I say all of this because the process is important.  There is a flow between collaboration and exploration, to knowledge creation, to information creation.  We’ve been talking about knowledge management for ages.  Let’s face it – knowledge management has not necessarily worked out.  It’s an old topic that many people are sick of hearing about, but the truth of it is that we still don’t manage the knowledge in our organizations well.  Many of our organizations still have thousands upon thousands of documents stored in Sharepoint databases, but they are poorly versioned, not well cataloged, and hard to find.  If knowledge management practices of 10 years ago had panned out, we would have it all figured out by now.  Part of the problem is that we’ve changed technologies and user requirements rather rapidly, but at the core of the problem, we really didn’t understand what it was that we were actually cataloging.  Turns out, it was not all about knowledge management at all.

Let’s take a sample process.  If we are creating a business case, we create a task force or project team to investigate the problem, any risks, possible interactions, costs, etc.  Through this process, a significant amount of collaboration happens in the course of the investigation and discovery, after which some sort of decisions are made.  It is through the collaboration that knowledge is often created.  However, we can’t manage that knowledge that is created until the information is created in the form of the business case.  A good business case will document not only why we want to do something, but how, what were the risks and costs, and all the other components.  The business case, or the information we can catalog, is the output of the knowledge gained, that which we cannot catalog.

So we talk about knowledge management, all the while realizing that we can’t catalog what is in people’s heads.  We can only capture what they record – and this has gotten more interesting as we have gone from documents to blogs and wikis.  But the quality of that content is still in flux.  Do people actually record everything that went into their decisions?  Do they only blog about what is interesting to them?  If a high performer leaves the organization and they were a good documenter and quality blogger, how do you know that you still have all the knowledge they produced with they worked for you?

In today’s world, we talk a lot about how to create productivity gains from collaboration networks – and this is clearly important – it’s the starting point of knowledge creation.  We’ve spent years talking about knowledge management and how to catalog – and this is also important.  We’ve created knowledge bases that are not always optimized, but it’s a starting point.  What we have not done is effectively have a conversation about information and the quality of that information in the organization.  How do we actually make sure that all of our data is good data and that it’s complete?  Collaboration and knowledge is the starting point, but I think we need to start having a discussion about what is next.

I’ll be honest, these days when I’m on the bike, the barrier for me is not usually my legs or my lungs.  If I have a few rides under my belt, I’m really pretty good.  The problem is all mental.  I’m not in college anymore and I really don’t like pain.  There are times I’ll be doing an extended climb and one of my riding buddies will “attack” and while I often could follow, something in the back of my head says, “nah.”  I could follow the lead, but I know it will be painful.

Transforming HR is really, really hard work.  For much of the readership, it’s not just hard work for us, it’s even harder work for the employees we would deploy to the effort.  When our execs chose to switch out the payroll system, guess who gets to work long hours in December prior to a January 1 go-live?  We deal with a lot of pain to implement systems, both in effort as well as cash, and the ROI is not always financially obvious, but to get to the top of that hill, it’s something we have to commit to, and something our staffs need to commit to.

In understanding the work behind HR transformation, there are a few things to remember:

• People actually don’t like change.  When you change their processes, they will resist doing something different than what they have done from years.  It’s not that they don’t want to support better processes, but a certain amount of fear arises when they are unsure how well they will perform in the new environment.
• People resist making others change.  HR transformation is just that – we are changing ourselves.  But teams often protect people internally realizing that friends will lose jobs, or be forced to make unwanted shifts and compromises.
• We get to do multiple jobs for a significant amount of time.  Not only are we going to have real jobs to do, but there will be project roles as well.  I don’t care if you bring an army from one of the large consulting firms, the internal team is going to be burdened with more work.
• Outsourcing done right is hard.  Organizations don’t remember the depth of retained organizations that are needed, SLA’s need to be formulated to be specific and measurable, and internal staff are resistant to seeing their jobs performed differently than how they did them themselves.

Often when we deploy and new system that has the opportunity to be transformational, we focus too much on the external.  We train managers, communicate to employees, figure out who the main audiences are that we need to convert.  We assume that our own people are already bought in.  All I’m saying, is we can spend some time to look internally.  Give them some love and attention.  Encourage and motivate them.  Otherwise you’ve got a Justin at the top of the hill looking down, wondering where the hell I am and why I didn’t make it up there with you.  It was just too much pain.

We often time our HR technology projects based on fictitious end dates.  Sure, there are a few out there that make a whole lot of sense.  It’s really nice if payroll implementations can go live on January 1.  It’s nice if new benefits vendors go live in time for a new open enrollment season.  But every once in a while, our CEO tells us in October that we had better have a new, global talent management system by January 1 in time for February performance reviews.  Huh?

In most of our projects, we have actually messed up our overall project timelines.  We don’t spend enough time thinking about some fairly significant parts of an implementation.  We’re all about getting the requirements blueprint down and hitting the config tables.  As you all know, I’m a big fan of prep.  When we rush into implementations, there just isn’t enough time to reengineer our processes and realign what we are doing to our core HR strategies.  We find out over and over again that we’ve simply reimplemented the same processes or the same config and not made HR any better.  We find out that we didn’t spend time cleaning up our data and our reports are still horrible.

1. Map to our mission and create actionable measurements of progress – Just because we map to our mission in the business case to implement a new system, does not mean we can stop measuring success.  Success needs to be measured before implementation, during implementation, and score carded repeatedly after go live.
2. Improve the quality of our data – data cleansing is not always sufficient.  Yes, it’s true that we should not just import data and begin a new system with the same crappy data that we had before, but it is equally wrong to clean the data without addressing the fundamental problems that created the bad data in the first place.  More on this in the next bullet.
3. Redesign our processes – Process redesign is not just for the sake of aligning process with the new technologies.  It’s an opportunity to address other issues within your environment.  Often, our processes are actually the cause of data issues we have.  Because we don’t use high quality data practices throughout our workflow, we end up auditing data on the back end when we catch only a fraction of the issues rather than ensuring high data quality throughout.

If we miss a step, it does not mean we don’t go live.  Nor does it mean that our implementation was not any good.  However, it might mean that our long term success is suboptimal.  For HR to have continued credibility with upper management, we have to do all the steps that it takes to create long term success.

If I can get all of this personally for $165, I’m trying to figure out why it feels like I don’t have access to this type of data as an HR professional.

• Case management tools are readily available:  Call centers do it.  If I go to my HR call center, they are probably tracking the number of cases each rep takes, how long it takes them to clear a call, etc.
• Transaction data is usually available, but takes some effort:  I suppose I could audit my database tables to see how many employee name change processes there are and exactly how long they are taking.  But it’s not like I’m going to make my data entry staff use an extra minute to create a case for a 2 minute transaction.  Adding 50% effort to a small transaction is rather silly.
• Data would be pretty impossible to get in an automated way: I mean, how much time does my staff spend in department meetings?  Not project meetings or something useful, I mean department get togethers, communications for what’s going on in the organization.  I’m not saying that this is not important stuff, but I had to run an activity analysis once just to prove to an organization that some of their people were spending 5% of their time in department meetings.

All I’m saying is that I feel like I should have a much better handle on my organization.  If I want to measure effectiveness, we seem to have dashboards for that.  Similar to my example where my bike stats can measure fitness, our dashboards can measure performance, talent acquisition, turnover, etc.  But similar to how a scale would then measure the miniscule core details of why I’m getting fitter (or not), I don’t feel like I have a dashboard for that.   For another example, we track training really well, but I think most of us would acknowledge that learning happens outside of training, and we don’t track real learning activities that well at all.

We’ve come a long way in the last [number] of years.  I’m hoping that in 3 more years, we can look back at 2011 and think, “god I’m glad we have this stuff in (in 2014).”  But no matter how far we go in the next [number] years, there will still be critical gaps.

1. I actually weigh myself 4 times a day when I’m home.  It’s a California thing. [back]

www.cedarcrestone.com/survey/systematicHR.html

For those of you who are actually going to read this, there are several surveys out there that the industry counts on for trending year over year. How much are people spending, what systems are being bought, what functions are getting the most focus, and how are users reacting? We’re always interested in finding out about emerging trends and the last few years have seen us go from talking about things like collaboration to actually implementing them.

I’m a big proponent of benchmarking. While I realize that any benchmark is to be taken with a grain of salt, or many grains, it’s still invaluable “directionally” as to whether you are heading in the right direction at the right pace. I’ve decided over the years that saying an organization should peg itself to being at the “75th%” only leads to trouble, but being able to say “we’re ahead of the curve, and we’re focusing on many of the same things as our peers” is both comforting and strategically helpful.

The point being, CedarCrestone’s survey is the largest survey out there. They get not hundreds, but thousands of respondents. If any of you out there ever hire a guy like me, you depend not only on my experience gained from prior clients, but also that I’m keeping up with all of you through tools like this survey. It’s only as good as the number and people who respond though.

In the meantime, there was a very interesting Bill Kutik show a few weeks back where Lexy Martin discusses the origins, objectives and surprises of the HR Systems Survey www.billkutikradioshow.com.

Apparently in a new poll, fully 50% of the US population registered with the Republican party believe this¹  I mean, COME ON!!!! Seriously?  I remember having an argument with my uncle back in early 2002.  Before the US “shocked and awed” Iraq, there was a pretty large part of the US population that was quite sure we would never find WMD’s there.  The evidence that Saddam didn’t have WMD’s was actually stronger than the evidence that he did.  And listen, I’m sure the other side does it too.  I just can’t give you examples because I’m sure I’ve bought into all of the left’s version of crap as a left leaning Democrat.  (Please don’t stop reading because of that)  At least I’ll admit it.

We lie.  Does not matter what side we’re on.  We lie to get what we want.  No, don’t call it manipulating the truth.  There is no truth in the tools that many politicians use to coerce their voting populace to give them money and votes.

How many of our organizations do we describe as “political”?  We politic to get ahead, to get funding, to get systems, to get employees, to get what we want.  Even though we all decry how much we hate it, we all play the game to some degree. In some cases (Mau Mau sympathizer??) we’re just making up crap.  In other cases, (WMD’s) we might actually believe we have the right information, or have manipulated the data to say what we want it to say.  ROI studies are probably the best example.  We’re big believers in ROI not just so we can get funding, but so we can get executive sponsorship.

There is an art to presentation and telling a story.  Crafting an effective story is truly the difference between getting change and not getting it, whether it’s a sale, executive sponsorship, funding, etc.  At the end of the day, the story is about conveying emotion, not data.  We use data as a tool, but we realize that the data can skew the emotion of what we’re trying to change by many degrees.  Knowing this, we sometimes  manipulate the data.

I’ll be honest in saying that every now and then the data surprises me.  I’ll go back to colleagues saying, “is this really telling me what I think it’s telling me?”  The result is going back and re-cutting the data several more ways to validate the results, and then, instead of crafting new results and “spinning the message,” going back to the client and admitting, “this is not what we expected.”

I recently did a survey with one of my clients which was supposed to tell me what their functional and system weaknesses were.  Instead, the data I got back was crap (self described).  It took me a couple days and many conversations to realize that the result I wanted (knowing what areas they needed to target to improve service delivery) was never going to materialize.  Instead, a completely new and unexpected story started to unfold in front of me.  Upon reanalysis and looking at the data in a completely different way, the client had deeper issues than functionality and technology.

Sometimes we know what we want, we get some data, and it’s just not corroborating our story.  But we end up telling our story anyway.  But you know what? Somewhere in the data lies a truth which is waiting to be uncovered, and that truth is stronger than any fictional story we want to tell.  It’s hard work, and it isn’t always the direction we want to go, but get to the bottom of it.  There’s no point being 3 years down the road later and wondering why anyone thought the Mau Mau thing was anywhere close to real.

1. Joe Klein, “Huckabucking.”  Time Magazine, March 11, 2011.  Page 15. [back]

How about this: ¹

1. Measure the time of day employees log into their PC in the morning.
2. Measure the time of day employees log out of their PC in the afternoon.
3. Measure the cost per day per trip (expenses) calibrated to some standard.
4. Measure the number of sick days on Monday and Friday.

I mean, why would you wait 6 or 12 months?

• If your employees are (on average) coming to work later or leaving earlier, they are less engaged.
• If the aggregated cost of a trip to NYC costs more per day, employees are “fudging” their expenses, and they are less engaged.
• If Monday and Friday sick time is increasing (faked sick time), they are less engaged.

I mean, come on, we want to have close to real time measures, right?  I’m not saying that employee engagement actually changes on a day to day basis, but charted weekly, you could get some really cool trending data and identify exactly when the engagement curve increases or decreases.  You could then correlate all of the events that happened in that timeframe and figure out what is actually causing increases or decreases in engagement.  You could also isolate specific groups and populations (sample size would have to be large enough).  Say a VP leaves and is replaced, and 6 months later employees are staying at work later.   Or, the cost of a meal in NYC seems to be getting higher for a specific project team – are they celebrating, or are they all depressed and eating more?

How cool would it be to then look at performance in correlation with a weekly trend in engagement?  This is assuming that we start managing and developing our employees on an ongoing basis rather than once a year, but the possibilities are out there.

1. The idea for this post came from:  Ariely, Dan.  “CEO’s probably think of their employees as more like rats in a maze than as people.”  Wired Magazine, UK Edition.  April 11, 2011.  Page 44 [back]

I should mention here once more that this was all years ago.  I now own a Motorola Droid 2 Global on the Android platform, after having owned the Motorlola Droid 1 and the Droid 2.  Absolutely love these phones.  I don’t know about you, but I have basically owned the popular cell phones of whatever era we were in (iPhone excepted since until very recently it was not available on my wireless provider of choice). I had that huge motorola flip phone in the late 90s, had the nokias like everyone else around the turn of the century, been given the blackberries by my employers, and I’ve been on the motorola droid for the last couple of years.

Phones are popular not because of their technology. They are popular because of what they do for us. Sometimes its the image. We all remember theMotorola Razer (or something like that – i didn’t own one of those) that everyone loved because they were small. We remember the nokias because at the time they were the simplest to use. We realize that many of us bought iPhones even though they were useless as phones in the US. The point being that the choices had almost nothing to do with technology. We sacrificed the ability to make phone calls on a phone so we could buy an apple product that had apps.

The point is this, if you have to explain why your product is better, your product has failed, and you will fail in marketing it. All too often, we deploy new HR systems and tell our clients (employees and managers) how great it will be that they have new tools and self service, only to find out that they hate the new system since they can no longer delegate manual tasks to their assistants – that we have actually just given them more work. We continuously fail in our change management programs for a large number of factors, but one of those facts is definitely hat we are trying to sell the wrong thing. It’s not about what they can do with the technology, it’s what the technology can do for them. (I am feeling like a Kennedy at the moment i suppose.)

In a perhaps more appropriate appropriate approach, applications like alert management must be acknowledged to put more activity on the individual manager’s proverbial table. Indeed, many a survey have shown that manager activity either stays the same or increases any time we give them more technology, but we keep advertising how much easier their lives will be. Instead, we should be owning up to the fact that their lives get busier and more complex, and that’s not a bad thing. The whole point of modern human resources is t hat we continuously get better at managing our people. What are our direct managers if not people managers? Sure, they have to manage activity and process, but it’s the people who have to execute those activities and processes. The technology enables managers to actually do their jobs better, and sometimes just to do their jobs. The fact that more work comes with doing jobs that they are supposed to have been doing all along is merely a byproduct of the technology. sure, you get more work, but now you can do it effectively. In the end, you’ll have happier people, they will stick around longer, have stronger capabilities, and you’ll look really really good.

Or, you can be like Motorola a decade ago when Nokia was cleaning their clock. Instead, give them something they can use, and understand easily. “It’s your job, dammit, and we’re going to make you better at it.” If we have to explain the technology, we’ve already failed.  Today, Motorola has transformed the market and you see Motorlola and iPhones everywhere, but not so much Nokia anymore (in the US).  Turns out that the technology is important, but it’s really about the experience.

• “Eh, voila!” universal for “eh, voila!”
• “Ah, asodeska” Japanese for “I understand”  (sp?)
• “Bo ko dien” is Taiwanese for highly unlikely or that’s ridiculous. (sp?)
• “Oh shiitake” (shitzu is also appropriate), is an imperfectly polite way of saying “oh &#!+”

Basically, these are phrases that i love, but at least the latter two are meaningless to most people i say them to. I could of course go to Japan and most people will know what I’m talking about when i tell them I understand them, but they will then look at me funny when i exclaim in the name of a mushroom in anger.

We face the same problems when we talk about data calculations in HR. The most common of which is the simple headcount calculation. “Simple?” you ask. I mean, how hard can it be to count a bunch of head that are working in the organization on any particular day, right? The smart data guys out there are scoffing at me at this very moment.

First, we put on the finance hat. Exactly how many heads is a part time person? HR exclaims that is why we have headcount versus FTE. But finance does not really care, and they are going to run a headcount using a fraction either way.

Second, we put on our function and division hat. Every division seems to want to run the calc in a different way. And then there are realistic considerations to be made, such as the one country out there that outsources payroll, and does not have a field to differentiate a PT versus FT person. or the country that has a mess of contractors on payroll, and can’t sort them out.

Then you put on the analytics hat, and realize that when you integrated everything into your hypothetical data warehouse, the definitions for other fields have not been standardized around the organization, and you can’t get good head counts of specific populations like managers, executives, and diversity. I mean, is a someone in management a director and above? Or is she jut a people manager? How many people does she have to manage to be in management? Are we diverse as an organization simply because we have a headcount that says we are more than 50% people of color even though 2000 of those people are in Japan where the population is so homogenous that any talk of non Japanese minorities is simply silly?

Then you put on your math hat and some statistician in the organization tells you that you can’t average an average, or some nonsense like that.

So the Board of Directors comes to HR and asks what the headcount of the organization is. You tell them that you have 100,000 employees, plus or minus 10%. Yep, that’s going to go over really well.

I’m not saying its an easy discussion, but all it really takes is getting everyone into the same room one (OK, maybe over the course of a couple of weeks) to get this figured out. I’ve rarely seen an organization that is so vested in their own headcount method that they can’t see the benefits of a standardized calculation. I fact, most of the segments within are usually clamoring for this and we just have not gotten around to it yet, or we think they are resistant. In the end, it’s really not so hard, and we should just get to it.

Asodeska?

There are some organizations that are quite liberal with knowledge management.  Many technology companies deploy blogs and wikis and actively encourage employees to write and participate.  Many brick and mortar companies won’t deploy enterprise social platforms because they are afraid of what might come out.  Rather than encouraging the discourse (ALL of which will happen anyway), many of us have suppressed it based on a fear of “bad behavior.”

The problem about this is not about trust.  It’s about generations.  Unfortunately, many of us (I’ll just draw a line at 35 years old and up), realize that large corporations have not been democratic societies.  We work in states that are oligarchical at best.  Even in companies where the corporate center does not have much power over divisions, the individual divisions can command the employees at will.  Those in the workforce in their 20’s have no acceptance of such a model.  We’ve always talked about them as being insistent on having access to decision-making, being vocal and contributory, and demanding the be part of the conversation in general.  They have grown up in a world where technology has democratized the world, and it’s their expectation that data and information is part of their realm.

Evidence supports that actual instances of “bad behavior” are so low that it’s really not worth being afraid of – and the community will generally self police itself.  People realize for the most part that the conversations that happen in the workplace are different than the conversations that happen without – and the 5 horror stories you hear each year are insignificant compared to the potential for collaboration you have.  We can’t control the thinking.  Nor can we control the content.

Between everything that has been going on in the Middle East and of course the earthquake in Japan, I think April will be a current events month.  My thoughts and best wishes go out to all those throughout the world as they struggle in their various ordeals.  (written a while back obviously – sorry)