Work Babble

Human Resources and Moneyball

I’m a little late but finally watched Moneyball and this should be required viewing for managers and HR because there are some great takeaways.  I only wish we could make things move as fast when it comes to Human Capital decisions. For example, in Tim Sackett’s post on ‘3 Things HR can Learn from Moneyball’ he talked about straight talk with employees – viewing them as professionals who can take bad news while understanding it’s a business decision. This idea is shown in the following scene from the movie:    

 

Can you imagine if HR could do that? And the point is well made as Brad Pitt states, “Would you rather take one bullet to the head versus five bullets to the chest and bleed to death?” Often Performance Improvement Plans are just that. It’s a document created for compliance purposes even though PIP’s are usually the result of a decision to get rid of someone. That is not how they are intended but they get used that way. So rather than speak frankly with an employee that his or her performance is suffering, behavior is poor, or skills are outdated, we go through processes like PIP which only delays the inevitable decision to cut the person.

This idea leads to the other point of the movie which is talent. How do you select talent when you have roadblocks like budget, skills availability, location, etc.? Dr Jac Fitz-Enz has spent years driving the human capital metrics game with great results but it’s not exactly like baseball where you can be as precise in certain parameters that can precisely define a top talent profile. That’s not to say you can’t – we are much closer today to doing that then twenty years ago, but Moneyball-like results are not quite mainstream HR practice.  If you are interested in metrics, here are some links:

Measuring Employees like Moneyball:

http://www.weknownext.com/workforce/how-moneyball-measures-up-as-an-hr-approach

http://www.slideshare.net/jbersin/data-science-and-analytics-in-human-resources-moneyball-comes-to-hr

http://www.shrm.org/Education/hreducation/Documents/Moneyball%20Original%20Article%2045-1.pdf

Ahead of finding the secret Moneyball sauce that will apply consistently to the corporate world; we can say that we are getting closer and closer to the union of individual expertise and interests, and business needs and interests. The faster we bridge these gaps both humanely and mathematically, the higher engagement and retention we will witness—not to mention profits.

How Cluttered is your Workspace?

Guest post by Brian Barwig, Marketing Executive with www.selfstoragefinders.com     

When you spend most of your day at a desk, personalizing the space makes perfect sense. You want to be sure to give your co-workers and clients a positive impression about you and how you work. Similar to how your body language and clothes represent you, your desk does the same….so what do you do?

Experts believe everything in your office sends a message about your efficiency and sociability, be it pictures, candy or posters. What impression are others getting from you when they see your workspace?

Pictures and Art

There is a fine line between sharing your interests and giving the impression you would rather be out of the office instead of working on the big project. Pictures and artwork make for good conversation starters but having too many of them will have your co-workers believing you’re spending your workday thinking about anything other than business. Keep the pictures and artwork to a minimum and you should be safe.

Candy

A full candy dish is like an open door policy for people to linger around your desk or office. The candy dish is a signal of an extroverted workspace and will invite people over all the time, including when you’re trying to get work done.  This can be a good ice breaker but has the potential to get overwhelming especially if your dish is always full.

Clutter

We’ve all seen these offices. Messy piles of paper which should be in files are spread throughout the room, half eaten food decays on top of the scattered papers, binders are being used as paperweights and the carpet has stains. A messy office can damage your reputation as well as give the impression you are inconsiderate and unorganized. Consider organizing those messy piles of paper and putting them in files. If you have too many papers or files, self storage is a great option. Many companies use business storage for filing old documents and tax forms.

Posters and Stickers

Co-workers and clients may get the impression you are a slacker or don’t care about work if they see bumper stickers or humorous posters all over your office. If you have clients regularly in your office or are in a high traffic area you should err on the side of caution with your decorating.

Personalizing your workspace is a good idea but you should be careful to not go overboard. A good first impression is important and even more important may be keeping your office HR compliant and clutter free. You may also want to hire a Human Resources professional to come in and speak to your organization about proper workspace decoration and team building.

About www.selfstoragefinders.com

SelfStorageFinders.com is the leading self storage directory on the web and is designed to be your one stop shop when searching for self storage or mobile storage throughout the United States. Our directory lists all of the storage facilities nationwide, from the large nationwide chains to the small mom and pop facilities in your neighborhood.

“Process-less” Human Resources?

By Tony Deblauwe (previously published on www.examiner.com)

For many people, the typical Human Resources function is considered bureaucratic and steeped in process. And while you do need to be sensitive to legal compliance requirements there are ways to reduce an overload of HR processes.  

For instance, in Silicon Valley operating a startup requires little to no HR processes. In startups, HR is a minimalist entity that offers employees basic amenities and only asks for a few government forms to be filled out. This mode of operation usually changes and eventually, like most large companies, HR processes creep in as the employee population grows. Soon the inevitable dilemma occurs between rigidly following policies in the employee handbook while simultaneously not stifling business operations. When grappling with this problem – can companies meet the needs of an expanding enterprise while keeping HR requirements to a minimum?

Tom Armor, co-founder of recruiting firm www.highreturnselection.com believes you can. Armor proved it when his firm reviewed their HR redundancies. “As we analyzed the various HR processes and data, we realized that HR was too involved in too many processes and often times interfered with the manager/employee relationship,” Armor said.  Armor’s team did some rework and found success through better hiring, paper thin policy manuals, and placing the right people management tools in the hands of managers.

Erika Walker, HR Manager with www.bestessayhelp.com had a similar experience. Walker reviewed ways to reduce the burgeoning HR processes that created extra workload for her small firm. Looking at efficiencies of scale, her team significantly reduced the amount of decision making and approvals required for written requests for proposals. According to Walker, “We managed to get away from the written decision making process and focus on the final outcome by means of group discussions and personal communication.”

At the end of the day reducing the amount of processes in HR can be challenging.  You certainly don’t want your organization to be caught off guard or at risk by lack of process, and you don’t want HR to be viewed as the police either. The trick is to find balance between baseline, essential policies HR must adhere to, and value driven policies that keep people productive and engaged.

 

Operational vs Strategic HR Focus

By Tony Deblauwe

I’ve been curious about the state of the HR field lately. For a long time now we have heard about HR’s “seat at the table” particularly as the evolution of the HR Business Partner role has become more and more prominent in organizations. The HRBP is a role that aligns very closely to the business much more than a Generalist or Administration oriented role. As such, companies have put several requirements on HRBPs most notably requiring (or desiring) MBA’s and experience in non-HR roles. In fact, this trend towards in-the-trenches HR folks to be more, well, non-HR, corresponds to many executive level HR hiring decisions in recent years where the individual came from a non-HR role, usually with zero HR acumen.

As frustrating as this is to many HR professionals, I wonder how ill-advised this approach is considering that most HR professionals continue to drive value through mostly operational methods. This is not an indictment of such efforts, but they can’t stand alone as the reason HR provides value, or strategic impact, to organizations. Nor does it mean that only executive level HR has the ability to make strategy decisions because of their rank and proximity to the business leaders. It simply means what we think of as strategic HR is confused through mostly everyday operational (i.e. tactical) excellence.

So what’s the difference in approaches? Martina Laudahn of Head of HR Interim Management & Global HR Consulting at PeopleExcellence described it best in a response to the strategic HR question posed on a June 1, 2010 blog entry by Donna Mason on www.focus.com. She compared tactical versus strategic HR in several core functional HR areas:

Function: Employee Relations
Tactical HR: Policies and records, compliance and discipline, company events and community relations, complaint resolution.

Strategic HR: Engaging employees to drive business results, recognizing teams and individuals strategically, seeing employees as an investment.

Function: Attraction & Selection
Tactical HR: Recruiting and hiring, testing and background checks, college relations, temporary staffing.

Strategic HR: Creating a compelling employment brand, workforce planning focused on talent needs, developing talent pipelines.

Function: Development
Tactical HR: Basic skills training, new hire orientation, values and competencies.

Strategic HR: People strategies that drive results, succession planning and onboarding, creating career and development plans.

Function: Performance & Rewards
Tactical HR: Performance management, compensation administration and surveys, job descriptions, executive compensation, benefit administration.

Strategic HR: Assigning goals and metrics aligned to the business strategy, rewarding employees for business results, measuring the results of deploying people, rewarding employees for their value, executive compensation tied to business results and shareholder value.

Laudahn summarizes strategic HR this way:

“Strategic HR practices need to translate the business strategy into action, engage employees at all levels to drive results and be transparent so everyone uses them every day to run the business. Strategic HR practices can result in a competitive advantage for the company in the marketplace, profitable revenue, innovation and strategic alignment.”

So do HR leaders recognize the difference? In a recent article for Forbes online, Steve Denning, author of The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management: Reinventing the Workplace for the 21st Century  outlined the disconnect between HR focus and executive and strategic business imperatives:   

“Thus the heart of HR’s problem—that HR is not at the center of the firm—is that HR leaders are spending their energy supporting of a failing business model.”

“The solution to the problem of HR requires a fundamental shift in the way the firm is being managed to one in which the people doing the work are able to contribute their full talents and energy to the goal of delighting the customer.”

HR has the capacity to delight customers by staying focused on the strategic connection to business needs and not get distracted by the compliance and regulatory necessity of the role. This is a fundamental point of view difference. HR professionals should know that the everyday tactical items must and will get done, but not as an end in itself. That is the problem in most cases – getting caught up in the short term fires and treating longer term strategic programs as an annual exercise usually reserved for the senior HR team and subject matter experts.

Strategic contribution is every HR professionals focus and needs to be a requirement of the role (not just HRBPs). The inspired HR leaders out there understand this and diligently follow a framework of competency assessment, job rotation, and targeted hiring to maintain a strategically focused HR talent pool.

What is your organization doing to clarify operational and tactical HR versus strategic? How are you measuring it and what policies are being adopted or created to maintain HR as a true partner not simply a support role?

The Trainability Factor: How and Why Trainability Should Be a Hiring Priority

Guest post by Kenneth McCall of www.storage.com

Managers sometimes have a thankless job. They can be as conscientious as the day is long, work harder than anyone, do the greatest job in the world, and yet if the people that work under them fail to perform, guess who gets all the blame. You got it. The buck always stops at the top.

A manager is challenged on multiple fronts. He needs to be responsible for his own performance, of course. But he also needs to figure out how to maximize the performance of each of his subordinates too. This is far from an easy task and one which has cost many managers many sleepless nights. Improving the performance of other people is always a challenging and stressful undertaking, simply because people are different and every individual has his or her own reason for underperforming.

The first step in fixing the problem is identifying what the problem is. In some cases, people fail because they lack the skill sets to do the work. More often, employees underperform because they lack a basic understanding of how to do one or more parts of their job. It's up to the manager to find out what each of his employees needs to learn in order for them to succeed, and then he needs to train them.

Training can take many forms. What some employees need is the basic classroom, where they can focus on learning and/or improving their proficiency in specific aspects of the job. For this, the manager might hire (or appoint from within) someone with the right kind of expertise. But very often training takes on a completely different look. It becomes more of a day-to-day coaching and mentoring exercise, where an employee develops and improves in a steady, incremental fashion. For this, it is often the manager himself who must conduct the training.

But regardless of who conducts the training, the manager still has a huge stake in the outcome. And the success or failure of a training initiative is very much dependent on the trainee. When the trainee is a willing and cooperative student, there is a good chance of a positive outcome. But managers can find themselves facing a huge obstacle when an employee doesn't respond to training. That obstacle can be nearly insurmountable when the reason, as is often the case, is that the employee is simply not "trainable."

Let's look at what this means. Sometimes employees are deficient in knowledge or skill in one particular area but they refuse to admit or acknowledge it. So they resist being trained. Or maybe they go along with the training but do so with little enthusiasm or interest. Either way, the training turns out to be a dismal failure and the employee continues to underperform. The problem is not an uncommon one. Employees like this are very often intelligent and experienced. But sadly, they are also “untrainable.”

People like to talk about things like experience, education, and talent when the subject of new employee hiring is raised. Trainability is a consideration you seldom hear about. Yet when you think about it, trainability is every bit as important as the other characteristics in assessing the makeup of a potential new hire. For sure, it's a little tougher to measure because it doesn't lend itself to quantification in neat terms like years of experience or degree levels of college diplomas. But that doesn't mean there aren't signs you can look for. It's all a matter of knowing what they are. Here are some questions a good hiring manager can ask himself about any job candidate he is interviewing:

1. Does the candidate show a history of flexibility and a willingness to adapt to change?

2. Is he the type of person who is able to check his ego at the door?

3. Does he display eagerness and passion about the job?

4. Is he a quick learner?

5. Is he open-minded?

6. Has he shown himself to be dependable and committed?

If you can answer yes to most of these questions with a fair amount of certainty, then very likely you have yourself a trainable candidate.

A manager's performance is only as good as that of his team. His employees can have tons of experience and multiple educational degrees, but these things can't guarantee that they will be able to learn the new business techniques or skills they may eventually need. But when a person is trainable he or she already has what it takes to be a successful learner. Make no mistake about it. The trainability factor is real. And when it becomes a priority during the hiring cycle, the manager doing the hiring is the clear winner.

About the Author:
Kenneth McCall builds creative and innovative tools for customer seeking self storage units. Kenneth is the director of operations at storage.com which provides Miami self storage listings, and storage units in many locations across the country. In his spare time he likes to get outside, ideally with a boat and waterskis.