Jan 14 2012
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Business, Employee Engagement, Enterprise 2.0, Human Resources, Leadership, Management, Social Media, Technology

Change & Communications Study Report: Implications For Asia Pacific

Towers Watson (my employer) recently released a report on The 2011/12 Change & Communication ROI Study report. It has great insights about what could organizations do to build Clarity, Confidence and Community in their organizations through effective communications and change management. While I leave you to enjoy the full report, I found some of the charts interesting as they showed geographical breakdowns including Asia-Pacific level data.

In terms of ensuring that employees are business literate and have a good view of organizational performance, there seems to be little variation across the geographical regions. Even so, Asia-Pacific sits at the bottom of the pack on these important issues related to providing clarity and building a sense of connection.

The second issue I spotted was related to Employee Value Proposition (EVP). Given the nature of the talent race in Asia, I think it’s quite a hot issues these days. And interestingly, a higher percentage of Asia-Pacific companies report that they have a clearly defined EVP. However, when it comes to having a segmented EVP approach (e.g. for high performers, high potentials etc.), these companies fare a bit badly. Also, the bigger question is how effectively is the EVP winning mind-share in the talent market.

And as social media powers the new world of communications, there is a fair distance that companies in Asia-Pacific have to go. Only about 30% of the organizations report that they have a documented social media policy in place, the corresponding number for the USA is 77%! Moreover, only a handful of Asia-Pacific companies report that they have the right tools to measure the effectiveness of social media. So, first there is an adoption issue and then, if measurement is not effective, then establishing a clear business case for social media will be a challenge for companies. As for me, I am more interested in finding out how Asia Pacific companies are leveraging these channels for building an open, transparent and collaborative workplace.

 

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Nov 23 2011
6 Comments
Business, Employee Engagement, Human Resources, Management

After Your Employee Survey…Bias For Action

I work with several companies on rolling-out the results of their employee surveys. I do executive presentations, employee town-halls, enterprise-level action planning, frontline action planning, KPI setting – the whole works! In my experience, the companies who come out successful from such initiatives are the ones with a strong “bias for action”. They have a sense of urgency for getting things done, for making the workplace better, for taking the organization forward. Often companies, leaders and HR professionals fall into the “excessive deliberation” trap. Deliberation is good, but an overdose of it can paralyze actions. It can be demotivating to people. Timelines can go for a toss. And employees are left in the lurch.

Tom Peters talked a lot about bias for action in his book “In Search of Excellence”. He also shared some slides on this on his website. I just loved the quote on the second slide:

“We have a strategic plan. It’s called doing things.” ~ Herb Kelleher

 So, stop staring indefinitely at the employee survey results. Make things happen.

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Oct 22 2011
1 Comment
Business, Employee Engagement, Human Resources, Management

Building A Sustainable Employee Engagement Strategy

Here is a link to an article I published on Towers Watson’s website, titled “Building A Sustainable Engagement Strategy”. Through this article, I urge companies to take a hard look at their employee research constructs and make sure that the frameworks they are using are helping them focus on the right issues. We need to make sure that the Employee Engagement models we are using are evolving with the times.

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Oct 15 2011
3 Comments
Human Resources

Key Analytical Skills for HR Professionals

HR organisations in several companies seem to be getting better at collecting data from multiple sources – HRIS data, financial metrics, people metrics, performance metrics etc. However, still, top-notch data analysis remains under the domain of a few specialists. I just come across a few HR professionals who can readily grasp the technical details of a multiple regression or a utility analysis for measuring the impact of engagement on attrition. As HR functions vie to get that seat at the table and position themselves as true business partners, senior executives will be looking at HR for persuasive, data-driven analytics to support key decisions and initiatives. In other words, HR has to get its game right for preparing a “business case” for all its programs.

I would like to propose a some key analytical skills for the HR professionals of tomorrow:

  • Research / Hypothesis Design: HR needs to understand how it can design experiments to validate hypotheses or come up with alternative explanations to organizational phenomena. At the same time, knowledge about effective sample design techniques can come in handy as well. It can help HR design research studies which can be administered to statistically representative samples, instead of the entire workforce. This could help generalize findings and help save on precious time & efforts.
  • Correlations & Regressions: I cannot count how many times I have seen these two key techniques completely misinterpreted or used senselessly. Most importantly, we need to distinguish between the two. Correlation is, simply, two variables moving in the same direction. For instance, employee engagement and financial performance might be positively correlated implying that both generally, move in the same direction. However, we cannot say that one causes the other for sure. On the other hand, regressions help us to form models to explain causality i.e. variables moving in the same direction because one causes the other to happen. For instance, among an employee engagement survey of 50 questions, you can use this to analyze what factors have the largest influence on engagement levels.
  • Financial Analysis Techniques: Now, this is a potentially long list, but there are a few key things that help in working out the business case for key initiatives / decisions. Firstly, there has to be a fine appreciation of costs – fixed costs, recurring costs, and variable costs. Secondly, skills around conducting cost-benefits or break-even analysis would be extremely helpful. And speaking of that, if HR professionals can master concepts around “the time value of money”, they can really start demonstrating the rigour of their analyses.
Of course, this is not comprehensive and I look forward to your views in the comments. What analytical skills would matter the most for high-caliber future HR professionals?
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Sep 23 2011
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Business, Human Resources, Leadership, Management

Transformative HR: Book Review

As many of you know, I love to read! While I have an appetite for all kinds of books, news & blogs, I just love great content on HR. And often, that’s the hardest to come by. One of my favourite authors on HR is John Boudreau. I became an instant fan when I read and reviewed his book Retooling HR. I felt that the frameworks, approaches and tools he talked about can not only help HR professionals to up their game, but can also help in talking coherently, logically and meaningfully with the business. The application of usual business analysis tools such as portfolio management, segmentation, conjoint analysis etc. to HR issues was extremely appealing.

So, when I got a copy of the book Transformative HR, I was thrilled. Transformative HR has been written by John Boudreau and Ravin Jesuthasan. Ravin is a senior colleague of mine and is the Global Practice Leader for Talent Management at Towers Watson. I hungrily read the book and I think it is one of the best I have read so far. The key takeaway is that HR professionals and leaders need to make informed human capital decisions to keep their organisations competitive. ‘Informed’ is a key word here and the book outlines an evidence-based approach to human capital decisions. They outline 5 basic principles of evidence-based change:

1) Logic-driven Analytics: How often do we HR professionals have an overload of information and metrics? Do we just have numbers or can we tell a powerful story? In a transformative HR future state, the authors share how we can use frameworks & mental models to go behind the metrics, understand the real picture and produce insights which are in high demand by other organisational stakeholders. After all, getting the numbers right is just the beginning. The real value-add comes from using a multi-dimensional approach by synthesizing business strategies, business metrics and talent metrics to produce real insights that help in achieving those business objectives.

2) Segmentation: Conceptually, most of us agree that one size doesn’t fit all and we need to segment our workforce. But, how? John and Ravin propose 3 fundamental questions:

  • What are our vital talent segments?
  • Which employment elements induce the desired responses at optimum cost (supply-side talent segmentation)?
  • What do we need employees to do (demand-side talent segmentation)?

I think this is a powerful way to think through key talent investment decisions, as it helps to understand how to customize the employment deal to create the highest payoff in terms of business outcomes, at the optimum costs.

3) Risk Leverage: I feel that Human Capital Risks are often under-reported and worst, not well-understood. Now, all organisations face HR-related risks, but instead of just mitigating risks, the focus should be on optimizing risks. The book presents a number of systematic approaches to optimize risks and develop sustainable advantages. Again, the approaches are rooted in management tools that business leaders are used to – tolerance analysis, portfolio theory, stochastic simulations, probability matrices etc. In two words: cutting-edge and powerful!

4) Integration & Synergy: Often, HR processes operate in silos which prevents us from getting the “1+1=3″ effect. This principle talks about how to integrate various HR sub-functions as well as integrating HR with other organisational units. The live example about the Talent Management Game at Shanda (one of China’s largest online gaming company) is just fascinating!

5) Optimization: The principle of optimization follows from segmentation. It is all about identifying where & how the payoff of certain HR investments will lead to exponential returns. It is all about identifying the mix of investments that will have the most desired business outcomes. So, instead of spreading HR investments across the board equally, the focus should be on understanding & positioning ‘fairness’ to mean strategically differentiated treatment.

The book is full of great examples and brilliant case-studies from leading global organisations such as IBM, Coca-Cola, Royal Bank of Scotland, Deutsche Telekom, Ameriprise, Royal Bank of Canada, Khazanah Nasional Berhad etc. Overall, it’s a compelling read. It is for anyone who wants to bring rigorous thinking, informed decision-making and sustainable impactful change in their organisation. Did I say that you just can’t miss this book!

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