On my recent Taiwan trip with my family, one of my uncles tagged along for much of the tour.  I really like this uncle as he is often quite interesting to talk to, and is an extremely smart guy.  He’s been retired for a while from his last job as the COE of a major electronics manufacturer, and now sits on the boards of several companies.  To say he’s smart is a but lame actually.  Chances are that the touchscreen you use on your phone or tablet were created by him – literally he is the patent holder.  So as usual when I see him, I’d try to engage him in any number of conversations from Taiwanese politics, the economy, history, the future of personal devices, etc.  Ultimately it occurred to me that these conversations seemed to be extremely short lived.  The extension of the conversations were quite long however, but always seemed to end up being about LCD touch panel displays.  At some point, I finally realized that it was all he either wanted to talk about, or could talk about.

Imagine this: you ask me a question about benefit plan strategy, and all I can talk about is benefit enrollment technology. (I do have my CEBS by the way, even though I never talk benefits).  Or if what you really want to know is best practices around transforming HR business partners into internal management consultants and I give you the pitch about how manager self service will free up time for you to work on that project.  It’s all good and sort of related, but really it’s not.  The problem is larger than random bloggers who have a one track mind though.  It’s not even a problem with HR technologists who do tend to be a bit “focused.”

I’ve spent years doing strategy projects from comp, HRIT, and service delivery organizations and they pretty much all have one guiding principle in common: the need to bring better value to the business.  We’re excellent at thinking about it, but we’re not so good at implementing it.  When we go to the business leaders we’ve promised ourselves to serve and communicate with better, inevitably, we fall back to the same conversations, “Here’s how we are restructuring HR to provide better service to you, our customer.”  It’s as if we think they care about our Talent Management project, or that we will be implementing new job codes.  These are just headache projects to them that mean more work they will need to bear in the short term.  At the end of the day, we’re trying to have the right conversations, but we’re are approaching them in the wrong way.  The end result is we just talk about the stuff we know, instead of the stuff they care about.

Here are some tips:

• Approach every leader conversation not as an update, but as a change management conversation.  If you do this, you are less likely to talk about the details and dynamics of the project, and much more likely to talk about why the project is important for the business and how the decisions you will be making right now will positively impact the leader.  You’ll also be better positioned to ask the leader to make decisions if they understand the context of how it fits into her business.
• Bring your guiding principles and strategy documents to every meeting.  Unless you meet with the leader every week, it won’t get redundant to spend 3 minutes at the start of each meeting revalidating the strategy and guiding principles.  It might be the best time you spend, drilling your leader with your core outcomes.  Without it, you risk a disconnect at the end of the project.  With it, you have a leader who will actively sponsor you if she continues to stay on board, and you’ll know this if you stay in front of it.
• End every meeting by making your leader agree that they get it and you are on track.  If they don’t get it or think you are off track, make them verbalize this and why they think so.  Most leaders who verbally tell you good news consistently and repeatedly either believe it to be true, or will convince themselves out of sheer repetition over time. (that’s not cynical, it’s psychology)
• Leave the project plan in at your desk.  Leaders only care about budget and timeframes if you’re totally off track and there is business impact.  Otherwise, just bring up the decisions that will be made in the context of pros and cons.

It’s totally human nature to talk about what we know best, and that is what we do every day.  But we risk sounding like a broken record that nobody was interested in in the first place.  What business leaders want to hear about is not our stuff in HR, it’s their stuff.  So long as we can figure out how to talk about their stuff, we’ll be in good shape.  I’m not so sure most of us are in good shape right now.

There was a long time ago I could pretty much build my bike from scratch.  Yeah, I could assemble everything, that’s easy.  Putting on gears, lacing up spokes onto wheels, getting the brakes on.  I even used to pick out the individual ball bearings that went into my bikes.  Then came a day when the ball bearings got sealed into cartridges making them last longer, roll smoother and easier to maintain.  In a couple years, hydraulic brakes for road bicycles will be here.  The industry has gone past my ability to build my bikes from scratch.  I can still do most of it, but for the highly technical pieces, I rely on an expert mechanic.

A few months ago, I had a conversation with one of my clients about whether they should “buy it or build it.”  Really?  I honestly didn’t know those conversations even happened anymore.  I really thought all the conversations these days were about should we use SaaS or stay on premise.  I was reminded about this as I read the 2012 HR Technology Survey from Cedar Crestone.  One of the charts noted the differences between HR, IT and executive perceptions and challenges to move to SaaS.  Number 3 for HR and Executives?  Security and Data Privacy concerns.  Of course that was number 1 for IT.

I remember when I used to work for ADP a number of years back.  This is old school, but their tax service center was in San Dimas, California… quite at risk of a major earthquake.  It was in California for a number of reasons – primarily I assume because it gave them an extra 3 hours to file taxes in the U.S.  But while ADP’s state of the art tax facility was at major risk of earthquake damage, their backup facility was somewhere on the other side of the San Andreas fault in Arizona.  I remember talk about power lines coming in from all 4 external walls, just in case some guy with a backhoe ploughed through power lines on 3 sides by accident.

I also love conversations about data security.  Let me be blunt: unless you are Citi, Amazon.com, or Walmart, you probably don’t have an entire organization dedicated to data security and the upkeep of your SAS-## (whatever it is these days).  I’m sure you can do security well, but the chances you can do it better than the organization that does it as their core business, stop worrying about it.  Back to ADP for a moment – I remember always having a personal chuckle moment when a client or prospect said to us that they had their own tax accountants, and felt better about that than using ADP.  Guys, let’s be blunt again.  ADP has probably hundreds of tax accountants, and they are probably better than yours.

Just like taxes are not your core business, you probably don’t host servers as your core business either.  SaaS is here.  Get over it IT.

Perhaps it was because I’m Chinese American and my Chinese parents were rather crazed about education.  I did graduate high school with a 4.2 GPA and considered myself an academic failure (still do in fact).  My parents used to threaten us that our grades and other bad things we did would go on our permanent records.  I’m sure some of the bad grades I got (B’s?) are stored somewhere, but the permanence of them is questionable.  If I tried hard enough, I could probably find a transcript, but who really cares?  The permanent record is only meaningful so long as anyone cares to look.

This changes once you get into the workforce.  You get a bad performance review and it’s going to follow you around in that company for a very long time.  One wrong comment in a meeting with the CIO and you are not living that puppy down for years.  But one can always move on, and most things don’t truly last forever, especially if you switch divisions or companies.  Pretty much, when someone calls your old company for a reference, there is about 10% chance that job and last date worked are the only tidbits of information anyone will get.  There are things that seem to last longer now…

Ok, admit it, sometime this year, you have Googled yourself to find out if your name is on the first page of hits.  I’m happy to admit it.  I probably search myself once a quarter, but it’s not some narcissistic thinking in the back of my mind that is driving me to do it.  I could care less that on a random friend’s web browser I’m 8 of the top 10 hits.  (yeah, don’t search for yourself on your own PC – Google and others have figured this out and move hits about yourself up apparently).  What I really care about is my reputation.  My Facebook, Linkedin, systematicHR, published articles are all out there.  I’ve had conversations and arguments on the web, all recorded on some server I have no control over.

That picture of me on Yammer pretending to be Vanna White at some client change management thing (there was a whole spin wheel for prizes and everything).  I’m horrified, but it is out there forever.  (Damn you Erin!!!)  I might do silly things that I regret later, but I manage myself pretty well that I don’t do stupid things.  Somewhere along the line, a recruiter will undoubtedly look at a candidate profile of me on Taleo or Brassring, or whatever, and see all the web tidbits that link back to me.  They owe it to their companies to get a complete picture of who I am and how I’ll fit into the organization.  I owe it to myself to make sure that it’s a realistic picture, and not one tainted by one or two events that will stain the rest of the image.  If the worst thing anyone ever finds is that I helped with some change management, I can live with that.

Today I was going through airport security with my wife.  I got randomly selected for a screening, which consisted of wiping my hands with a cottonish fabric and sending it through the scanner that detects explosives or something like that.  After the screening, I commented to my wife, “so don’t all the terrorists know to not go to the gun range or handle their explosives within 24 hours of going to the airport?  It seems to me that this particular screen is really not a deterrent.  Any half intelligent terrorist worth their salt has got to have investigated TSA, right? ¹

I’ve been trying to figure this out for ages.  You see, the problem is that even if you have stricter limits on access to fields and tables in your security setup, even if you limit the number of users to sensitive information, you should not assume that your data is any more secure from unauthorized sources.  All you have done is make it harder to access.  Now, I’m not saying that making it harder to access is not a worthwhile exercise.  It is.  But let’s be honest with ourselves.  Harder was not the goal.  Impossible was.

Pretty much every reporting engine in the world allows you or the user to somehow download the data.  Before we lay blame on the vendors, let’s realize that it’s our own fault – we placed it as a requirement in every single RFP, or we “ooh’d” and “aah’d” when they demo’d how easy it was to download to MS Excel.  Either way, we lose all control over data security once data is downloaded by the user.  Privacy controls are voided, confidentiality issues arise, and we have no idea where the data ends up.  Not that this is all our fault either.  People who have security access to compensation data for example should know better than to email that stuff around.

There are a couple of nice solutions though, but I’m not sure how perfect anything is since at some point most of our organizations need to have data stored or downloaded.  We could of course disable downloading, and every manager, finance person and HR practitioner would just have to pull up a dashboard and view the data in real time.  Right…  At the same time, I’ve been advocating that all HR decisions are based in facts and data, and I can envision a world where meetings get really dull when we gather executives around the table but were not able to prepare decks full of analytics beforehand.

Here are a few things you can do to improve your reporting data security:

• Make sure managers are certified and trained regarding their data responsibilities when they become managers and every year.
• Review your security access periodically to make sure sensitive data is being accessed by the right roles – some roles may no longer need the permissions over time.
• Build a prominent warning at the top of reports when data is loaded to ensure that dissemination of sensitive data is a breach of security.
• Scrub your reports frequently – you may find old reports that are run with sensitive data that is not necessary based on the purpose of the report.

This is just one of those problems I keep grappling with.  We keep giving managers and non-HR functions access to more data – I do believe the business requires it.  We want everyone to be able to make decisions in real time, but we don’t trust our partners fully either.  I’m also completely uncomfortable giving up and going with the idea that some data is just going to slip through or saying that it’s just a change management problem.  Anyone have any thoughts about what they have done?  Please ping me.

1. if I end up on some FBI watch list for this post, I’ll be both highly amused and highly irritated at the same time [back]

I was riding my bike around Marin (north of San Francisco) this fall, it was a bit cloudy, grey and not as bright as usual.  Just the week before, I had purchased a new pair of lenses for my sunglasses, just for this occasion, and I was absolutely stunned at the difference it made to my ride.  I felt like I was seeing the road and the vistas for the first time.  Indeed, it was simply the first time I was seeing the views with a Yellow #20 lens.  The reality is that I’d done this exact ride dozens of times before.  I commented my amazement to my riding buddies, how different everything was, brighter, more cheerful, and happy.  But alas, it was just the Yellow #20 versus my usual middle grey.

The current world seems to be in love with the infographic.  Hell, I’m in love with the infographic.  They are pretty, colorful, easy to understand, present only the key pieces of information that you need.  In 45 seconds, every one of us can be conversant in a topic with a very defined point of view.  Well, actually, this is exactly the problem.  You see, while the infographic is a very valuable tool, we should all realize that it’s there as a precision marketing tool.  It is there just to provide a point of view, not a complete conversation.  Here are a couple of things you can do to combat “infographic conventional wisdom.”

• Take infographics with a grain of salt – statistics are useful, but remember that there is a whole book called “how to lie with statistics.”
• Question everything – we don’t always look at the source, nor do we ponder the alternative points of view when looking at these things.
• Evaluate the publisher – if the infographic comes from a vendor, just remember it’s a marketing tool.
• Rely on research – infographics will continue to be a good source for quick summaries, but research with full commentaries still outvalue the quick infographic by far.

So why am I writing this in an HR blog?  As buyers of HR technology and services, if we are not already flooded with infographics, we will be quite soon.  We love these things for good reason – they are so easy to use, and marketers know it.  Hell, I’ve been known to produce an infographic when I’m presenting a business case to a steering committee.  The problem is it’s too easy to take them without full context and conversation.  90% of the time they are a single point of view only, and an alternative vendor may have statistics proving why their own software is better in exactly the opposite direction.

This great infographic from http://visual.ly/effectiveness-infographics.

I’ll admit it. I fly United. I also know that everyone hates them, but I actually don’t. In fact, I’d fly United over any other carrier in the US (which does happen quite often). Ok, so sometimes extreme status helps out, but they do treat their upper tiers of status holders rather well. In the latest round of airline mergers, I was nonetheless please to hear that it was not really a merger of equals. In fact, what happened is that at the end of the day, Continental Airlines bought market share and brand, the United leadership team was generally disbanded, and the continental leadership team brought in to transform what is generally considered a high cost United model. No matter what, I have been treated well at United, but not everyone is. In fact, unless you are a 100k miles flyer and up, your experience on UAL probably sucked. For me, I knew exactly what I was getting when I got on a plane or called my excessive help line. But for the masses, the experience was poor. ¹

As I extended my travels outside the US, I also had a similar experience on United. I knew I could count on upgrades, tell free exclusive help lines no matter where I was in the world. Again, for the masses, this didn’t work out to the same experience. Instead, if you really wanted a good experience, you decided to fly regional carriers. Everyone that is not a frequent business traveller seems to love Southwest, Jet Blue, and Virgin Atlantic, and if you go overseas, god forbid you get stuck in some foreign land using a large US based carrier.

Part of what I see in HR is that HR service delivery is totally variable depending on who you are and where you sit.  OK, I get it that on an airplane, if I pay for a business class seat, I should get a nicer seat and better food.  I get that if I’m a seriously frequent flyer, I’m going to get on the plane first.  But shouldn’t everyone who calls the help desk get the exact same experience?  Is it ever acceptable that someone sits on the phone for 15 minutes to wait for a real person?  Back to this idea of variability, there’s a significant problem that how good your service is can depend on what country you are in.  It’s not for skills, but for US based countries, the training is just often better and more attentive.  If you don’t sit in the HQ country or have a large population, then your employees are relegated to second class status where service is concerned.  Often, we have plenty of people from HR Service Centers and HR Coordinators and HR Business Partners in our major population centers.  Countries with 20 people get a website and a phone number of someone who is not supposed to talk to them if they are not a director and up.

If I think about who our callers are, let’s face the facts here as well.  If a VP calls your HR center, you are going to get her paycheck fixed within a matter of hours.  Some guy from the manufacturing line?  Right, manual check will be cut, Fedex’d out and you’ll have a new check in 4 days.  We all know the probabilities – the VP does not really need the money, but the line guy might be living paycheck to paycheck.  Our priorities are to address those with status first though.

Here are a few things you can do to fix the problems:

1. Look into your service delivery infrastructure and find out if all your populations have acceptable if not equal access to services
2. Do a survey in your non-major populations to see if you are effective or not
3. Run a report on HR staff training to see if your non HQ populations receive the same level of attention
4. Look at call volumes per country, and don’t stop there – understand the differences in volumes and don’t assume lower is better

Don’t get me wrong – I love the fact that someone pretty much always picks up the phone when I call.  I love that I only have to listen to 20 seconds of the automated guy, and that they keep upgrading me.  I totally get they do this so they can keep my money when I fly.  But I’m also quite saddened to hear when others have very poor experiences.  If the VP with the paycheck knew what the experience of the line person was, she’d most likely tell you to give everyone equal treatment.

Tweet 1: Airline miles is not a model for #HR. Services to all, not just the loudest and neediest. http://bit.ly/12SA5uL

Tweet 2: Standardizing user experience globally in #HR Service Delivery http://bit.ly/12SA5uL

Tweet 3: Your low population countries matter for HR service delivery too. http://bit.ly/12SA5uL

1. I write this sitting in International First  – no doubt in my mind that my experience is vastly different than it is downstairs. [back]

I have an argument with my wife every few years.  I tend to like cars with a bit more horsepower.  I mean, that 1 time a year when there is a really stupid driver about to crash into you, a few extra horses comes in handy when you really need to speed away.  The problem is that 99.99% of the time, that extra horsepower is a luxury you really don’t need.  You’d get from point A to point B just as safely, and probably just as fast.  Sometimes though, that engine really does matter.  (My wife wins 90% of arguments by the way)

Everyone in HRIT is talking about big data these days.  Unless I completely don’t get it, I thought this is what we’ve been working towards for years.  I mean, having ALL of our talent data, core HR, learning, recruiting, payroll, benefits, compensation, safety, etc data all in the same place and running analytics against it all was always part of the data warehouse plan.  I mean come on, what else is ETL for if not to grab data from all over the place, aggregate it into the ODS, and then figure out how to make sense of it all?  We’ve built a nice engine that caters to our needs 99.99% of the time.

I’m going to propose something:  Big data does not matter to HR.  It’s just a new naming of something that does matter.  Business intelligence and truly focused analytics is what makes us focus our actions in the right places.  BI, Big Data, I don’t care what we call it.  Just do it.  Either way, HR does not have a big data need at this point.  I’d propose that we can use Big Data technology to speed up our analytics outcomes, but that’s about all we need for the next few years.

In my simplified definition of Big Data, it comes down to two major attributes: the use of external data sources, and the lack of need to normalize data across sources.  If we look at it from this point of view, the reality would state that almost no HR department on the face of the earth is ready to take HR data and compare it with government census data, or employment data.  Let’s get really creative and take local population health statistics combined with local census to get some really interesting indicators on our own employee population health.  Right, we’re just not there yet.

Let me reverse the thinking for a moment though.  What about the other 0.01% of the time that our traditional BI tools just won’t help us out?  Going back to benefits examples, how many global organizations can really directly compare benefit costs across the entire world?  How many of those same global organizations have a great handle on every payroll code?  Much of the problem is that the data is often outsourced, and definitely not standardized.  Collecting the information is problematic in the first place, but next to impossible to standardize annual changes in the second. The beauty of Big Data is that in these cases, you’d actually be able to gather all of that data and not worry about how to translate it all into equal meanings.  The data might aggregate in a more “directional” way than you’d like, but you’d probably still have an acceptable view of what global benefits or payroll is doing.  It seems to me that this puts us quite a bit further ahead of where we are now.

Listen, I know that HR has some place in Big Data at some point in the future, but the reality is that the current use cases for Big Data are so few and far between, and that we have so many other data projects to work on that we should continue investing in the current report and analytics projects.  Big Data will come back our way in a few years.

As I said, my wife usually wins the arguments.  We end up buying a car that has 175 horses under the hood, and I end up wishing we had more once a year.  But inevitably, automakers seem to up the game every few model years and come 5 years down the road, that same car model how has 195 horses.  If I just wait long enough, those extra horses in the engine just become standard.

So I had to upgrade my cell phone contract.  I used to be on this thing where I had a bucket of minutes and text messages to use, and now I’m on exactly the opposite.  I have unlimited phone and text and about 10 GB of data I can use every month.  It really points to a shift in how we as users of wireless devices are working.  Less and less of our days are spent actually talking to each other, and more of our days are spent collaborating through various mechanisms that involve data.  I will admit to spending an exceptional amount of time browsing news on my phone, looking through facebook updates to keep tabs on people, and using my phone for work emails.  Nobody calls me anymore, and if they do, I get my voicemails through data (I read my VM, have not listened to one in years).

One of the big questions these days is about SaaS and Cloud.  Should we do it?  Should we stay on PeopleSoft or SAP HCM?

The answer for SaaS is a definitive Yes.

At some point, be it this year, next or in 5 years, you are going to move to the cloud.  I’m not an opinion about your current on-premise strategy, and I’m not making a judgment of you if you disagree.  I’m simply stating a fact.  Let’s tale a look at the facts:

• ADP: The actual development of the Enterprise HRMS client server product is probably severely limited.  I don’t even know if they sell it anymore.  We do know that ADP Vantage is what they are selling and developing.
• Oracle / PeopleSoft:  We’ve all heard about applications unlimited, but for those who thing that in 2020 we’ll still be going to a PeopleSoft Track at OpenWorld, I think you really have to evaluate your reality.  The developers are all on Fusion.  Let’s say you are right and there is still a PeopleSoft product in 2020.  How long do you think it will have been since your last major product enhancement?
• SAP: Well, there’s HAHA, and there’s SuccessFactors.  Either way, SAP kind of knows that they are pouring development resources into the cloud.  Same conclusion as with PeopleSoft – it will be around for a while, but that’s not the whole reality.
• Workday:  It’s already in the cloud from the start – no discussion here.
• Talent Management: It does not really matter if you bought Taleo, SuccessFactors, Cornerstone, PeopleFluent, (I’m going to get in trouble for leaving out 50 companies), you bought into the cloud long ago for TM.

I’m not really trying to change your mind on the cloud here.  It really does not matter.  If you are an HR technology buyer, you simply don’t have a choice.  The vendors and the industry are in the midst of choosing for you.  In just a few short years, all of your premise based HR technologies are going to cease or significantly slow their development efforts and fully shift to the cloud.  If you want to be on a product that will be continuously developed, that is where it will be.

Just in the same way I really don’t have a choice to stay on my old cell phone plan, the world is moving on when it comes to HR applications.  It’s time to move with it.

As per my last post,at the end of 2012, I was doing a family vacation in Taiwan.  Being with family for 2 weeks is quite an expose into mannerisms that each of us have.  I was particularly intrigued by my brother’s questioning of my mother.  My brother would constantly ask my mother things like “why are we going to [city_name]?” instead of “what are we planning to do when we get there?” and “how much time will I need to prepare the kids to sit in the car?”  Luckily, we had my mother there fueling the ridiculous line of questioning.  90% of the time, her answers had nothing to do with the questions he was asking.

• “Why are we going to [city_name]?” “Oh, let me tell you, when I was growing up, I used to play with my cousins there.”
• “Mom, why are we going to [city_name]?” “Oh, did you see that beautiful view over there?”
• “Mom, can you please just tell me why were are going to [city_name]?” “Don’t worry, you will love it.  It’s beautiful there.”

There are two items I’d like to diagnose.  First, are we actually listening to the question?  Second, did we understand the question?

The first is fascinating to me because I’m not sure we actually are listening.  Many of our reporting organizations are pure intake, create, output engines.  We grab the data that is asked for, create the report and send it out hoping we got it right.  Basically, we are spec takers.  Second question follows right after the first.  Much of the time, we don’t know why report requesters want the data at all.  We could be asking ourselves why they want to know, and if the data we are providing helps them solve a problem.  If we are really cool, we could be asking if they are even trying to solve the right problem or not.

Here are a few questions you should explore when data requests come your way:

• How are you going to use the data?
• What is the core problem you are trying to solve for?
• Are there other data elements or analysis that we have that can help further?
• Are there other correlated problems that we should try to answer at the same time?

For all intents and purposes, this post is the exact corollary of the prior on how to ask the right questions.  The problem with being a non-strategic reporting organization is that if the wrong questions get asked, the output is doomed to be the wrong information as well.  But even works, sometimes the wrong question gets asked and we still give the requestor the wrong data back.  All this does is create turn – another report request, or bad data going to managers (who in turn trust HR a little less the next time around).

In the case of my brother, he asked the wrong question in the first place.  It would have been much more advantageous had he explained why it was important for him to prepare the children for the outing, have the right clothes, have enough food along, and maybe get them extra sleep.  I’ll never know if my mother would have given him the right information in return, “yes it usually rains on that side of the island, it’s 40 minutes away, and we will be in a friend’s house so they can’t get too wild.”  But the crafting if the right answer is a tight collaboration of both sides creating understanding of what the objectives are.

At the end of 2012, I was doing a family vacation in Taiwan.  When I say family vacation, I mean not just my wife and me, but my brother’s family along with my parents, visiting all of the senior members of the family (an important thing in Asian cultures).  There is an incredible exposure of habits and an interesting (but sometimes undesirable) analysis of where my brother and I got those habits from.  I was particularly intrigued by my brother’s questioning of my mother.  Let’s just say that getting 2 grown sons, their spouses, and our parents together creates a certain amount of strife.

Let’s also just say that my brothers’ hauling around of two young children may have added to the stress – he really needed to understand the daily schedules and what was going to happen when.  Back to the questions: my brother would constantly ask my mother things like “why are we going to [city_name]?” instead of “what are we planning to do when we get there?” and “how much time will I need to prepare the kids to sit in the car?”  (more on my mom’s response in the next post)

The problem in the questions was not the question itself, but in the thought process.  All too often, we ask questions about what we think we are supposed to know.  We want to know about turnover, headcount, spending per employee.  This is information that is useful, but does not actually inform us about what our next actions are.  Being “strategic” to me means that we have a plan, and we are actively managing our programs towards that plan.  If we’re using data that just skims the surface of information, we have no ability to adjust direction and keep going in the right direction.

I’ve often heard storied about HR executives who go into the CEO office for a meeting to present data, and all they get are questions back that cannot be answered.  Some HR teams go into those meetings with huge binders (sometimes binders that I’ve sent with them), and those teams come out still not having answered the questions.  The problem is not with the data.  The problem is that the team has not figured out what the actionable metric is, and what the possible actions are.  No CEO cares about the data – they want action that ties back to what the strategic objective is.  In other words, why do they care?

Here are a couple things you can do to craft better questions:

• Always think about the root of the question:  HR tends to analyze at the surface more than some other functions.  We have finance doing complex correlations and marketing doing audience analysis.  We’re reporting headcount and turnover to executives.  What kind of crap is that?
• Be a child:  Ask why/what/how up to 3 times.  Why 1: “Why are we going to [city_name]?”  Why 2: “Why do I want to know what we are going to do there?” What 3: “What do the kids need to be prepared with?”
• Take action:  If you ask a question that can be answered in such a way that you can’t take action, you asked the wrong question.
• Create an intake form that customers can request through: make sure you ask the right questions here to ensure they think through the process and understand what they need.

Many of the organizations I consult with have some pretty robust analytics organizations.  When I dig under the covers, they are reacting to create ad hoc reports for managers and HR business partners.  Once a quarter they scramble to create a CEO report card to depict the state of HR programs.  This state is sad to me.  We should be doing deeper analysis and diagnosis on a daily basis.  If we asked the HRBP’s what/why that wanted data for, we’d probably find there is a huge amour of quality analysis being performed in silos that could be leveraged organizationally.