diginomica 2015 - Janine's choice
- Summary:
- Janine Milne casts her eye back over 12 months of HCM, talent management and analytics.
1 What a performance
A soul-sucking monster that’s attached to the business.
Why? Performance management has come under a lot of flak this year, and in my mind, it’s well deserved. The case for the prosecution has presented some convincing evidence, particularly when it comes to the potentially damaging effect of ratings systems, which reveal more about the manager than the employee being rated through “the idiosyncratic rating effect” as noted in
- Performance management – time to rip it up and start again?
- Performance management – HR’s most hated tool?
- Performance management – the “soul-sucking monster” of HR.
It’s easy to throw stones, but what about a solution? The answer lies is simultaneously both startlingly easy and incredibly hard: having good leaders. Effective leaders and line managers are able to encourage and support their staff to do better in the future and play to their strengths, rather than offer them feedback on past behaviors and mistakes.
2 Talent trials and tribulations
Companies say ‘our employees are our greatest asset’ – but they don’t even know how many they’ve got.
Why? Ask any chief executive what their biggest asset is (and their biggest cost) and nine times out of 10 they will answer their employees. Managing those employees, particularly in times of economic growth (albeit steady rather than stellar) is vital for success when competition for staff is keen.
But who are your employees? That’s not such an easy question to answer, when you consider that many companies have a mixture of part-time, freelance, contractors, volunteers, outsourced workers as well as your ‘regular’ full-time workers. According to a Total Talent Management report, by ERE Media and Staffing Industry Analysts, 16% of all workers are non-permanent and in some companies this rises to half the workforce.
Talent management has tended to focus on full-time workers, but now it’s time to widen the playing field to consider all talent that carry out jobs in the company. And that includes the work done by robots and cognitive computing: Why talent management is in need of a total upgrade – even for the robots.
3. Socially inept?
There’s an assumption that everyone is au fait with social media, but they aren’t as much as you’d think. There are large gaps in knowledge, particularly in the SME space.
Why? Given how using social media has become second nature to most of us, as usage figures for the users of Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter will attest, it’s strange that there is still quite a lag with corporate usage.
It’s a theme noted in Is social management the key to winning the talent war? While the article acknowledges that social media has become accepted among HR people and CEOs as a recruitment tool, there’s still surprisingly little action going on particularly among SMEs.
This idea that there is still surprisingly little action on the corporate social media front was echoed by Euan Semple more recently in HR and opening up to social media. Semple said that most companies are still only doing it “at the margins” and very few have truly embedded it into the way they work.
One company that is using it effectively for recruitment is Hunkemöller Holding out for a ‘shero’. What was great about this story is it illustrates just how much can be achieved with social media, even if you do not have any internal technical experience. The key to their success was having a really strong understanding their customers and their staff.
Emerson is another example of a company that has transformed its recruitment process with social media. In Social media proves just the job for ‘Wild West’ recruitment at Emerson, Emerson’s head of global talent acquisition, Tim Potten, made the interesting observation that it was vital for HR to link up early on with marketing to tap into their deep understanding of branding.
4. Applying the grey matter to HR
It’s a great area with huge potential, but the brain is a quite a complicated piece of machinery and then you have to translate that into the workplace. It’s not just a matter of understanding the brain, but applying it.
Why? Will neuroscience make psychology obsolete? It’s a tantalizing idea (and perhaps a little far-fetched) but the field of neuroscience is making incredible discoveries and they are beginning to filter through into classrooms and workplaces alike.
Creating a brain-friendly workplace – stop dealing with people as rational human beings looked at how neuroscience is beginning to be used in workplace. One clear application is the learning and development space, helping us understand the best way not only to learn new information or skills, but also to retain that information.
We’re only just scratching the surface of what neuroscience can tell us but it’s something that every HR professional should have on their radar.
5. Analytics on the couch
Companies making progress have made the decision that data will never be perfect.
Why? Analytics represents one of the biggest opportunities for HR to truly make a strategic difference. It furnishes HR professionals with the hard facts to come up with solutions to business problems rather than figures on headcount or absence levels.
We’re written about many examples of companies that have put HR analytics to work effectively, including
- Virgin Media cures high sickness rates with analytics
- Putting predictive analytics on the menu at EAT
Analytics is having a profound efffect, but there’s still a hell of a lot of work to do, as pointed out in HR analytics “stuck in neutral”. Deloitte’s annual report on HR trends found a worrying disconnect between the perceived importance of analytics and ability to deliver. While 75% of the organizations Deloitte surveyed believed analytics was important, only 8% said they felt strong in analytics.
The key message from Deloitte and from other experts and case studies is that you have to start somewhere. Data will never be perfect, you won’t have the right skills right off the bat, but there’s no room for excuses: start now!
6. Wear or beware? The case for wearables.
There’s a dichotomy – it can be mutually beneficial or potentially an instrument of exploitation and control.
Why? Wearables, such as Fitbit and smart watches, are beginning to catch on in the consumer world. But what about the workplace? There’s a huge potential notes The case for wearables in business – wearing well or wearing thin.
But there are problems with ethical and privacy issues to be sorted out – who owns data on how you’re sleeping or how much activity you engage in? And will it affect your health premiums?
The key as noted in Wearing your HR on your sleeve, is to apply wearable technology where it as useful for employees as it is for employers.
7. The YouTube effect
When we look at what we expect to provide our learners, we have to think differently, because they are behaving differently.
Why? Everyone is a potential film maker these days. It’s easy to take a quick video of what you’re doing and stick it up on the internet. And video is now having a profound effect on the corporate world, particularly in the learning and development space. Why go to a manual or spend time and energy on a formal course, when you quickly watch a video of someone who can show you what to do in five minutes?
The benefits are huge: it’s cheap (it doesn’t need to be a slick, professional quality), it’s quick and easy to do, it’s easily accessible and can be delivered at the exact point someone needs it. It’s also something that can accessed again and again.
Many companies are beginning to realize the potential of video including Ericsson ‘YouTubes’ its learning.
8. From creator to curator
This YouTube effect is part of a wider change in learning and development. With so much more user-generated content rather than official, centrally created courses, this is changing the jobs of learning professionals.
Why? In Lack of confidence dogs learning and development professionals take up of technology, Andy Lancaster head of learning & development at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) talked about the effect of digital technology on learning and development.
Half of all content is still created from scratch by L&D and one tenth by employees themselves, according to the CIPD’s 2015 annual report on L&D. But the shift is towards more content being created outside the L&D team and means they are moving into the role of guardians of quality control. In other words they are moving from creators to curators – which requires different skills.
9. Spend, spend, spend?
The economy is better and it’s the evolution of software- as-a-Service or cloud that’s really created a lot activity.
Why? It’s looking pretty rosy for vendors in the HR technology space. In All change – a third of firms will buy new HR management systems this year, Towers Watson found a third of respondents to its annual HR technology survey planned to replace their HR management systems – the highest figure since they began the survey 18 years ago.
The desire for cloud-based systems and all the benefits they bring is the main driver for this change.
What’s interesting is that the survey also mentions that a third of organizations still use manual or paper methods somewhere in their HR organizations. It’s all too easy to get carried away with the possibilities of analytics, wearables and social media. But the reality is that there’s still an awful lot of work happening on Excel spreadsheets as we saw in:
- Monitise breaks free of Excel limitations with cloud HR strategy
- ServiceNow helps UK university graduate to HR success
- Cloud blows away those HR spreadsheets.
10. HR needs to go back to school?
L&D professionals are struggling to gain the competence and experience to exploit technology.
Why? Looking back over the stories I’ve covered this year, I was struck by the amount of times the lack of confidence or skills of HR professionals was mentioned. Whether it was the effect of digital technology on learning and development - Lack of confidence dogs learning and development professionals take up of technology - or in analytics - Lack of confidence in skills and tools stalls HR analytics uptake - , technology is having a profound effect on HR and the skills they need.
It doesn’t mean HR people need to get down and dirty with coding, but it does mean building an understanding of technology and what it can do for HR and the business.