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HR News & Trends, HR Technology

HR Tech Day 2: The Great Debate Over Human Capital Management

by on Sep 30, 2010, 2:47 PM  |  No comments yet
HRTech1

Define “Best of Breed.” That’s rhetorical, but think about it because it illustrates a point about the direction of HR software that was part of the “Great Technology Debate” at the 13th annual HR Technology Conference & Exhibition this morning in Chicago.

It wasn’t among the questions posed to debaters Jason Averbrook, CEO at Knowledge Infusion, and Gartner’s Managing VP Jim Holincheck, though it lurked behind their generally affable agreement on most of the talent management issues that arose during their time on stage.

For instance, when show co-chair and debate moderator Bill Kutik asked about the meaning of strategic human capital management, and, later, about just what workforce planning is, there wasn’t much debate. Read more…

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HR Management, HR trends

Waiting For Engagement: When to Debate and When to Just Get it Done

by on Sep 30, 2010, 10:27 AM  |  2 Comments
Getting employees to buy in to a new initiative can be a bit challenge for any manager or HR professional. (Photo by Dreamstime).

I have been writing a lot recently about the work I do in helping companies identify and deal with execution risks.

One of the biggest issues companies are facing today is that people are simply not in the game. They are keeping their heads down, waiting for the rest of the shoes to drop, and for the dust to clear.

So people are not engaging. Execution stalls. Read more…

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HR Basics, HR Management

You Still Have To Get The Little Things Right In HR

by on Sep 30, 2010, 8:47 AM  |  2 Comments
Photo illustration by Dreamstime

Earlier this week, Abercrombie & Fitch was fined a hefty sum ($1 million) for what amounted to be technical difficulties in their I-9 processing system. Here’s an excerpt from the story:

The New Albany, Ohio-based retailer did not verify the employment eligibility of its workers and lacked documentation, said Khaalid Walls, spokesman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Walls said the government had a tip that there were “severe deficiencies with their documents.”

The audit uncovered numerous technology-related deficiencies in the retailer’s electronic I-9 verification system. The company cooperated throughout the investigation and did not knowingly hire illegal immigrants, the government said in a statement.

Still of the opinion that transactional HR doesn’t have strategic value? Ask A&F what they could have done with an extra million dollars this year. Tell me if that sort of swing in cash is of strategic value to the organization.

Read more…

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HR News & Trends, HR Technology

What Recession? No Downturn at “Largest HR Tech Show in History”

by on Sep 30, 2010, 7:57 AM  |  1 comment
HRTech1

Lucky that the recession ended last year, otherwise it might hard to explain all the shoppers here at the annual HR Tech show  in Chicago.

I met a guy this morning at breakfast who runs the HR analytics department for a major financial institution. We talked data and he told me about the challenges of getting usable data out of multiple systems — not to mention the various ways systems allow information to be entered. Here’s here shopping for tools to help solve the problem and improve analysis.

To my left at the table was an HRIS manager for a specialty retailer with more than 12,000 employees looking at new talent management systems.

At the opening reception Tuesday night I met a team of two HR professionals who came to look at comp management systems. And on the shuttle ride to the McCormick Place convention center, an HR generalist with tech savvy said he’s at the show to scope out a new recruiting system. He won’t be looking at anything from the current vendor because, he confided, of its poor customer support. Read more…

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HR Management

The Eight Steps to Driving Successful Large Scale Change

by on Sep 29, 2010, 12:27 PM  |  No comments yet
Buyin

By John P. Kotter and Lorne A. Whitehead

One of us (Kotter) has been studying buy-in within the very specific context of large-scale change projects for nearly two decades. Because of the increasing importance of large-scale organizational change, we feel it necessary to explicitly comment on how the work in this book fits into that context.

Research clearly shows that people, even experienced executives, are not very good at transformational change, or change of any significance. Multiple studies have shown that 70 percent of the time, when significant change is needed, people back away, go into denial, try but fail rather miserably, or stop, exhausted, after achieving half of what they want using twice the budgeted time and money.

Nevertheless, there are cases of organizations changing to exploit big opportunities, and the changes are, by most standards, sensationally successful. And, to our good fortune, in all of those cases, there is a clear pattern of what works. The pattern has eight steps. Read more…

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HR Basics, Recruiting and Staffing

Ask the HR Pro: Should I Use Gimmick Questions in Job Interviews?

by on Sep 29, 2010, 11:27 AM  |  3 Comments
Questionexpert

Want to know how other managers and HR Pros would deal with a sticky workplace issue?

Well, this is an ongoing feature where we take a workplace or HR-related question sent to us by a TLNT.com reader and ask members of our TLNT LinkedIn group to give us their insight and perspective on it.

What do you think? Do you agree with the responses here, or do you have a completely different viewpoint? Please let us know by leaving your response here, and send questions to me here at john@tlnt.com, or post them on the TLNT LinkedIn group. We’ll use the best responses in a future column.

DEAR HR PRO: Whether you follow the Barbara Walters line of questioning (“If you were a tree, what kind would you be?”) or you go more philosophical (“What’s the meaning of life?”), some people just seem to love to do these gimmick-driven interview questions. While the validity of standard interviewing techniques have been studied and discussed for decades, these kinds of test questions have not faced that sort of scrutiny. This makes me wonder — should I be using these sorts of questions in interviews? Read more…

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HR Management

Conventional Leadership Wisdom is Wrong – and Why We Need to Change

by on Sep 29, 2010, 8:15 AM  |  2 Comments
Illustration by Dreamstime.

Last Friday, I was interviewed as part of the Executive Conversation Series at the Human Capital Institute where I serve as a member of the Expert Advisory Panel on Talent Management. We spent an amazing hour discussing the The Look of Leadership 3.0

I started my conversation with the analogy about the styles of leadership over the years: Henry Ford, Jack Welch, Steve Jobs, Eric Schmidt, Mark Zuckerberg, etc. If we were able to do a comparative graph, the styles of leadership of each of these legendary individuals and leaders the arc would be off the chart.

Each one is a masterful leader in his own right. Could Henry Ford or Jack Welch manage a workforce today with the same level of success. I personally think not. The evolution of modern leadership requires a different style from what may have been successful years ago.

The workforce has evolved into a multi-generational hodgepodge of unique individuals with Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs” possibly still intact, but the level of connectivity between leader and employee is now out of balance. The recession, and the fallout from it, has changed the landscape. Read more…

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Benefits

Benefits Expo Day 2: Waking up to Tough Talk on Health Care Reform

by on Sep 28, 2010, 1:07 PM  |  2 Comments
Benefitsexpo1

There’s nothing quite like kicking off a morning in a room with 500 other yawning people who haven’t had quite enough coffee listening to a panel discussion on health care reform.

Okay, so I say that with a bit of tongue in cheek, but so it goes on Day 2 of the 23rd annual Benefits Forum & Expo, sponsored by Employee Benefit News, that started Sunday here in Boca Raton, Florida.

That morning panel discussion — titled Health Care Reform: The Next Horizon for True Change – quickly got to the heart of the issue, and something that all four panelist were in total agreement on. In other words, what we call health care reform (or Obamacare) isn’t what you think it is. In the minds of the panelists, “it’s really insurance market reform, not health care reform.” Read more…

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Recruiting and Staffing

Five “Must Know” Trends in Employee Screening

by on Sep 28, 2010, 11:57 AM  |  1 comment
Photo illustration by Dreamstime.

You all know the drill: you’ve got a great candidate, you make the offer and now you’ve got to make sure they pass the background check.

Most of the time, it comes back with a green light and you’re good to go. Other times, there are discrepancies or other issues. The worst is when the discrepancies get revealed after the hire is made and you have to address the messy afterward of employee screening gone bad. And the bigger the position, the more important the background check. See: Every poorly vetted executive whose fake degrees or title inflation makes the news.

While there are horror stories, background check policies gone bad, and perhaps one or two panic inducing mix ups, knowing what is going on outside of your company can be a big help to plotting a proactive path to employee screening success.I had the opportunity to talk to Rob Pickell, VP, Customer Solutions at HireRight about the results of their annual employee screening benchmarking survey and some of the trends that they are seeing. Read more…

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Benefits

The Health Care ROI Debate: Do I Really Need to Sell You on Wellness?

by on Sep 28, 2010, 9:35 AM  |  4 Comments
From the HR blog on TLNT: workplace wellness

I frequently interview non-client companies to hear what they’re doing to build health-supporting cultures. One question I always ask is: what’s your ROI?

When I interviewed Hollie Delaney from Zappos.com, Inc. about their approach to employee wellness, she told me they’re interested in their employees’ happiness; they believe when you feel better, you work better. When I asked how they measured this, she said they haven’t quite figured out how to measure happiness. Plus, their company isn’t purely a metrics-driven company.

Aren’t they the lucky ones? Most companies must prove the ROI before they get crackin’ on design and implementation, particularly when it comes to wellness, a topic that many still find squishy. Read more…

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