Pittsburgh-based Highmark Health generates some $19 billion in annual revenues and employs about 50,000 people across the nation. The healthcare company serves 50 million people in all 50 states. Highmark’s diversified portfolio includes businesses in health insurance, healthcare delivery, retail…
HR Business Partner
You Can Build An HR Department Without HR People
What do you look for when you’re hiring for an HR opening? A person with HR experience and a SPHR or CEBS or a SHRM-SCP? If those are your criteria, you’re missing out on a future rock star. “If you’re…
HR, We Have A Problem: Up To 80% Of Employees Don’t Trust Us
Building employee trust is a cornerstone of HR’s values. So, everyone in HR should pay immediate attention when they learn that in excess of 70% of employees working at each of the top 4 most valuable firms in the US…
Data Journalism for HR: A Beginner’s Guide
For the average person, data without a narrative is like a trip into the wilderness without a compass: overwhelming and disorienting. But when the facts are tied together by a good story, an otherwise intimidating journey turns into an enriching experience….
It’s Not Complicated. HR Is About the People
Andrea Butcher thinks we’ve over-complicated HR. “We’re making tools and processes for the business and not for people,” Butcher tells her Indianapolis audience of HR professionals. “So no wonder people don’t like us, because we complicated it. We’re confusing it.”…
5 Ways CFOs and CHROs Can Drive Performance Together
There’s been plenty written on the differences between the “people side” and the “numbers side” of business, and yet organizations with a high level of collaboration between HR and finance departments perform better. While many in the C-suite still see…
Everyone’s Got HR Metrics. It’s What You Do With Them That Matters
When Google Analytics debuted in 2005, the ability to look under the hood, and see who was viewing your website (and for how long), was all at once foreign and exciting. In fact, it was so exciting there was a…
4 Steps to Becoming a Valued Business Partner
What if you could speak a language understood by everyone in the world? What, you say. There is no such language. Ashley Vella, an Amazon HR business partner, disagrees with you. Math, she explains in the DisruptHR video from Vancouver,…
Smart Hiring Can Keep Your Startup From Failure
Research suggests that about 75% of venture-backed tech startups fail to thrive. Only slightly over half of all new businesses survive five years. I didn’t intend to start this article with negative stats, but it’s a hard world out there…
6 Steps for Making Smart Decisions With Wearables Data
Several years ago, data gathered from sociometric badges (wearable devices equipped with sensors) revealed something interesting about the Bank of America’s call center employees: Those with the fastest “average call handling time” were also the most social. The company then…
Make Sure There’s a Business Purpose Before You Jump
It may be true that the average line manager is more data-savvy than the average HR manager, but that doesn’t mean they have a clue about how to approach people analytics. The fact that they may think they do only…
5 Steps for Linking Employee Engagement to Business Outcomes
When it comes to employee engagement surveys, you don’t always get what you pay for. Consider this: Many years ago, a municipal organization I worked with in a previous role spent $150,000 on an employee engagement survey. The results were…
Three Reasons Why HR Needs Data Science
Data science has crept into so many areas of business that even smaller companies have begun to adopt some of the techniques large organizations have been using to better understand their customers and their business. Increasingly, data science is making…
6 Steps to Great Talent Reviews
It’s great news that talent reviews have become almost universal in larger organizations, avoiding the fads that have overtaken HR processes like performance management. The fact that most companies do them, however, doesn’t mean that they’re done well. We often…
3 Steps Companies With a Blended Workforce Should Take to Protect Themselves
Companies that solely rely on traditional hiring models may soon lose their ability to remain competitive. Traditional models of hiring no longer provide the agility businesses must have to access in-demand skills when and where they’re needed. One reason is…
4 Benchmarks and What They’ll Tell You About the Business
Skilled talent is becoming harder to find. National unemployment is at a 16-year low of 4.1%. Companies are competing with one another to provide more flexible and generous benefits packages. And, 61% of the workforce is either actively or passively…
Make Solving the Business Problem Your Anchor
I remember hearing myself when I used the phrase, “Let strategic and business be your anchor” with a group of HR professionals. The famous phrase, “We’re in the people business serving coffee, not the coffee business serving people, was uttered…
Managers Are Hoarding Talent: A Hidden Problem That’s Likely Hurting Your Firm
Expediting the transfer of employees among diverse business units allows a firm to develop and retain employees, while simultaneously increasing the cross-pollenization of ideas and the transfer of best practices. Unfortunately, I find that executives at every large organization I…
The New Business-Driven Approach to Employee Experience
Human resources is experiencing a massive shift. For years, organizations have relied on a single annual engagement survey to collect feedback from employees. These surveys have become a ritual for many companies, and a lucrative industry has sprung up around…
How to Get Useful Feedback from Your Employees
Chances are that if you are in a position where you supervise or manage employees beneath you, you’ve put a lot of effort into giving your junior team members the feedback they need to grow and improve. But have you…