Posts belonging to Category talent management

Though we did write about Cathy Benko, vice president and managing principal at Deloitte Consulting, closer to when her book, The Career Lattice, came out (she actually co-authored it with Molly Anderson, Deloitte’s director of talent), her message as Wednesday morning’s keynoter at Impact 2013 was inspiring nonetheless.

It was nice to hear (and not just edit) her premise that talent management and employee engagement can no longer be about climbing the corporate ladder, but should instead be thought of as more of a lattice system, with far more employees moving laterally across an organization than waiting to be booted up to higher levels of management and eventually the executive suite.

“There is this tidal wave of change [around talent management] staring us in the face,” Benko told attendees. “We need to accept it and move forward.”

But that’s not easy, she said, citing research findings that show HR is the “least agile” position in business today. With changes in society, including the changing family structure, and with this lattice organization taking hold, employers and their HR leaders are going to have to be even more creative and must lead the way in giving employees something in return for having to give up this ever-dwindling ladder-climbing, promotion-based workforce.

That something, said Benko, involves taking charge and establishing more robust workplace-flexibility programs … programs that actually work on a more transparent basis. Engagement levels will immediately respond to such an effort. “It used to be,” she said, “that engagement meant just showing up; now, it involves many more non-measurable aspects,” including, but not limited to, skills-based volunteering opportunities and corporate-sustainability efforts that the new force of Gen Yers can believe in. And, yes, flexibility.

Benko encouraged HR professionals to not only dismantle the corporate ladder, but focus more now on “systematizing agility” and helping employees stay relevant in their job functions so they can move around better.

“Staying relevant in this business environment,” she said, “is a skill [and job] unto itself.”

She also encouraged HR not to mistake the business models they’re comfortable with for those they should be advancing.

Do not confuse a portfolio of projects, programs and policies — though admittedly all necessary — “with a system of change,” she said.

So how does HR value more of the intangible value of people, all wanting and needing a much more transparent, mobile and engaging experience in a much flatter organization? Benko posed.

For starters, she said, consider the fact that “people trust who they know and choose to follow more than their corporate leaders.” Citing research from Edelman’s 2013 Trust Barometer, she told attendees that 69 percent of respondents said they “trust those they feel are experts more than their employers or CEOs.”

Research also showed companies that have figured all this out, said Benko, showed 40 percent more profitability, 78 percent more productivity and 100 percent more return on assets.

“Where do you take all this from here?” she said. “That’s your call.”

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HR’s always talking about the importance of having a robust talent pipeline. But what about its own pipeline? Is the profession doing enough to develop the next generation of HR leader?

To that end, the National Academy of Human Resources launched its Ram Charan HR Essay Contest in 2011, aimed at recognizing thought leadership among university undergraduate and graduate students in the fields of HR, industrial/labor relations and related fields.

The contest is made possible through a generous donation by NAHR Distinguished Fellow Ram Charan to the NAHR Foundation.

For the 2013 contest—which has an Aug. 1, 2013 deadline—the students are being asked to address the topic of electronic technology and social media, and how these are affecting the employment relationship (from hiring to engagement to retention) between employers and employees; as well as the roles, responsibilities and contributions of HR organizations. Clearly a timely and relevant topic.

Prizes of $20,000, $10,000 and $5,000 will be awarded, with the winners being officially announced at the Nov. 7 NAHR Annual Dinner. (Essays will be evaluated and judged by a panel of HR professionals who are Fellow of the NAHR.)

Kudos to Charan, a respected author, speaker and business consultant, and the NAHR for providing students with this worthwhile opportunity. Details can be found on the NAHR site.

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Pretty funny — yet telling — assessment in the latest HRExaminer report by Marc Effron of the current state of human resource leaders’ abilities to determine and defend talent management’s return-on-investment.

I was hooked into reading it — with a slight grin on my face — by the title alone: Talent Management ROI (Ridiculously Overwrought Insecurity).

Effron — an HRExaminer editorial advisory board member; president of The Talent Strategy Group, based in New York; author of One Page Talent Management; and overall well-respected HR expert — starts his treatise (I guess a better description would be his ”sad chuckle”) by taking the reader to a recent breakfast, focused on talent management in the financial-services industry, where one participant said having better ROI would help prove talent management’s value.

“Unfortunately,” writes Effron, “my literal response was, ‘Those who worry about talent management ROI are insecure HR leaders who feel the need to justify their existence.’ ”

Pretty hard-hitting. So are his reasons for blasting “any concerns over a lack of ROI diminishing our ability to prove talent management’s value: 1) your CEO either gets it or s/he doesn’t, 2) your CFO won’t believe you anyway, 3) HR’s ROI calculations are often laughable and 4) broad claims [i.e., the 'generalized research findings' often used by HR] don’t yield company-specific benefits.”

And those reasons are almost as hard-hitting as his descriptions of the last two on the list, taking aim (for No. 3) at an ROI calculation he says he found on the Society for Human Resource Management’s website (“You can pass a solar system through the holes in this logic, yet it’s not unusual math in many HR departments”) and finding fault with a “Watson Wyatt” finding (for No. 4).

OK, I’ll admit, citing something from Watson Wyatt long after its merger with Towers Perrin to become Towers Watson seems a bit dated, but who amongst you can poke a single hole in what Effron concludes?

If you question the value-add of talent-management activities at your company, answer these questions:

• Do you thoroughly understand your company’s business strategy?
• Do you understand how your senior team wants talent managed?
• Have you created talent processes that are being executed and that reflect the two questions above?

If you can respond affirmatively to those three, it’s likely that your talent-management activities will have a positive return on investment. That should help sooth any lingering insecurity.”

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Much has been made of the mass employee exodus we may start to see as the long-sluggish job market slowly stabilizes, and how companies must work to retain critical talent now if they want to thrive in the near future.

Well, employers don’t seem to be making too much of it.

That’s according to a study from AMA Enterprise, a division of the New York-based American Management Association, which asked nearly 1,000 companies what they think of employees expressing their intentions to seek new positions. Employers answered:

• It’s nothing new for employees to keep an eye out for new opportunities, and I don’t regard the present situation as something unusual (69 percent).

• This is a growing mindset among our employees, and I expect many to seek a new job as soon as they’re able (24 percent).

• This has become a prevalent attitude among our employees and an urgent issue our organization needs to address (7 percent).

So, that’s nearly three-quarters of participating companies shrugging off the notion that their employees could be eyeballing the exits in large numbers. And, when asked how urgent senior management at their organizations regards the potential or actual turnover situation, 39 percent said “not so urgent,” with another 22 percent saying leadership considers the matter “not at all urgent.”

Maybe your organization shouldn’t be more concerned with workers dreaming of greener pastures now than at any other time. Or maybe its ignoring the symptoms of what could prove to be a big problem. Either way, keeping a close watch on the door probably wouldn’t hurt, according to Sandi Edwards, senior vice president of AMA Enterprise.

“The lack of focus on turnover tells me that many top-level executives are not tuned into the widespread worker dissatisfaction found in so much recent research,” said Edwards, in a statement.

Intent to leave is a key indicator of engagement and commitment to the organization. If management wants the best out of its people, they need to be aware of their stress and contribution levels. Management needs to work with them individually to understand what will meet their career goals along with what has to be done to drive the organization forward.”

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I came across this study from Randstad US  the other day that speaks to something I wrote a feature about back in our mid-October digital edition — that younger and older workers are much more closely aligned in temperament, taste and priorities than either demographic group is with Gen Xers.

Mind you, the studies are considering two different groups of older workers, baby boomers and mature workers, but the general finding seems to be that millennials’ goals and needs at work mirror those of their parents’ generation (and even the next one back) more than they do the goals and needs of those who came just before them.

In Randstad’s “Engagement Study,” it finds employees in two demographically opposed age brackets (millennials, born 1979 to 1994, and mature workers, born before 1946) share a common vocational verdict: They both expressed a more positive outlook on their careers than other demographics surveyed.

In fact, 89 percent of mature workers and 75 percent of millennials say they enjoy going to work every day, and a majority of both groups feel inspired to do their best at work (95 percent of mature respondents and 80 percent of millennials). These workers also perceive a higher morale in the workplace than other age groups, with 69 percent of millennials and 64 percent of mature workers finding a positive energy at work, compared to just a 53-percent average among other groups, including Gen X.

Similarly, in my October Q&A with talent-management and demographic expert Sylvia Ann Hewlett titled “Rethinking Demographics,” she presents her case for millennials and baby boomers (born 1946 through 1964) being cut from the same cloth when it comes to their interests in flexible schedules and social connections, their commitments to bettering the planet and finding meaning in their work, and even the fact that they both value loyalty to their employers.

On the contrary, says Hewlett — whose research into this was published in a Harvard Business Review article, ”How Gen Y & Boomers Will Reshape Your Agenda” — Gen Xers (born 1965 through 1978) are the lone group among the three. She calls them “the generation of hard knocks … hit hardest by two or three major recessions [and] burned in underwater mortgages with young children.”

Both Hewlett and Jim Link, managing director for Randstad US, say companies need to do a much better job incorporating these similarities and differences into engagement and talent-management strategies. Link says it’s “critical for companies [to] dive into what engagement and retention drivers are aligned and not aligned [in order to] identify and prioritize the larget opportunities to improve employee engagement … .”

Such as, you might ask? For one, Hewlett suggests partnering young and old in a kind of training-up-and-training-down program. Another might involve sending boomers and millennials out together on volunteer projects.

Both say initiating programs with demographic alignment in mind will reap rewards you can’t even imagine till you try.

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We often joke about how many companies have to actually do something before we can safely call it a trend. Three? Five? Ten?

In the realm of telework practices, we now have at least two companies that have announced a change in course in the past couple of weeks.

On the heels of Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer’s decision a couple of weeks ago to nix telework, Best Buy announced earlier this week that it had cancelled its much-publicized Results Only Work Environment program. As most of you already know, the big-box retailer essentially gave birth to the approach in 2005. (HRE last revisited the ROWE concept in detail in 2010, with a story titled “Anytime, Anywhere.”)

Apparently, Best Buy CEO Hubert Joly wasn’t a huge fan of the policy. In February, the Star Tribune quoted him as saying that the ROWE policy was “ ‘fundamentally flawed from a leadership standpoint’ in that it effectively assumed the only acceptable way to lead is by delegating.”

Erin Kelly, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota who has studied the effectiveness of ROWE, told that same paper more recently that companies are unfairly scapegoating flexible-work programs for their subpar performances. “I’m concerned that these flexibility initiatives and telework initiatives are getting blamed for what may be other problems those organizations are facing in the broader market.”

(No secret both Yahoo! and Best Buy have had their share of troubles lately.)

So should we expect another shoe to drop on telework in the coming weeks? Your guess is as good as mine. But even were that not to happen, I suspect the debate over the pros and cons of telework is going to continue to have some legs.

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Can a tweet be more important than the all-mighty resume?

According to this USA Today piece, the answer could be yes, and sooner than you may think:

Several tech-forward marketing companies are going where few have gone before: they’re ditching the résumé and the conventional job interview process for tweets. A simple tweet or two — sometimes called Twitterviews — can lead to a job.  In a nation where unemployment stands at 7.9%, how you tweet can now determine how employable you are.

The story mentions a few examples where such a novel hiring process was employed, but cautions that not every position will be available for such a hiring process. Says Jan Melnik, a career coach from Durham, Conn.:

“You won’t see a CEO — or a college professor — hired based on a tweet,” she says. Nor would she hire someone based solely on a tweet.  But, she laughs, “I would hire someone on  Skype.”

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Is your HR department world-class? Would you like it to be? It wouldn’t hurt to check out the latest Book of Numbers research from the Hackett Group, which has been putting out these reports for the past 17 years. Hackett defines “world class” as “companies that achieve top-quartile performance across a weighted array of efficiency and effectiveness metrics.” The findings are based on detailed benchmarks of Global 1000 companies over the past two years.

World-class HR departments make far greater use of self-service for payroll, training, total-rewards administration and staffing services than typical companies do. They also focus on keeping it simple: they use nearly 70 percent fewer job grades, 40 percent fewer health and welfare plans and 40 percent fewer compensation plans than typical companies of their size. They have 20 percent fewer managers but with greater spans of control, which leads to streamlined management, reduced costs and quicker decisionmaking, says Hackett. They’re also better at outsourcing than typical companies, retaining fewer internal staff associated with processes that have been outsourced, which helps them realize greater cost benefits from the arrangement than other companies, which tend to make few internal changes after outsourcing.

World-class HR departments are heavily focused on employee development, says Hackett. They dedicate 15 percent more in spending and allocate more staff than typical companies do to strategic workforce planning and tend to have more staff skilled in areas such as anlytics and modeling. They’re focused on identifying skills needed by their company today and in the future, and often take a “multi-year” perspective that lets them develop needed skills internally. They have nearly twice the number of internal placements than typical companies, and are able to recruit staff externally much more quickly when necessary. They also take a rigorous approach to employee engagement, measuring it regularly and equipping managers with the skills they need to guide people effectively.

In addition to being more tightly integrated with business strategy than their counterparts at typical companies, world-class HR departments are more engaged in managing and facilitating organizational change. And, while 20 percent of typical HR departments report metrics for HR-managed projects, world-class HR departments do this three times more often, and close to 80 percent report organizational metrics for change initiatives. Doing this, says Hackett, “helps HR leadership build credibility with executive management.”

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Just when you think you’ve come across every kind of challenging employee …

In a new book, British psychologist, journalist, best-selling author and broadcaster Oliver James has identified three types of dysfunctional personalities commonly found in white-collar work environments: the psychopath, the Machiavellian and the narcissist. These personality types, he writes, often seem to possess an innate knack for climbing the corporate ladder, and many organizations seem to actually reward their ruthless behavior.

Here’s the even scarier part. In Office Politics: How to Thrive in a World of Lying, Backstabbing and Dirty Tricks, James introduces a fourth dysfunctional type or “triadic person” that combines the traits of these three personality types to form some type of self-involved, psychopathic, scheming super-beast ready to run roughshod over the workplace.

James describes how these “triadics” have a “dangerous, yet effective mix of a lack of empathy, self-centeredness, deviousness and self-regard” that can propel them to the top of organizations. He offers up fictitious examples such as Sopranos skipper Tony Soprano and Gordon Gekko, the corporate raider, antagonist and symbol of unfettered greed in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street. He also provides some real-life, albeit anonymous illustrations of calculating, cunning or just plain cruel behavior displayed by those in leadership positions. For instance, he writes of an advertising and film executive who once introduced a female colleague by saying, “The last time I saw Suzy she was stark naked,” and referred to a respected academic as having “little capacity for original thought,” but “a great talent for acquiring and taking credit for others’ ideas.”

James also recalls partners from what he describes as an “elite” law firm, who possessed social skills “akin to someone with Asperger’s syndrome, so unaware were they of the thoughts and feelings of others.”

Or, consider the investment banker who got his position by fooling an interview panel into believing he was an expert on a product he knew nothing about, and further duped his new boss into thinking he came from an exceedingly wealthy background.

Finally, and not surprisingly, James predicts this new breed of superslime in our midst will cause colossal headaches for their employees, and offers a word of caution for the companies employing them.

“This dark triad of characteristics is very likely to be present in that person in your office who causes you so much trouble … ” he writes.

The likelihood of your daily working life being sacrificed by a person who is some mixture of psychopathic, Machiavellian and narcissistic is high. If you do not develop the skills to deal with them, they will eat you for breakfast.”

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More bad news on the skills-shortage front since my last post on the subject. This time, the shocker comes in the form of a number, part of the McKinsey Global Institute’s recent World at Work report: By 2020, according to the report, the world could have 40 million too few college-educated workers.

Youch. That’s a huge shortage — as the late George Carlin might have said in his infamous oxymoron routine.

As Tracy McCarthy, senior vice president of human resources at Chicago-based SilkRoad technology, told the Society for Human Resource Management in it’s report (subscription required) on this matter,

This skills shortage, particularly for high-tech skills, has existed in the United States for some time now. If you look at the number of H-1B visa holders, you’ll find the majority are for high-tech skilled workers such as engineers.”

Yes, I’ve been aware of the skills shortage for some time now; I know about the scarcity of math-and-science-proficient engineers (something I keep telling my engineer son to bear in mind and use to his advantage as he plots his future); I just hadn’t seen a 40-million-shortage headcount by 2020 until now.

Ravin Jesuthasan, Chicago-based global-talent-management-practice leader for Towers Watson, says the future gap will come with some friction points too. As he puts it,

While there will be an overall shortage of college-educated talent, there will be dramatic differences across countries. Developed markets like the United States, Japan, Germany and the United Kingdom will experience huge shortages, while countries like India and Indonesia will generate significant surpluses as the key drivers of education, demographics and immigration play out differentially. The challenge for employers will be how they tap into these surpluses; making the mobility of work essential.”

What the McKinsey report does not cover, Jesuthasan adds, are the specific skills that businesses will demand and the gaps relative to those within the current workforce. As noted in Towers Watson’s Global Talent 2021 report, he points out, employers expect to place increasing emphasis on four skill areas: digital skills, agile thinking, interpersonal and communication skills, and global operating skills.

I guess you can look at all this as more fodder for the battle cry to bring the best thinkers of the world together now – from employment, academic, even governmental sectors – to try and solve this thing before the global marketplace closes up shop.

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