It is interesting to think about the fact that Marketing departments don’t really control how employees understand the brand or display the brand values or deliver the customer value proposition. And yet, company brand and reputation are typically drivers of talent attraction. Similarly, the HR departments don’t exercise much control over company brand, customer perceptions etc. And yet, employees are the key factor in delivering the customer value proposition.

More than anywhere else, I think this is particularly relevant in service sector industries like say financial services, hospitality, healthcare, professional services, retail etc. In these industries, every employee is a representative of the company brand. And every employee creates or destroys brand value at each customer interaction point. Companies need to think about how they can get HR and Marketing teams to work together to design and deliver an integrated value proposition to their employees and customers. Have you come across companies who are doing this effectively?

• Employees not being “enabled” by the local work environment and struggling to get things done. Hence, productivity suffers and employees feel frustrated.
• Employees not feeling “energized” and hence, burning out as a result of stress.

Here is a nice video from World At Work, where Max Caldwell from Towers Watson (disclaimer: my employer) talks about taking Employee Engagement to the next level and what some of the best companies are doing about it. Enjoy!

Within the enterprise, gamification – the process of adding gaming elements to a non-gaming activity to encourage action and participation – has gone from being a faux pas to an accepted growing trend. Currently, many software vendors are experimenting by adding gaming elements to their software. I decided to do some experimenting of my own, focusing on help desk software.

The support team environment is a rigorous and demanding one where there is high turnover due to support agents getting burned out. But what if you added gaming elements to help desk software in such a way that helped boost employee retention by providing agents with a greater sense of accomplishment? If they felt like they were “winning,” perhaps agents would be more motivated in their daily activities.

Going off this premise, I focused on a few of the main activities support agents engage in each day (ticket resolutions, customer relations, training) and added some gaming element to it. I made some sketches of what the UI’s of a “gamified” help desk system might look like. Check them out below.

1. Accomplishment metrics

Three of the most important metrics to support agents are number of ticket resolutions, number of “quick” ticket resolutions and positive customer feedback. In this UI, you can see that those three metrics are tracked visibly across the top of the agent’s dashboard. The numbers increase as the day goes on, allowing the agent to see their progress and accomplishments in real time. Additionally, these metrics are variable, depending on the organization. For example, a “quick” resolution could be one that happens in 30 minutes or less.

2. Leaderboards

Based on those metrics, you could create leaderboards, allowing agents to see how they are measuring up again their peers. You will notice the added “Score” column. Again, this is a variable metric, depending on how your organization weights the three individual metrics.

You could do the same with a team leaderboard, comparing parallel support teams within your organization.

3. Training:

One of the biggest issues support team managers have is onboarding new agents in a timely manner. By gamifying the training process, you could ensure a quick onboarding process, while making it fun for the new agent.

The article talks about how companies could strengthen their Employee Engagement programs by broadening their focus to Enablement and Energizing of the workforce as well. It also shares insights about what truly differentiates Leadership Practices and People Experiences in high-performing high-engagement organisations.

Unfortunately, the magazine doesn’t have an online edition. So, here is a scanned copy and better still, here is a much more readable PDF.

Enjoy! And do share you comments.

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.

All graphs and data credits to Towers Watson

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.

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.

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!

Filed under: Business, Human Resources, Leadership, Management Tagged: Business, Change Management, Deutsche Telekom, HCM, HR, HRM, Human capital, Human Capital Management, Human Resource, Human Resources, IBM, Leadership, Management, Performance Management, Royal Bank of Scotland, Talent Management, Transformation, Workplace ]]> http://abhishekmittal.com/2011/09/23/transformative-hr-book-review/feed/ 0 1.352083 103.819836 1.352083 103.819836 Abhishek Transformative_HR_art copy http://abhishekmittal.com/2011/09/03/a-mobile-strategy-for-employee-engagement/ http://abhishekmittal.com/2011/09/03/a-mobile-strategy-for-employee-engagement/#comments Sat, 03 Sep 2011 14:38:02 +0000 Abhishek http://abhishekmittal.com/?p=1279 ]]> I remember clearly that a couple of years ago, a leading mobile handset manufacturer talked about a term called “micro-boredom”. Micro-boredom happens in very small slices of time in which we do not know how to fill the time. And mobile devices, with their applications, provide the escape route. Clearly, I felt that this is going to be an important trend which will mean that mobile devices with a large apps ecosystem would flourish. That’s what is happening today with iPhone and Android devices. But, importantly, micro-boredom is a trend and people do tend to look at mobile devices as a way to fill in the void. And you can possibly see this trend all around you – think about daily commutes, coffee breaks, waiting for someone – the list is endless. In effect, I think that there are multiple opportunities to have the attention of people.

On the other hand, there is some data (though limited to the USA) from a mobile analytics firm, Flurry, to suggest that mobile app usage is not only increasing over time, but is also actually ahead of the traditional web consumption. This reinforces the strength of the mobile medium.

Combining the two trends above, I feel that the most ubiquitous, available, connected and engaging screen is the screen of a smart-phone. It is always with the individual, it is always on and one can push content on it. While a number of companies are using this screen for engaging their customers, I have not come across companies with a mobile strategy for engaging their employees. The possibilities are endless. It could be an enterprise social networking app to keep up with other colleagues or the latest news about the company or to check out what is the next product being developed by the team on the 18th floor! It could be a video app where people could listen to senior leaders articulating the purpose of the company or the new strategy. It could be an app that provides e-learning. It could be an intelligent recommendation engine app that looks across all your enterprise web activities and recommends books for professional development. Or it could all come together in an integrated app. I could go on, but I am sure that we can conjure up even greater possibilities with this.

I think having a mobile strategy for engaging employees is very important already, though it may not be widely recognized as a need. I think this is a powerful medium to connect and engage with employees. If you have any ideas on how to bring a “mobile employee engagement strategy” to life, do write in!