Upon graduating from college (from what turned out to be an excellent, small, liberal arts college), I didn’t land that highly desired job in consulting or investment banking. Those jobs primarily came from colleges more elite than my own. So I fought and clawed my way into situations where I would learn and grow, eventually creating this blog not as a public space, but as a place to record my thoughts so I’d remember them in the future.

I now have the pleasure of helping my clients understand how strategy can impact all manner of HR, talent and service delivery outcomes. One of the most interesting in recent years has been a focus on understanding staffing outcomes in the college recruiting area. The old conventional wisdom has always been to get the most elite candidates from the most elite colleges. After all, these are the best and the brightest, and what CEO does not tell the world that they have the best and smartest team in the world? Unfortunately, this conventional wisdom does not work out for all it’s cracked up to be.

My favorite case study comes from a global financial analyst firm. This organization recruited from one of the Ivy Leagues for years, but ultimately they ran some analytics and discovered that the Ivy League candidates not only didn’t perform better, they often performed worse than candidates from “middle of the pack” schools. The most successful candidates (those promoted into management and eventually reaching executive ranks, those who had long tenure rates, and those who became great leaders and people managers), were often from public sector universities in “Po-dunk, Middle-of-Nowhere.” The analysis revealed a single striking characteristic difference: the sense of entitlement.

It turned out that candidates from elite schools were indeed smarter, but they also had in their belief system that they could do better – no matter where they were. There was not only a continuous striving to get to the top faster, but a sense of discontent no matter how good their present state was. This ultimately lead to early voluntary terminations in less than 2 years, and a striving for job/title inflation that was counter-productive to real experiential growth.

On the other hand, candidates from “Po-dunk” were so excited for the opportunity, happy they were in New York instead of “Po-dunk” and genuinely appreciative that they somehow got into one of the elite financial firms, that they worked their butts off and formed long term relationships with their companies. Ultimately, sticking around and putting in some real effort ensured that many of the “Po-dunk” graduates made it into executive ranks, probably as quickly as the elitists did (after 6 company changes).

Another customer, an engineering firm, found that not only did the school not matter (which would seem odd in engineering), but what did matter was how well this organization could form high quality relationships with Ph.D candidate advisors. A high quality relationship with a professor guiding many engineering Ph.D. candidates was a significantly better predictor of the new hire’s desire to put in hard work and stick around. After all, if your Ph.D. advisor got you and many of your predecessors an opportunity at a job, and they are all experiencing success, aren’t you going to do the same thing?

The point being that the old conventional wisdom isn’t the formula for recruiting success anymore. The pressure high school kids face these days to get set up for life by getting into the best colleges is also creating very bad precedent and expectations. Just the idea that they think they will be “set up for life” by getting into the right schools is turning off employers. More and more of my customers are doing deep analytics to understand where their top college candidates come from, and increasingly it’s not the elite schools. If you’re still following the old conventional wisdom, it might be time to revisit your strategy.

In HR’s pursuit to get better at catering to the business, it has pursued a variety of programs including implementing technologies that provide “insights out of the box” and governance programs that promise to clean data so that HR has more credibility.  But these programs don’t increase HR’s ability to deliver an insight – they only allow HR to deliver something they should have had 10 years ago.  THis presents one of the significant problems HR has with data – in the lack of having adequate capability, HR thinks that bigger is better and the shiny new toy will solve all problems.

Just as when 5 years ago “social” was the shiny new toy (that HR was afraid to tackle), today HR looks to big data to assist with capability shortcomings.  HR reasons that if their organizational data is paired with external data, instant benchmarks can provide immediate and deep insights for leaders.  They think that bringing in data from non-HR systems within the organizational firewall will help them identify human resource attributes like productivity that were previously off limits.  These assumptions can be true, but only if HR staff has a capability already to grapple with data problems and create insights of of those problems.  Shiny tools that help visualize make it easier to create insights, but the beginning and end to the problem is and always has been about data oriented people.

HR should not go big – in fact, HR should probably go smaller to the smallest segments of data that they already have but don’t use effectively.  Rather than looking towards big data to solve problems and introduce new complexities that they are unready to deal with, HR should be taking the current HR data already in possession and looking at unused meta-data to tap into new insights.  There are things going on within our organization that HR has not even thought about, but impact the future of the workplace and how employees get things done.

HR Meta-Data Use Case 1:
Within almost every good HR system is the ability to track data about each transaction.  HR already reports on mundane transactions like job changes and trends about who goes where and how long the average person takes to get promoted.  But embedded within each of these transactions is the meta-data that tells us when managers are performing these transactions (date and time stamp), and sometimes what type of device they are using.  Purely hypothetical, an organization could find out that managers typically perform HR transactions outside of normal work hours, presumably because they are busy with their “regular” jobs between 8 to 5.  Or that managers who have had tablets deployed to them and have a better user interface approve transactions faster than their counterparts.  In today’s world, HR is consumed by administering the employee record rather than understanding how work gets done more productively.  The meta-data can tell us how a transaction got done, not just what the transaction was.

HR has plenty of data, especially now that Talent Management has been in full swing for almost a decade.  Meta-data by definition is “data about the data.”  For years, HR has not cared about this type of data and has almost completely ignored it.  Indeed, the purpose of meta-data seemed to be system oriented rather than business useful.  As HR data sets have grown however, use cases have increased beyond just understanding how managers are doing their work, to increasing insights about the employees themselves, and how HR can improve their own programs.

HR Meta-Data Use Case 2:
Most employers provide some form of total compensation statements with the objective of increasing employee engagement and satisfaction.  It’s hard to correlate the simple presence of a total compensation statement with satisfaction without meta-data.  Combining meta-data with employee engagement survey data, HR can make real correlations between employees that log into total compensation statements to view them, and that populations’ engagement scores.  Are people who look at their compensation all the time more or less engaged?  Is checking total compensation a predecessor activity for voluntary terminations?  Taking the meta-data to another level, the volume of logins per employee might )or might not) yield even greater impact to engagement.  This activity could be extended to payroll and benefit portals as well.  Given real data regarding correlation, HR might elect to develop marketing campaigns to increase traffic to benefits portals among older employees, total compensation among mid career employees, and learning portals among younger employees.

In the last several years, people have become more sensitive to the intrusion of privacy that governments can exercise.  From the NSA tracking who we are talking to, to our cell phone providers tracking where we are at any time, meta-data has gotten a bad rap for being a tool of “big brother.”  Indeed, HR has actually been using meta-data since the dawn of “personnel administration.  Simple headcount reports are not about the HR data itself, but a count of the data.  Turnover reports are similarly not about the data, but a count of a specific type of transactions.  So looking deeper into meta-data than HR has in previous generations should not be a surprise.

HR has a wealth of data already at its disposal.  In its attempt to find meaning within that data, expanding the data set and making it even harder for HR to craft new insightfulness would seem to be a mistake.  HR already has more data than it can consume, and finding meaningful ways to use and interpret that data is a better bet than trying to create entirely new data sets while existing data sets stagnate even more.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could apply a cheat code in our work lives?  If there was one, it can’t possibly be as simple as a game where you just google to see if a cheat code exists.  In real life, cheat codes are incredibly hard to find, but perhaps they do exist somewhere.  In the world of technology deployments, we certainly know what are NOT cheat codes.

• Lift and shift deployments.  Let’s say you have a user experience problem and you want to implement a new core HR system and have much better cloud systems that employees interact with.  The reality is that you will end up with a much better UX, but when your employees log into the new system, they are not going to be any happier with the experience if you did a lift and shift implementation.  Simply going in and changing the technology without any of the other foundational factors really does not help you.  It turns out that other factors like your process design, your portal and content management, and your approval chains are still an obstacle.  Let’s say for example an employee has moved homes.  The fact that they still can’t find documentation in the portal that tells them an address change is only the first step, and payroll/state tax changes might need to happen, or how benefit pans are impacted is still a problem.  Sure, getting into a more beautiful system might give them incremental happiness, but it’s not enough to overcome the significant shortcomings in your overall program.
• Radical technology transformations only.  In addition to #1, many organizations do radical technology transformations and completely forget the amount of change management they will need, or they defund the change management work stream after the first change order comes in.  It’s always sad to see an organization that has spent millions of dollars implementing technology that users don’t adopt because there was a poor change strategy.  Often there is nothing wrong with the technology, or the processes.  But when a user finds something hard the first time because they were not coached on the new process, the repeat user is hard to come by.
• Saving costs by changing your processes only.  At the end of the day, you do have to realize that your users really are dissatisfied with your technology too.  Yes, they do hate the process because it takes too long and involves too many people that don’t matter to the outcome, but the interface is terrible and hard to navigate.  I’ve seen company after company implement new processes on top of really old technology and then wonder why the end users still complain.
  The moral of the story here is that people (change), process and technology all matter, and it’s hard to have huge successes if you don’t transform all of these three components together.

The good news is that there actually are some valid cheat codes.

• Cloud.  Wait, didn’t we just say that you can’t just do technology alone?  Yes we did, but the facts are that today’s best cloud technologies allow organizations not only to shift cost and headcount resources in a highly efficient manner by removing in-house technology management, but process design is simply so much easier than it was with legacy platforms.  We’ll still need to remember to have good change management, but cloud really also makes adoption easier since the UX is so significantly better than older platforms.  Compared to legacy on-premise software, cloud platforms accelerate people, process and technology components and serve as a game changing cheat code.
• Crowd.  I’m not seeing crowdsourcing in HR yet, but I think it’s a major cheat code for whoever can figure it out first.  We have build such huge and costly infrastructures around shared services, but today’s social technologies combined with metadata/tagging structures have the ability to let end users manage their own inquiries with the corporate cloud.  Imagine the employee who moves homes and asks the corporate crowd what to do, and receives multiple answers from the crowds with links to the address change function in HR, payroll tax forms, and benefits enrollment.  HR now plays the content curator role rather than the source of all content.

The thing to remember is that these cheat codes only are available for a short period of time.  At some point, everyone else figures what the cheat code is and everyone has the advantage.  The early adopters can leverage an advantage for a few years, while laggers suffer higher costs, lower adoption, poorer UX, and slower processes for years to come.

During this year’s HR Technology  Conference HCM roundtable, it was fascinating to hear what everyone was working on (it was the first question posed to the group, and I’m not trying to bash any vendor, but I am representing my opinion of the answers).

• What was fascinating was that 2 of the vendors were talking about a great user experience (Oracle Fusion and Ultimate).  Wait a second.  We’re still talking about UX?  How did these 2 vendors get a seat at this panel and only have UX to offer up for what’s new in the product.  It’s unfortunate.  Y’all gotta do better than that.
• 2 of the vendors talked about machine learning.  (ADP and Workday).  Machine learning was part of an overall theme of the conference, and there was a follow-up conversation in this panel about it, but these 2 vendors were the ones who brought it up as a focus area in their opening comments.  When I think about social HR 7 years ago, I think that machine learning is what the next few years might be about and it seems like 2 vendors want us to know that they’re on top of it.  What is surprising here is who the vendors were – and it shows us that there can be surprises.  It wasn’t Oracle and SAP with their deep (and legacy) analytics engines and mountains of programmers.  It was ADP (wh-wh-wh-what?!?!  I LOVE that ADP is thinking about this as they have the largest client/employee base to run analytics off of.  Maybe I don’t give them enough credit.) and Workday (ok, maybe predictable since they seem to be thinking/innovating faster than the others).
• Last up was SAP.  Can anyone say “extensibility?”  Actually, SAP was gearing up to talk about some really cool metadata and object architecture that will create extensibility, but they got cut off from a time perspective.  Leave it to SAP to make things more complex, but if we can get to configurable extensibility, that’s pretty cool.  Honestly, I would have expected Oracle to be on the extensibility bandwagon based on their application architecture.

I’m hard pressed to say whether machine learning or extensibility is what’s next, but I’d think that all the vendors should be working on both of them.  UX is table stakes, and you should not be allowed to talk at the table (or panel as it was) if that’s what you’re working on.  My guess is that SAP will have some chops in the machine learning space, but it just was not what they wanted to focus on.  It’s also interesting that ADP and Workday were not on the extensibility front as it’s clearly a focus area for the very large customers that SAP has as its client base (but maybe that’s why SAP is so focused).

In a few vendor comments unrelated to the HCM roundtable, the HCM vendor space is going to start reaching parity in the next year.  Oracle and SAP are picking up steam and finally starting to look competitive.  First of all, lets agree that I HCM software in vendor demo booths while I was at the conference.  The following is an aggregation of vendor demos and conversations I had with conference participants.  Here are a couple of comments around gaps or deficiencies that I’m still watching out for based on those conversations:  (alpha order)

• ADP:  I was really quite pleased to see their new UX.  I can’t remember what it’s called, but they’ll be rolling it out to all of their products so that no matter what you’re on, you’ll have a similar experience.  My concern is really still around the back end.  ADP’s ability to stitch together a common front end on top of multiple back end (and still mainframe?) systems is pretty good, and perhaps when you’re outsourcing everything but the core HCM to a best in class payroll and benefits vendor, it might not matter what the back end looks like.  Maybe.
• Oracle:  The main question is in the UX.  It’s simply not seamless, and it goes to the point of why they were focused on UX in the panel. It’s way better than the last couple of years, but one goes from the cool “mobile apply” look and feel into a slightly different transaction screen, into a completely non-appy environment in just a few clicks.  The first couple pages are well executed, but it just feels like they didn’t finish the job as you continue through a manager transaction.  The second question is in their customer base for sold Fusion Core HCM.  As I talked to conference participants, they were getting numbers from the Oracle booth anywhere between 400 to 600 (note to Oracle, please get your story straight).  There are still a lot of conference participants wondering why Oracle is giving Fusion HCM licenses away for free if they have market demand in the 100’s of customers.  It’s just not adding up, and nobody I talked to could figure out the story.
• SAP:  I’m pretty sure that SAP is on its way to filling a few gaps.  Certainly per the above comments, if they are working to fill extensibility gaps that its large enterprise clients will need, they are also going to figure out benefits administration, timekeeping and payroll.  I talked to one conference participant who was told that benefits administration will be available to demo this quarter, and another who said they were told it would be in Q4 of 2015.  Either way it’s coming and that’s good news.  I think SAP’s original philosophy that payroll, time and benefits get outsourced, but for the top 250 clients in size, that’s a hard position to maintain.  (I don’t consider SAP cloud payroll to be comparable to Employee Central in architecture, agile configurability, or usability, so that’s why I harp on it.  I know that SAP would disagree).
• Workday:  Everyone has been uber positive about Workday for years.  The questions among conference participants seemed to be around the viability of their recruiting module.  Granted this is their newest module, and the top vendors seem to have the capability to innovate rapidly over a couple release cycles.  Just as I’m confident SAP is going to figure out benefits quickly, same goes for Workday recruiting.

Having said all of this, I’m actually quite pleased with the vendor space.  The last couple of years (no matter what Oracle and SAP say) have been relatively uncompetitive.  There has been one clear winner in the market, and the fact that I don’t have to say who it was is a good indicator that it’s true. I think 2015 will get a bit more competitive, but 2016 will become an all out war.  This post is definitely “negative” about what my concerns might be, but what I don’t mention is the huge progress that all of the vendors have made and the very long lists of things they have done well and right.  I’m going to get in trouble from the vendors over this post anyway, but either way, I think 2015 is going to be interesting.  More viable vendors is always a good thing.

(Last comment.  I thought long and hard whether to post this.  Some vendor somewhere is going to be pissed at me, but at the end of the day, there were only 5 HCM vendors on stage, so any exclusion is not mine.  Also, each vendor chose to talk about what they talked about.  Perhaps they didn’t have enough time, but again, if Oracle really wanted to talk analytics but didn’t get to it, that’s not my fault.  Each vendor decided what they wanted to focus on by themselves.  The opinions in the latter half of this post are based on talking to other conference participants and seeing each of the vendors demo at their booth.  Posting this also saves me the effort of writing a year end post.)

The point being… that was 10 years ago.  If you are not already in the cloud, you’re somewhere between 5-10 years behind the times.

None of us can imagine being on our 2004 Motorola flip phone, so why is it ok that we’re still talking about deploying cloud technology today?  I still go to clients that tell me they are getting ready for PeopleSoft 9.3.  A recent conversation with a large employer informed me that a client on Oracle EBS had no intention of getting off of it.  If you are on-premise for HCM, chances you installed it between 1998 and 2008.  I tell you what – you can have your 10-15 year old technology.  Send me your iPhone, and I’ll send you a 10 year old flip phone.  It’ll be great.

By the way.  PeopleSoft was founded in 1987 and the underlying architecture has remained pretty much the same.  Where were you in 1987?  I was just starting high school.

The point being… your employees and managers hate you.  

You really think they don’t know that their employee and manager self service technology predates Amazon.com’s initial user interface?

Wait, if I’m telling you to get over the cloud, where exactly are you supposed to be?  All the cool stuff right now is in consumer driven technology.  Think Uber.  I don’t call a taxi service that controls where the cabs go.  I get on an app and the consumer controls the experience without a middleman.  Same with AirBnB.  Come to think about it, same with Quora.  Ask anything and a community of users will tell you how it is.  Hang on, we’ve been rating products to help other consumers on Amazon for years.  How many of us read the product description on Amazon?  Maybe a few of us, but pretty much 100% of us check the consumer star ratings first.

The same thing is happening in HR.  Companies like Careerify are helping employees control the recruiting process.  Instead of recruiting organizations pleading with employees to provide referrals, the technology advises the employee putting them in complete control.  Companies like Betterworks are making goals and feedback real time, collaborative, and truly valuable.  At the HR Technology conference this year, ADP and Workday were talking about machine learning where their tools will help employees predict what to do next faster and better than your HR people.

The point being…  HR isn’t the facilitator anymore.  If you are, then you’re not adding value where you should be.  HR should be sitting around analyzing what is happening, not managing it.  The power to create, transact, and collaborate is squarely in the hands of employees and managers now.  Time to give them the technology to do it.  

And if you’re still not in the cloud, you’re 10 years behind your competitors.

Seriously, global payroll is such a PITA.  It’s just too hard to figure out how to get all of your payroll vendors on a single platform or even a single vendor.  Local countries want their own autonomy, but corporate controls want centralized reporting and GL integrations.  Because if the very disparate local compliance issues, it’s incredibly difficult to normalize much of the global payroll environment.  Here are a couple of quick vendor thoughts that have been coming into focus and reality for a couple years:

• ADP Streamline.  I don’t quite understand this service, but Streamline can basically take ADP global payrolls and consolidate much of the payroll data into one place.  This allows for generally centralized reporting and results.  The weakness of this model is that it’s not in the ADP HCM applications and can’t do reporting that has HCM data in it (afaik)
• Ceridian Dayforce Payroll.  I don’t remember the name of their product, but Dayforce HCM is basically able to take Ceridian global payrolls and dump things into the Dayforce application, again providing consolidated reporting.  The weakness of this is that it’s in Dayforce HCM, and not everybody wants to run Dayforce HCM.
• There are other great global payroll vendors that I like (Celergo comes to mind) but I didn’t visit them this particular HR Tech, so I won’t comment.

The idea of having a single payroll vendor doing all of the work in one place is fantastic, but it’s really pretty mythical.  Not one vendor can cover the entire globe, and most companies will have a gap somewhere, even with the big vendors like ADP and Ceridian.  Most organizations will try to get to 2-3 vendors to cover the globe, and some of them use outsourced BPO arrangements like AonHewitt or NorthgateArinso to coordinate these services.  Either way, single consolidated global payroll data is either on multiple vendors, or you spent millions of dollars and years of time consolidating on legacy HCM like SAP or PeopleSoft.

The other observation I’d make is that most global payroll organizations have to stack rank their companies for who is going onto a centralized platform and who is not.  For example, most companies decide on an employee count threshold to determine if it’s worth moving them to Streamline; under 100 employees and the cost of adding a Streamline country may not be worth the ROI.  These smaller countries are often left to their own devices and more manual integrations.

All in all, global consolidated payroll is still a bit mythical, but the last couple of years brought significant capabilities where the major vendors now have the ability to consolidate more than they had in the past.  As country footprints continue to increase, maybe a single global payroll provider is not such a distant future.

Let’s start off with recruiting because…. well everything starts off with recruiting.

User Experiences:  
The idea that you can take any of the older recruiting experiences like Taleo, Brassring, PeopleSoft, etc and wrap a UX around it is fantastic.  Half of the candidate problem is process and interview experience, but it all start with being able to submit an application in the first place.  We all know when we’re in the never ending PeopleSoft application submission process because most of us have never actually gotten to the end of it.  Manager experiences are equally bad, and half of our organizations can’t get managers to use recruiting functionality because it’s so bad.  We have HRBP’s supporting them instead.

• Jibe has been around for a few years that I know of, and they have an incredibly elegant candidate, manager and recruiter experience.    Jibe avoids all of that by cleaning up the experience, making it mobile and easy, and doing for a huge selection of ATS systems.  I do have some concerns with their laser focus on the user experience since at some point the vendors might catch up and make the UX overlay unnecessary, but for now and the next few years, there is a huge amount of opportunity for them.
• Findly is an organization that I just don’t understand their core ATS differentiator, but they also have the ability to wrap a UX around Taleo, Brassring and SuccessFactors recruiting.  At this point they are only doing a wrap around for the candidate experience, but it’s pretty decent.
• Many of the newer cloud ATS (including the ones mentioned below) have great UX – being architected in the last 5 years puts them far ahed of the old generation, and really makes it unnecessary to wrap a different UX around it.

Old vs. New ATS
One of the things I’m desperately trying to figure out is when the new vendors will be ready to fully take over the mantle from the older recruiting vendors.  We still have the old school, behemoth vendors with such robust and rich feature/functionality that deployment and maintenance of the applications just are not agile.  Then we have the new school of recruiting applications that are very agile, but don’t have nearly the depth in functionality.  Somewhere in the middle is a happy medium that allows 95% of our organizations to get what we need and manage staffing practices with the speed at which the employment market changes.

Just to name a few, we have Jobvite with good ATS adoption, but it’s obviously not Taleo in functionality, we have Smashfly who started in the referrals business and is trying to broaden functionality quickly, Hirevue started in interviewing and is also trying to grow into other areas.  All of the systems have gaps, and at some point the gaps are small enough that system viability is unquestionable over the old ATS.  Right now, this feels a bit like 2007 when the talent systems started buying each other ,but there were always clear strengths based on where the vendor’s original functionality was.  it took 5 years before end to end talent was truly viable.

Recruiting CRM:
I’m still seeing a pretty big gap in really capable recruiting CRM systems.  Integration to the truly powerful content marketing engines and really deep CRM that comes close to matching traditional CRM is just not there yet.  That said, there are recruiting CRM systems that do a great job, but there are not that many of them.

I’m pretty excited about recruiting systems this year.  I do think we’re in a transition phase where the old stuff looks a lot older this year, and the new stuff starts looking pretty good.  Next year should hopefully see more maturity and hopefully the start of the changing of the guards.

Sometimes our KPI’s go desperately wrong, even though they seem to make sense.  My current personal goal is to get back to 10% body fat.  For those of you who don’t know me, let’s just say I’m already one “skinny ass dude.”  The problem is that less fat for a person who is generally athletic and out of doors as often as possible sounds like a good thing.  The question is, is it the right thing?  We actually face the same problem in our HCM KPI’s.  Here are a few examples.

Employee Referral %:  

• Employee’s who are referred to us by other employees are our best people.  Right?  Almost all of us would agree that this is true as these employees will have higher levels of engagement, are pre-screened as people we’d want to work with, are capable and smart.  The referrer has a stake in the person’s success, but their credibility is also on the line so they probably won’t be referring crappy people.
• Often, we’ll see that companies want to achieve as high a referral % as possible.  This allows the company to get more great people, but also reduce recruiting costs.  The problem is that there’s also a tendency to refer people who are similar to us.  This is a problem on a couple of fronts.  First of all, there is an ideation and innovation problem.  If you recruit people who are similar to you, who have similar experiences, have worked in the same places, you are not getting your company’s due in diverse thinking.  Second, people like us are not demographically diverse all of the time.  if you have a lot of “white dudes” and you want a 100% referral rate, you’re still going to be a bunch of “white dudes” in 5 years.

Employee Turnover %:

• This one is fun.  Some organizations are SO proud of the low turnover that they have.  I’ll walk into a new project and within day’s I’m inundated with how they have achieved 5% turnover.  I mean, having great employee engagement so much so that nobody ever wants to leave is a great thing, right?  We see targets of 8% and lower all the time.
• Depending on which philosophy to subscribe to, there is such a thing as “desirable turnover.”  Those are the Jack Welch bottom 10%, or in your forced bell curve performance ratings the bottom 5-15%.  Let’s just say that there are 10% of people in your organization at any time that SHOULD leave, and you should be encouraging to leave.  So if your desirable turnover is up to 10%, and your target is less than 10%, something is pretty much wrong.  Right?
• The key is to figure out how to shift the conversation to unwanted turnover rate instead of total turnover rate.  A very high performing organization could have a total turnover rate at 12%, but if their unwanted turnover is only 2%, I’d say they are doing fantastically.

We all want high referral rates, and we also want low turnover rates.  These are great KPI’s, but we take too much for granted and at face value.  Going to extremes just because there’s a number to hit impacts our organizations in a pretty negative way, and in HR, it usually means that we have some of the wrong people working for us.

One of the very few surveys that is just purely robust in it’s data set and is unquestionable in it’s quality is CedarCrestone’s Annual HR Technology Survey.  This is the 17th year of the survey, and we’ve all benefitted from its insights and direction.  It helps us all know what the market is thinking about and if we’re keeping up with everyone else.

All respondents will receive an advance copy of the results in early October 2014. The first 100 respondents to complete all questions will receive a $5 Starbucks card. The 17th, 117th, and 1,017th respondents will receive a $100 Visa gift card in celebration of our 17th year. All who complete the Survey will be entered into a drawing for an in-depth Benchmark Service.

SystematicHR.com used to be one of the leading blogs in terms of how many responses this website generated versus other blogs.  In fact, at some point we were the top blog, but we slipped last year.

First:  Fill out the survey.  It’s worth doing just from the standpoint of helping out the industry.  Second, use this link!!!

We’ve been experimenting with the idea of standardization for decades, but more so in the last 15 years as our organizations have gotten more global and those global populations have kept increasing.  The evolution started with zero standardization.  it was really step one as global organizations just did whatever they wanted to.  There were shadow HR systems everywhere, country specific processes, and inconsistent delivery to the business.  Local HR organizations provided generally adequate service to the business, but corporate HR organizations couldn’t get simple head counts let alone anything that was actually useful.

Many organizations have moved to the next stage of evolution, the corporate mandate.  Corporate HR organizations tried to make some sense of this mayhem by implementing core HR systems and mandating that all countries around the globe had to have their employees entered into the common HR system.  This did nothing except ensure that country HR double entered employee data but kept their own individual way of processing transactions.  In almost all cases, the shadow systems (usually spreadsheets) still existed.  The problem is that most organizations think that there is a way to make the corporate mandate work, when really this is as much a failure as the mayhem that existed before.

We’ve also gone down the road of “the only modifications to standard processes will be for local compliance needs.”  Basically, we’ve told the local HR organizations that the local practice is not acceptable and we’re not going to cater to them unless there is a law involved.  Personally, I can’t think of much that less engaging.  Some things make sense, like if we’re transferring an employee, it should not be that different across the world.  Especially if transfers are across country borders, we really do want some consistency.  But when we get to things like how managers work with employee performance or the allocation of spot bonuses, there will often be some local flair that could be important.

What I’ve found is that the corporate HR mandate is just as dysfunctional as the mayhem of no standardization.  This is because the corporate mandate does not solution for local needs in any way, or even admit that local needs might be different.  It’s a totally selfish view by corporate HR organizations that the need of central authority, consistency, governance and data override everything else.  If we treated our personal relationships this way, we’d have no friends.  Luckily, we seem to have some sons socially in our personal lives.  Not so much in business though.

Here’s my solution.  At the end of the day, it’s about the business.  We need to let the in-country businesses decide that they can standardize and want to standardize.  This actually means de-standardizing for them.  In some cases, it’s as simple as providing them with the localizations they need (and that we promised them for compliance reasons, but for some reason we never came through on that promise).  In other cases, it’s giving in on the one extra level of approvals they want for the salary increase process.  In simple terms though, you almost never get what you want by mandate, you get it by partnership.

These days, the new HR systems all pretty much come with packaged localizations, so it’s not like the old days when you had to purchase the country pack and install the thing.  I’ll admit I’m not a fan of massive process customizations for every country – this becomes impossible to manage.  I’m really not a fan of anything other than the minor token tweak.  What we’ve found over time however, is giving in on one or two battles that are genuinely important to the local business will leave you from ten other battles that could have happened.  At the end of the day, it’s about finding that middle ground that gets you the desired results for both corporate HR and the local business at the same time.