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?

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.

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.

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!

I could think of one potential approach, and it may be suitable to larger size organizations with a decent number of “units of analysis” i.e. bank branches, retail stores, production sites etc. If we have sufficient number of units to study, the first step would be to start linking the employee engagement survey data to business metrics. Think sales, profitability, productivity, employee attrition, customer survey scores, safety incidents, customer waiting time etc. Then you would need some analytical wizardry to examine how these metrics link to employee survey data. Do highly engaged bank branches have higher loan growth and higher net interest margin? Or do low engagement manufacturing plants showlow productivity as well? Or worse, the linkage is not meaningful or not strong enough (in which case you really need to go back to the drawing board to design a good survey). Such linkages help to establish the validity of your employee research frameworks and help create buy-in among the senior leadership team.

The next step is really to take it a notch further up. Based on the above linkage analysis, you would have identified your high / average / low performing units. Now, the way HR can really add value and improve business performance is by replicating the high performing units. How do you do that? Well, you try to examine what differentiates these high performing units from others. You could look at a range of variables for employees in these groups – age, tenure, experience, competencies, managerial practices – anything that can hypothetically differentiate performance. And yes, you could also connect it all back to the employee survey and see what issues are these “high engagement – high performance” units particularly satisfied on as compared to other units. Again, we are just looking for factors which can differentiate or even predict engagement and performance

Only when you have insights of this depth, then you could work out a plan for replicating such high-performance. Such insights can provide inputs into recruitment plans, talent management, rewards, training & development, career progression etc.  And all this will potentially have much more credibility since you have validated these against business outcomes.

What do you think? How are you using employee survey data to improve business performance? Drop in a line if you would like to discuss this in details.

Enjoy the infographic! And do share your best ideas on gamification.

Employee Value Proposition (EVP) can also be understood in a similar way. It is the sum-total of benefits and experiences a company promises an employee in return for the employee’s time and efforts. The EVP can include compensation, benefits, learning & development opportunities and the overall workplace experience. Usually, companies would define their EVP through some combination of these. So, that’s the promise. But, the crucial challenge for HR, leaders and managers is to deliver on the EVP.

Many a times, I see HR professionals in a rush to define the EVP and communicate it to the world. We want to create a message, come up with great tag-lines, brand the communications and throw it out. Advertisements, posters, billboards, social media – you can do it all and still achieve nothing. A badly execution EVP strategy can never solve talent attraction and retention problems. To be effective in the EVP initiative, it is equally or more important to think about whether existing systems, policies, culture, management style and processes support the delivery of the EVP. If not, then we need to think about what changes are required. Your Employer Brand could fail miserably if the brand doesn’t deliver on the promises. And in this day and age, sentiments are often vented quite openly on public channels.

So, if your EVP promises “a culture that thrives on teamwork, leveraging collaboration to solve X challenges”, but employees join the organisation only to find silos, then its a failure. Or if you promise “performance based pay and best-in-class benefits”, but pay is driven by tenure and benefits are just about average when compared to other organizations, employees will feel disenchanted. The list of examples can be endless.

So, the first step is to look within, not outside. Look within and ensure that the delivery mechanisms are in place. If you get it right, you will just end up creating engaged employees, who also act as advocates for the Employer Brand. It’s as much about the delivery, as it is about the those feel-good, slick communications.

• Jon Ingham is one of my favourite bloggers. He feels that there is a need for a differentiated unique proposition for people management. Sticking to the theme of “talent race”, he shares how Haier (a consumer electronics MNC that started off in China) established race tracks for a unique way of managing their talent base.

• Laura Schroeder wonders where has all the talent gone. She analyzes reports from the Economist Intelligence Unit and Bersin & Associates to come up with strategies to bridge the talent gap.

• Talent retention is on top of the agenda for most HR professionals. Derek Irvine from GloboForce outlines some Tips to Keep Headhunters Away from your Top Employees.

• Tanmay Vora writes at the QAspire blog and shares with us some Core Lessons in Leading & Managing People. He says that “working with people, guiding a team and helping them in their quest for peak potential is one of the noblest things we can do as leaders. It is an opportunity and an obligation as well.

• As HR professionals, we are often heard advising employees to “take charge of your own development”. But do most employees really know how to do this? In this post, Dan McCarthy, from Great Leadership, offers a free step-by-step self-study guide to developing leadership skills. Best of all, it’s free to use and/or share, as a way to engage and retain valuable employees who are willing to learn on their own but need a little structure”.

• Yes, programs are needed. Benefits have to be appropriate. Salary right. But no matter what the industry, the killer app in retention is the personal involvement of management with employees, says Marsha Keeffer.

• Heard about the “HR Hairball”? Find out in this excellent post by Mark Stelzner.

• Ian Welsh writes in from Canada and says that “If we need talent for the future, we need to belong to the future we visualize”. Simply “buying” talent is not the panacea.

• It might be important to hire employees for their skills, but hiring for culture-fit is really important as well. Wally Bock shares his views on Hiring Well. One of my favourite lines from the blog post – “Performance and growth are often situational”.

• Amy Wilson writes about transforming existing performance models into one that is more work-centric and embedded in the natural flow of business to get the best work done.

• Robin Schooling has a different take on Talent Management – Family Style.

• A strong learning & development platform is critical for organization looking at managing their talent base effectively and driving sustained business performance. Linda Fisher Thornton from Leading in Context shares 11 Learning & Development Reports. Informative!

• Anita Lettink feels that “best practices” may not always work for you because you have your own unique context. Instead, she shares some guidelines for winning the Talent Race.

• Finally, to add more of an Asian touch to the Carnival, here is one of my posts about Change Management and Leadership in Asia 2.0

As a consultant, I constantly meet HR professionals and get great opportunities for conversations. What I realize from these conversations is that most HR professionals are in a race – the “Talent Race”. And the race seems to get hotter and harder as some parts of the globe ease out of the economic downturn and are preparing for the next growth phase. So, tell me more about what are your latest & greatest ideas about winning the race – specifically how do you think we should go about attracting, engaging and retaining talented people in our organisations? What’s new in talent management?

And since I am based in sunny Singapore, posts with an Asian flavour would go to the top of the pile! So, start putting your thoughts together and write out the next best idea. Few things to keep in mind:

• Submit a recent post. Something that is written in the 2 weeks preceding the Carnival
• Send me the posts by 4th July, 2011. My email is i at abhishekmittal dot com