Consultant's Corner

Agree...And Then Stick to the Agreement

mike.brennan — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 12:10:36 GMT

In a Consultant Corner post last month (see HR: Importance vs. Influence), my top-flight colleague, Suzanne Rumsey leveraged a recent survey from McKinsey & Co to demonstrate HR’s perceived lack of alignment with the businesses they support. She highlights that line managers who participated in the study, much more than HR participants, agree that:

1. HR lacks capability to develop talent strategies aligned with business objectives

2. That HR is not held accountable for success or failure of talent management initiatives, and

3. That talent management is viewed solely as HR's responsibility.

When I hear about alignment and ownership from HR clients of ours, I propose they use service level agreements (SLAs) to address them. SLAs serve as anchors to the performance consulting models HR and T&D groups must employ to better support the needs of the business. The purpose of these agreements is to require HR to work with its business customers to define their desired business and workforce outcomes and then what programs and services will be delivered to achieve them.

To write an effective SLA and ensure it’s used to perpetuate alignment, I recommend combining it with your intelligence strategy. Specifically, I recommend using SLAs to facilitate the 3 types of measurement needed not only to establish alignment and accountability, but to drive ongoing adjustments and improvements to the programs and services in-scope.

Use measurement to drive focus and accountability. The SLA has an integral role to play in 3 types of measurement. The first is predictive measurement, which is meant to drive alignment between HR / T&D investments and the needs of the business expressed, where possible, to KPIs important to line managers. The KPIs documented on the SLA should establish the causal chain between the services being provided and workforce performance as well as establish service quality and accountability goals for both HR and line managers to meet. In the case of talent management, these KPIs are typically tied to effectiveness in the form of workforce productivity, competencies, bench strength, retention, mobility, etc. They may also include measures of HR service quality (e.g., our staffing group produces high-quality candidates) and efficiency (e.g., time-to-fill).

The second type is in-process measurement. Its purpose is to validate that a program or service is believed to be achieving its desired business results as measured through the KPIs identified on the SLA. In-process measurement may combine a mix of transactional data collected through HR systems (e.g., time-to-fill, participation in new product training) and survey instruments to assess whether or not HR services and programs are making the desired impact on the target audience, and in turn, the organization. HR should use in-process measurement to make periodic/continual improvements to their services and programs.

The third and final type of measurement that leverages an SLA is retrospective measurement, which is meant to assess desired business impact. This may or may not include calculation of ROI. The assumption here is that enough time has passed and/or enough employees have been touched by the program or resource. Retrospective measurement builds on data captured through predictive and in-process measurement by integrating data captured through other systems (e.g., point-of-sales, IT help ticket system, CRM) to demonstrate causality and ROI. With sufficient data and analysis, the outcomes of retrospective measurement can be used to feed predictive measurement through scenario planning and analytics.

My advice to those considering performance consulting models that leverage SLAs - start small and keep the language simple. I also recommend engaging the right stakeholders.

My request to those who read this post - please share your thoughts…

How to Feast on Workforce Data without Choking On It

mike.brennan — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 12:21:59 GMT

Some people just hear terms like 'analytics,' or 'business intelligence,' and they get choked up. Some because they are uncomfortable applying measures to HR and talent management processes. Others because they have data scattered across too many systems and spreadsheets.

The fact is that applying measurement to HR and talent management does not have to be a non-starter. As with all HR-driven initiatives, the success of workforce intelligence depends on alignment with the business. The key to ceasing on this alignment and getting your workforce intelligence strategy off the ground is getting the right cooks in the kitchen. Indeed, cross-functional representation drives success in all phases of a of a workforce intelligence rollout—from providing executive sponsorship and defining the metrics that should be tracked to selecting the appropriate technology solution and driving adoption when the solution is deployed.

Every workforce intelligence initiative should incorporate the following cross-functional stakeholders:

All leads of HR functions (e.g., recruiting, learning and development, compensation)
IT personnel with business analytic and systems experience
Representatives from finance accustomed to executive-level reports to support decision making on a regular basis
Representatives from target user groups (i.e., the audiences who will ultimately use the measures delivered to make smarter business decisions)

The table below outlines the tasks and responsibilities of lines of business I typically recommend for our clients' (LOB), HR, and IT stakeholders. What do you think of this shared responsibility matrix? Would it help drive greater buy-in to your workforce intelligence strategy? Have anything like that resembles the outlined responsibilities at your organization?

Responsibilities	Line of Business Personnel	HR Functional Personnel	IT/Finance/HR Tech Personnel
Identifying Measures & Metrics	X	X
Gathering & Computing Metrics		X	X
Delivering Metrics (e.g., reports, dashboards)		X	X
Analyzing Metrics	X	X	X
Acting on Metrics	X	X

Butts-In-Seats Matter

mike.brennan — Thu, 29 May 2008 14:44:06 GMT

In speaking with a lot of learning and development professionals lately, I hear that a lot of them are not concerned with 'butts-in-seats' for classroom training or 'eyeballs' or completions for online courses. Rather they are concerned with more strategic measures such as knowledge transfer and ROI. Some of them have even relegated attendance to a lowly Level 0 on Kirkpatrick's famous 4-level impact scale, which starts at level 1, stating that such reports are useless.

I think this view is a little extreme. In fact, I think that while 'butts-in-seats' as a measure is transactional, it is foundational in that it can lend strategic insights into the value of learning investments and lead to better decisions on how to allocate those investments going forward. For instance:

It matters to a Chief Compliance Officer that every manager took part in the sexual harassment training. Without any needed proof of knowledge transfer or understanding in any state of which I am aware (sad), attendance is all you really have.
Several senior business leaders with whom I've spoken want to know that their potential successors are taking part in the accelerated leadership development programs they were involved in designing for the good of the long-term health of the company.
The head of product marketing wants to know that all salespeople and channel partners have sat through training on the new black-box, which is now available for sale 4 weeks ahead of the company's nearest competitors' black-box.
The head of customer training is concerned about butts-in-seats because its directly tied to the top line of her P&L. She is also interested in the average price charged per learner.
The CLO cares because he wants to know what courses are in high-demand and which ones should be put out to pasture.

While I don't subscribe to obsessing over transactional measures like attendance or training departmental measures such as how much you spend on catering, I do feel that you do need spend some time tracking them in order to tie training to business value via quality and efficiency. I'd love to hear how you're approaching your T&D measurement strategy.

Talent Measurement is Also Specific to Vertical Industry

mike.brennan — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 00:49:24 GMT

This entry is a build on a great post from Jason Averbook today on the Knowledge Infuser, which asserts, "Talent Management has specific industry characteristics that MUST be taken into account when addressing all aspects of people, process and technology." It stands to reason that an organization engaged in one kind of commercial enterprise - say, health insurance - would have different talent demands than another - say, fashion retail. Furthermore, while the ultimate success of any company is measured by its ability to deliver long-term value to shareholders, the metrics to gauge this success are certainly not identical. After all, does a health insurer care about same-store sales?

If you take a popular measurement framework such as The Balanced Scorecard, there is perhaps no category of measurement that differs from one industry to the next than the one that focuses on people. Some refer to this category as ‘learning and growth;' others call it, ‘human capital.' The uniqueness driven by industry is driven by distinctive operations and differences in what roles are critical in driving those operations. As Mike Shoemaker pointed out in a response to Heidi Spirgi's post last month, "measurement in talent management...is clearly critical, provided the measures are tied to the industry and functional context, as well as the strategic objectives of the company."

Furthermore, measurement is essential to diagnosing business issues, which HR executives and their business partners should use to drive the creation and revision of talent management strategies and tactics. Take the following:

Hiring salespeople with consulting backgrounds to combat the commoditization of your retail business.
Developing employee relations training programs for first-time managers who your biotech company is counting on to retain talent and scale its business now that a drug in your pipeline has been approved for commercialization.

To help you think through how you should measure your people and the investments your organization makes in them (e.g., pay and benefits, training, incentives, attracting candidates outside the organization, etc.), try using the following framework. What you will find as you work down this list is that it is progressive in several ways: It becomes more specific to industry; the type of metrics becomes more strategic to the organization; and the type of metrics becomes more difficult to measure. In addition to the measures becoming more industry-specific, it is important to point out that the benchmarks (e.g., voluntary turnover rate) established using these measures often differs.

Transactional: These measures quantify the activity in various HR functions. When taken in isolation, none of these figures is very strategic. However, many of them act as building blocks (i.e., variables used to calculate) for HR Operational, Workforce Management and Workforce Effectiveness Metrics.
HR Operational: These are meant to monitor and continually improve HR functions' performance in terms of process efficiencies and outcomes and are meant to better focus efforts and resources. Examples include time-to-hire, time to submit performance reviews and # of courses per instructor.
Workforce Management Metrics: These metrics demonstrate the soundness of the organizational policies, procedures, and programs administered by HR as well as the competence of business managers and leaders in applying them. An example would include voluntary turnover within 90 days, which may reflect opportunities to improve hiring decision-making, development of new managers, and/or on-boarding improvements.
Talent Intelligence: These metrics are products of statistical analysis meant to demonstrate the relationships between the three categories above and KPIs outside HR. As such, they yield the intelligence to support strategic decision making - by showing what has happened and modeling scenarios of what the future might bring. Examples include the total cost of new-hire turnover and the effect of product knowledge training on sales productivity.

This was a mouthful, even for those who may be focused on Talent Management strategy at the moment. Any and all questions/comments are welcome.