Tag Archives: Workplace

Take A Break! (Infographic)

The folks at Learn Stuff sent me a cool infographic, which I am hosting on the blog. We all have been working hard this year, and as we race towards the finishing line, maybe it’s time to take a break!

Enjoy!

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The Carnival of HR: Emerging Trends in HR

The Carnival of HR is back in sunny Singapore after more than a year! Themed as “Emergent Trends in HR”, I hope you enjoy reading the posts in this edition as much as I did. Many thanks to the prolific people who contributed to the carnival.

  • One of my ex-colleagues, Joachim Stroh, proposes an awesome hack which can take us From Filling Positions to Matching Talentusing powerful concepts of micro-tasks, micro-roles and micro-skills. Not to be missed!
  • We don’t have a lot of HR bloggers in Asia (excl. India), but William Chin is an exception. From his den in Beijing, he has taken a lot of effort to consolidate the social media recruitment statistics in Asia. Fantastic work!
  • Chris Wells sent his entry on Work Management and how it integrates seamlessly with performance management.

Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed the Carnival of HR!

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Social HR – Objectives & ROI

Many HR professionals I talk to, talk enthusiastically about “social media”. After all it’s the hottest thing to talk about! Some of them have implemented a Facebook for the Enterprise – to help people communicate. In fact on a visit to a toilet in a client facility, I saw posters inside the toilet saying “XYZ – let’s talk on our social media platform”! Or some have started a LinkedIn group for posting jobs. Or some have web-based discussion forums (where apparently no one talks!). Or some are experimenting with Yammer or its other brethren.

Given my interest in this area, I often have two simple questions – “Why are you doing this?” and “How do you know you are meeting your stated objectives?”. Simple questions, but elusive answers. More often that not, I find that the people driving these initiatives are not establishing clear objectives and ROI measures. “It’s a fun initiative, and we need to do to engage large Gen-Y population!”, says one or the other – “LinkedIn & Facebook are other ways to spread news about career opportunities.”

But, businesses don’t run that way. How hard can it be to credibly work out how the savings from getting candidates from social media channels, rather than paying off headhunters. Or making reasonable estimates of time saved on designing communications and doing it, with the launch of a social communication / collaboration program. What stops HR from running a short survey asking employees how they are benefitting from tools like Yammer or Jive for instance. Or checking on a small sample of employees to find out how much less time they are spending searching for information. By collecting data this way and making reasonable assumptions, it’s quite easy to work out credible estimates of the ROI of these initiatives.

Establishing goals, KPIs and tracking performance is the most common management technique of all. Then why are we not doing the same for enterprise social networking initiatives! We simply can’t expect senior management and employee to buy-in into these initiatives, if we don’t manage these programs just like we manage other parts of the business. And without proper management, we can’t expect these initiatives to be anything more than “yet another thing from HR.”

How has your experience been? How have you addresses these situations?

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Strategy At Work: Vital’s Workplace Transformation (Case Study)

Over the years, I have had the opportunity to work with Vital – the Singapore Government’s shared services provider. Together, the Vital and Towers Watson team have been able to effect incredible cultural transformation and workplace effectiveness in a fairly short amount of time.

A short case-study is now featured on the Towers Watson website. It’s a part of an online magazine called “Strategy at Work”. Here is a link to the case-study: http://towerswatson.com/newsletters/strategy-at-work/8134For those who love details, check out the detailed PDF article, which outlines Vital’s “Tribe-based” approach.

Vital is a remarkable story of leadership-driven engagement, the power of communities and an openness to new perspectives on managing the workplace. I hope you enjoy reading the article. If you have had similar stories, do share with me.

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Employee Value Proposition and Employer Branding

Employer Branding is a  hot topic these days. I find it to be one of the most common topics that comes up for discussion during my interactions with HR practitioners. Given how tight the talent markets can be (especially in parts of Asia), the issue of Employer Branding is very top-of-the-mind. Companies want to go out in the talent markets and create the “buzz” about their workplaces.

This is, without a doubt, a noble intent and an important strategy to attract & retain great talent. However, as I see it, a lot has to be done before we get to the branding stage. The first step to an Employer Branding project should be research. Companies need to determine the unique ingredients in their workplaces through quantitative research (employee surveys) and qualitative research (focus group discussions, interviews, vision-boarding etc.). Getting perspectives from senior leaders about the kind of workplace they want to promise to employees is also critical. The research would point us to key factors which employees (and prospective employees) truly value about the workplace – the driving forces which can potentially attract, engage and retain them.

Once we have research which is grounded in business realities, we can mine that information to identify the key themes. These themes (typically 2-3 priority areas) would serve as the key tenets of the company’s Employee Value Proposition. And we would need to validate these tenets through “proof-points”, to make sure there is evidence that the company can actually deliver on these. This is a very critical part of the process. For any product / service, a clear value proposition should be in place before it is branded and communicated in the marketplace. Think of any great products you use in your daily life, and you can see that it first has a clear value proposition. And the branding is built on top of the value proposition. This is also the stage, where one needs to determine if the employee value proposition needs to be segmented for different employee segments like high-potentials, top performers, demographics etc.

The branding part should happen once there is consensus on the employee value proposition tenets and validation exercises have been done to see if it really “sticks”. The branding would be so much more focused, sharp and “real” this way. It will be an authentic articulation of the “deal” that employees get, backed up by the company’s ability to actually deliver on the promise. Of course, at this stage, we also need to think about the channels for reaching the target audience and the messaging strategy itself. If we do Employer Branding in the reverse process, we would be running the risk of not being able to deliver on what is communicated or communicating something that does not resonate with the target audience.

What has been your experience with Employee Value Proposition and Employer Branding? What worked for you?

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