Employee Experience Tag Archive

Deploy a Strategic Human Capital Operating Model to Build Critical Org Capability

September 24, 2019| Organizations, People|

We live in a world of constantly evolving technology and ways to organize work. This means that people are in constant threat of their skills becoming less relevant or even obsolete. At the same time, organizations face the challenge of building new capabilities internally to take advantage of new technologies that will transform what they produce and how they produce it.

Organizations today take two different approaches to align their employees’ developmental needs with the business’ human capital needs: the laissez faire model and the planning model. Here I propose a third way, the strategic human capital operating model. It is currently used in a rare number of cases, and should become the standard all large companies strive to meet. It can reduce turnover and adoption costs for new technology, while improving employee morale, engagement and productivity.

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Systems diagnostics are essential to create high performance

December 18, 2017| Organizations, Systems|

I have spent the better part of two decades helping organizations solve big, complex challenges that hold back performance and create problems with strategy execution. The problems have varied from talent to teams to the operating model and workforce management. And the solutions have ranged from compensation, to communication, to work redesign, matrix decision making, leadership behaviors, and much more. But the one thing that has been a critical part of the diagnosis and finding solutions in all cases has been systems thinking.

Systems thinking has roots that trace back over six decades ago to Kurt Lewin (1951), and include approaches promoted by prominent authors including Leavitt (1965), Galbraith (1977), Tichy (1983), and many more. At its most fundamental, this approach demands that we look at the entire organizational system when diagnosing the sources of performance problems to identify solutions that work.

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Talent is an organizational capability

August 23, 2017| People, Systems|

Everyone knows what talent management means, right? Yet despite widely accepted common practice, most talent management approaches fall way short of the mark when it comes to improved strategy execution and organizational effectiveness.

When we talk about accomplishing business objectives and achieving strategic success, the talent that’s embodied in people plays a critical role: without the contributions of individuals, nothing would ever happen. Yet this traditional way of defining and focusing on talent leaves a gaping hole in what we need to know: there are other major components of work design that must be included to optimize organizational performance and achieve strategic success. No one is an island, and that applies in spades at work.

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Workforce Planning That Really Is Strategic

August 17, 2017| People, Systems|

Most workforce planning efforts are fairly short sighted and narrow, and could more accurately be called 12 month hiring plans. Strategic workforce planning promises to deliver greater value by using a longer time horizon and a talent supply chain approach. The problem, however, is that even then it’s still too narrowly focused on the low hanging fruit of butts in seats. In order for HR to really raise its game, workforce planning has to be much more focused on addressing holistically the systemic talent issues that impede business performance. (more…)

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High Performance Work Design Trumps Employee Engagement

April 6, 2017| People, Systems|

People usually equate high performance with employee engagement. Yet engagement is not the same as productivity and performance. How engaged people are depends on the work design, and the work design itself can promote productivity separately from employee engagement. Individual ability also is a critical contributor. Together they are the three main contributors to job performance: state of mind, ability, and job design. Engagement refers only to the first, yet the other two are arguably more important, especially for sustained performance over an extended time.

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Show me the money: How and why compensation matters

April 27, 2016| People|

Every leader wants the best people possible working for them. Compensation is the most prominent and costly part of job design that directly impacts the bottom line in multiple ways. So not surprisingly line leaders pay inordinate attention to compensation when trying to maximize margins and performance. Yet there are many aspects of compensation that get lost or glossed over in the search for the perfect pay rate. Before your next heated conversation about how much to pay your people consider the following points.

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Benchmarking engagement and spans only is not strategic

February 15, 2016| Organizations, People, Systems|

Key insights:

  • Benchmarking employee engagement, survey data, and spans of control is not strategic
  • You have to embed that data in the larger context of work design and what drives organizational performance to truly understand what’s actionable and where you need more info to drive change in the right direction

Leaders love to benchmark, which is how they evaluate operational performance. So benchmark data play a central role in a lot of analytics carried out both in the business and by HR. (more…)

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Big data’s problems and potential: Beware statistical sirens

December 1, 2015| People|

Businesses worldwide are in the midst of a data feast and statistical Renaissance. Data scientists are being hired at a rapid clip, the likes of which haven’t been seen since the launch of the Internet and the frenzied search to hire anyone who could do HTML programming and build web sites. Based on reports from the front lines of business analysis, it would appear safe to conclude that the promise of Big Data is being realized daily. But is it? (more…)

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Strategic Analytics is a team sport

November 10, 2015| People, Systems|

Right now senior leadership in both the business and in HR are leaving value on the table. We have to end the “business as usual,” nonintegrated way enterprise analytics and human capital analytics are conducted.

The lack of coordination is understandable at first glance. People are very busy: dividing business and HR process management and the accompanying analytics up into separate domains makes it easier to tackle the tasks. That way the leadership of the business and the leadership of HR stick to what they know best, including the analytics needed to monitor and assess progress. But the divide-and-conquer approach is precisely where things go wrong. (more…)

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The Dangers of HR Data Mining

October 20, 2015| People|

HR is becoming more and more data based and analytical. Yet the insights that we’re getting from the data are not increasing as quickly as the rapid proliferation of software tools, seminars, and people with “data scientist” titles. Why is that? A big part of the problem lies in the kinds of analysis we’re doing, with too much emphasis focused on techniques that appear to provide new insights, but which more often than not are a distraction: data mining and linkage analysis. (more…)

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