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This Is HR’s Opportunity

From the beginning of commerce and organization of labor (and even before that, if we want to get down to brass tacks with our definition of HR), there have been men and women who have dedicated their careers to finding, managing, and maintaining talent.

HR executives oversee the people chain. From the inception of the field, HR’s primary responsibility has been related to managing risk and making sure people were paid and “somewhat” happy, how productive those people were, how productive those people could be, how to solve problems that were standing in the way of that productivity, and so on.

The HR function has spent more time measuring itself than the true performance of the workforce.

Consider this self-fulfilling prophecy: HR departments weren’t expected to do great things, so they did not expect themselves to do great things.

Changes afoot in the HR function are efficient, effective, and most certainly measurable. Gone are the days of vague proclamations and action items gone stagnant. This is our opportunity to move forward and get things done.

Good business sense dictates that the HR department needs to align itself directly with the C-level executives and the corporate missions of the organization, all of which are structured to grow profit, drive revenue, and increase customer satisfaction. When HR takes its expertise in human capital and applies that to the corporate objectives, this makes for not only a successful HR department, but also for a successful corporation.

There are eight domains that the HR and talent management spheres seem to revolve around:

1. Technology
2. Agility both in HR and for the business as a whole. As talent manager, HR bears considerable responsibility for making sure that its company can continue to employ and empower a workforce meant to move the business forward.
3. Finding the right people is a vital part of this challenge.
4. Focusing on—and continually increasing—engagement. What can an HR department do to partner with the business and to create a more deeply engaged workforce?
5. In large part, keeping the workforce engaged will depend on HR’s your understanding of how today’s watercooler works.
6. Measuring the value of people will always be a fundamental concern for HR. HR needs to look at the mandate it has always had—to be the facilitator for the company’s human capital—and see how that capital can truly be measured in quantifiable ways that easily translate to the other execs in the boardroom.
7. Next, to truly push on and get the results that today’s customers and companies demand, HR needs to learn how to operate in an anytime/anyplace world. The boundaries of the workplace have changed alongside the boundaries of the economy.
8. Finally, the HR department needs to take ownership of these technologies rather than foisting them upon the IT department. Understanding what the workforce needs is something that falls under HR’s purview, not IT’s—and in this case, the technology is merely a tool to augment the human capital.

As Averbook puts it, “I can tell you from personal experience that the only way to change and grow is to push and to think differently.”

 

This Isn’t Your Grandparents’ HR

Reimagining the HR Function and Its Use of Technology

On the highest level, the greatest indication that HR’s future is long overdue for a major overhaul is the fact that, as a world, we’ve moved from economies of things to economies of ideas.

HR is no longer tasked with counting machines, and instead now counts people. We must understand the value of those people, have a handle on who those people are and what roles they play, what skills they have, and how we leverage them in the best possible way.

Unlike other segments of industry, HR seems particularly resistant to change—not just from within, but from without as well. Historically, HR has been seen as a reactive support function rather than a proactive profit driver.

HR is a line item—an expense. HR needs to be staffed with employees who are charged with mitigating risk and keeping the lights on—and these aren’t trivial contributions, by any means.

The HR department isn’t going to take on a radically different role in any corporation, but this doesn’t mean that it can’t take on a radically different approach. When HR is aligned with the larger corporate goals, it can then move beyond the basic transaction—acquiring its human capital—and engage it, instead, in a more holistic approach that looks specifically to assess and fill the needs of the changing organization.

If corporate objectives are understood, the HR department can develop its HR objectives. Once those objectives are clearly outlined, the HR technology objectives can be put in place based on that. But if one piece of the puzzle is taken away, then we’re attempting to go forward without a map. This leaves us moving in circles at worst, and standing completely still at best.

In a faster moving, more globally connected workforce, HR can no longer afford to stick its head in the sand and ride the coattails of IT and its upgrades. They need to start steering, and the only way to go is forward.

HR needs to look out, not in. For years, those in the HR function have looked inward to measure their performance. They stacked up their output against benchmarks that applied only to HR. This is no longer good enough.

One thing that often happens with implementing change is that a technology will be changed, but the processes that go along with that technology will be the same. This means that the same mistakes and inefficiencies will continue to be repeated. If HR architects true change, processes must change alongside technology.

 

Change Happens Faster Than Ever: Creating Agility

The most important thing for you to understand about change is that it’s happening—with or without you.

Of the companies on the Fortune 500 in 1987, roughly twenty-five years ago, only sixty-five of those 500 companies—just about 13 percent—remain active. If the corporate landscape is changing, and the people within it are changing, it follows that the processes employed by these organizations must change as well.

HR processes, when left unchanged, can be frustrating and outdated, particularly for Gen Y and Z workers who are used to a certain sense of integration and immediacy. Bringing an employee on board faster means less lag time, more engagement, quicker productivity, and therefore, quicker generation of profit.

For the first time ever, consumers often have access to better technology than the businesses do. We can’t sit on our hands and wait until the perfect thing is engineered, because by then, it will be long obsolete.

Focus on the things you want to be great at, and you’ll understand where your time and energy needs to flow. What’s left after this are the things at which you can afford to simply be good.

Focus, focus, focus. It’s tempting to try to do everything all at once. Don’t. First of all, you can’t, and second of all, you shouldn’t. If you take a strategic approach after understanding your overarching corporate goals, you’ll be able to focus on what’s doable, and moreover, what’s important.

 

How Does Your Bench Look? Managing Talent

From a talent management standpoint, one of the most common problems in organizations is that they struggle with knowing and understanding their talent. Often, organizations do not know what talent they already have, how to manage that talent, how to keep their talent, and/or how to be more forward in acquiring new talent.

Generally organizations do not have a systematic handle on where their workers were hired from, how they heard about the position, what they want to be when they grow up, or what skills the worker has for the long term. They are not sure which positions are truly pivotal positions. In their mind, they’re all the same, and in the HR department, all employees are processed and treated equally. This is truly a fatal error. In reality, there are positions that are more important than others from a talent management standpoint.

Collect data on talent, and put a system in place to engineer optimal performance from each person.

Not knowing what and who you have in your stable is a surefire way to lose them—and quickly. If LinkedIn knows more about your assets than you do, then that means the competition isn’t far behind. Recruiters should reframe their job as talent managers versus solely recruiters.

96 percent of all Millennials surveyed said that the opportunity for growth was most important to them, as opposed to Gen X respondents, who ranked growth as a lower priority. To retain these workers, organizations will need to spend some time familiarizing themselves with—and aligning their goals with—their values.

If the HR department were to have properly aligned its training initiatives with the overarching goals of the business, time and money would be better spent, and employees would be better prepared for the changes to come. This kind of alignment can be achieved through transparent discussion through the corporate chain, but there are also more small-scale, real-time ways that this can happen. One is by actively soliciting and collecting real-time feedback from employees on the various learning events that they complete.

Part of talent management is, of course, offering incentives to those talented assets that we hope to retain. Unfortunately, HR has been behind the curve on this as well—continuing to do what’s comfortable and what has always been done and hoping that it continues to work for the workforce of now and the workforce of ten years from now.

There’s no one-size-fits-all incentive solution, just as there is no silver bullet for acquisition or retention. You must take a long, hard look at your organization and understand its goals, understand the goals of the people who make it up, and then try your hardest to offer something that fits with those goals.

Know your employees. More is always more, in the case of vital information about employees.

 

How to Keep Your Talent: Increasing Engagement

Now that you’ve amassed your appropriate talent pool, you owe it to them—and to your organization—to cast an eye toward keeping them engaged, for both now and for the long term.

Industry estimates provided by Towers Watson per their Global Workforce Study show us that just over a third (35 percent) of their 32,000 survey respondents could be classified as “highly engaged.”

Much as the HR function is at its best when aligned with the larger corporation’s goals and objectives, the individual employee is most engaged when he is aligned with those same objectives. All of the benefits of feeling like he’s part of a larger team with a greater purpose bolster his engagement, his commitment, and the overall quality of his work.

Knowing this, HR leaders need to consider how best to first align themselves with the overall goal and purpose of the organization, and then to impart that alignment to the workforce, staying vigilant to avoid being out of alignment.

Gallup put together an excellent report in 2013 entitled “State of the American Workplace: Employee Engagement Insights for U.S. Business Leaders,” in which they reviewed over 25 million responses to an employee engagement survey over a period that stretched back to 2008.

Their report revealed 70 percent of American workers are not engaged or are actively disengaged. Gallup researchers studied the differences in performance between engaged and actively disengaged business/work units and found that those scoring in the top half on employee engagement nearly doubled their odds of success compared with those in the bottom half. Those at the ninety-ninth percentile had four times the success rate of those at the first percentile.

There’s no silver bullet: Understanding what’s most important to your employees and to your organization should help drive your strategy.

One constant, standard factor that positively impacts engagement levels is communication and interactions. If a company fosters open communication and interactions within its organization—not just between equivalent employees but also between subordinates and supervisors all the way up the chain to the CEO—employees will feel more engaged.

Alignment drives engagement. If your workforce is aligned with your organizational goals and objectives, they’ll be engaged in the mission.

Once you’ve measured the engagement of your workforce and come to understand the feedback they’re giving you, act on it. It’s not good enough just to say to them, “We’re listening.” Listening is an active process. Listening is adapting. Listening is coming up with new and better ways to engage your employees.

Communicate, communicate, communicate. Communication has a positive impact across the board, but particularly where engagement is concerned. If an organization has an open, communicative culture that fosters collaboration and respectful dialogue from the top down, the workforce will emulate this attitude.

 

Teamwork Today: Fostering Collaboration

There is a unique aspect to collaboration today, and that’s the remoteness of the worker, or the potential remoteness of the worker.

Part of what undeniably motivates and engages people in an important social way is the concept of community interactions and communication. In order to keep your workers happy and engaged, you’ll want to foster communication through collaboration.

Greater engagement leads to greater productivity leads to greater bottom lines.

HR as a profession is supposed to be fostering collaboration, claims to be fostering collaboration, but seems scared to death of a collaborative tool—or anything that even remotely resembles that tool.

Social media doesn’t deserve the reputation it has gotten: that it’s just a place where you talk about what you had for lunch. It’s a place where people can learn from each other, understand who the experts are in an organization, reach out to those experts, and get things done for customers and colleagues—much faster than they’ve been able to before.

The term “social” is throwing people off, whether or not it’s warranted. Really, all we mean by this is sort of a slang term for collaborative and interactional.

It’s important to note that what ultimately makes flexible work environments successful—and work environments in today’s knowledge economy in general, also—is having a collaborative culture and infrastructure built into the organization. It’s not enough to pay lip service to the idea of collaboration and flexibility, rolling out a tool here or there, but then stifling your workforce’s use of that tool or their desire to collaborate.

You don’t want to create a culture where your employees keep their mouths shut until happy hour, when the chatter can turn destructive and put up a barrier to further engagement.

If you have a social media or flexible work arrangement policy that truly reflects your values, and those values have been properly communicated to your workforce, those policies will ultimately be a success. Using social/collaborative tools properly is simply another extension of workplace responsibility and accountability.

An organization full of leaders that encourage engagement and make themselves available to engage with is an organization well on the way to implementing collaboration and collaborative tools in the absolute best possible way.

Collaboration can happen using remote technology just as much as face-to-face.

The way that we think of “face time” in the office and the way that we think of telecommuting for workers who may need or want to work remotely should change along with these shifting realities.

Social tools aren’t a luxury, nor are they time-wasters.

Good employees will always be good employees. Don’t let your fear of what can happen on social media sites keep you from advancing with the rest of the world.

 

Making Heads Count: Measuring the Value of People

One of the things that HR has tried to be good at over the decades is counting heads.

Row Henson, Averbook’s mentor at PeopleSoft, said, “The Holy Grail of HR is to shift from counting heads to making heads count, and we’re missing out if we can’t find it.”

What HR needs to do to ensure success—and not just for an individual department, but also for the organization as a whole—is to organize a strategic shift away from a philosophy that measures people by the numbers rather than making those individuals count for something.

There’s not necessarily a standard set of metrics and there’s no technology that you can purchase that will show you what you “should” be measuring. There’s no standard scorecard.

The absolute first and foremost thing that has to happen for your measurements and metrics to actually mean something is that they must be aligned to whatever the corporate or organizational goals and objectives are.

If you’re measuring time to fill with no end goal in mind, or if you have an end goal and you’re not measuring the proper metric, then you’re just spinning your wheels.

The information gleaned from them must be delivered to people who can actually do something about the issue at hand/do something productive and proactive with this information. If the information is kept inside the HR silo, used only to help the HR team come up with modeling and predictions to help their individual team’s end goals, that’s not helping the business.

As an HR leader, the role should be to not just gather the information, but to deliver it with prescriptive action items that can be implemented, or at least considered, by the decision makers. Easier said than done, perhaps.

HR needs to have a master data strategy—a plan in place that allows them to get all the data in one easily accessible format and system such that they can then generate the information and achieve alignment, delivery, and prescriptive measures with that data.

Understanding and implementing a master data management strategy will help move the focus away from rolling out modules and toward rolling out processes that enable data to flow from place to place. This is the first step to making sure that all data is stored and accessible in a way that it’s actually useful to the organization.

Focus on more than just the data. Your measurements should be looked at from a high-level organizational point of view, rather than just from an HR standpoint. Deliver your measurements to people that matter. You should always be delivering your data specifically to those who can actually do something with that information. There must be prescriptions tied to the information.

 

Helping the Workforce Work Better and Faster with Cloud-Based Technology

The notion that the HR of the past was a “full-service” model, whereas today it’s asking employees to take part in “self-service,” is just that—a notion.

Stop calling it “self-service!” Promote it as a more usable tool, a quicker tool, a tool of the people and for the people—but don’t make it sound like your employees are going to have to stand at a gas station getting covered in grease and soot waiting to fill up their own tank. Clients should call this type of technology direct access—it sounds more positive, it’s absolutely accurate, and it lets employees know that the power rests in their hands.

WIIFM, or What’s In It For Me? HR must stop asking this question as it relates to their own work and start anticipating what the answer should be when it’s the employees who are asking. At every single turn, the HR bigwigs must put themselves in the shoes of the average worker, anticipating any resistance and truly understanding the benefits of the new tool when they begin to push it out to employees and managers.

To do this properly, bring employees and managers onto the project teams responsible for designing, selecting, and deploying new technology to assure that their interests are represented, they are invested, and WIIFM ultimately becomes a rhetorical question.

The proliferation of Software as a Service (SaaS) also means that, just as HR has had to reframe how it selects and deploys software for the users, those same leaders must now reimagine how they work together with the IT function to select the software and tools that they need. Gone are the days when HR could just throw its requirements at IT and wait for a solution that might fit them. In other words, in the cloud world, strategy and technology are no longer separate entities—they are one in the same, brought together by innovation and possibility.

If the tool is only usable to HR, it will fail. Any tool deployed to the larger workforce needs to be written in the language of those who are using the tool.

The workforce is full of tech-savvy consumers. People are used to getting constant, seamless updates from SaaS solutions that they use in their day-to-day lives. This expectation is no different in the workplace.

 

Taking Charge of Technology

Unfortunately, HR departments often continue to see it differently, choosing to see their job function as one that is separate from technology. The work of leveraging technology to make their lives easier is somehow not their job; generally, they would rather (or for some reason think they need to) tell IT what they need and hope that IT can either come up with something to fill that need or create it out of thin air.

One solution that many intrepid organizations came up with was to create a Human Resource Information Systems (HRIS) function—sort of a hybrid between HR and IT. These groups were information service groups that worked within the function of HR, giving HR some control over software and solutions.

The bottom line is that in today’s world, where we’re consumed by technology and technology is the best and frankly only way to get from now to next, HR can no longer opt out of the IT function.

In order to be successful, an organization must close the chasm between its strategic goals and the technology functions that allow it to achieve those goals. In order for HR to accomplish this, every HR department must have a process and technology function incorporated into its goals and objectives.

The other important thing to call out is that this process and technology function or team can’t be seen as a low-level function on the totem pole. Rather, it must be seen as a function that sits at the table with HR leadership so that it can constantly see what HR is doing and thinking, as well as the goals that HR is trying to reach, so that the team can be fully aligned—not just in terms of strategy, but in terms of priorities as well.

When it comes to thinking about the competencies that are required for the ideal HR process and technology group, they fall into six key areas.

1. The Process Ninja: The Process Ninja is someone who is constantly thinking about process, and who brings experience in this area to the table. In the industry, we have what are called Six Sigma Black Belts—people who have gone through Six Sigma training and have a complete understanding of process efficiency.
2. The Strategic Functional Analyst: Commonly referred to, also, as a Business Analyst, this person takes the ideas and requirements of HR and its workforce and maps out what needs to happen in order for those ideas and requirements to align with the corporate goals and objectives, all through the lens of understanding how to turn that alignment into usable technology.
3. The User Experience Expert:  The consumer is the employee, the manager, or the workforce at large. This person thinks about which user interfaces, which vendors, and which software best fit the need of the department or employee requesting it.
4. The Change Enablement/Marketing Ace:  In many (un-aligned) organizations, change enablement (or change management) is oftentimes handled by a corporate communications or training department. The former will inform employees about new policies and procedures, while the latter (often outsourced) will bore employees to tears while sapping time away from the typical workday. This normally results in a lot of jargon and a lot of money left on the table.
5. The Workforce Intelligence (the Data Czars): In the workforce intelligence role, what we’re looking for is someone who is responsible for thinking about how to provide data to the consumers (who might be employees, managers, executives, HR people, etc.) in a consistent manner.
6. The Technologist: This sixth role is the role of the technologist itself—one who does nothing but think about the market, keep abreast of the technology solutions available, and keep alignment with the organization in mind. This person understands what enterprise technology tools are available, what is needed from an HR standpoint, and works closely with both HR and IT groups to make decisions about what technology to purchase and deploy.

We are all technologists now. No matter what our role is in our organization, we can’t offload technology tasks entirely to IT.

HR departments must have process and technology continuously on the brain. It’s the job of HR, not IT, to reimagine its processes. Without IT, HR will surely fail.

 

The Five Things You Need to Succeed

Avoid viewing these five things as magic wands, but the five things you need to be successful are:

(1) Your Lens

Being able to look at problems and devise solutions through the appropriate lens is a key trait in being able to be successful at anything you do, but this specifically applies to the HR space, particularly as HR professionals try to reimagine and rethink what they’re doing.

Steve Jobs, whose philosophy and products served as icons of complex simplicity, once famously said that “Simple is the hardest thing to do.”

Many HR managers will pat themselves on the back for electronic self-service (and again, using the term direct access sits much better with the troops, and with good reason) portals where employees can enter their own updates to personal information. But there are still problems with these portals.

Managers want to be able to get information and see information in a way that’s specific to them—information that’s about their workforce. They are paid to worry about their workforce, not another department’s workforce, not another section of the industry’s workforce, but their workforce. Executives obviously have their own specific lens.

(2) Change enablement (or change management/marketing)

This mind-set shift of change enablement, that “thinking differently,” can lead to radical and wonderful things in organizations, industries, and society at large.

To succeed, you have to manage the 99 percent of your employees, not the 1 percent.

This widening of the scope of technology use (and ownership) means that change enablement/change management today has taken on more of a communication/marketing flavor than the training flavor of the past.

(3) Never Stop Learning

In life as in the workplace, change is the only constant. Today, like everything else, the landscape of learning has changed. Now, in a world where more information is available to be consumed than ever before, learning means putting yourself out there, being willing to watch and learn from other companies—even your competitors. Chances are good that they want to learn from you as much as you want to learn from them, and they’re willing to share.

To never stop learning also means to never stop listening, and to understand that oftentimes the best ideas can come from people and places that you wouldn’t expect them to.

(4) Perpetual Beta

Perpetual Beta is a popular term that’s cropping up more often; it’s basically a tech-savvy way of saying, “You’re never done.”

Over the decades, we’ve been used to going through a process for a product launch:

• Working on it in secret
• Convening a go-live party
• Rolling the technology out into the world
• Moving on to the next thing

But in the world we live in today, we can never stop continuing to advance what we’re doing—we can’t start a website or blog and then leave it to collect dust.

We live in a world of perpetual beta—where we’re constantly exploring, constantly gathering feedback, and constantly trying new things. Hopefully, this process will help us continue to improve, making it worth the risk and bumps along the way.

For HR, that means that once you’ve rolled out a process, you then have to do the work of analyzing that process, tweaking it, making it better, and seeing what you can get out of it.

Perpetual beta means being willing to shift, to change, and to continue to innovate using the tools at hand to glean different types of information, or to use those tools differently to drive different outcomes.

(5) Dream

From the book The Radical Leap by Steve Farber, “leap”, in addition to being a fantastically apt verb, Farber uses it as an acronym to stand for:

• Love
• Energy
• Audacity
• Proof

The premise behind Farber’s book is that in order to do anything in today’s world, you have to love what you’re doing. If you love what you’re doing, you’re going to gain the energy to do something audacious. And in order to keep that energy contained in a positive cycle, you’ll have to have proof, for yourself and others, that the audacious thing gave something back to your life.

Inertia is an insidious, powerful thing.

 

A Community Call to Action

If we are in the HR space, embracing that change means truly understanding what our responsibilities are—and how those responsibilities differ from what they might have been in the past. Remember these eight domains as you move forward, manifesting the more aligned, agile tomorrow you most wish to inhabit:

1. Reimagine HR. HR can no longer say, “This is the way we’ve always done it, so this is the way we’ll always do it.”
2. Create agility. Change is a funny thing. It will trample you if you’re not looking, but if you can harness it, it can take you on one heck of a ride.
3. Identify talent. If LinkedIn knows more about your greatest assets (your people) than you do, then you’re in trouble. Work to identify talent within your own organization (and use tools like LinkedIn to your advantage, grooming and identifying the talent from without as well) and learn how to play to the strengths of that talent, properly retaining, developing, and incenting them.
4. Increase engagement. Like the other domains, this one overlaps with the one before it. When we talk about increasing engagement, we’re talking about making that investment in our ultimate asset: Our talent pool.
5. Foster collaboration. Just as the business day is no longer confined to 9-to-5, an employee is no longer restricted by the cubicle walls. Changing technologies are making wonderful collaborative tools available to organizations of all sizes.
6. Think differently about measuring. HR can no longer count heads. That’s not good enough. We need to move to truly making heads count.
7. Keep your head in the cloud. With technology moving from the world of on-premise software to the cloud, and SaaS making it easier than ever before to deploy new technologies and keep those technologies updated, it doesn’t make sense to tether yourself down with clunky solutions. It’s much more cost-effective to subscribe versus buy and maintain nowadays.
8. Take ownership over technology. We’re all technologists now. It’s not good enough to just wash your hands of IT, or blame IT for the problems you as an HR person are experiencing. The two departments must work together, now more than ever before, particularly in this age of SaaS and instant access.

We will get there. Where you ask? We will get from Now to Next.