.

 

There’s certainly no reason that confidence couldn’t be an outcome based index.

It goes back to the point I made last year as part of a longer series of posts on engagement surveys that we should really be focusing on surveying much more than just engagement:

“In my last post, I provided some advice on surveying the engagement of your workforce.  But why stop there?  What's so magical about engagement which means this is the only thing you think about surveying, when human capital consists of so much more?  As I've described, engagement is just one bucket inside the bigger bucket of human capital.  And this itself is contained within the even bigger bucket of organisational capability (human + organisation + social capital).  So why not survey these?”

 

The need for social connection may not show up as part on an engagement index, depending on how you define it (pride, satisfaction, retention, advocacy in the case of Kenexa), but this doesn’t mean that this, or things like confidence, can’t have a sizeable impact on discretionary behaviours and business results.

It’s important to focus on outcomes rather than just activities, but we need to ensure that we’re paying attention to the right ones.

Any more thoughts?

 

 

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Thursday, 27 May 2010

Promotion (and salary) envy

 

   My last but one post argued that despite Jack Wiley’s findings, the workplace is a very social environment, and we need to influence its sociology, if we want to maximise engagement and collaboration.

And as I stated at the summit, social media has a role to play in this, but so does lots of other things we’ve traditionally done within HR.  Like the way we promote people, and pay them…

Interesting then to see these two articles today:

1.   The workplace is a seething hotbed of promotion envy – HR Magazine (UK)

“A survey of more than 1,300 employees finds the office is dog-eat-dog after 34%, of employees in small businesses said that they would purposely sabotage a colleague's chances of a promotion, rising to 62% in larger businesses.”

And why?  “because they believe their co-workers would do the same to them if the situation were reversed”.

 

2.   BT union demands inflation-busting pay rise or they'll strike – Management Today

“It’s a bit hard to imagine anyone looking at the strategy currently being employed by the unions at BA and using it as model for their own industrial relations. But that appears to be the case at BT, another once-nationalised giant that’s been feeling the pain lately: its biggest union is threatening to walk out on strike unless management agrees to an inflation-busting 5% rise. Now it’s true that things are looking up at BT, and the £1m bonus CEO Ian Livingston stands to pocket as a result is being used by the unions as justification for their demands. But at a time when we’re barely out of recession, when unemployment is rising and BT itself has just shed 35,000 staff, isn’t it about time the union faced up to harsh economic reality?”

 

Yes, but if we see organisations as societies in their own right, and acknowledge that people will behave dysfunctionally if they believe they’ve been treated unfairly in just a relatively minor way (eg being passed over for promotion), then how do we think people are going to react when their CEO gets paid 40 times their average salary (£850k salary plus £1.2m bonus never mind his share options compared to an average salary of £50k)?

Is it really that hard to predict?

 

As Andy Kerr, deputy general secretary of the Communication Workers Union has said:

"It's all about fairness. We don't mind senior executives getting bonuses, but we want all staff to share in the success of the company."

 

Well, yes.  It is.  I’ve used the terms envy and dysfunctional in this post.  But I don’t mean to indicate that they’re that negative, that they’re things we should expect people to be able to avoid, or that they’re limited to a small group of people (let’s just call them ‘C’ players, shall we?).

I don’t and they’re not.  They’re  very natural emotions, behaviours and reactions that affect us all.

We’re human.  We’re social animals operating in social environments.  We’re not cogs in a wheel.

 

Interestingly, I included BT as a case study organisation in my presentation on social media and HR.  And think that in many other ways, it’s a very people-focused business – for example, its long-standing policy of avoiding compulsory redundancies  (it’s also a former client).  But with this sort of pay differential, can any organisation really be that socially functional, or that effective?

 

Picture credit: nicked from HR Magazine’s article, sorry.  I did want to include a picture of someone ‘slapping their forehead’ but they don’t seem to have any of these in wikimedia commons where I try to take my pictures from – and I didn’t think its alternative suggestion of ‘shopping in moorehead’ was that relevant!

 

 

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“People join organisations but leave managers” and more HR twadle

 

   One thing I did agree with Jack Wiley on, and was pleased to hear him say (because sometimes I’ve felt I’m the only one who does) was that the adage, ‘people join organisations but leave managers’, is a myth.  That the data just doesn’t back it up.

Of course, there’s a lot more of these fallacies as well.  One of my other favourites is ‘you can’t manage what you can’t measure’.  It’s.  Not.  True.

There are more of these in Jeffrey Pfeffer’s books, ‘Hard facts, dangerous half-truths and total nonsense’ (with Bob Sutton) and ‘What were they thinking?’.  And in Bob Sutton’s blog.  (Yes, OK, I know these two are fans of evidence based management and would therefore probably want you to measure so that you can manage.  So?).

 

Anyway, regarding ‘people join organisations but leave managers’, Jack Wiley suggests the issue is just a lot more complicated than that.

Kenexa’s WorkTrends survey shows that the key factors influencing stay / leave decisions in Europe at least are:

  1. Promising future for one’s self
  2. Excited about one’s work
  3. Confidence in organisation’s future
  4. Can balance career goals and family/personal life
  5. Contribution is valued
  6. Opportunity for growth/development
  7. Manager treats me with respect and dignity
  8. Safety is a priority
  9. CR efforts increase satisfaction
  10. Feel part of a team.

 

The manager is there, at #7, and they’re also going to influence the rest of the factors.  But it’s certainly not all about them.

 

Like Jack, I’ve seen data which discredits Marcus Buckingham’s suggestion (OK, I don’t think he was the first person to suggest it, but I think it’s down to him the phrase draws 1,480,000 results in Google).

For example, when I was at Penna, we produced evidence, which I found compelling, that while this might be true for production workers, knowledge workers were much more influenced by organisational values and senior leadership.

And didn’t Theresa Welbourne produce some similar findings suggesting that low performers might be engaged most by their managers but high performers again were influenced by broader issues (I might be making this up but I don’t think so).

It doesn’t even stand up to a decent bit of introspection – which to me at least is much more powerful than all of Jack’s stats.  Think back over the last 10 years of your career and reflect on when and how you’ve been engaged, and why you’ve left or joined organisations.  I bet it’s not ‘I joined because of the organisation and left cos of my manager’.

It’s complete rubbish.  So why do so many HR people trot it out?  Is it simply because they’re so busy, they just don’t stop to think?

I hope so.  Because the alternatives are far more worrying!

 

Photo: Gordon Bown (the exception that proves the rule?)

 

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Posted by Jon Ingham at 21:37 2 comments
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Social engagement – fact or fiction?

 

   In my end-of-day keynote at Kenexa’s Euro Summit, I talked about how the social aspects of an organisation play an important role in influencing the engagement levels of employees.

I referred in particular to some of:

 

I used these arguments to suggest that much of what engages us at work comes from our relationships with the people we work alongside.

So I was paying particular interest to Jack Wiley’s keynote at the start of the day in which Jack described the findings of Kenexa’s 2010 WorkTrends survey, wondering to what extent this social type of engagement would appear in their research.

The answer is it didn’t.  Hardly at all – just in terms of the #10 reason that people leave (feeling part of a team)*.

 

I carried on anyway – and I don’t think anyone noticed the divergence in our views.

But what’s behind the discrepancy?  Who’s right, who’s wrong.  I’d love to learn your views.

 

 

* PS the social aspect of the organisation did come through in some of the other presentations.  For example, Stefanie Confurius from Philips talked about their focus on:

  • Me and my company
  • Me and my manager
  • Me and my department.

 

Within this last area, Philips have been running some deep dive sessions and team building events to increase (social) engagement.

 

In addition, Nicky Ivory-Chapman from McDonald’s explained that one aspect of this company’s EVP is Friends and Family, which includes:

  • Everyone treated the same
  • Inclusiveness
  • Diversity
  • Same access to training and development
  • Progress if they wish.

 

So it’s there, but still not that strongly…

 

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Wednesday, 26 May 2010

Kenexa Euro conference presentation

 

   I told attendees at Kenexa’s European summit that I’d provide them with the links I used in my presentation on social media, HR, engagement and collaboration.  So here you go:

 

Social HR / HR 2.0 (we focused on recruitment since this was a recruitment and retention conference, and the greatest number of people – about 20 – already used social media in their recruitment):

 

Social engagement:

 

We also talked about the benefits of extending this socialisation outside of the organisation:

 

Social collaboration:

 

We then spoke about the opportunity to combine social media with other activities to enhance eg collaboration.  See these posts on Cisco’s collaborative structures:

 

More posts following the conference coming up shortly.

 

If you were at the summit, do comment below.  And join up on Twitter / follow me at @joningham.  Then continue the conversation at the Connecting HR tweet-up (after-work meet-up for HR people interested in using Twitter and social media) in London on 24 June.

 

PS:

 

 

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Tuesday, 25 May 2010

Presenting in an online world (Talking HR 028)

 

   Tomorrow I’m going to be keynoting at Kenexa’s European Summit.

It’s a face-to-face rather than an online / social media presentation, but it’s a presentation about social media, so I was thinking back to our last Talking HR podcast on presenting in an online / social world:

Listen to internet radio with Talking HR on Blog Talk Radio

This show was a triggered by my question in the previous one, about how presenting changes, either when presenting online, or when presenting f2f but there’s lot’s of social media stuff going on as well (eg incorporating the twitter backchannel).

However, as I’ll be talking about tomorrow, I think the social world is  much bigger thing than just a world which uses social media.  It’s one in which ‘social’ is important – ie one in which we need to put value on connecting, relationships, conversations and so on.

The most important thing in this new world isn’t anything to do with social media, it’s about being social.  And the one thing we forgot to talk about on the show, in terms of presenting f2f, is allowing time to be social.  For Q&A; for conversations over coffee before and after a talk; and for just being around.

It’s why I think it’s increasingly dissonant for presenters to stroll in and stroll out again as soon as they’ve finished speaking (often protected by minders).  And of course, it’s particularly incongruent if they’re talking about social media / management 2.0 (Gary Hamel at al take note). 

It’s why I’ll be at the Kenexa conference all day tomorrow.  I hope to meet some of you, dear readers, there.

 

 

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Thursday, 15 April 2010

Kenexa Euro Summit, May 2010

Kenexa Euro Summit   I’ll be presenting on HR and Social Media at the Kenexa Euro Summit in London on 26 May.

“In today's current economic environment the importance of attracting, motivating, engaging and retaining the industry's highest performing employees has never been more vital to your organisation's success. This year's conference will feature a full day of thought-provoking sessions that will help you discover how to identify and nurture high performers and create the right environments within your organisation for them to thrive.

 

Why You Should Attend

Guarantee yourself the ultimate learning experience as you explore, learn, share and network at Kenexa's complimentary flagship European event with senior HR members from Europe's most elite organisations.

  • Learn Best-in-class thought leadership from Europe's top HR influencers around the themes of recruitment and retention
  • Find out exclusive business research and data around key business metrics and performance
  • Listen to case study presentations from leading European and global organisations
  • Gain insight and adopt best practices around the latest HR challenges and innovation
  • Discover the industry's latest cutting edge HR technology, featuring product roadmaps and demonstrations
  • Network with senior HR members and influencers and create the invaluable personal connections you need to help you overcome your challenges in the forthcoming year.

You can register for a free place at the event by clicking here.

Let me know if you read this blog and you will be attending.  It would be great to say hello.

 

You can also read an article from me in the latest edition of Kenexa’s Evolve HR.

 

 

 

  • Consulting - Research - Speaking  - Training -  Writing
  • Strategy  -  Talent  -  Engagement  -  Change and OD
  • Contact  me to  create more  value for  your business
  • jon  [dot] ingham [at] strategic [dash] hcm [dot] com

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