To sum up the past decade of HR technology, talent platforms have evolved from tackling such procedures as applicant tracking and on-boarding to now being able to automate an organization' s every HR process.
These talent platforms' capabilities have expanded to not only include pre-hire functions, like CRM and resume parsing, but to also streamline post-hire functions, such as employee performance management, succession planning and off-boarding. Provided an organization chooses a platform that best fits its business needs, this will undoubtedly make the HR staff's lives easier.
But during a time when most companies are experiencing little to no hiring and are under stringent budgetary restraints, does avoiding an HR headache justify a sizable investment in a talent platform? As more and more organizations are making investments in HR technology, the answer seems to be a resounding yes. The immediate and long-term cost-effectiveness of HR technology - important during stable times - becomes absolutely crucial during a downturn, and numbers are showing that senior-level talent executives at organizations of all sizes, in all locations and in all industries are realizing this.
How can an organization immediately cut costs by using a talent platform? Right off the bat, organizations of all sizes save money by using a talent platform's job posting and applicant tracking tools, which eliminate the costs spent on tools and technologies to communicate with passive and active candidates. That means no more costly mass mailings, reminders and tracking job statuses. By taking the plunge into talent acquisition of the 21st century and carrying out a completely paperless recruiting and on-boarding process, the cost of paper products is eliminated.
The immediate cost efficiencies of a talent platform continue to add up, while additional long-term savings emerge as well. Many talent platform vendors have competitive job posting packages, thereby eliminating the cost of posting jobs each month and also doing away with staffing and consulting agency fees every year. Because everything is automated and searchable, it's easier and cheaper (e.g., free) to report on such key metrics as EEO and OFCCP compliance.
Meanwhile, the unemployment rate is at a 26-year high of more than 9 percent. Many HR departments are being cut in size because of budget reductions, leaving fewer people with the overwhelming task of managing a massive influx of candidates per each job opening. A talent platform eliminates the hours of manual labor and data entry associated with this, allowing a small team to accomplish the same, if not a greater, amount of work. Being able to maintain the same level of productivity and efficiency while employing a smaller number of employees not only presents long-term cost value, but is an especially vital advantage in today's economy.
Taking a step back to look at the results of implementing a talent platform, organizations not only see decreased cost per hire but also reduced time to hire, all of which give organizations a greater return on investment to impact the bottom line. HR technology is always a worthwhile business practice for organizations, but when budgets are being scrutinized and expenses need to be reduced in every way possible, the immediate and long-term savings seen from the implementation of a talent platform more than justify its implementation.
[About the Author: Caitrin O'Sullivan is the public relations coordinator at iCIMS, the third-largest provider of talent acquisition solutions and an Inc. 500 honoree focused on solving corporate business issues.]
Compiled by; Hemant Gade
Hemant@JobsEnsure.com
http://www.jobsensure.com
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Saturday, September 25, 2010
Are You Missing Key Capabilities When Assessing Talent ?
Many companies today have adopted Session C, GE's rigorous performance management process that includes a "nine block" for ranking employee performance and a "bottom 10" for getting rid of talent that fell in the bottom 10 percent of the nine block.
What may be missing from this equation is a talent strategy called "4D" - which was developed by NexGen Advisors and includes four dimensions - that is critical to the future of any business and talent management process.
Implementing the following steps can help a company identify not only employees who will be future leaders, but also employees who may not be future leaders but are nonetheless integral to driving growth and allowing the business to operate efficiently.
High potentials and these employees are very different, so managers should think twice before using a standard nine block that may not give them the full picture of the company's human capital strengths and weaknesses.
1. Performance:
This piece of the equation is usually weighted the most and has the most focus. It is simply: How did the employee perform against goals and objectives? It's rather straightforward and represents the "current" state of an employee's performance. The key here is to see consistent performance year over year.
2. Promotability:
The "future" aspect of the equation is the promotability factor. If the employee has consistent performance year over year and exhibits the competencies the company has identified as critical to the business, then the employee has a high chance of being promoted or moving up the career path. A big mistake companies make is to only have one career path, which leads to managing people. Companies must have a career path for experts (technical, scientific, engineering, etc.) in order to have a promotability factor that does not include managing people. Not all employees are good at managing, but they may be highly proficient at their discipline.
3. Growth:
In today's economy, one of the most important skill sets is the ability to grow a business. As revenues plummet and margins compress, companies need to look at ways to grow the top line. Whether operationally, by reducing costs to increase profit, through innovation of products and services or through expanding in new markets and regions, growth is the name of the game. Companies that excel at this will ultimately win over competitors.
4. Risk:
The other side of the equation is risk. Most people are aware of how crucial it is to assess financial risk when managing a company, but how many understand it's a crucial ingredient when assessing talent? Another factor to consider is the loss of legacy knowledge when long-tenured employees are laid off. Unless a company has a knowledge management database, they lose this valuable knowledge forever, which in turn can hurt productivity and business continuity. It's often easy to understand the impact to a business when it loses a strong leader, but the risk of losing a plant manager can also have a similar impact.
Compiled by; Hemant Gade
Hemant@JobsEnsure.com
http://www.jobsensure.com
[About the Author: Carla Zilka is the founder and principal advisor of NexGen Advisors LLC, an advisory firm specializing in business restructuring, talent management, organizational efficiency and business process improvement. She was a former vice president of HR at GE.]
What may be missing from this equation is a talent strategy called "4D" - which was developed by NexGen Advisors and includes four dimensions - that is critical to the future of any business and talent management process.
Implementing the following steps can help a company identify not only employees who will be future leaders, but also employees who may not be future leaders but are nonetheless integral to driving growth and allowing the business to operate efficiently.
High potentials and these employees are very different, so managers should think twice before using a standard nine block that may not give them the full picture of the company's human capital strengths and weaknesses.
1. Performance:
This piece of the equation is usually weighted the most and has the most focus. It is simply: How did the employee perform against goals and objectives? It's rather straightforward and represents the "current" state of an employee's performance. The key here is to see consistent performance year over year.
2. Promotability:
The "future" aspect of the equation is the promotability factor. If the employee has consistent performance year over year and exhibits the competencies the company has identified as critical to the business, then the employee has a high chance of being promoted or moving up the career path. A big mistake companies make is to only have one career path, which leads to managing people. Companies must have a career path for experts (technical, scientific, engineering, etc.) in order to have a promotability factor that does not include managing people. Not all employees are good at managing, but they may be highly proficient at their discipline.
3. Growth:
In today's economy, one of the most important skill sets is the ability to grow a business. As revenues plummet and margins compress, companies need to look at ways to grow the top line. Whether operationally, by reducing costs to increase profit, through innovation of products and services or through expanding in new markets and regions, growth is the name of the game. Companies that excel at this will ultimately win over competitors.
4. Risk:
The other side of the equation is risk. Most people are aware of how crucial it is to assess financial risk when managing a company, but how many understand it's a crucial ingredient when assessing talent? Another factor to consider is the loss of legacy knowledge when long-tenured employees are laid off. Unless a company has a knowledge management database, they lose this valuable knowledge forever, which in turn can hurt productivity and business continuity. It's often easy to understand the impact to a business when it loses a strong leader, but the risk of losing a plant manager can also have a similar impact.
Compiled by; Hemant Gade
Hemant@JobsEnsure.com
http://www.jobsensure.com
[About the Author: Carla Zilka is the founder and principal advisor of NexGen Advisors LLC, an advisory firm specializing in business restructuring, talent management, organizational efficiency and business process improvement. She was a former vice president of HR at GE.]
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Background Screening: A Crucial Step When Hiring Talent
Background screening every single candidate is not cost-effective, yet maintaining a safe work environment is critical. There are a number of ways to verify an employee's identity before he or she comes on board so as to ensure a no-surprises approach to hiring and on-boarding talent.
The term "identity theft" conjures up images of hackers stealing credits cards for online purchases or scenes from "The Bourne Identity." In the workplace, however, a more common scenario is when someone uses someone else's name and Social Security number to land a job in the United States. Oftentimes, it is an illegal immigrant seeking legitimate employment - a paycheck and benefits - who cannot apply for a SSN firsthand. In fact, experts suggest that almost 75 percent of illegal aliens are using fraudulent Social Security cards to obtain employment.
One of the biggest issues employers must tackle when recruiting new talent is to verify the individual's identity and authorization to work; however, this cannot be done until an employee is actually hired.
Many companies with high-volume hiring requirements are considering proactive measures to make sure employees are really who they say they are.
An action that can be easily implemented pre-hire is asking a series of knockout questions during the application process, such as, "Do you have a driver's license?" In this way, applicants can be sorted into those who do and those who don't. Additionally, letting applicants know during the interview process that any job offer is predicted on the successful completion of a background check, drug screening and identification verification will help filter out those applicants who know they cannot successfully pass these.
Post-hire, employers can ensure that their staff members are legal by using a combination of the federal government's E-Verify system and the Social Security Number Verification System. Other companies offer services to verify identity against public databases and provide a detailed report. For example, the person with real estate holdings in multiple states is unlikely to be applying for work in a poultry processing plant.
Being audited by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement means lost productivity and brand damage. Employers who knowingly hire or knowingly continue to employ unauthorized workers face civil penalties from $250 to $11,000 per violation. Even in high-volume, minimum-wage hiring situations, some employers have chosen to put pre-hire assessment testing in place. In addition to interview knockout questions, these pre-hire assessment tests require candidates to be consistent in their responses to behavioral and skills-related questions. Some tests are designed to help determine who is truthful as well as what their tendencies will be once they're hired into the job. Even in high turnover situations, a penny spent on pre-hire assessments can help significantly lower costs over the long term.
There's another significant aspect of identity verification employers ought to consider. Hiring is on the increase, but the supply of candidates still outweighs the demand. With no additional recruiters or HR staff to help qualify the plethora of candidates, employers can consider instituting a "rehire eligibility check" as part of the pre-hire qualification process. Not all former employees are qualified candidates for positions in other employer locations. This approach can be particularly helpful in preventing someone fired for stealing at one location from being hired at another. These checks are especially meaningful in industries such as staffing, retail and restaurants.
Identity theft cannot be dismissed or ignored when it comes to hiring. Whether the illegal employment is intentional or merely due to an oversight or lack of knowledge, the employer bears the burden of the fines, and the person whose identity has been compromised may be subject to years of red tape to undo the damage. Rather than risk compromising their companies' reputation, employers should consider reliable employee verification checks to remove uncertainty in the recruiting process and have the protection and assurance that the candidates they hire really are who they say they are.
Compiled by ; Hemant Gade
Hemant@JobsEnsure.com
http://www.jobsensure.com
The term "identity theft" conjures up images of hackers stealing credits cards for online purchases or scenes from "The Bourne Identity." In the workplace, however, a more common scenario is when someone uses someone else's name and Social Security number to land a job in the United States. Oftentimes, it is an illegal immigrant seeking legitimate employment - a paycheck and benefits - who cannot apply for a SSN firsthand. In fact, experts suggest that almost 75 percent of illegal aliens are using fraudulent Social Security cards to obtain employment.
One of the biggest issues employers must tackle when recruiting new talent is to verify the individual's identity and authorization to work; however, this cannot be done until an employee is actually hired.
Many companies with high-volume hiring requirements are considering proactive measures to make sure employees are really who they say they are.
An action that can be easily implemented pre-hire is asking a series of knockout questions during the application process, such as, "Do you have a driver's license?" In this way, applicants can be sorted into those who do and those who don't. Additionally, letting applicants know during the interview process that any job offer is predicted on the successful completion of a background check, drug screening and identification verification will help filter out those applicants who know they cannot successfully pass these.
Post-hire, employers can ensure that their staff members are legal by using a combination of the federal government's E-Verify system and the Social Security Number Verification System. Other companies offer services to verify identity against public databases and provide a detailed report. For example, the person with real estate holdings in multiple states is unlikely to be applying for work in a poultry processing plant.
Being audited by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement means lost productivity and brand damage. Employers who knowingly hire or knowingly continue to employ unauthorized workers face civil penalties from $250 to $11,000 per violation. Even in high-volume, minimum-wage hiring situations, some employers have chosen to put pre-hire assessment testing in place. In addition to interview knockout questions, these pre-hire assessment tests require candidates to be consistent in their responses to behavioral and skills-related questions. Some tests are designed to help determine who is truthful as well as what their tendencies will be once they're hired into the job. Even in high turnover situations, a penny spent on pre-hire assessments can help significantly lower costs over the long term.
There's another significant aspect of identity verification employers ought to consider. Hiring is on the increase, but the supply of candidates still outweighs the demand. With no additional recruiters or HR staff to help qualify the plethora of candidates, employers can consider instituting a "rehire eligibility check" as part of the pre-hire qualification process. Not all former employees are qualified candidates for positions in other employer locations. This approach can be particularly helpful in preventing someone fired for stealing at one location from being hired at another. These checks are especially meaningful in industries such as staffing, retail and restaurants.
Identity theft cannot be dismissed or ignored when it comes to hiring. Whether the illegal employment is intentional or merely due to an oversight or lack of knowledge, the employer bears the burden of the fines, and the person whose identity has been compromised may be subject to years of red tape to undo the damage. Rather than risk compromising their companies' reputation, employers should consider reliable employee verification checks to remove uncertainty in the recruiting process and have the protection and assurance that the candidates they hire really are who they say they are.
Compiled by ; Hemant Gade
Hemant@JobsEnsure.com
http://www.jobsensure.com
Friday, June 4, 2010
The Right Kind of Retention
Money is often seen as the most motivating factor for employee engagement, but it can lead to employees working for incentives instead of focusing on good work. Instead, employers must focus on intrinsic rewards -- meaningfulness, choice, competence and progress -- to keep employees engaged.
Given the cost of employee onboarding, HR and top management concern over retention is certainly justified.
However, those who fixate on retention itself may be missing the point - all retention is not necessarily equal. If, for example, employees remain primarily because they feel they have no other options or they're afraid of losing benefits, it's logical to assume they aren't giving their full talent and energy to the work.
Conversely, if they stay put because they enjoy or believe in their work - or are, in other words, engaged in their work - you may reasonably expect higher quality/productivit y. Engagement, therefore, should be a chief concern in any retention plan.
What fuels engagement? In our research for the Work Engagement profile - an instrument designed to measure the level of individual employee engagement and provide insight into how it can be improved - we found that, while salary, benefits and other extrinsic rewards are doubtless a factor, there is a more powerful indicator - intrinsic motivation.
When employees are intrinsically motivated, they derive energy and satisfaction from doing work that matters and doing it well, and tend to excel. What are some of the intrinsic rewards that fuel engagement? And how can organizations employ these in a way that, not only reduces turnover, but enables employees to connect meaningfully with their work? Those answers will allow companies to achieve the right kind of retention.
Defining Work Engagement
The engaged employee is committed to the purposes that underlie his or her job and self-manages in pursuit of accomplishment. Research shows that today's work requires considerably more judgment than in the past, including adapting to customer needs, solving problems and innovatively achieving organizational purposes.
However, the level of employee engagement is not keeping up with the growing need for it. The 2008 study The State of Employee Engagement by BlessingWhite found that only 29 percent of North American workers were fully engaged.
How can organizations fuel true engagement? Money - viewed by many as the end-all-and- be-all of motivators - does not have quite the impact on engagement you might expect. In fact, when employees are motivated only by incentive systems, they tend to care more about the rewards than doing good work, focus solely on rewarded activities, perform only "well enough" to get rewarded and often try to game the system.
Employees, it turns out, are not in it simply for the pay. Sure, they need the money, but once on the job, they also need to feel that their work makes a positive difference. They make ongoing judgments concerning their contributions which, when positive, produce strong, energizing intrinsic (psychological) rewards that fuel a high level of work engagement.
When the judgments are moderate, they become only somewhat engaged, putting in a "fair day's work." When the judgments are negative, in contrast, they become increasingly disengaged and cynical about work and begin to resent the effort they put into it.
In the Work Engagement Profile we identify four key intrinsic rewards based on the judgments employees make about their contributions:
1. Sense of Meaningfulness
You feel that you have an opportunity to accomplish something of real value that matters in the larger scheme of things. You feel that you are on a path that is worth your time and
energy, and have a strong sense of purpose and direction.
2. Sense of Choice
You feel free to choose how to accomplish your work - to use your best judgment to select work activities that make sense and perform them in ways that seem appropriate. So you feel an ownership of your work, believe in the approach you are taking and feel responsible for making it count.
3. Sense of Competence
You feel a sense of satisfaction, pride, or even artistry in how well you perform your work activities - that you are doing good, high-quality work.
4. Sense of Progress
You are encouraged and feel that your work is on track and moving you toward accomplishing your purpose. You see convincing signs that things are working out, giving you confidence in your choices and in the future.
Our research indicates that these intrinsic rewards have widespread and powerful effects, and are strong predictors of the kind of retention that truly benefits the organization. They are a healthy and sustainable source of employee motivation, leading to more positive - and fewer negative - feelings on the job, higher job satisfaction, fewer stress symptoms and a feeling of professional accomplishment.
Employees with high intrinsic reward levels show more work concentration and innovation, are rated as more effective, and become informal recruiters and marketers for their organization.
Creating a Culture of Engagement
You can create a culture of engagement by making it clear that your organization stands for quality, meaningful work. Keep people's attention focused on the elements of employee contribution, constantly asking:
a) What can we do that is meaningful?
b) What creative choices can we make to accomplish our purpose?
c) How can we improve our competency?
d) How can we ensure we are making progress toward our purpose?
Here are some additional guidelines for building a culture of engagement:
1. Engage the "middle."
It is tempting to divide your time between the "go-to," highly engaged employees and the disengaged ones who need the most oversight. But success depends largely on engaging the sizable group of "somewhat engaged" employees in the middle. Bringing these folks into the "highly engaged" category will create a strong majority of engaged people and a culture of engagement.
2. Regularly take stock of the four intrinsic rewards.
We designed the Work Engagement Profile for this purpose, but individual leaders can also get a rough sense of the level of each reward through ongoing conversations with their employees. Feedback from those in the engagement middle-ground is particularly useful. This ongoing assessment provides vital diagnostic information, revealing areas of reward that need attention.
3. Provide missing building blocks for any intrinsic rewards that are low.
Each intrinsic reward requires its own, unique enabling conditions, or "building blocks," which we identify as:
Meaningfulness:
a) A non-cynical climate: freedom to care deeply
b) Clearly identified passions: insight into what one cares deeply about
c) An exciting vision: a vivid picture of what can be accomplished
d) Relevant task purposes: a connection between one's work and the vision
e) Whole tasks: responsibility for an identifiable product or service
Choice:
a) Delegated authority: the right to make decisions
b) Trust: confidence in an individual's self-management
c) Security: no fear of punishment for experimenting or honest mistakes
d) A clear purpose: an understanding of what one is trying to accomplish
e) Information: access to relevant facts and sources
Competence:
a) Knowledge: an adequate store of insights from education and experience
b) Positive feedback: information on what is working
c) Skill recognition: due credit for one's successes
d) Challenge: demanding tasks that fit one's abilities
e) High, non-comparative standards: demanding standards that don't force rankings
Progress:
a) A collaborative climate: co-workers who help each other succeed
b) Milestones: reference points to mark stages of accomplishment
c) Celebrations: occasions to share enjoyment of milestones
d) Access to customers: interactions with the beneficiaries of one's work
e) Measurement of improvement: a way to see if performance gets better
4. Share credible evidence of meaningfulness, choice, competence and progress.
Engaging leaders keep their people energized through such practices as sharing appreciative customer-feedback customers, reminding people how much they've accomplished, telling stories about innovative solutions, drawing attention to special accomplishments and celebrating important milestones.
5. Build intrinsic motivation and engagement into leadership training programs.
Finally, provide supervisors and managers with an understanding of the importance of intrinsic rewards and worker engagement.
Managers and professionals, though quick to recognize the importance of these rewards in their own engagement, are often surprised to realize that they are equally important to employees at all levels. Give them the tools to engage their direct reports, so that they can help you achieve the right kind of retention for your organization.
-Kenneth W. Thomas
[About the Author: Ken Thomas is perhaps best known as co-author of the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument, which has sold over 6 million copies. His new instrument, the Work Engagement Profile (with Walter Tymon, Villanova University), published by CCP, Inc., provides a means of gauging the level of intrinsic motivation within an organization or individual, and tools for using the four intrinsic rewards to increase work engagement. Ken is also author of Intrinsic Motivation at Work: What Really Drives Employee Engagement, co-published by Berrett-Koehler and ASTD.]
Compiled by ; Hemant Gade
Hemant@JobsEnsure.com
http://www.jobsensure.com
Given the cost of employee onboarding, HR and top management concern over retention is certainly justified.
However, those who fixate on retention itself may be missing the point - all retention is not necessarily equal. If, for example, employees remain primarily because they feel they have no other options or they're afraid of losing benefits, it's logical to assume they aren't giving their full talent and energy to the work.
Conversely, if they stay put because they enjoy or believe in their work - or are, in other words, engaged in their work - you may reasonably expect higher quality/productivit y. Engagement, therefore, should be a chief concern in any retention plan.
What fuels engagement? In our research for the Work Engagement profile - an instrument designed to measure the level of individual employee engagement and provide insight into how it can be improved - we found that, while salary, benefits and other extrinsic rewards are doubtless a factor, there is a more powerful indicator - intrinsic motivation.
When employees are intrinsically motivated, they derive energy and satisfaction from doing work that matters and doing it well, and tend to excel. What are some of the intrinsic rewards that fuel engagement? And how can organizations employ these in a way that, not only reduces turnover, but enables employees to connect meaningfully with their work? Those answers will allow companies to achieve the right kind of retention.
Defining Work Engagement
The engaged employee is committed to the purposes that underlie his or her job and self-manages in pursuit of accomplishment. Research shows that today's work requires considerably more judgment than in the past, including adapting to customer needs, solving problems and innovatively achieving organizational purposes.
However, the level of employee engagement is not keeping up with the growing need for it. The 2008 study The State of Employee Engagement by BlessingWhite found that only 29 percent of North American workers were fully engaged.
How can organizations fuel true engagement? Money - viewed by many as the end-all-and- be-all of motivators - does not have quite the impact on engagement you might expect. In fact, when employees are motivated only by incentive systems, they tend to care more about the rewards than doing good work, focus solely on rewarded activities, perform only "well enough" to get rewarded and often try to game the system.
Employees, it turns out, are not in it simply for the pay. Sure, they need the money, but once on the job, they also need to feel that their work makes a positive difference. They make ongoing judgments concerning their contributions which, when positive, produce strong, energizing intrinsic (psychological) rewards that fuel a high level of work engagement.
When the judgments are moderate, they become only somewhat engaged, putting in a "fair day's work." When the judgments are negative, in contrast, they become increasingly disengaged and cynical about work and begin to resent the effort they put into it.
In the Work Engagement Profile we identify four key intrinsic rewards based on the judgments employees make about their contributions:
1. Sense of Meaningfulness
You feel that you have an opportunity to accomplish something of real value that matters in the larger scheme of things. You feel that you are on a path that is worth your time and
energy, and have a strong sense of purpose and direction.
2. Sense of Choice
You feel free to choose how to accomplish your work - to use your best judgment to select work activities that make sense and perform them in ways that seem appropriate. So you feel an ownership of your work, believe in the approach you are taking and feel responsible for making it count.
3. Sense of Competence
You feel a sense of satisfaction, pride, or even artistry in how well you perform your work activities - that you are doing good, high-quality work.
4. Sense of Progress
You are encouraged and feel that your work is on track and moving you toward accomplishing your purpose. You see convincing signs that things are working out, giving you confidence in your choices and in the future.
Our research indicates that these intrinsic rewards have widespread and powerful effects, and are strong predictors of the kind of retention that truly benefits the organization. They are a healthy and sustainable source of employee motivation, leading to more positive - and fewer negative - feelings on the job, higher job satisfaction, fewer stress symptoms and a feeling of professional accomplishment.
Employees with high intrinsic reward levels show more work concentration and innovation, are rated as more effective, and become informal recruiters and marketers for their organization.
Creating a Culture of Engagement
You can create a culture of engagement by making it clear that your organization stands for quality, meaningful work. Keep people's attention focused on the elements of employee contribution, constantly asking:
a) What can we do that is meaningful?
b) What creative choices can we make to accomplish our purpose?
c) How can we improve our competency?
d) How can we ensure we are making progress toward our purpose?
Here are some additional guidelines for building a culture of engagement:
1. Engage the "middle."
It is tempting to divide your time between the "go-to," highly engaged employees and the disengaged ones who need the most oversight. But success depends largely on engaging the sizable group of "somewhat engaged" employees in the middle. Bringing these folks into the "highly engaged" category will create a strong majority of engaged people and a culture of engagement.
2. Regularly take stock of the four intrinsic rewards.
We designed the Work Engagement Profile for this purpose, but individual leaders can also get a rough sense of the level of each reward through ongoing conversations with their employees. Feedback from those in the engagement middle-ground is particularly useful. This ongoing assessment provides vital diagnostic information, revealing areas of reward that need attention.
3. Provide missing building blocks for any intrinsic rewards that are low.
Each intrinsic reward requires its own, unique enabling conditions, or "building blocks," which we identify as:
Meaningfulness:
a) A non-cynical climate: freedom to care deeply
b) Clearly identified passions: insight into what one cares deeply about
c) An exciting vision: a vivid picture of what can be accomplished
d) Relevant task purposes: a connection between one's work and the vision
e) Whole tasks: responsibility for an identifiable product or service
Choice:
a) Delegated authority: the right to make decisions
b) Trust: confidence in an individual's self-management
c) Security: no fear of punishment for experimenting or honest mistakes
d) A clear purpose: an understanding of what one is trying to accomplish
e) Information: access to relevant facts and sources
Competence:
a) Knowledge: an adequate store of insights from education and experience
b) Positive feedback: information on what is working
c) Skill recognition: due credit for one's successes
d) Challenge: demanding tasks that fit one's abilities
e) High, non-comparative standards: demanding standards that don't force rankings
Progress:
a) A collaborative climate: co-workers who help each other succeed
b) Milestones: reference points to mark stages of accomplishment
c) Celebrations: occasions to share enjoyment of milestones
d) Access to customers: interactions with the beneficiaries of one's work
e) Measurement of improvement: a way to see if performance gets better
4. Share credible evidence of meaningfulness, choice, competence and progress.
Engaging leaders keep their people energized through such practices as sharing appreciative customer-feedback customers, reminding people how much they've accomplished, telling stories about innovative solutions, drawing attention to special accomplishments and celebrating important milestones.
5. Build intrinsic motivation and engagement into leadership training programs.
Finally, provide supervisors and managers with an understanding of the importance of intrinsic rewards and worker engagement.
Managers and professionals, though quick to recognize the importance of these rewards in their own engagement, are often surprised to realize that they are equally important to employees at all levels. Give them the tools to engage their direct reports, so that they can help you achieve the right kind of retention for your organization.
-Kenneth W. Thomas
[About the Author: Ken Thomas is perhaps best known as co-author of the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument, which has sold over 6 million copies. His new instrument, the Work Engagement Profile (with Walter Tymon, Villanova University), published by CCP, Inc., provides a means of gauging the level of intrinsic motivation within an organization or individual, and tools for using the four intrinsic rewards to increase work engagement. Ken is also author of Intrinsic Motivation at Work: What Really Drives Employee Engagement, co-published by Berrett-Koehler and ASTD.]
Compiled by ; Hemant Gade
Hemant@JobsEnsure.com
http://www.jobsensure.com
Monday, April 19, 2010
Why Employees Leave Organization ?
WHY EMPLOYEES LEAVE ORGANISATIONS ? -
Azim Premji, CEO - Wipro
Every company faces the problem of people leaving the company for better pay or profile.
Early this year, Mark, a senior software designer, got an offer from a prestigious international firm to work in its India operations developing specialized software. He was thrilled by the offer.
He had heard a lot about the CEO. The salary was great. The company had all the right systems in place employee-friendly human resources (HR) policies, a spanking new office,and the very best technology,even a canteen that served superb food.
Twice Mark was sent abroad for training. "My learning curve is the sharpest it's ever been," he said soon after he joined.
Last week, less than eight months after he joined, Mark walked out of the job.
Why did this talented employee leave ?
Mark quit for the same reason that drives many good people away.
The answer lies in one of the largest studies undertaken by the Gallup Organization. The study surveyed over a million employees and 80,000 managers and was published in a book called "First Break All The Rules". It came up with this surprising finding:
If you're losing good people, look to their immediate boss .Immediate boss is the reason people stay and thrive in an organization. And he 's the reason why people leave. When people leave they take knowledge,experience and contacts with them, straight to the competition.
"People leave managers not companies," write the authors Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman.
Mostly manager drives people away?
HR experts say that of all the abuses, employees find humiliation the most intolerable. The first time, an employee may not leave,but a thought has been planted. The second time, that thought gets strengthened. The third time, he looks for another job.
When people cannot retort openly in anger, they do so by passive aggression. By digging their heels in and slowing down. By doing only what they are told to do and no more. By omitting to give the boss crucial information. Dev says: "If you work for a jerk, you basically want to get him into trouble. You don 't have your heart and soul in the job."
Different managers can stress out employees in different ways - by being too controlling, too suspicious,too pushy, too critical, but they forget that workers are not fixed assets, they are free agents. When this goes on too long, an employee will quit - often over a trivial issue.
Talented men leave. Dead wood doesn't.
"Jack Welch of GE once said. A company's value lies "between the ears of its employees".
Compiled by ; Hemant Gade
Cel : 9824015971
Hemant@JobsEnsure.com
http://www.jobsensure.com
Azim Premji, CEO - Wipro
Every company faces the problem of people leaving the company for better pay or profile.
Early this year, Mark, a senior software designer, got an offer from a prestigious international firm to work in its India operations developing specialized software. He was thrilled by the offer.
He had heard a lot about the CEO. The salary was great. The company had all the right systems in place employee-friendly human resources (HR) policies, a spanking new office,and the very best technology,even a canteen that served superb food.
Twice Mark was sent abroad for training. "My learning curve is the sharpest it's ever been," he said soon after he joined.
Last week, less than eight months after he joined, Mark walked out of the job.
Why did this talented employee leave ?
Mark quit for the same reason that drives many good people away.
The answer lies in one of the largest studies undertaken by the Gallup Organization. The study surveyed over a million employees and 80,000 managers and was published in a book called "First Break All The Rules". It came up with this surprising finding:
If you're losing good people, look to their immediate boss .Immediate boss is the reason people stay and thrive in an organization. And he 's the reason why people leave. When people leave they take knowledge,experience and contacts with them, straight to the competition.
"People leave managers not companies," write the authors Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman.
Mostly manager drives people away?
HR experts say that of all the abuses, employees find humiliation the most intolerable. The first time, an employee may not leave,but a thought has been planted. The second time, that thought gets strengthened. The third time, he looks for another job.
When people cannot retort openly in anger, they do so by passive aggression. By digging their heels in and slowing down. By doing only what they are told to do and no more. By omitting to give the boss crucial information. Dev says: "If you work for a jerk, you basically want to get him into trouble. You don 't have your heart and soul in the job."
Different managers can stress out employees in different ways - by being too controlling, too suspicious,too pushy, too critical, but they forget that workers are not fixed assets, they are free agents. When this goes on too long, an employee will quit - often over a trivial issue.
Talented men leave. Dead wood doesn't.
"Jack Welch of GE once said. A company's value lies "between the ears of its employees".
Compiled by ; Hemant Gade
Cel : 9824015971
Hemant@JobsEnsure.com
http://www.jobsensure.com
Thursday, March 4, 2010
Learning in 2010
Learning in 2010
by Elliott Masie
As we head into 2010, many, if not most, in the learning and development community are anticipating at least some level of change. Here, I present a list of predictions for the world of learning in 2010 - a combination of actual trends that we are tracking at The Masie Center as well as some early data points that could affect learning's impact.
1. Compliance weariness, push back and alternatives.
For the past three years, we have tracked the growth of compliance-driven learning. In many organizations, almost 70 percent of all e-learning offered is for compliance rather than performance and development purposes. We are beginning to track a push back from large organizations, especially when they consider the total wage and motivational cost of so much compliance-driven e-learning. Organizations are starting to resist and consider alternatives, including sampling worker compliance, continuous micro-testing to surface compliance vulnerabilities, and better integration of compliance elements in performance- enhancing activities. Watch for a large number to surface with regard to the total cost of organizational compliance training in 2010.
2. Designable and actionable social networks.
Right now, most social networks - either at work or in our personal lives - are places to visit, interact or just gawk. But most social networks do not allow instructional designers to design an actionable request. For example, if I am building a management development program, could I configure the social network to require that each learner have an in-depth conversation with a peer in the organization who meets key criteria? Could I design a collaborative project that would leverage an internal social platform, like SharePoint, and structure the action in a visual format?
3. Video annotation and editing made simple.
As we grow the use of YouTube-like video, demand for simple editing and, more importantly, annotation of video will rise. So, if I take a video of how to load paper into the copy machine, how could I easily add a comment and even a big white arrow pointing to the button that needs to be pushed? Most workers are not going to learn in-depth or complicated video editing programs; therefore, you will see at least two Web-based, online video editing sites become popular in 2010. They will have a range of templates and even allow for multiple annotations in different languages. Also, watch for a beta version of a video-to-text auto transcription capacity pop up in one of these services.
4. Skype, Google and Microsoft video come to work.
Currently, millions of people are using platforms like Skype to chat with their friends, family or colleagues around the world. Still, simple desktop video has not really taken hold in the workplace. IT groups don't want to see it waste bandwidth, and legal groups wonder if they need to store video chats for future lawsuits. But just as the use of color monitors and speakers started at home and then invaded the office, watch for the rise of desktop videoconferencing using tools like Skype, Google or Microsoft in the enterprise.
5. Project-based learning grows.
Watch for organizations to increase their use of structured projects for learning. Instead of registering for an instructor-led class to hear a lecture or take an e-learning module, project-based learning models assign "stretch" projects to workers for the purpose of learning. They may be asked to do such projects independently or in small groups. Learning resources are suggested, and the learner or group has access to subject-matter experts for assistance, perspective and feedback, but the focus is on doing the project. Projects can be real work or simulated tasks, both of which give learners the ability to immerse in work as they learn.
6. New, thinner, cloud-based learning systems.
We are seeing early signals about new learning systems - LMS and LCMS - that may be headed to the market or to the open source world in late 2010. These systems are slim in size, located in the computing cloud and more focused on learners who engage in social, mobile and contextual learning. One of the ventures is based in Asia and the other is coming out of a higher education project. Interestingly, both see themselves as systems that could be deployed by small workgroups, individuals or enterprises. I give them about a 40 to 60 percent chance of making it to market.
[About the Author: Elliott Masie is the chair and CLO of The Masie Center's Learning Consortium.]
Compiled & Posted by : Hemant Gade Hemant@JobsEnsure.com 9824015971
by Elliott Masie
As we head into 2010, many, if not most, in the learning and development community are anticipating at least some level of change. Here, I present a list of predictions for the world of learning in 2010 - a combination of actual trends that we are tracking at The Masie Center as well as some early data points that could affect learning's impact.
1. Compliance weariness, push back and alternatives.
For the past three years, we have tracked the growth of compliance-driven learning. In many organizations, almost 70 percent of all e-learning offered is for compliance rather than performance and development purposes. We are beginning to track a push back from large organizations, especially when they consider the total wage and motivational cost of so much compliance-driven e-learning. Organizations are starting to resist and consider alternatives, including sampling worker compliance, continuous micro-testing to surface compliance vulnerabilities, and better integration of compliance elements in performance- enhancing activities. Watch for a large number to surface with regard to the total cost of organizational compliance training in 2010.
2. Designable and actionable social networks.
Right now, most social networks - either at work or in our personal lives - are places to visit, interact or just gawk. But most social networks do not allow instructional designers to design an actionable request. For example, if I am building a management development program, could I configure the social network to require that each learner have an in-depth conversation with a peer in the organization who meets key criteria? Could I design a collaborative project that would leverage an internal social platform, like SharePoint, and structure the action in a visual format?
3. Video annotation and editing made simple.
As we grow the use of YouTube-like video, demand for simple editing and, more importantly, annotation of video will rise. So, if I take a video of how to load paper into the copy machine, how could I easily add a comment and even a big white arrow pointing to the button that needs to be pushed? Most workers are not going to learn in-depth or complicated video editing programs; therefore, you will see at least two Web-based, online video editing sites become popular in 2010. They will have a range of templates and even allow for multiple annotations in different languages. Also, watch for a beta version of a video-to-text auto transcription capacity pop up in one of these services.
4. Skype, Google and Microsoft video come to work.
Currently, millions of people are using platforms like Skype to chat with their friends, family or colleagues around the world. Still, simple desktop video has not really taken hold in the workplace. IT groups don't want to see it waste bandwidth, and legal groups wonder if they need to store video chats for future lawsuits. But just as the use of color monitors and speakers started at home and then invaded the office, watch for the rise of desktop videoconferencing using tools like Skype, Google or Microsoft in the enterprise.
5. Project-based learning grows.
Watch for organizations to increase their use of structured projects for learning. Instead of registering for an instructor-led class to hear a lecture or take an e-learning module, project-based learning models assign "stretch" projects to workers for the purpose of learning. They may be asked to do such projects independently or in small groups. Learning resources are suggested, and the learner or group has access to subject-matter experts for assistance, perspective and feedback, but the focus is on doing the project. Projects can be real work or simulated tasks, both of which give learners the ability to immerse in work as they learn.
6. New, thinner, cloud-based learning systems.
We are seeing early signals about new learning systems - LMS and LCMS - that may be headed to the market or to the open source world in late 2010. These systems are slim in size, located in the computing cloud and more focused on learners who engage in social, mobile and contextual learning. One of the ventures is based in Asia and the other is coming out of a higher education project. Interestingly, both see themselves as systems that could be deployed by small workgroups, individuals or enterprises. I give them about a 40 to 60 percent chance of making it to market.
[About the Author: Elliott Masie is the chair and CLO of The Masie Center's Learning Consortium.]
Compiled & Posted by : Hemant Gade Hemant@JobsEnsure.com 9824015971
Friday, February 12, 2010
Talent Executive Guidance for 2010
Talent Executive Guidance for 2010
by Brian Kropp
Most executives would like to put at least some part of 2009 behind them, and in most cases for good reason. Organizations in the present business climate have had to contend simultaneously with plummeting growth, an evaporation of capital, dramatically curtailed liquidity, commodity price volatility and global supply chain exposures and risks.
That has forced organizations to rapidly curtail spending, pare the workforce and exit some business lines and geographies, all the while trying to maintain morale among employees and the investor base. And, while the press has made much of the so-called "green shoots" portending economic recovery, for most of us today, those feel like much ado about nothing. In short, little about 2009 has been easy.
However, as organizations turn to 2010, there is a commonly held belief that an improving economic outlook will lift all boats. But it is critical to realize that recoveries are not restorations. Approaching the post-recession workforce landscape with the same viewpoint that organizations had in the middle part of the decade runs the risk of organizational underperformance.
After extensive surveys and thousands of conversations and corporate plan reviews. The Corporate Executive Board (CEB) has arrived at the following statistical analyses of past, ongoing and future business trends related to talent management. Further, it has identified six enemies of post-recession performance that can significantly undermine organization recovery, erode profitability and make past performance levels unattainable:
1. Sharply lower marketing and sales productivity due to changed customer needs.
2. Productivity losses due to top talent disengagement and flight.
3. Larger and more frequent losses due to increasing risk velocity.
4. Rising losses and steeper penalties due to high levels of employee misconduct.
5. Low returns from IT budgets due to targeting a shrinking share of enterprise information.
6. Productivity losses due to misplaced leaders.
Two of these enemies - top talent disengagement and misplaced leaders - fall squarely within the responsibilities of human resources officers and talent managers.
Top Talent Disengagement and Flight
As we would expect, in 2009, workforce reductions have driven down employee engagement. While most employees' discretionary effort levels have fallen, this has yet to translate into massive turnover due to a perceived lack of job opportunities. However, this does not hold true for the entire workforce. More surprising may be that the employee segment expressing the greatest likelihood of turning over is the high-potential employee segment, stemming in large part from a 15 percent decline since 2006 in organizational effectiveness at delivering a competitive employee value proposition. Not only is talent bench shortfall a leading cause of corporate stalls, but the typical organization faces an imminent 7 percent productivity hit from the combination of departing top talent and undermanaged recruiting pipelines.
Most organizations try to engage high-potential employees by stressing the stability of their jobs. They drive speed of change and execution by making top-down decisions and communications regarding reorganizations, job design, strategy and goals. And they have reduced recruiting costs by focusing only on candidate applications where they have a specific need.
In addition to not taking for granted the retention of high-potential employees, the best organizations are:
a) Nurturing a talent pipeline for future need, even if applicants aren't suited for current positions.
b) Setting accurate employee expectations of stability.
c) Involving employees in job design decisions.
d) Enabling employee mobilization at lower levels in the organization.
Employee turnover at most companies has hit a historic low this year. Yet, CEB surveys of tens of thousands of employees across dozens of countries have revealed an alarming trend: 25 percent of high-potential employees currently are searching for a new employer, up 13 percent from the pre-recession period. That's substantially higher than the 10 percent for all other employees.
Most executives express genuine surprise at this finding. After all, few employees have been leaving. But the retention levels of the past year provide false comfort. Employees, even the best, don't want to switch companies in such an uncertain climate. Workforce reductions and redundancies, lower incentive compensation, and diminished resources, combined with unrevised expectations, have reduced job satisfaction and created a pent-up demand for jobs at other firms. Absent aggressive intervention, as the economy improves, organizations will see their best people leaving for seemingly greener pastures.
Many different retention strategies can be deployed quickly to reduce the risk factor here, including building customized retention plans for high-potential staff. Most organizations focus on communicating a message of stability to this group. That sentiment motivates managers at all levels of the organization to overstate the stability of an employee's position. This includes not only one-off statements, but official communications as well.
When organizations tell employees that they have high job stability and it proves true, they see a boast in employee commitment. But when it turns out that organizations have overstated stability, employee commitment falls 46 percent, from a 29 percent increase to a 17 percent decrease. In short, if organizations tell employees that all of the changes that they have been through are done, and more come, employee commitment is destroyed. The early read on 2010 is that organizational change, while not at the same clip of the past 18 months, will continue.
Executives are driving rapid changes in business operations and associated leadership roles as well as shifting job responsibilities to compensate for workforce reductions. Changes to people's roles and responsibilities come fast, and they come top down.
While faster in the near term, this approach is counterproductive when it comes to retaining and engaging employees. When organizations ask employees to express their degree of satisfaction with their job, they find that if they haven't involved staff in their job design, only 31 percent express high job satisfaction. By contrast, that goes all the way up to 82 percent whenever employees believe they have a high degree of involvement. But what is truly powerful here is not that employees need to own their job design, but rather that a small degree of involvement dramatically increases their perception that they are in the right job.
Misplaced Leaders
It is not surprising that many organizations have responded to the financial downturn by focusing on improving the quality of the leadership bench. The difference in team productivity between high-performing leaders and lower-performing leaders has significant impact on corporate performance. Examining data from the first half of 2009, teams led by the best leaders are not only 30 percent less likely to experience attrition, but they also work 26 percent harder than teams led by the worst leaders. But improving the strength of the leadership bench is no easy task and has left most organizations wondering - where are all the good leaders? The answer: they are already at these organizations, just likely to be in the wrong job and stymied by a significant number of organizational constraints. Not only does solving these challenges improve workforce outcomes, but proper support of a company's existing leaders can support revenue and profit by more than 10 percent.
The knee-jerk reaction in many organizations to any real or perceived legacy leadership issues is to get rid of the old leaders - a strategy adopted to varying degrees by 62 percent of organizations - or conduct another round of leadership training and development exercises - a classic buy-versus-build approach that moves leader by leader. This is not wrong per se, but it is often an inadequate response to what is a much more systemic problem because less than 10 percent of leaders are truly underperforming, and only one-third of leaders have the capabilities gaps that would benefit from these sorts of development exercises.
Most organizations already have plenty of leaders with the capabilities necessary to succeed; 86 percent have the right talent buried in the wrong places. It is the process for assigning, and then supporting, leaders that limits performance. Going into 2010, the strategy to improve the performance of the leadership team should focus on activating existing capabilities and deploying leaders in the right way, rather than massive, across-the-board development exercises.
The second common approach that organizations have pursued to improve the performance of their leaders is to restructure the organization and in turn the leadership team, adopted by more than 16 percent of organizations. In reality, the massive restructuring is certainly a function of organization strategy, but neglecting the implications of these restructuring initiatives on leaders is hugely damaging because 40 percent of leadership performance is driven by organizational factors. Organizational obstructions include lack of role clarity, poor goal alignment, poor job and work design and weak knowledge transfer systems.
In order to limit the impact of these obstructions, organizations must surface all barriers to leadership performance, both the soft and the hard. The soft assessment involves an examination of barriers such as culture, interface tensions and business processes. The hard barriers involve structural factors such as lack of strategic oversight, resource misalignment and complexity of job design.
But this should also become a dynamic process both in terms of developing the capabilities of individual leaders and organization design. What the best organizations are doing to ensure that they avoid future misplaced leadership challenges is to better align the trajectory of the personal growth of their leaders with the trajectory of the change in needs for a specific role. By more effectively aligning these two, organizations will be able to ensure the effectiveness of the leadership team well into the future.
Building the Workforce Plan for 2010
As mentioned, recoveries are not restorations. As the economy continues its slow improvement, HR executives have two critical focus areas. The first is ensuring that as the labor market improves, the disengagement and potential flight of their top talent doesn't prevent their organizational recovery. The second is to re-examine organizations' approach to the performance of their leaders and to shift from improving the performance of individual leaders to determining how to activate and deploy all leaders to improve the performance of the entire leadership bench.
[About the Author: Brian Kropp is managing director in the HR practice of The Corporate Executive Board.]
Posted by : Hemant Gade
Hemant@JobsEnsure.com
http://www.JobsEnsure.com
by Brian Kropp
Most executives would like to put at least some part of 2009 behind them, and in most cases for good reason. Organizations in the present business climate have had to contend simultaneously with plummeting growth, an evaporation of capital, dramatically curtailed liquidity, commodity price volatility and global supply chain exposures and risks.
That has forced organizations to rapidly curtail spending, pare the workforce and exit some business lines and geographies, all the while trying to maintain morale among employees and the investor base. And, while the press has made much of the so-called "green shoots" portending economic recovery, for most of us today, those feel like much ado about nothing. In short, little about 2009 has been easy.
However, as organizations turn to 2010, there is a commonly held belief that an improving economic outlook will lift all boats. But it is critical to realize that recoveries are not restorations. Approaching the post-recession workforce landscape with the same viewpoint that organizations had in the middle part of the decade runs the risk of organizational underperformance.
After extensive surveys and thousands of conversations and corporate plan reviews. The Corporate Executive Board (CEB) has arrived at the following statistical analyses of past, ongoing and future business trends related to talent management. Further, it has identified six enemies of post-recession performance that can significantly undermine organization recovery, erode profitability and make past performance levels unattainable:
1. Sharply lower marketing and sales productivity due to changed customer needs.
2. Productivity losses due to top talent disengagement and flight.
3. Larger and more frequent losses due to increasing risk velocity.
4. Rising losses and steeper penalties due to high levels of employee misconduct.
5. Low returns from IT budgets due to targeting a shrinking share of enterprise information.
6. Productivity losses due to misplaced leaders.
Two of these enemies - top talent disengagement and misplaced leaders - fall squarely within the responsibilities of human resources officers and talent managers.
Top Talent Disengagement and Flight
As we would expect, in 2009, workforce reductions have driven down employee engagement. While most employees' discretionary effort levels have fallen, this has yet to translate into massive turnover due to a perceived lack of job opportunities. However, this does not hold true for the entire workforce. More surprising may be that the employee segment expressing the greatest likelihood of turning over is the high-potential employee segment, stemming in large part from a 15 percent decline since 2006 in organizational effectiveness at delivering a competitive employee value proposition. Not only is talent bench shortfall a leading cause of corporate stalls, but the typical organization faces an imminent 7 percent productivity hit from the combination of departing top talent and undermanaged recruiting pipelines.
Most organizations try to engage high-potential employees by stressing the stability of their jobs. They drive speed of change and execution by making top-down decisions and communications regarding reorganizations, job design, strategy and goals. And they have reduced recruiting costs by focusing only on candidate applications where they have a specific need.
In addition to not taking for granted the retention of high-potential employees, the best organizations are:
a) Nurturing a talent pipeline for future need, even if applicants aren't suited for current positions.
b) Setting accurate employee expectations of stability.
c) Involving employees in job design decisions.
d) Enabling employee mobilization at lower levels in the organization.
Employee turnover at most companies has hit a historic low this year. Yet, CEB surveys of tens of thousands of employees across dozens of countries have revealed an alarming trend: 25 percent of high-potential employees currently are searching for a new employer, up 13 percent from the pre-recession period. That's substantially higher than the 10 percent for all other employees.
Most executives express genuine surprise at this finding. After all, few employees have been leaving. But the retention levels of the past year provide false comfort. Employees, even the best, don't want to switch companies in such an uncertain climate. Workforce reductions and redundancies, lower incentive compensation, and diminished resources, combined with unrevised expectations, have reduced job satisfaction and created a pent-up demand for jobs at other firms. Absent aggressive intervention, as the economy improves, organizations will see their best people leaving for seemingly greener pastures.
Many different retention strategies can be deployed quickly to reduce the risk factor here, including building customized retention plans for high-potential staff. Most organizations focus on communicating a message of stability to this group. That sentiment motivates managers at all levels of the organization to overstate the stability of an employee's position. This includes not only one-off statements, but official communications as well.
When organizations tell employees that they have high job stability and it proves true, they see a boast in employee commitment. But when it turns out that organizations have overstated stability, employee commitment falls 46 percent, from a 29 percent increase to a 17 percent decrease. In short, if organizations tell employees that all of the changes that they have been through are done, and more come, employee commitment is destroyed. The early read on 2010 is that organizational change, while not at the same clip of the past 18 months, will continue.
Executives are driving rapid changes in business operations and associated leadership roles as well as shifting job responsibilities to compensate for workforce reductions. Changes to people's roles and responsibilities come fast, and they come top down.
While faster in the near term, this approach is counterproductive when it comes to retaining and engaging employees. When organizations ask employees to express their degree of satisfaction with their job, they find that if they haven't involved staff in their job design, only 31 percent express high job satisfaction. By contrast, that goes all the way up to 82 percent whenever employees believe they have a high degree of involvement. But what is truly powerful here is not that employees need to own their job design, but rather that a small degree of involvement dramatically increases their perception that they are in the right job.
Misplaced Leaders
It is not surprising that many organizations have responded to the financial downturn by focusing on improving the quality of the leadership bench. The difference in team productivity between high-performing leaders and lower-performing leaders has significant impact on corporate performance. Examining data from the first half of 2009, teams led by the best leaders are not only 30 percent less likely to experience attrition, but they also work 26 percent harder than teams led by the worst leaders. But improving the strength of the leadership bench is no easy task and has left most organizations wondering - where are all the good leaders? The answer: they are already at these organizations, just likely to be in the wrong job and stymied by a significant number of organizational constraints. Not only does solving these challenges improve workforce outcomes, but proper support of a company's existing leaders can support revenue and profit by more than 10 percent.
The knee-jerk reaction in many organizations to any real or perceived legacy leadership issues is to get rid of the old leaders - a strategy adopted to varying degrees by 62 percent of organizations - or conduct another round of leadership training and development exercises - a classic buy-versus-build approach that moves leader by leader. This is not wrong per se, but it is often an inadequate response to what is a much more systemic problem because less than 10 percent of leaders are truly underperforming, and only one-third of leaders have the capabilities gaps that would benefit from these sorts of development exercises.
Most organizations already have plenty of leaders with the capabilities necessary to succeed; 86 percent have the right talent buried in the wrong places. It is the process for assigning, and then supporting, leaders that limits performance. Going into 2010, the strategy to improve the performance of the leadership team should focus on activating existing capabilities and deploying leaders in the right way, rather than massive, across-the-board development exercises.
The second common approach that organizations have pursued to improve the performance of their leaders is to restructure the organization and in turn the leadership team, adopted by more than 16 percent of organizations. In reality, the massive restructuring is certainly a function of organization strategy, but neglecting the implications of these restructuring initiatives on leaders is hugely damaging because 40 percent of leadership performance is driven by organizational factors. Organizational obstructions include lack of role clarity, poor goal alignment, poor job and work design and weak knowledge transfer systems.
In order to limit the impact of these obstructions, organizations must surface all barriers to leadership performance, both the soft and the hard. The soft assessment involves an examination of barriers such as culture, interface tensions and business processes. The hard barriers involve structural factors such as lack of strategic oversight, resource misalignment and complexity of job design.
But this should also become a dynamic process both in terms of developing the capabilities of individual leaders and organization design. What the best organizations are doing to ensure that they avoid future misplaced leadership challenges is to better align the trajectory of the personal growth of their leaders with the trajectory of the change in needs for a specific role. By more effectively aligning these two, organizations will be able to ensure the effectiveness of the leadership team well into the future.
Building the Workforce Plan for 2010
As mentioned, recoveries are not restorations. As the economy continues its slow improvement, HR executives have two critical focus areas. The first is ensuring that as the labor market improves, the disengagement and potential flight of their top talent doesn't prevent their organizational recovery. The second is to re-examine organizations' approach to the performance of their leaders and to shift from improving the performance of individual leaders to determining how to activate and deploy all leaders to improve the performance of the entire leadership bench.
[About the Author: Brian Kropp is managing director in the HR practice of The Corporate Executive Board.]
Posted by : Hemant Gade
Hemant@JobsEnsure.com
http://www.JobsEnsure.com
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Seven Strategies to Engage Employees in 2010
Seven Strategies to Engage Employees in 2010
by Diane Brown
Effective leaders continually seek business improvements and ways to maximize the potential of those they lead. They see the untapped potential in their employees and deploy strategies to bring out the best in every person or team.
This is essential given the fact that the cost of unfocused, unmotivated and unhappy employees takes a heavy toll on business. Employee disengagement costs businesses in the United States more than $300 billion each year.
One study compared highly engaged business units to disengaged units and found that the engaged groups rated 86 percent higher in customer satisfaction, had a 78 percent higher safety record, maintained a 70 percent lower turnover rate, delivered a 70 percent higher productivity rate and scored 44 percent more in profitability.
The good news for leaders is that untapped potential of disengaged employees can be turned around. Here are some key strategies leaders can employ to increase staff engagement and further organizational success.
1. Hire right.
The most important decision that leaders make is to bring the right talent into the organization - this means finding a fit between what the job, team and organization needs and what the employee brings to the table. Too often, leaders hire people they like in the interview; this "like" factor creates a personality fit, but commonly misses several other important success factors. Instead, they must utilize a comprehensive performance assessment to help objectify the hiring process. An assessment that measures personality, motivation and competency provides the highest level of superior job performance predictability.
2. Honor the whole person.
Employees don't want to be used simply as a vehicle for corporate success. Engaging leaders truly care about workers as unique people. Employees engage when leaders demonstrate that they care about and are interested in them, their families and their careers.
3. Honor competency.
In the 21st-century, almost all jobs require some level of individual creativity, leadership and decision-making autonomy. An engaging leader understands that employees often have better answers to their own work issues than the boss does. Leaders should honor the competency of their employees by asking them to share their opinions and ideas and coaching them to think and create solutions themselves.
4. Establish a partnership environment.
Employees typically want to experience the success of achieving a cause bigger than themselves. However, most organizations miss opportunities to include employees in achieving the vision, mission and values of the company. Employee meetings are good vehicles for sharing information, but information and dialogue must flow freely through all levels of leadership, even to the most entry-level employee. Engaging leaders treat employees as partners in the business, and transparency of an organization' s financial status when possible is important.
5. Encourage healthy dialogue.
The majority of people tend to shy away from disagreements and conflict, but engaging leaders master the art of facilitating respectful and open dialogue that honors and encourages differing views. This type of environment not only fosters engagement, but it also produces healthier business decisions and increased profitability.
6. Provide resources.
Once employees are motivated to perform, it becomes critical that leaders provide all the resources employees need to be successful. These could include systems infrastructure, such as IT, financial funding, tools and equipment, information, and skills and abilities.
7. Ensure accountability.
When performance or interpersonal issues are not addressed, a team's morale suffers. The impact of even one disengaged employee can be devastating to the overall engagement of a department or team. High-performance teams within organizations operate just like winning sports teams - those that win are working together as a cohesive and engaged team. Losing teams may have a few individual stars, but no one performs at his or her best. Effective leaders deal with performance issues to ensure the entire team is functioning at its full potential.
[About the Author: Diane Brown is founder of Talent Journey, a talent management solutions provider, and an ACC accredited coach.]
by Diane Brown
Effective leaders continually seek business improvements and ways to maximize the potential of those they lead. They see the untapped potential in their employees and deploy strategies to bring out the best in every person or team.
This is essential given the fact that the cost of unfocused, unmotivated and unhappy employees takes a heavy toll on business. Employee disengagement costs businesses in the United States more than $300 billion each year.
One study compared highly engaged business units to disengaged units and found that the engaged groups rated 86 percent higher in customer satisfaction, had a 78 percent higher safety record, maintained a 70 percent lower turnover rate, delivered a 70 percent higher productivity rate and scored 44 percent more in profitability.
The good news for leaders is that untapped potential of disengaged employees can be turned around. Here are some key strategies leaders can employ to increase staff engagement and further organizational success.
1. Hire right.
The most important decision that leaders make is to bring the right talent into the organization - this means finding a fit between what the job, team and organization needs and what the employee brings to the table. Too often, leaders hire people they like in the interview; this "like" factor creates a personality fit, but commonly misses several other important success factors. Instead, they must utilize a comprehensive performance assessment to help objectify the hiring process. An assessment that measures personality, motivation and competency provides the highest level of superior job performance predictability.
2. Honor the whole person.
Employees don't want to be used simply as a vehicle for corporate success. Engaging leaders truly care about workers as unique people. Employees engage when leaders demonstrate that they care about and are interested in them, their families and their careers.
3. Honor competency.
In the 21st-century, almost all jobs require some level of individual creativity, leadership and decision-making autonomy. An engaging leader understands that employees often have better answers to their own work issues than the boss does. Leaders should honor the competency of their employees by asking them to share their opinions and ideas and coaching them to think and create solutions themselves.
4. Establish a partnership environment.
Employees typically want to experience the success of achieving a cause bigger than themselves. However, most organizations miss opportunities to include employees in achieving the vision, mission and values of the company. Employee meetings are good vehicles for sharing information, but information and dialogue must flow freely through all levels of leadership, even to the most entry-level employee. Engaging leaders treat employees as partners in the business, and transparency of an organization' s financial status when possible is important.
5. Encourage healthy dialogue.
The majority of people tend to shy away from disagreements and conflict, but engaging leaders master the art of facilitating respectful and open dialogue that honors and encourages differing views. This type of environment not only fosters engagement, but it also produces healthier business decisions and increased profitability.
6. Provide resources.
Once employees are motivated to perform, it becomes critical that leaders provide all the resources employees need to be successful. These could include systems infrastructure, such as IT, financial funding, tools and equipment, information, and skills and abilities.
7. Ensure accountability.
When performance or interpersonal issues are not addressed, a team's morale suffers. The impact of even one disengaged employee can be devastating to the overall engagement of a department or team. High-performance teams within organizations operate just like winning sports teams - those that win are working together as a cohesive and engaged team. Losing teams may have a few individual stars, but no one performs at his or her best. Effective leaders deal with performance issues to ensure the entire team is functioning at its full potential.
[About the Author: Diane Brown is founder of Talent Journey, a talent management solutions provider, and an ACC accredited coach.]
Friday, January 29, 2010
Two Lenses of Talent Management
The Two Lenses of Talent Management
By: - Stuart Crandell, Ph.D.
Talent management should be managed through two lenses: one for the organization and one for the individual focused on career development. The economy has led many organizations to neglect the individual lens. This is a mistake, as development options are key to retention and growth.
The economic crisis made it more tempting for organizations to focus on organizational needs rather than those of individual employees. With layoffs, diminished resources, cuts and contraction, the trend is to put the organization first and feel a false sense of security with regard to talent. After all, with widespread job insecurity, who's going to quit at a time like this? Not many. At least, not yet. Right now many organizations are distracted by the effort to survive. But if leaders don't pay attention to individuals' career development needs, they may be putting the business at risk.
The benefits of talent management are widely known and appreciated. Talent management allows the organization to make the best decisions about talent to optimize the business, mitigate risk, increase talent availability and improve strategy. Organizations focus on analyzing supply and demand, workforce planning and the core areas of talent management: selection, performance, development and succession. But without a dual focus on the individual, these same organizations run the risk of not fully engaging the hearts and minds of the very people they need to accomplish business goals.
What's in It for the Individual?
To be most effective, talent management needs to be seen and managed through two lenses: the organization and the individual. It comes down to aligning talent management with individual career development, which is the hallmark of truly effective talent management systems.
Many organizations suffer from a one-lens organizational perspective on talent management. Typically, these organizations experience high turnover of their top talent and find that high-potential individuals often turn down roles. There may be a lack of development opportunity and rigid, narrowly defined career paths. Rather than seek out people with diverse experience, organizations have unwritten rules about what backgrounds are needed. For example, all general managers need to come through sales and marketing. As a result, key leadership roles end up with small feeder pools, people remain in their own silos, and there is limited cross-organization movement.
These symptoms arise because the organization is not asking questions of its talent management system from the individual's perspective. These include: Does our talent know what roles are available and what is required to fill those roles? What motivates people? What kind of development do people need to achieve their career goals? What diverse experiences do people need to move into roles they want, roles they will find rewarding, inspirational and challenging?
A two-lens approach focused equally on individual career development and enterprise concerns will create a dynamic talent management system that increases an organization's ability to engage and retain the best talent and ensure they are in rewarding roles that meet the company's needs. The dual-lens approach will give talent leaders greater assurance that talent needs are aligned with the right people - those who will fill open roles, have a deeper commitment to the organization and will enjoy their work. When people know their career goals are important, understood and relevant to the organization, they are more likely to remain engaged. Further, people need to be able to envision themselves achieving their career goals within their current organization, or they will leave when the opportunity arises.
Six Key Factors to Create a Dual-Lens Approach
PDI Ninth House has developed an outline of the factors needed to achieve a dual-lens talent management system. These are based on extensive research in what works in real-world business and more than 40 years of working with organizations to help them improve their talent management processes. Included are six key areas with considerations for both the organization and the individual:
a) Knowledge of roles and requirements.
b) Knowledge of the people and their capabilities.
c) Motivation.
d) Access.
e) Assignment of people to roles.
f) Development.
1. Knowledge of roles and requirements:
What jobs and roles are available, and what do they require? Note this may include roles that do not yet exist, such as roles the person or organization may design to meet various needs, including how to attract certain types of people to fill them. For the organization, this includes identifying key roles to be filled and the requirements needed to be successful. Organizations need to have clearly defined success profiles that align with the roles and the business strategy. For the individual, this involves gaining knowledge of the positions, roles and career paths within the organization.
2. Knowledge of the people and their capabilities:
What do people bring to the table? What people are out there and what are their characteristics? For the organization, this requires knowledge of their current talent. This can be accomplished with assessment centers, 360-degree feedback, boss evaluations and various assessment tools. For the individual, this requires honing a self-awareness of one's own qualifications, motivators, values, style, competencies, interests and constraints to create a deeper understanding of what roles and positions would be most suitable and enjoyable.
3. Motivation:
Why should people engage? What drives them, inspires them and creates job satisfaction? For the organization, this involves creating a meaningful reward and reinforcement system. For the individual, it means knowing what motivates one to seek and accept a given role or job. Understanding motivation is most effectively achieved by solid observation, development planning and coaching.
4. Access:
How are people recruited? For the organization, this involves gaining access to potential talent and understanding the internal and external supply of potential talent for a given role. For the individual, it requires access to decision makers. People must have the ability to get their names and qualifications in front of the senior leaders who make talent decisions. One of the explicit goals of many programs for high potentials is to increase the talent visibility with top management.
5. Assignment of people to roles:
How are people matched to jobs? Organizations need to provide a fair and transparent process to match talent to roles. Individuals need to understand the process and see it as fair so they are willing to engage. Solid success profiles based on effective competencies as well as objective promotion processes can make this easier to achieve.
6. Development:
How does the organization develop people for new roles? Organizations need to provide diverse methods to develop the skills and capabilities needed for new roles. Individuals need to be willing to develop, seek out development opportunities and communicate with their manager that they want to develop their skills.
When these six factors are played out, they create a dual-lens talent management system that benefits both the organization and the individual. Individuals gain a better understanding of the roles available and how to fit in, have better opportunities to decide what their career path should be, make conscious choices about their careers and make informed commitments to a certain career path. Further, individuals are more likely to want the roles the organization has to offer.
Without the Individual's Lens
Organizational leaders who do not create a dual-lens approach often suffer from talent constraints. When a company fails to see talent management from the individual's perspective, it may miss placing talented people because they simply never knew of the opportunities available. Talented people often leave because they are in roles they do not find rewarding, when a fairly simple job redesign can make the roles more attractive. And they may be stuck in dead-end jobs because they never considered the career paths available to them.
Poor talent management ultimately leads to poor business results. With the wrong people in key roles, organizations experience subpar performance and high turnover. The business may experience unnecessary risk - something no organization wants when the economy has already created a high-risk environment. Alternatively, a dual-lens approach leads to decreased turnover, a more engaged workforce, more readily available talent, a bigger pool of talent with greater flexibility and versatility, and a positive effect on organizational performance.
Due to the economy, there are fewer opportunities for people, career paths are limited, and there is less movement within organizations. However, this doesn't mean talent leaders can afford to take their eyes off career development. How else can they engage talent when there are fewer career development opportunities available? Talent leaders should take extra steps to engage employees in the process right now. Provide insight. Find out what motivates people. Make them visible. Even in a tough economy with fewer resources, do as much development as possible. Foster action learning assignments where people can learn on the job. Use technology to leverage distance learning. Get creative to engage people in ways that will reinforce that their careers matter to the organization. Make it clear that even though career paths may be on hold, the situation will eventually change and you, the talent leader, are doing whatever you can to make sure they are ready to move forward when it does.
It's critical that talent management systems engage people at the career development level. Organizations may not be aware of it, but people are watching and making decisions about their careers right now. If all they see during this economic crisis is a focus on the organization and not the individual, they will leave when the crisis is over. Now is the time to take measures to retain employees. You can't afford to wait.
[About the Author: Stuart Crandell, Ph.D., is a senior vice president for PDI Ninth House.]
By: - Stuart Crandell, Ph.D.
Talent management should be managed through two lenses: one for the organization and one for the individual focused on career development. The economy has led many organizations to neglect the individual lens. This is a mistake, as development options are key to retention and growth.
The economic crisis made it more tempting for organizations to focus on organizational needs rather than those of individual employees. With layoffs, diminished resources, cuts and contraction, the trend is to put the organization first and feel a false sense of security with regard to talent. After all, with widespread job insecurity, who's going to quit at a time like this? Not many. At least, not yet. Right now many organizations are distracted by the effort to survive. But if leaders don't pay attention to individuals' career development needs, they may be putting the business at risk.
The benefits of talent management are widely known and appreciated. Talent management allows the organization to make the best decisions about talent to optimize the business, mitigate risk, increase talent availability and improve strategy. Organizations focus on analyzing supply and demand, workforce planning and the core areas of talent management: selection, performance, development and succession. But without a dual focus on the individual, these same organizations run the risk of not fully engaging the hearts and minds of the very people they need to accomplish business goals.
What's in It for the Individual?
To be most effective, talent management needs to be seen and managed through two lenses: the organization and the individual. It comes down to aligning talent management with individual career development, which is the hallmark of truly effective talent management systems.
Many organizations suffer from a one-lens organizational perspective on talent management. Typically, these organizations experience high turnover of their top talent and find that high-potential individuals often turn down roles. There may be a lack of development opportunity and rigid, narrowly defined career paths. Rather than seek out people with diverse experience, organizations have unwritten rules about what backgrounds are needed. For example, all general managers need to come through sales and marketing. As a result, key leadership roles end up with small feeder pools, people remain in their own silos, and there is limited cross-organization movement.
These symptoms arise because the organization is not asking questions of its talent management system from the individual's perspective. These include: Does our talent know what roles are available and what is required to fill those roles? What motivates people? What kind of development do people need to achieve their career goals? What diverse experiences do people need to move into roles they want, roles they will find rewarding, inspirational and challenging?
A two-lens approach focused equally on individual career development and enterprise concerns will create a dynamic talent management system that increases an organization's ability to engage and retain the best talent and ensure they are in rewarding roles that meet the company's needs. The dual-lens approach will give talent leaders greater assurance that talent needs are aligned with the right people - those who will fill open roles, have a deeper commitment to the organization and will enjoy their work. When people know their career goals are important, understood and relevant to the organization, they are more likely to remain engaged. Further, people need to be able to envision themselves achieving their career goals within their current organization, or they will leave when the opportunity arises.
Six Key Factors to Create a Dual-Lens Approach
PDI Ninth House has developed an outline of the factors needed to achieve a dual-lens talent management system. These are based on extensive research in what works in real-world business and more than 40 years of working with organizations to help them improve their talent management processes. Included are six key areas with considerations for both the organization and the individual:
a) Knowledge of roles and requirements.
b) Knowledge of the people and their capabilities.
c) Motivation.
d) Access.
e) Assignment of people to roles.
f) Development.
1. Knowledge of roles and requirements:
What jobs and roles are available, and what do they require? Note this may include roles that do not yet exist, such as roles the person or organization may design to meet various needs, including how to attract certain types of people to fill them. For the organization, this includes identifying key roles to be filled and the requirements needed to be successful. Organizations need to have clearly defined success profiles that align with the roles and the business strategy. For the individual, this involves gaining knowledge of the positions, roles and career paths within the organization.
2. Knowledge of the people and their capabilities:
What do people bring to the table? What people are out there and what are their characteristics? For the organization, this requires knowledge of their current talent. This can be accomplished with assessment centers, 360-degree feedback, boss evaluations and various assessment tools. For the individual, this requires honing a self-awareness of one's own qualifications, motivators, values, style, competencies, interests and constraints to create a deeper understanding of what roles and positions would be most suitable and enjoyable.
3. Motivation:
Why should people engage? What drives them, inspires them and creates job satisfaction? For the organization, this involves creating a meaningful reward and reinforcement system. For the individual, it means knowing what motivates one to seek and accept a given role or job. Understanding motivation is most effectively achieved by solid observation, development planning and coaching.
4. Access:
How are people recruited? For the organization, this involves gaining access to potential talent and understanding the internal and external supply of potential talent for a given role. For the individual, it requires access to decision makers. People must have the ability to get their names and qualifications in front of the senior leaders who make talent decisions. One of the explicit goals of many programs for high potentials is to increase the talent visibility with top management.
5. Assignment of people to roles:
How are people matched to jobs? Organizations need to provide a fair and transparent process to match talent to roles. Individuals need to understand the process and see it as fair so they are willing to engage. Solid success profiles based on effective competencies as well as objective promotion processes can make this easier to achieve.
6. Development:
How does the organization develop people for new roles? Organizations need to provide diverse methods to develop the skills and capabilities needed for new roles. Individuals need to be willing to develop, seek out development opportunities and communicate with their manager that they want to develop their skills.
When these six factors are played out, they create a dual-lens talent management system that benefits both the organization and the individual. Individuals gain a better understanding of the roles available and how to fit in, have better opportunities to decide what their career path should be, make conscious choices about their careers and make informed commitments to a certain career path. Further, individuals are more likely to want the roles the organization has to offer.
Without the Individual's Lens
Organizational leaders who do not create a dual-lens approach often suffer from talent constraints. When a company fails to see talent management from the individual's perspective, it may miss placing talented people because they simply never knew of the opportunities available. Talented people often leave because they are in roles they do not find rewarding, when a fairly simple job redesign can make the roles more attractive. And they may be stuck in dead-end jobs because they never considered the career paths available to them.
Poor talent management ultimately leads to poor business results. With the wrong people in key roles, organizations experience subpar performance and high turnover. The business may experience unnecessary risk - something no organization wants when the economy has already created a high-risk environment. Alternatively, a dual-lens approach leads to decreased turnover, a more engaged workforce, more readily available talent, a bigger pool of talent with greater flexibility and versatility, and a positive effect on organizational performance.
Due to the economy, there are fewer opportunities for people, career paths are limited, and there is less movement within organizations. However, this doesn't mean talent leaders can afford to take their eyes off career development. How else can they engage talent when there are fewer career development opportunities available? Talent leaders should take extra steps to engage employees in the process right now. Provide insight. Find out what motivates people. Make them visible. Even in a tough economy with fewer resources, do as much development as possible. Foster action learning assignments where people can learn on the job. Use technology to leverage distance learning. Get creative to engage people in ways that will reinforce that their careers matter to the organization. Make it clear that even though career paths may be on hold, the situation will eventually change and you, the talent leader, are doing whatever you can to make sure they are ready to move forward when it does.
It's critical that talent management systems engage people at the career development level. Organizations may not be aware of it, but people are watching and making decisions about their careers right now. If all they see during this economic crisis is a focus on the organization and not the individual, they will leave when the crisis is over. Now is the time to take measures to retain employees. You can't afford to wait.
[About the Author: Stuart Crandell, Ph.D., is a senior vice president for PDI Ninth House.]
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