Human Resource Experience

Writing Job Specifiactions (Gary Dessler)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 16 Jul 2019 02:00:00 +0000

The job specification takes the job description and answers the question, “What human traits and experience are required to do this job effectively?” It shows the hiring criteria for the job, in terms of what kind of person to recruit and for what qualities you should test that person. It may be one section of the job description, or a separate document. Often the

employer makes it part of the job description.

Specifications for Trained versus Untrained Personnel

Writing job specifications for trained employees is straightforward. Here your job specifications might focus mostly on traits like length of previous service, quality of relevant training, and previous job performance. The problems are more complex when you’re filling jobs with untrained people (with the intention of training them on the job). Here you must specify qualities such as physical traits, personality, interests, or sensory skills that imply some potential for performing or for being trained to do the job.

For example, suppose the job requires detailed manipulation in a circuit board assembly line. Here you might want to ensure that the person scores high on a test of finger dexterity. Employers identify such human requirements either through a subjective, judgmental approach or through statistical analysis (or both). Let’s examine both approaches.

Specifications Based on Judgment

Most job specifications come from the educated guesses of people like supervisors and human resource managers. The basic procedure here is to ask, “What does it take in terms of education, intelligence, training, and the like to do this job well?”

There are several ways to get these “educated guesses.” You could review the job’s duties, and deduce from those what human traits and skills the job requires. You can also choose them from the competencies listed in Web-based job descriptions like those at www .jobdescription.com. (For example, a typical job description there lists competencies like “Generates creative solutions” and “Manages difficult or emotional customer situations.”) O*NET online is another source. Job listings there include lists of required education and other experience and skills.

USE COMMON SENSE In any case, use common sense when compiling your list. Don’t ignore the behaviors that may apply to almost any job but that might not normally surface through a job analysis.

Industriousness is an example. Who wants an employee who doesn’t work hard? One researcher collected supervisor ratings and other information from 18,000 employees in 42 different hourly entry-level jobs in predominantly retail settings. Regardless of the job, here are the work behaviors (with examples) that he found to be important to all jobs:

Job Specifications Based on Statistical Analysis

Basing job specifications on statistical analysis is the more legally defensible approach, but it’s also more difficult. The aim here is to determine statistically the relationship between (1) some predictor (human trait, such as height, intelligence, or finger dexterity), and (2) some indicator or criterion of job effectiveness, such as performance as rated by the supervisor.

The procedure has five steps:

(1) analyze the job and decide how to measure job performance;

(2) select personal traits like finger dexterity that you believe should predict successful performance;

(3) test candidates for these traits;

(4) measure these candidates’ subsequent job performance; and

(5) statistically analyze the relationship between the human trait (finger dexterity) and job performance. Your objective is to determine whether the former predicts the latter.

This method is more defensible than the judgmental approach. For example, hiring standards that discriminate based on sex, race, religion, national origin, or age may have to be shown to predict job performance. Ideally, you do this with a statistical validation study, as in the five-step approach outlined above. But in practice, most employers probably rely more on judgmental approaches.

Using Task Statements

Although employers traditionally use job descriptions and job specifications to summarize what their jobs entail, task statements are increasingly popular. Each of a job’s task statements shows what the worker does on one particular job task, how the worker does it, the knowledge, skills, and aptitudes required to do it, and the purpose of the task.

The first step is to write a task statement for each of the job’s tasks. Thus, one task for a drycleaning store counter person might be “taking in new orders”. The task statement here might say, “accepts an order of clothes from a customer and places it into a laundry bag and provides the customer with a receipt, in order to ensure that the customer’s clothes items are together and identifiable and that the store and customer have an accurate record of the transaction.” (In contrast, the traditional job duty might say, “accepts orders of clothes from customers and places them in laundry bags; gives customers receipts).

For each task, also identify the knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics (KSAOs) needed to do each task. For the sample task above, the counter person should know how to operate the computerized cash register, be skilled at identifying fabrics so proper prices can be charged, and have the ability (for instance, cognitive ability or physical ability) to perform arithmetic computations and lift heavy laundry bags. Most jobs also require certain “other” human characteristics. For example, “conscientiousness” might be important for this and most other jobs.

Second, the job analyst takes the resulting 12 or 15 task statements (including their KSAOs)

for the job’s say, 12-15 specific tasks, and groups them into four or five main job duties. Thus, the four main counter person job duties might include accepts and returns customer’s clothes, handles the cash register, fills in for the cleaner/spotter when he or she is absent, and supervises the tailor and assistant counter person.

Finally, the job analyst compiles all this information in a “job requirements matrix” for this job. This matrix lists the following information in 5 columns: each of the four or five main job duties in column 1; all the task statements associated with each main job duty in column 2; the relative importance of each main job duty, and the time spent on each main job duty in columns 3 and 4; and the knowledge, skills, ability, and other characteristics or competencies related to each main job duty in column 5.

Such a job requirements matrix provides a more comprehensive picture of what the worker

does and how and why he or she does it than does a conventional job description. For instance, it clarifies each task’s purpose. And, including the required knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics for each duty provides critical information for making selection, training, and appraisal decisions. Modeling and profiling, to which we turn next, is another way to compile information on the knowledge, skills, ability, and other characteristics a job requires of its incumbents.

Source : Gary Dessler. Fundamental of Human Resource Management. Third Edition. Pearson. 2014

Writing Job Descriptions (Gary Dessler)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 09 Jul 2019 02:00:00 +0000

The most important product of job analysis is the job description. A job description is a written statement of what the worker actually does, how he or she does it, and what the job’s working conditions are. You use this information to write a job specification; this lists the knowledge, abilities, and skills required to perform the job satisfactorily.

There is no standard format for writing a job description. However, most descriptions contain sections that cover the following:

Job identification
Job summary
Responsibilities and duties
Authority of incumbent
Standards of performance
Working conditions
Job specification

Job Identification

The job identification section contains several types of information.

The job title specifies the name of the job, such as telesales representative, or inventory control clerk. The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) status section identifies the job as exempt or non exempt. (Under the FLSA, certain positions, primarily administrative and professional, are exempt from the act’s overtime and minimum wage provisions.) Date is the date the job description was approved.

There may also be a space to indicate who approved the description and perhaps a space showing the location of the job in terms of its facility/division and department. This section might also include the immediate supervisor’s title and information regarding salary and/or pay scale. There might also be space for the grade/level of the job, if there is such a category. For example, a firm may classify programmers as programmer II, programmer III, and so on.

Job Summary

The job summary should summarize the essence of the job, and include only its major functions or activities. For example, the telesales rep “is responsible for selling college textbooks. . . .” For the job of mailroom supervisor, “the mailroom supervisor receives, sorts, and delivers all incoming mail properly, and he or she handles all outgoing mail including the accurate and timely posting of such mail.”

While it’s common to do so, include general statements like “performs other assignments as required” with care. Some experts state unequivocally that “one item frequently found that should never be included in a job description is a ‘cop-out clause’ like ‘other duties, as assigned,’” since this leaves open the nature of the job. Finally, make it clear in the summary that the employer expects the employee to carry out his or her duties efficiently, attentively, and conscientiously.

Relationships

There may be a “relationships” statement that shows the jobholder’s relationships with others inside and outside the organization. For a human resource manager, such a statement might look like this:

Reports to: Vice president of employee relations.
Supervises: Human resource clerk, test administrator, labor relations director, and one secretary.
Works with: All department managers and executive management.
Outside the company: Employment agencies, executive recruiting firms, union representatives, state and federal employment offices, and various vendors.

Responsibilities and Duties

This is the heart of the job description. It should present a list of the job’s significant responsibilities and duties. For example, list each of the job’s major duties separately, and describe it in a few sentences. For instance, the job’s duties include “achieve quantitative sales goal . . .” and “determine sales priorities. . . .”

Typical duties for other jobs might include making accurate postings to accounts payable, maintaining favorable purchase price variances, and repairing production-line tools and equipment.

This section may also define the limits of the jobholder’s authority. For example, the jobholder might have authority to approve purchase requests up to $5,000, grant time off or leaves of absence, discipline department personnel, recommend salary increases, and interview and hire new employees. How does one determine what the job’s duties are and should be? The answer first is, from the job analysis; this should reveal what the employees on each job are doing now. Then (second), to determine what other duties this job might be expected to include, the manager can review various sources of standardized job description information. For example, the Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) (www.bls.gov/soc/socguide.htm) classifies all workers into one of 23 major groups of jobs, such as “Management Occupations” and “Healthcare Occupations.” These, in turn, contain 96 minor groups of jobs, which, in turn, include 821 detailed occupations, such as the mar

keting manager description.

The employer can use standard job descriptions like these to identify a job’s duties and responsibilities, such as “Determine the demand for products.” (Theaccompanying Managing the New Workforce feature addresses some legal aspects.) The employer

may also use other popular sources of job description information, such as www.jobdescription.com . O*NET online is another option for finding job duties. We’ll turn to this in a moment

Standards of Performance and Working Conditions

A standards of performance section lists the standards the company expects the employee to

achieve for each of the job description’s main duties and responsibilities. Setting standards isnever easy. However, just telling subordinates to “do your best” usually does not provide enough guidance. One straightforward way to set standards is to finish the statement, “I will be completely satisfied with your work when. . . .” This sentence, if completed for each listed duty, should result in a usable set of performance standards. Here is an example:

Duty: Accurately Posting Accounts Payable

Post all invoices received within the same working day.
Route all invoices to proper department managers for approval no later than the day following receipt.
Allow an average of no more than three posting errors per month.

The job description may also list the working conditions involved on the job. These might include conditions such as noise level, hazardous conditions, or heat.

Source : Gary Dessler. Fundamental of Human Resource Management. Third Edition. Pearson. 2014

Realigning HR to Deliver Business Results (Bradley W Hall,PHD)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 02 Jul 2019 02:00:00 +0000

Two things will help us implement the new Human Capital Strategy by realigning HR to deliver business results:

(1) splitting the HR administrator, fixer, and strategic partner roles, and

(2) aligning the human capital organization to deliver the four strategic objectives.

Split the HR Administrator, Fixer, and Strategic Partner Roles.

In 1964, Chaney and Owens conducted an academic study that makes a persuasive case that individuals with different personalities tend to migrate to jobs that fit. From a sample of 900, they looked back to high school and found that engineers disliked verbal activities and courses where discussion was involved, were slow in dating and preferred to spend time reading or in problem-solving activities. Those who became sales reps were only average in math and science capabilities, dated earlier, enjoyed meeting new people and had more friends and were leaders in different activities.

Sure, there are some good “sales scientists,” but not many, and trying to make a scientist into a sales rep may result in frustration by both parties. (As the saying goes, “Don’t try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and it frustrates the pig.”) The study provides an important lesson for HR. The all-in-one HR business partner model has not and will not deliver value because it is based on an assumption that people can perform well in very different roles that require very different talents. It is time to admit defeat and completely separate the administrative, fixer, and strategic roles.

A more radical solution is to follow the Innovator’s Dilemma model of creating a stand-alone unit for the discontinuous work of strategic HR. The head of HR administration should report to the corporation’s top operations executive or CFO. This reporting relationship was very common in the days before the promise of strategic HR. It was common because it made sense. If the core capability of administrative HR is operational excellence, then operations is the right place to report. (See Figure 3-5.)

Next, build a fully separate organization reporting to the CEO that provides change leadership and organizational consulting to top leaders. Calling this organization something other than “human resources” might be wise as an HR title brings with it a set of internal customer service expectations that will no longer apply. This new “human capital” organization will comprise a set of full-time consultants who are educated and trained to improve the performance of people and organizations. Human capital business consultants should spend 100 percent of their time identifying opportunities to improve customer and shareholder satisfaction and should be evaluated by their impact to both. Their customer is external, their investment model is ROI-based, and they are business performance advocates.

Align the Human Capital Organization to Deliver the Four Strategic Objectives.

To deliver business results, the human capital organization must align to the Human Capital Strategy. It must build and manage a system for delivering each of the strategic components:

(1) effective executive teams,

(2) leaders who deliver results,

(3) key position excellence, and

(4) workforce productivity.

Align corporate HR professionals to the strategic components, and make this dimension primary. Next, matrix COE members from their current professions to populate the new COE teams. For example, a compensation expert may be assigned to the workforce productivity COE. Each member remains aligned to a profession, and each profession continues to deliver on its value-added current tasks. For example, annual workforce plans would still be created and executed by the workforce management profession.

Members of the new COEs would be accountable for results that matter to customers and shareholders. To deliver the expected business results, each new COE will have several key duties:

Set and execute a strategy to deliver the strategic objective.
Engage the broader organization through personal leadership and influence.
Teach line managers to make effective human capital decisions.
Measure and manage performance at individual and collective levels to understand relationships and progress.

Most of these duties are probably self-evident. The third duty, teaching line managers to make good human capital decisions, may not be as clear. Think of the CFO model. No CFO can make all financial decisions, since maximizing return on financial assets requires scores of managers to make sound daily decisions. Many finance functions have helped managers make better financial decisions through formal training in basic finance. This same kind of training is required for managers to make more effective human capital decisions. Such training must be based on research in the behavioral sciences, particularly in organizational psychology and human learning. Managers should know how great leaders are most effectively developed, how competencies should be used (and not used), the most valid ways of predicting performance in new roles, and how best to motivate employees. The answers to these questions begin with behavioral science research, but they become far more powerful after company data has been captured and analyzed.

Source : Bradley W Hall, PhD. The new human capital strategy : improving the value of your most important investment—year after year.AMACOM. 2008

Aligning the HR Structure (Bradley W Hall,PHD) - Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 25 Jun 2019 02:04:00 +0000

HR Is Structured to Produce Programs and Policies Rather than Business Results

Let’s say, as a general manager, you see a leadership deficit in your business unit. Who in your HR function is accountable for improving leadership performance? The organizational development department is not; it creates competency models and assessment tools. The talent management department is not; it runs the succession planning cycle. The performance management department is responsible for appraisals, the compensation department makes pay decisions, and the training department develops and delivers courses. So which department manager will stand up and say, “My department is accountable for growing leaders”?

Today, the answer is “nobody.”

The reason is that today’s HR is aligned by subprofession (e.g., training, staffing, compensation), the same as it was thirty years ago. Let’s call these subprofessions by their new name, Centers of Excellence (COEs). COEs are factories that produce state-of-the-art HR tools. They are not designed to produce business results and often operate as uncoordinated product development units, as indicated by Figure 3-4, which shows the COEs of one institution.

Many companies refer to both first-level (e.g., organizational development) and second-level (e.g., HR metrics) organizations as COEs. If this was an automobile engine, each COE unit would be producing a different engine part. The problem is that there is no blueprint of what

the completed engine will look like or do. Just as it is unreasonable to build parts to an engine without a blueprint of the finished engine, it is unreasonable to build HR tools and processes without a Human Capital Strategy.

How, then, is COE performance evaluated today? Success is defined by external professional standards. For example, success is defined as world-class leadership development rather than as world-class leaders. Performance ratings depend on program quality and by volume of tools and products produced: a fat training catalogue, annual refreshing of the performance appraisal process, or a rich portfolio of recognition programs. More is better. That is why line managers so often complain about volumes of more “stuff” coming from HR. Good stuff, but to what end?

Today’s COE design is based on the assumption that HR business partners will cobble together tools and programs from across COEs to build customized solutions for their business unit. This further assumes that two conditions exist:

(1) Each COE has designed outputs to a common strategic plan, and

(2) business partners have sufficient cobbling skills.

What actually happens is that HR business partners end up being the equivalent of an auto assembly plant with Mercedes carburetors, Toyota rocker arms, and Chevrolet engine blocks. No amount of cobbling expertise can make up for parts that fundamentally do not fit.

USC Center for Effective Organizations’ study describes two prominent organizational characteristics of today’s HR model: the decentralized generalist and the emergence of COEs. According to the study, COEs are designed to provide decentralized generalists with “sources of expert help.” Has this model worked as intended? It has not. The authors summarize ten-year organizational changes in the HR profession:

"There is a significant decrease to which HR practices vary across business units. This finding suggests that while there may be dedicated HR leaders supporting businesses, their role is not to tailor HR practices to those businesses, but rather to work with centers of excellence and HR services teams to deliver common services to their parts of the organization."

COEs are delivering results exactly opposite of what was intended. Rather than providing parts and advice to enable business partners to craft customized solutions, COEs are increasing the production and use of one-size-fits-all programs. The previously cited statistic that only 9 percent of HR leaders feel that human capital practices are connected to organizational performance is starting to make more sense.

Once again: The problem is the HR model. It’s broken

Source : Bradley W Hall, PhD. The new human capital strategy : improving the value of your most important investment—year after year.AMACOM. 2008

Aligning the HR Structure (Bradley W Hall,PHD) - Part 1

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 18 Jun 2019 02:06:00 +0000

Today’s HR organizational structure is misaligned with a Human Capital Strategy of sustained competitive advantage through people. There are two critical areas of misalignment:

Strategic and administrative work remains tangled.
HR is structured to produce HR products and processes rather than business results.

Strategic and Administrative Work Remains Tangled

Several decades ago, sales and marketing organizations were commonplace. Over the years, marketing was split off into its own organization. Although the purpose of both functions is business development, each requires a different approach and skill set. The same is true with accounting and finance. Accounting is an old profession, and finance recently emerged from accounting with the rise of capital markets. The purpose of both functions is to leverage financial capital, but each uses different methods to accomplish the task. Like sales and marketing and accounting and finance, administrative and strategic HR are both about people, but each requires a different approach and skill set.

Over the past decades, the HR profession has aspired to create fundamentally different outcomes, but it has attempted to do so inside the walls of traditional HR. As the model presented in Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma (Harvard Business School Press, 1997) would predict, it is difficult to create a business that represents a discontinuous change inside an old organization: The old will strangle the new. When an organization needs new capabilities, it may need a new organizational space where those capabilities can be developed. Christensen suggests that a successful approach is to spin off an organization so that the new capabilities can be managed in a very different way than in the mainstream business. This has not happened in HR; the old is strangling the new.

The strategic HR seed was planted and nurtured in the traditional HR function, but it has failed to grow. It is time to press the reset button and start a new. Let’s begin by defining three ways in which HR adds business value:

The HR Administrator: Handles employee records, benefits, compensation, payroll.
The Fixer: Fixes difficult situations, such as labor unions, quarreling executives, legal issues.
The Strategic Partner: Improves customer and shareholder satisfaction.

Each of the three roles is very important. Each role not only requires a different skill set but different talents. Skills can be developed over time, but talents cannot. Let’s examine these roles using the following screens:

Who is the customer? Where must the person focus?
What education/experience is required?
What talents/personality traits are required?

Then ask yourself: “How many people do I know who can be best-in-class in each of the three roles?” Should these roles be structurally separate? Is there a compelling reason to put these roles under the same roof?

The HR Administrator. The theory behind administrative HR is that fairness and consistency improve employee satisfaction, and satisfaction creates performance improvements. Good administrative HR professionals strengthen the perception of fairness by developing and enforcing consistent policies and processes. HR administrators do not, and should not, see themselves as accountable for improvements in external customer satisfaction or revenue growth. Since there is no tangible financial return on the investment for administrative activities, cost reduction is the key financial measure.

Successful HR administrators are service-oriented and processoriented. They are comfortable with the stability and predictability. They are also good with detail, they value fairness and equity, and they enforce company policies. A 2006 Corporate Leadership Council Study found that “compliance expertise” is the HR profession’s most accomplished skill.

Taking on an administrative HR role does not require a specialist degree. Many non-HR members successfully transfer into HR administrative roles and can immediately perform standard duties such as managing the appraisal cycle or helping people with policy or benefit questions. Non-degreed HR professionals can learn HR policy and benefit programs as fast as degreed individuals.

The Fixer. The theory behind the fixer model is that improving employee relations is good for business. As David Newkirk, now CEO of executive education at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, stated:

"Every organization needs an HR person who can get senior managers out of tangled situations. These can include harassment cases, labor issues, etc. After years of pulling thorns out of the boss’s paw, it is difficult to move the individual for not being a strategic contributor. Businesses need both individuals."

He’s right. Every executive needs a good fixer—someone to take care of the daily problems that distract an executive and place him/her in a role that is uncomfortable. Fixers provide advice and support to managers and executives and have strong negotiation skills.

General managers often become deeply committed to their fixer. However, fixers contribute little to the development of sustained competitive advantage. Stamping our fires puts us back where we were in the first place.

The Strategic Partner. The theory behind strategic HR is that a company can win in the marketplace when its people outperform competitors’ people. Strategic HR partners are accountable for driving business results through people and organizations—ensuring that the right people are in place, that jobs and organizations are properly aligned to the strategy, and that the work environment enables high performance. Successful strategic partners love change and hate bureaucracy.

These folks have no desire to be compliance experts; in fact, in many ways, they are the antithesis of the HR administrator. Strategic partners focus externally on customers and shareholders. They see line managers as business partners, not customers. Strategic partners push line managers into unfamiliar territory. They debate, challenge, and argue, and they never accept a manager’s diagnosis of people or organizational issues as “truth.” The investment model for strategic HR is ROI-based.

Edward E. Lawler and Susan A. Mohrman of USC wrote about strategic partnering skills:

"Business-partnering effectiveness requires knowledge and skills in such areas as change management, strategic planning, and organizational design. These are complex judgmental areas where HR professionals have traditionally had little experience. This expertise is both hard to acquire and in short supply. Becoming expert in business partnering demands the acquisition not only of explicit knowledge, but also of tacit knowledge that comes from experience."

Note that explicit knowledge comes from books and classes, while tacit knowledge is experiential.

Notice the differences in each of the three roles (HR administrator, fixer, and strategic partner). Each requires different skills, talents, and daily focus. Putting a single person in charge of all three ensures mediocrity. A 2005 McKinsey Quarterly article reported:

“An effort to accomplish these complementary goals [strategic valueadd and administrative cost reduction] with the same individuals, within the same career structures, and with the same HR leaders is almost bound to fail.”

Yet today’s model commonly deploys a career path from administrative to strategic roles. After a person proves his/her value as a good administrator, the person becomes a candidate for an HR business partner opportunity. Given the differences in roles, one wonders if the best administrators will make the worst strategic business partners. No wonder today’s business partner model has not worked. And neither accountability nor training will help.

Continued to Part 2

Source : Bradley W Hall, PhD. The new human capital strategy : improving the value of your most important investment—year after year.AMACOM. 2008

Today’s Human Resources Function (Bradley W Hall,PHD)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 23 May 2019 06:00:00 +0000

Throughout history, virtually all breakthroughs required replacing a current model with a fundamentally different paradigm. Scientific examples include germ theory and the theory of relativity. Federal Express and Amazon.com are business examples of a paradigm shift, and W. Edwards Deming’s statistical process control is an example of a professional shift. In each case, these new paradigms emerged and completely challenged existing “truths.” The HR profession has yet to go through its paradigm change.

Think of today’s HR model as an engine with four elements:

(1) structure (i.e., who reports to whom, roles, and accountabilities),

(2) systems (i.e., performance measures, business reviews),

(3) shared values (i.e., beliefs, values, culture), and

(4) skills (i.e., talents, knowledge).

The elements all align with one another. The key message in this chapter is that today’s HR model (i.e., the integration of the four elements) continues to produce precisely what it was designed to produce when it was created in the 1960s. HR’s structure is the same, its measurement systems align beautifully to the structure, and the skills and shared values not only align with each other but to the structure and systems as well. When looking across the profession, rather than at any single company, the model fits together very well—the engine works. (See Figure 3-1.)

When the HR model was originally designed more than thirty years ago, it was expected to produce outputs for a personnel function. These included benefits policies, employee records, and payroll, as well as maintaining good labor relations to keep unions at bay. Take a look at Figure 3-2, which shows two prototypical HR organizations separated by thirty years. The first organization is from the 1972 Handbook of Modern Personnel Administration, which was the professional standard for many years. The second comes from a 2003 Corporate Leadership Council study of sixty-two HR organizations across twelve industries.

(Note: The percentages represent the percent of the sixtytwo organizations with that department.)

Organizational titles have changed: Employment is now called staffing, personnel directors have become Chief Human Resources Officers, and personnel administrators became HR generalists and then strategic business partners. Despite these great titles, the daily activities and skills of HR business partners never have changed. HR departments (e.g., training, compensation) are changing their names to HR Centers of Excellence (COEs). Again, though, aside from the fancy title, little has changed.

Over the same thirty-year period, there have been dramatic changes in the results expected from the HR profession. There have been many articles written to help HR professionals deliver to these new expectations, but most have focused on training or tightening up today’s model through increased accountability and additional performance measures.

In a July 2006 article in Business Week, Jack Welch states: If there is anything we have learned over the past few years of traveling and talking to business groups, it is that HR rarely functions as it should. That’s an outrage; made only more frustrating by the fact that leaders aren’t scrambling to fix it. . . . HR should be every company’s killer app.

Welch goes on to suggest that the root of HR’s problem is from the lack of accountability and measures. Two months later in September 2006, the Harvard Business Review published an article called “How to Fix HR.” Its author, Gary Kaufman—much like Welch—chastised the profession for its pursuit of activities rather than results and for a lack of accountability. Peter Senge refers to this as the “Push Harder” paradigm. The underlying assumption is that the current model works just fine; the real problem is motivation, nothing that a good stiff push cannot fix. Yet if today’s model for growing human capital is not designed to produce business results, stronger accountability— pushing harder—will not help.

Today’s HR model was never designed to add value to customers or shareholders; it was designed to provide administrative services, to extricate managers from employee relations jams, and, at best, to provide support and advice. Many HR functions perform these functions well.

However, today’s HR model has not, does not, and will not produce business results through people until it is deliberately realigned for this purpose. You can hope that an ice cream machine begins toproduce popcorn. You can complain about it, measure it, and angrily beat on it. But the machine will continue to produce precisely what it was designed to produce. Retitling machine bolts to be “strategic connectors” neither changes their function nor changes the output of the machine. HR can either shift to a new operational paradigm or retreat back to its original mission. Pushing harder on the ice cream machine will not produce popcorn.

Source : Bradley W Hall, PhD. The new human capital strategy : improving the value of your most important investment—year after year.AMACOM. 2008

Methods For Collecting Job Analysis Information Part 2 (Gary Dessler)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 16 May 2019 06:29:00 +0000

Observation

Direct observation is especially useful when the job consists mainly of observable physical activities—assembly-line worker and accounting clerk are examples. On the other hand, observation is not as useful when the job entails a lot of mental activity (lawyer, design engineer).

Nor is it useful if the employee only occasionally engages in important activities, such as a nurse who handles emergencies. And reactivity—the worker’s changing what he or she normally does because you are watching—also can be a problem.

Managers often use direct observation and interviewing together. One approach is to observe

the worker on the job during a complete work cycle. (The cycle is the time it takes to complete the job; it could be a minute for an assembly-line worker or an hour, a day, or longer for complex jobs.) Here you take notes of all the job activities. Then, ask the person to clarify points not understood and to explain what other activities he or she performs that you didn’t observe.

Participant Diary/Logs

Another method is to ask workers to keep a diary/log of what they do during the day. For every activity engaged in, the employee records the activity (along with the time) in a log. Some firms give employees pocket dictating machines and pagers. Then at random times during the day, they page the workers, who dictate what they are doing at that time. This can avoid requiring workers to remember what they did hours earlier when they complete their logs at the end of the day.

Quantitative Job Analysis Techniques

Qualitative methods like interviews and questionnaires are not always suitable. For example, if your aim is to compare jobs for pay purposes, a mere listing of duties may not suffice. You may need to say that, in effect, “Job A is twice as challenging as Job B, and so is worth twice the pay.” To do this, it helps to have quantitative ratings for each job. The position analysis questionnaire explained next and the Department of Labor approach are quantitative methods for doing this.

POSITION ANALYSIS QUESTIONNAIRE

The position analysis questionnaire (PAQ) is a very popular quantitative job analysis tool, consisting of a questionnaire containing 194 items. The 194 items (such as “written materials”) each represent a basic element that may play a role in the job. The items each belong to one of five PAQ basic activities:

(1) having decision-making/communication/social responsibilities,

(2) performing skilled activities,

(3) being physically active,

(4) operating vehicles/equipment, and

(5) processing information.

The final PAQ “score” shows the job’s rating on each of these five activities. The job analyst decides if each of the 194 items plays a role and, if so, to what extent. For example, “written materials” received a rating of 4. Since the scale ranges from 1 to 5, a 4 suggests that written materials (such as books and reports) do play a significant role in this job. The analyst can use an online version of the PAQ (see www.paq.com) for each job he or she is analyzing.

The PAQ’s strength is in helping to assign jobs to job classes for pay purposes. With ratings for each job’s decision-making, skilled activity, physical activity, vehicle/equipment operation, and information-processing characteristics, you can quantitatively compare jobs relative to one another,12 and then group and classify jobs for pay purposes.

Internet-Based Job Analysis

Methods such as questionnaires and interviews can be time-consuming. And collecting the information from geographically dispersed employees can be challenging. Conducting the job analysis via the Internet is an obvious solution.Most simply, the human resource department can distribute standardized job analysis questionnaires to geographically disbursed employees via their company intranets, with instructions to complete the forms and return them by a particular date.

Of course, the instructions should be clear, and it’s best to test the process first. Without a job analyst actually sitting there with the employee or supervisor, there’s always a chance that the employees won’t cover important points or that misunderstandings will cloud the results.

Job Analysis Guidelines

Before actually analyzing the job, keep several things in mind.

● Make the job analysis a joint effort by a human resources manager, the worker, and the worker’s supervisor. The human resource manager might observe the worker doing the job, and have both the supervisor and worker fill out job questionnaires. Based on that, he or she lists the job’s duties and required human traits. The supervisor and worker then review and verify the HR manager’s list of job duties.

● Make sure the questions and the process are both clear to the employees. (For example, some might not know what you mean when you ask about the job’s “mental demands.”)

● Use several different job analysis tools. Do not rely just on a questionnaire, for instance, but supplement your survey with a short follow-up interview. (The questionnaire might miss a task the worker performs just occasionally.)

Source : Gary Dessler. Fundamental of Human Resource Management. Third Edition. Pearson. 2014

Methods For Collecting Job Analysis Information Part 1 (Gary Dessler)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 09 May 2019 04:49:00 +0000

We’ll see that there are various ways (interviews or questionnaires, for instance) to collect information on a job’s duties, responsibilities, and activities. The basic rule is to use those that best fit your purpose. Thus, an interview might be best for creating a list of job duties. The more quantitative position analysis questionnaire may be best for quantifying each job’s relative worth for pay purposes.

The Interview

Job analysis interviews range from unstructured interviews (“Tell me about your job”) to highly structured interviews containing hundreds of specific job items to check off.

Managers may conduct individual interviews with each employee, group interviews with groups of employees who have the same job, and/or supervisor interviews with one or more supervisors who know the job. They use group interviews when a large number of employees are performing similar or identical work, since this can be a quick and inexpensive way to gather information. As a rule, the workers’ immediate supervisor attends the group session; if not, you can interview the supervisor separately.

Whichever type of interview you use be sure the interviewee fully understands the reason

for the interview. There’s a tendency for workers to view such interviews, rightly or wrongly, as “efficiency evaluations.” If so, interviewees may hesitate to describe their jobs accurately.

TYPICAL QUESTIONS

Some typical interview questions include the following:

What is the job being performed?
What are the major duties of your position? What exactly do you do?
What physical locations do you work in?
What are the education, experience, skill, and [where applicable] certification and licensing
requirements?
In what activities do you participate?
What are the job’s responsibilities and duties?
What are the basic accountabilities or performance standards that typify your work?
What are your responsibilities? What are the environmental and working conditions
involved?
What are the job’s physical demands? The emotional and mental demands?
What are the health and safety conditions?
Are you exposed to any hazards or unusual working conditions?

STRUCTURED INTERVIEWS

Many managers use a structured format to guide the interview, such as job analysis information sheet. It includes questions regarding matters like the overall purpose of the job; supervisory responsibilities; job duties; and education, experience, and skills required.

Structured lists are not just for interviews. Job analysts who collect information by personally observing the work or by using questionnaires—two methods explained later—can also use structured lists.

INTERVIEWING GUIDELINES

To get the best information possible, keep several things in mind when conducting job analysis interviews.

● Quickly establish rapport with the interviewee. Know the person’s name, speak understandably, briefly review the interview’s purpose, and explain how the person was chosen for the interview.

● Use a structured guide that lists questions and provides space for answers. This ensures you’ll identify crucial questions ahead of time and that all interviewers (if more than one) cover all the required questions. (But also ask, “Was there anything we didn’t cover with our questions?”)

● You do not want to overlook crucial but infrequently performed activities—like a nurse’s occasional emergency room duties. Therefore do not just focus on duties the worker performs repeatedly, several times a day. Instead, ask the worker about all his or her duties and have the person rank the duties in order of importance and frequency of occurrence.

● After completing the interview, review the information with the worker’s immediate supervisor and with the interviewee.

Questionnaires

Having employees fill out questionnaires to describe their job-related duties and responsibilities is another popular way to obtain job analysis information. Some questionnaires are very structured checklists. Here each employee gets an inventory of perhaps hundreds of specific duties or tasks (such as “change and splice wire”). He or she is asked to indicate whether he or she performs each task and, if so, how much time is normally spent on each. At the other extreme, the questionnaire may simply ask, “describe the major duties of your job.”

In practice, the best questionnaires often do both. A typical job analysis questionnaire might include several open-ended questions (such as “What is the job’s overall purpose?”) as well as structured questions (concerning, for instance, education required).

All questionnaires have pros and cons. A questionnaire is a quick and efficient way to obtain information from a large number of employees; it’s less costly than interviewing hundreds of workers, for instance. However, developing the questionnaire and testing it (perhaps by making sure the workers understand the questions) can be time-consuming. And as with interviews, employees may distort their answers.

Continued to Part 2.

Source : Gary Dessler. Fundamental of Human Resource Management. Third Edition. Pearson. 2014

Conducting a Job Analysis (Gary Dessler)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 02 Dec 2015 23:00:00 +0000

There are six steps in doing a job analysis, as follows.

Step 1: Decide how you’ll use the information Some data collection techniques—like interviewing the employee—are good for writing job descriptions. Other techniques, like the position analysis questionnaire we describe later, provide numerical ratings for each job; these can be used to compare jobs for compensation purposes.

Step 2: Review relevant background information such as organization charts, process charts, and job descriptions.Organization charts show the organization-wide division of work, and where the job fits in the overall organization. The chart should show the title of each position and, by means of interconnecting lines, who reports to whom and with whom the job incumbent communicates. A process chart provides a more detailed picture of the workflow, particularly the flow of inputs to and outputs from the job you’re analyzing. (In Figure 2, the quality control clerk reviews components from suppliers, checks components going to the plant managers, and gives information regarding component’s quality to these managers.) Finally, the existing job description, if there is one, usually provides a starting point for building the revised job description.

WORKFLOW ANALYSIS AND JOB REDESIGN Job analysis tasks such as reviewing current job descriptions enable the manager to list what a job’s duties and demands are now. Job analysis does not answer questions such as “Should this job even exist?” To answer such questions, one must conduct a workflow analysis. You may then deem it necessary to redesign the job. Workflow analysis is a detailed study of the flow of work from job to job in a work process. Usually, the analyst focuses on one identifiable work process (such as processing an insurance claim), rather than on how the company gets all its work done. The accompanying HR as a Profit Center feature illustrates workflow analysis.

BUSINESS PROCESS RE-ENGINEERING workflow analysis also illustrates business process re-engineering. Business process re-engineering means redesigning business processes, usually by combining steps, so that small multi function teams using information technology do the jobs formerly done by a sequence of departments. The basic approach is to:

1. Identify a business process to be redesigned (such as approving a mortgage application).

2. Measure the performance of the existing process.

3. Identify opportunities to improve this process.

4. Redesign and implement a new way of doing the work.

5. Assign ownership of sets of formerly separate tasks to an individual or a team that uses new computerized systems to support the new arrangement.

As an example, one bank re-engineered its mortgage approval process by replacing the sequential operation with a multi function mortgage approval team. Loan originators in the field now enter the mortgage application directly into wireless laptop computers, where software checks it for completeness. The information then goes electronically to regional production centers. Here, specialists (like credit analysts and loan underwriters) convene electronically, working as a team to review the mortgage together—at once. After they formally close the loan, another team of specialists takes on the task of servicing the loan.

JOB REDESIGN As at this bank, re-engineering usually requires redesigning individual jobs. Job enlargement means assigning workers additional same-level activities. Thus, the worker who previously only bolted the seat to the legs might attach the back as well. Job rotation means systematically moving workers from one job to another.

Psychologist Frederick Herzberg argued that the best way to motivate workers is through job enrichment. Job enrichment means redesigning jobs in a way that increases the opportunities for the worker to experience feelings of responsibility, achievement, growth, and recognition. It does this by empowering the worker—for instance, by giving the worker the skills and authority to inspect the work, instead of having supervisors do that. Herzberg said empowered employees would do their jobs well because they wanted to, and quality and productivity would rise. That philosophy, in one form or another, is the theoretical basis for the team-based self-managing jobs in many companies around the world today.

Step 3: Select representative positions Whether or not the manager decides to redesign jobs, the next step in job analysis is to decide on which positions to focus the job analysis. For example, it is usually unnecessary to analyze the jobs of 200 assembly workers when a sample of 10 jobs will do.

Step 4: Actually analyze the job—by collecting data on job activities, working conditions, and human traits and abilities needed to perform the job In brief, actually “analyzing” the job involves several steps. Specifically, greet employees; briefly explain the job analysis process and the employees’ roles in this process; spend about 15 minutes interviewing the employees to get agreement on a basic summary of the job; identify the job’s broad areas of responsibility, such as “calling on potential clients”; and identify duties/tasks within each area interactively with the employees.

Step 5: Verify the job analysis information with the worker performing the job and with his or her immediate supervisor. This will help confirm that the information you’ve compiled (for instance regarding the job’s main duties) is correct and complete, and may help gain employees’ acceptance of your conclusions.

Step 6: Develop a job description and job specification The job description describes the job’s duties, activities and responsibilities, as well as its important features, such as working conditions. The job specification summarizes the personal qualities, traits, skills, and background workers require for getting the job done.

Source : Gary Dessler. Fundamental of Human Resource Management. Third Edition. Pearson. 2014

The Basics Of Job Analysis (Gary Dessler)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 29 Nov 2015 23:00:00 +0000

Talent management begins with understanding what jobs need to be filled, and the human traits and competencies employees need to do those jobs effectively. Job analysis is the procedure through which you determine the duties of the jobs you are analyzing and the characteristics of the people to hire for them.

Job analysis produces information for writing job descriptions (a list of what duties the job entails) and job (or “person”) specifications (what kind of people to hire for the job). Virtually every personnel-related action you take—interviewing applicants, and training and appraising employees, for instance—depends on knowing what the job entails and what human traits and skills one needs to do the job well.

The supervisor or human resources specialist normally collects one or more of the following types of information via the job analysis:

● Work activities. First, he or she collects information about the job’s actual work activities, such as cleaning, selling, teaching, or painting. This list may also include how, why, and when the worker performs each activity.

●Human behaviors. Information about human behaviors the job requires, like sensing, communicating, lifting weights, or walking long distances.

●Machines, tools, equipment, and work aids. Information regarding tools used, materials processed, knowledge dealt with or applied (such as finance or law), and services rendered (such as counseling or repairing).

● Performance standards. Information about the job’s performance standards (in terms of quantity or quality levels for each job duty, for instance).

● Job context. Information about things like working conditions, work schedule, incentives, and, for instance, the number of people with whom the employee would normally interact.

● Human requirements. Information such as knowledge or skills (education, training, work experience) and required personal attributes (aptitudes, personality, interests).

As Figure 1 summarizes, job analysis is important because managers use it to support just about all their human resource management activities. For example, they use it to decide what sorts of people to recruit for a job, and for what traits and competencies to test and train them.

Source : Gary Dessler. Fundamental of Human Resource Management. Third Edition. Pearson. 2014

What Is Talent Management? (Gary Dessler)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 25 Nov 2015 23:00:00 +0000

Talent management is the goal-oriented and integrated process of planning, recruiting, developing, managing, and compensating employees. When a manager takes a talent management perspective, he or she:

1. Understands that the talent management tasks (including recruiting, training, and paying employees) are parts of a single interrelated talent management process. For example, having employees with the right skills depends as much on recruiting, training, and compensation as it does on applicant testing.

2. Makes sure talent management decisions such as staffing, training, and pay are goal directed. Managers should always be asking, “What recruiting, testing, or other actions should I take to produce the employee competencies we need to achieve our strategic goals?”

3. Consistently uses the same “profile” of competencies, traits, knowledge, and experience for formulating recruitment plans for a job as for making selection, training, appraisal, and payment decisions for it. For example, ask selection interview questions to determine if the candidate has the knowledge and skills to do the job, and then train and appraise the employee based on whether he or she shows mastery of that knowledge and skills.

4. Actively segments and manages employees. A talent management approach requires that employers proactively manage their employees’ recruitment, selection, development, and rewards. For example, employers pinpoint their “mission-critical” employees, and then manage their development and rewards separately from the firms’ other employees.

5. Integrates/coordinates all the talent management functions. Finally, an effective talent management process integrates the underlying talent management activities such as recruiting, developing, and compensating employees. HR managers might simply meet as a team to visualize and discuss how to coordinate activities like testing, appraising, and training. (For instance, making sure the firm uses the same skills profile to recruit, select, train, and appraise employees for a particular job.) Or, they can use information technology to integrate these activities. As one example, Talent Management Solutions’ (www.talentmanagement101.com) talent management suite includes e-recruiting software, employee performance management, a learning management system, and compensation management.

This suite of programs ensures “that all levels of the organization are aligned—all working for the same goals.”

Source : Gary Dessler. Fundamental of Human Resource Management. Third Edition. Pearson. 2014

Strategic Human Resource Management (Gary Dessler)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 22 Nov 2015 23:00:00 +0000

Managers formulate corporate strategies, and then competitive strategies for each of their businesses. Then, we’ve seen that once a business decides how it will compete, it turns to formulating functional (departmental) strategies to support its competitive aims. One of those departments is human resource management and its functional strategies are human resource management strategies.

What Is Strategic Human Resource Management?

Every company needs its human resource management policies and activities to make sense in terms of its broad strategic aims. For example, a high-end retailer such as Neiman-Marcus will have different employee selection, training, and pay policies than will Walmart. Strategic human resource management means formulating and executing human resource policies and practices that produce the employee competencies and behaviors the company needs to achieve its strategic aims. The following Strategic Context feature illustrates this.

Figure 6

The basic idea behind strategic human resource management is this: In formulating human resource management policies and activities, the aim must be to produce the employee skills and behaviors that the company needs to achieve its strategic goals.

Figure 6 graphically outlines this idea. First, management formulates strategic plans and goals. In turn, executing these plans and achieving these goals depends on having the right mix of employee competencies and behaviors. And finally, to produce these required employee competencies and behaviors, the human resource manager must put in place the right mix of recruitment, selection, training, and other HR policies and practices.

Human Resource Strategies and Policies

Managers call the specific human resource management policies and practices human resource strategies. For example, several years ago, Newell Rubbermaid changed its emphasis from manufacturing and selling housewares such as Rubbermaid and Levelor Blinds to mostly marketing them. Implementing this plan called for new personnel competencies and behaviors. Its human resource management team began by benchmarking the firm’s big marketing competitors to see what their best human resource practices were. They then met with the heads of each of Newell Rubbermaid’s divisions, for example, to develop new training programs and a plan for adjusting each division’s staffing needs.

Strategic Human Resource Management Tools

Exactly what human resource strategies do we need? Managers use several tools to translate the company’s broad strategic goals into human resource management policies and practices. Three important tools include the strategy map, the HR scorecard, and the digital dashboard.

STRATEGY MAP The strategy map summarizes how each department’s performance contributes to achieving the company’s overall strategic goals. It helps the manager and each employee visualize and understand the role his or her department plays in achieving the company’s strategic plan. Management gurus sometimes say that the map clarifies employees’ “line of sight,” by linking their efforts with the company’s ultimate goals.

THE HR SCORECARD Many employers quantify and computerize the strategy map’s activities. The HR scorecard helps them to do so. The HR scorecard is not a scorecard. It refers to a process for assigning financial and non-financial goals or metrics to the human resource management–related strategy map chain of activities required for achieving the company’s strategic aims.

The idea is to take the strategy map and to quantify it. Managers use special scorecard software to facilitate this. The computerized scorecard process helps the manager quantify the relationships between :

(1) the HR activities (amount of testing, training, and so forth),

(2) the resulting employee behaviors (customer service, for instance), and

(3) the resulting firm-wide strategic outcomes and performance (such as customer satisfaction and profitability).

DIGITAL DASHBOARDS The saying “a picture is worth a thousand words” explains the purpose of the digital dashboard. A digital dashboard presents the manager with desktop graphs and charts, showing a computerized picture of how the company is doing on all the metrics from the HR Scorecard process.

Source : Gary Dessler. Fundamental of Human Resource Management. Third Edition. Pearson. 2014

What Are HR Audits? (Gary Dessler)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 18 Nov 2015 23:00:00 +0000

Human resource managers often collect data on matters such as employee turnover and safety via human resource audits. One practitioner calls an HR audit “an analysis by which an organization measures where it currently stands and determines what it has to accomplish to improve its HR function.” The HR audit generally involves reviewing the company’s human resource function (recruiting, testing, training, and so on), usually using a checklist, as well as ensuring that the firm is adhering to regulations, laws, and company policies.

In conducting the HR audit, managers often benchmark their results to comparable companies’. Sample measures (metrics) might include the ratio of HR professionals per company employee. HR audits vary in scope and focus. Typical areas audited include the following:

1. Roles and head count (including job descriptions, and employees categorized by exempt/ nonexempt and full- or part-time).

2. Compliance with federal, state, local employment–related legislation.

3. Recruitment and selection (including use of selection tools, background checks, and so on).

4. Compensation (policies, incentives, survey procedures, and so on).

5. Employee relations (union agreements, performance management, disciplinary procedures, employee recognition).

6. Mandated benefits (Social Security, unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation, and so on).

7. Group benefits (insurance, time off, flexible benefits, and so on).

8. Payroll (such as legal compliance).

9. Documentation and record keeping. For example, do our files contain information including résumés and applications, offer letters, job descriptions, performance evaluations, benefit enrollment forms, payroll change notices and documentation related to personnel actions such as employee handbook acknowledgments?

10. Training and development (new employee orientation, workforce development, technical and safety, career planning, and so on).

11. Employee communications (employee handbook, newsletter, recognition programs).

12. Termination and transition policies and practices.

Source : Gary Dessler. Fundamental of Human Resource Management. Third Edition. Pearson. 2014

What Do The New Human Resource Managers Do? (Gary Dessler)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 15 Nov 2015 23:00:00 +0000

For much of the twentieth century, “personnel” managers focused mostly on day-to-day activities. In the earliest firms, they took over hiring and firing from supervisors, ran the payroll department, and administered benefits plans. As expertise in testing emerged, the personnel department played a bigger role in employee selection and training. New union laws in the 1930s added, “Helping the employer deal with unions” to its list of duties. With new equal employment laws in the 1960s, employers began relying on HR for avoiding discrimination claims.

Today, employers face new challenges, such as squeezing more profits from operations. They expect their human resource managers to have what it takes to address these new challenges.

Let’s look at 10 things today’s HR managers do to deal with these challenges.

THEY FOCUS MORE ON STRATEGIC, BIG PICTURE ISSUES First, human resource managers are more involved in helping their companies address longer-term, strategic “big picture” issues. We see that Strategic human resource management means formulating and executing human resource policies and practices that produce the employee competencies and behaviors the company needs to achieve its strategic aims. The basic idea behind strategic human resource management is this: In formulating human resource management policies and practices, the manager’s aim should be to produce the employee skills and behaviors that the company needs to achieve its strategic aims. So, for example, if you want the CEO to focus on boosting profits, tie his or her incentive plan to the company’s profitability.

We will use a model to illustrate this idea, but in brief the model follows this three-step sequence:

Set the firm’s strategic aims → Pinpoint the employee behaviors and skills we need to achieve these strategic aims → Decide what HR policies and practices will enable us to produce these necessary employee behaviors and skills.

THEY USE NEW WAYS TO PROVIDE HR SERVICES To free up time for their new strategic duties, today’s human resource managers deliver their traditional day-to-day HR services (such as benefits administration) in new ways. For example, they use technology such as company portals so employees can self-administer benefits plans, Facebook recruiting to recruit job applicants, online testing to prescreen job applicants, and centralized call centers to answer supervisors’ HR related inquiries. IBM’s employees use its own internal social network site to “create personal profiles similar to those on LinkedIn . . . share files, and gain knowledge from white papers, videos, and podcasts.” Table illustrates how employers use technology to support delivering human resource management activities.

THEY TAKE A TALENT MANAGEMENT APPROACH TO MANAGING HUMAN RESOURCES With employers pressing for improved performance, one survey of human resource executives found that “talent management” issues were among the most pressing ones they faced. Talent management is the goal-oriented and integrated process of planning, recruiting, developing, managing, and compensating employees.42 It involves putting in place a coordinated process for identifying, recruiting, hiring, and developing employees. For example, we saw that IBM split its employees into three groups, to better coordinate how it serves the employees in each segment.

THEY MANAGE EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT Improved performance means you need your employees to be engaged. The Institute for Corporate Productivity defines engaged employees “as those who are mentally and emotionally invested in their work and in contributing to an employer’s success.” Unfortunately, studies suggest that less than one-third of the U.S. workforce is engaged. Today’s human resource managers need skills to manage employee engagement.

THEY MANAGE ETHICS Regrettably, news reports today are filled with managers’ ethical misdeeds. For example, prosecutors filed criminal charges against several Iowa meatpacking plant human resource managers who allegedly violated employment law by hiring children younger than 16. Behaviors like these risk torpedoing even otherwise competent managers and employers. Ethics means the standards someone uses to decide what his or her conduct should be. Many serious workplace ethical issues—workplace safety and employee privacy, for instance—are human resource– management related.

THEY MEASURE HR PERFORMANCE AND RESULTS Perhaps most notably, the pressures of global competition forced human resource managers to be more numbers oriented. Several years ago, IBM’s Randall acDonald needed $100 million to reorganize its HR operations. He told top management, “I’m going to deliver talent to you that’s skilled and on time and ready to be deployed. I will be able to measure the skills, tell you what skills we have, what [skills] we don’t have [and] then show you how to fill the gaps or enhance our training.” Human resource managers use performance measures (or “metrics”) to validate claims like these. For example, median HR expenses as a percentage of companies’ total operating costs average just under 1%. On average, there is about 1 human resource staff person per 100 employees. To compare their own companies to others, human resource managers obtain customized benchmark comparisons from services such as the Society for Human Resource Management’s Human Capital Benchmarking Service.

THEY USE EVIDENCE-BASED HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT Basing decisions on such evidence is the heart of evidence-based human resource management. This is the use of data, facts, analytics, scientific rigor, critical evaluation, and critically evaluated research/case studies to support human resource management proposals, decisions, practices, and conclusions. Put simply, evidence-based human resource management means using the best-available evidence in making decisions about the human resource management practices you are focusing on. The evidence may come from actual measurements (such as, how did the trainees like this program?). It may come from existing data (such as, what happened to company profits after we installed this training program?). Or, it may come from published research studies (such as, what does the research literature conclude about the best way to ensure that trainees remember what they learn?).

THEY ADD VALUE The bottom line is that today’s employers want their HR managers to add value by boosting profits and performance. Professors Dave Ulrich and Wayne Brockbank describe this as “The HR Value Proposition.” They say human resource programs (such as screening tests) are just a means to an end. The human resource manager’s ultimate aim must be to add value. “Adding value” means helping the firm and its employees improve in a measurable way as a result of the human resource manager’s actions.

THEY UNDERSTAND THEIR HUMAN RESOURCE PHILOSOPHY Peoples’ actions are always based in part on the basic assumptions they make; this is especially true in regard to human resource management. The basic assumptions you make about people—Can they be trusted? Do they dislike work? Can they be creative? Why do they act as they do? How should they be treated?— together comprise your philosophy of human resource management. And every personnel decision you make—the people you hire, the training you provide, your leadership style, and the like—reflects (for better or worse) this basic philosophy.

How do you go about developing such a philosophy? To some extent, it’s preordained. There’s no doubt that you will bring to your job an initial philosophy based on your experiences, education, values, assumptions, and background. But your philosophy doesn’t have to be set in stone. It should and will continually evolve as you accumulate knowledge and experiences. For example, the personnel philosophy at Hon Hai’s Foxconn plant seems to have softened in response to its employees’ and Apple’s discontent. In any case, no manager should manage others without first understanding the personnel philosophy that is driving his or her actions. One of the things molding your own philosophy is that of your organization’s top management. While it may or may not be stated, it is usually communicated by their actions and permeates every level and department in the organization. For example, here is part of the personnel philosophy of the founder of the Polaroid Corp., stated many years ago:

To give everyone working for the company a personal opportunity within the company for full exercise of his talents—to express his opinions, to share in the progress of the company as far as his capacity permits, and to earn enough money so that the need for earning more will not always be the first thing on his mind. The opportunity, in short, to make his work here a fully rewarding and important part of his or her life. Current “best companies to work for” lists include many organizations with similar philosophies.

For example, the CEO of software giant SAS has said, “We’ve worked hard to create a corporate culture that is based on trust between our employees and the company . . . a culture that rewards innovation, encourages employees to try new things and yet doesn’t penalize them for taking chances, and a culture that cares about employees’ personal and professional growth.” Sometimes, companies translate philosophies like these into what management gurus call high-performance work systems, “sets of human resource management practices that together produce superior employee performance.” For example, at GE’s assembly plant in Durham, high-precision aircraft parts.

THEY HAVE NEW COMPETENCIES. Tasks like formulating strategic plans and making data-based decisions require new human resource manager skills. HR managers can’t just be good at traditional personnel tasks like hiring and training. Instead, they must “speak the CFO’s language” by defending human resource plans in measurable terms (such as return on investment). To create strategic plans, the human resource manager must understand strategic planning, marketing, production, and finance. (Perhaps this is why about one-third of top HR managers in Fortune 100 companies moved there from other functional areas.) He or she must be able to formulate and implement large-scale organizational changes, design organizational structures and work processes, and understand how to compete in and succeed in the marketplace.

Source : Gary Dessler. Fundamental of Human Resource Management. Third Edition. Pearson. 2014

Why Is Human Resource Management Important to all Managers? (Gary Dessler)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 11 Nov 2015 23:00:00 +0000

Perhaps it’s easier to answer this by listing some of the personnel mistakes you don’t want to make while managing. For example, you don’t want

● To have your employees not doing their best.

● To hire the wrong person for the job.

● To experience high turnover.

● To have your company in court due to your discriminatory actions.

● To have your company cited for unsafe practices.

● To let a lack of training undermine your department’s effectiveness.

● To commit any unfair labor practices.

IMPROVED PERFORMANCE Carefully studying this text can help you avoid mistakes like these. More important, it can help ensure that you get results—through people. Remember that you could do everything else right as a manager—lay brilliant plans, draw clear organization charts, set up modern assembly lines, and use sophisticated accounting controls—but still fail, for

instance, by hiring the wrong people or by not motivating subordinates.

On the other hand, many managers—from generals to presidents to supervisors—have been successful even without adequate plans, organizations, or controls. They were successful because they had the knack for hiring the right people for the right jobs and then motivating, appraising, and developing them. Remember as you read this text that getting results is the bottom line of managing and that, as a manager, you will have to get these results through people. This fact hasn’t changed from the dawn of management. As one company president summed it up:

For many years it has been said that capital is the bottleneck for a developing industry. I don’t think this any longer holds true. I think it’s the workforce and the company’s inability to recruit and maintain a good workforce that does constitute the bottleneck for production. I don’t know of any major project backed by good ideas, vigor, and enthusiasm that has been stopped by a shortage of cash. I do know of industries whose growth has been partly stopped or hampered because they can’t maintain an efficient and enthusiastic labor force, and I think this will hold true even more in the future.

YOU MAY SPEND TIME AS AN HR MANAGER Here is a third reason to study this text: you

may well spend time as a human resource manager. For example, about a third of large U.S. businesses surveyed appointed non-HR managers to be their top human resource executives. Thus, Pearson Corporation (which publishes this text) promoted the head of one of its publishing divisions to chief human resource executive at its corporate headquarters.

Why? Some think these people may be better equipped to integrate the firm’s human resource activities (such as pay policies) with the company’s strategic needs (such as by tying executives’ incentives to corporate goals). However most top human resource executives do have prior human resource experience. About 80% of those in one survey worked their way up within HR. About 17% had the HR Certification Institute’s Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR) designation, and 13% were certified Professionals in Human Resources (PHR). The Society for Human

HR FOR ENTREPRENEURS Finally, you might end up as your own human resource manager. More than half the people working in the United States today work for small firms. Small businesses as a group also account for most of the 600,000 or so new businesses created every year. Statistically speaking, therefore, most people graduating from college in the next few years either will work for small businesses or will create new small businesses of their own. Especially if you are managing your own small firm with no human resource manager, you’ll probably have to handle HR on your own. If so, you must be able to recruit, select, train, appraise, and reward employees.

Source : Gary Dessler. Fundamental of Human Resource Management. Third Edition. Pearson. 2014

Determining the Optimal Blueprint for Your Organization (Bradley W Hall,Ph.D)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 08 Nov 2015 23:00:00 +0000

The key question to answer here is: What is the most effective Human Capital Strategy for your organization? How can you know if your company is improving the performance of its human capital? How can you know if your company is managing its human capital more effectively than its competitors are?

The Human Capital Lagging Indicator

Is there a single measure that concludes human capital improves year- over-year? Or, should we judge the efficiency of a human capital strategy by measuring changes in each of a set of key positions?

A 2007 McKinsey Quarterly article stated that the value of “intangible capital” of the world’s top 150 companies, as measured by market value less invested financial capital, increased from $800 billion in 1985 to $7.2 trillion in 2005.6 However, annual reports still focus on how a company uses its financial capital—not how it is growing its in- tangible values, the most important of which is human capital.

The McKinsey study examined the thirty largest companies in the world (by market capitalization) over the period 1995 to 2005. They found that the driver of a five-fold increase in profits was a doubling of profits per employee and number of employees. The Return on Invested Capital (ROIC) increased only by one-third during that same period. In other words, human capital measures were a much stronger predictor of market capitalization through profit growth than traditional measures such as ROIC. The world has changed. Effective human capital management, rather than financial capital management, is the most important driver of business value. Here is the equation for predicting profit growth and eventually market capitalization increases:

Profit per Employee X Number of Employees

You need a high profit per employee and lots of employees. This equation held true for companies like WalMart, with lots of employees and low profit per employee, and for Microsoft, with few employees and high profits per employee. The equation is not perfect, but it’s pretty robust and very simple.

Any company can measure its year-over-year change in human cap- ital by applying this formula to answer the question “Are we managing our human capital more effectively than last year?” Companies can also compare the effectiveness of their human capital with those in similar competitor companies. This requires that the companies are identical. Perhaps a better measure is year-over-year performance changes between industry competitors.

Human Capital Leading Indicators

What if you knew the most important things to do for your organiza- tion to grow its profit per employee and market cap? You have a vision and strategy that you can show, statistically, is the best model for your organization. This is possible and requires only simple statistics—the stuff you learned in Statistics 101.

Here is how it works. We’ve made an assumption that four strategic components are both necessary and sufficient for delivering the human capital vision. Thus, if an organization scores well on all four, it will have a sustained competitive advantage. However, whether these four truly matter to your organization’s business results is still an educated guess. Let’s turn gut level feelings into facts.

Building the optimal Human Capital Strategy for your organization requires systematically tracking performance over time and isolating relationships between lagging indicators (e.g., revenue growth, profit, customer satisfaction) and leading indicators (i.e., the four strategic components). This requires a basic regression equation between each of the four strategic objectives and one or more lagging indicators. The result will tell you the relative impact on profit per employee of each of the four strategic components. (See Figure 2-4.)

Scores for each of the four strategic components are regressed on profit per employee. Remember, this is illustrative—it’s not real data. If this were real data, key position excellence would be the strongest driver of operating profits because it has the biggest correlation coefficient (r = .56), followed by effective executive teams (r = .44) and workforce performance (r = .42). The bigger the correlation coefficient (r), the more impact the strategic component has on profit. In this ex- ample, key position excellence has eight times more impact on profit than leaders who deliver results (i.e., .56 is eight times more than .07). If we want changes in profit per employee, we would be wise to make bigger investments in key position excellence than in leadership development. (Again, remember that this is not real data.)

If this data appeared in your organization, you might conclude that leadership performance (r = .07) is not related to profits. This might be because in your organization, leadership really isn’t that important. Alternatively, it might indicate that you chose the wrong leadership roles or the wrong leadership results, or that the results were inaccurately measured. Any of these hypotheses can be easily tested if you have the kind of data recommended throughout this book.

You might wonder, “What if there are other important strategic components we should have measured but didn’t?” Let’s say the top team chooses these four components to begin, but they also feel that “across-the-board skills” might be a good predictor—they’re just not sure. The team might choose to add the new measure “skills” to the model as a test component and analyze it behind the scenes. Let’s say that regressing “across-the-board skills” produces a coefficient of .62. That would mean that compared to the other four components, improving across-the-board skill levels was the most important thing to get right to improve profits. The team may then choose to eliminate leadership as a strategic component and add across-the-board skills. (See Figure 2-5.)

By capturing and analyzing data over time, your organization can estimate the financial impact of performance changes on each of the strategic components and make better informed investment decisions. Remember that y = ax + b equation from Statistics 101 that you swore you would never use? You need it now. Plug in x as the leading indicator and out pops y as the estimated value of the lagging indicator. “If we improve key position performance by x percent, we will increase profits by y percent.” It’s really no different from using retirement calculators where changing the leading indicators (e.g., years to retirement, money saved per year, percent annual investment increases) changes the number of work years left—the lagging indicator. Any graduate student in statistics can do this work for you.

Source : Bradley W Hall, PhD. The new human capital strategy : improving the value of your most important investment—year after year. AMACOM. 2008

Strategic Human Capital Components (Bradley W Hall,Ph.D)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 04 Nov 2015 23:00:00 +0000

The human capital vision creates a concrete and measurable definition of success; the strategic components are plans that describe how to achieve that vision. Achieving the vision requires excellence in four components. (See Table 2-2.) If all four are well-executed, it is likely that your organization will have a sustained competitive advantage through people. The first three strategic components are critical roles - roles that are most important for customer and shareholder satisfaction. The fourth component enables the first three.

Effective Executive Teams

The key question to ask about the first critical role—effective executive teams—is: Are our executive teams more effective this year than last year? The executive teams may include the corporate top team, business unit teams, region/country-level teams, and functional leadership teams. Without a high-performing executive team at the top, little will happen below. Executive teams set the end-state vision and business strategies, and invest time and money to ensure that aspirations turn to business results.

Just as human capital growth requires a top-down, comprehensive, and integrated improvement plan, so do executive teams. (However, that’s not the way many internal and external consultants approach ex- ecutive teaming today.) An effective executive team improvement plan begins when executive team members agree on the team’s value-add to the business and define specific activities and measures for realizing that value-add.

Leaders Who Deliver Results

What is the single most important decision a corporation can make? Arguably, it is choosing the CEO. What about the most important de- cision for a company’s China subsidiary? It’s probably choosing the general manager for the subsidiary. At each level, starting from the top and working down, great leaders build the strategy, choose the leader- ship team, and align the organization.

At McDonald’s, except for location, every restaurant is essentially the same—same menu, same prices, same training material, and same store layout. The difference between high-performing and low-performing McDonald’s restaurants is almost exclusively a function of the restaurant manager. Take a failing store, import a successful manager, and even with essentially the same crew, the restaurant will recover within thirty days. Great restaurant managers create a culture that delivers the oxymoron of discipline and fun. And when McDonald’s restaurant managers are excellent, district and area managers are largely unnecessary. Great managers generally don’t need or want HR field support, local marketing support, etc.— they prefer to stand on their own. Not only do great managers grow unit profits, they also reduce system-wide costs. Despite the obvious im- portance of unit managers at retail organizations, how many companies report year-over-year leadership performance changes of their unit managers?

Twenty-five years of Gallup research concludes that how long em- ployees stay and how productive employees are is determined by their relationship with the immediate supervisor.5 The world’s best recruit- ing, development, and appraisal processes are useless if managers are not top quality. But what is “top quality,” and how do you get from here to there?

Key Position Excellence

The most important question to answer here is: Are those in key positions outperforming their peers in competitor organizations? Too often today, people programs and policies are rolled out system-wide, with programs and policies applying to everyone in the organization.

Making equal investments in all roles seems fair and equitable, but it’s bad for the business. Some roles are more important to customers and shareholders than others. The most important roles should be paid well over industry standards, the moderately important ones at or be- low standards, and the least important ones below standards or out- sourced. Training investments should also vary. When we follow the key position approach, we attempt to increase the performance of the 20 percent of positions that produce 80 percent of customer and shareholder value. Think in terms of your own finances: When you allocate your personal investment dollars, do you invest the same amount in every mutual fund, or do your dollar amounts differ by expected return?

The ideal performance measure for excellence in a given position is performance relative to competitors. For sales positions, this may be measured by a customer rating of the sales representative or sales team versus sales reps or teams from competitor organizations. For scien- tists, it might measure the number of new patents by a scientist or re- search team that turn into products versus the average of those at competitors. Unfortunately, comparison statistics are not always pos- sible. In these cases, you may choose to use an internal measure of year-over-year performance changes while you continue to search for good comparison measures.

Workforce Performance

The key question to answer here is: Has workforce performance improved since last year? No amount of success in critical role develop- ment is possible until the organization has a clear strategy and organizational capabilities aligned to that strategy. The strategic com- ponent, workforce performance, is actually the first step in any human capital improvement project. We cannot know which roles are critical until the strategy is set and the organization realigned. We need to have a simple and compelling vision, an aligned organization, a high-per- formance culture, and an appropriate appraisal and rewards process.

Simple and Compelling Vision. The organization must try to answer the following questions:

• Where are we going and why?

• What are the steps for getting from here to there?

• How are we doing and what else needs to be done?

Aligned Organization. The second critical success factor is to fully align organizational activities to the strategy and to create a cascade of objectives to ensure that all objectives are delivered. Not only does this focus efforts on the most important tasks; it also exposes tasks that do not directly add business value.

Performance Culture. The two statistically most important drivers of a high-performance culture are:

(1) fairness and accuracy when providing feedback and assessing performance results, and (2) creating a risk-taking culture.

Appraisal and Rewards. The organization must try to answer the fol- lowing questions:

• Which performance improvement methods have the biggest impact on productivity?

• What is the best way to improve focus, accountability and motivation?

Source : Bradley W Hall, PhD. The new human capital strategy : improving the value of your most important investment—year after year.AMACOM. 2008

Setting the Human Capital Vision (Bradley W Hall,Ph.D)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 02 Nov 2015 03:00:00 +0000

The human capital vision is founded on the human capital theory and attempts to turn the theory into a concrete statement of success. Figure 2-2 presents an example.

Several assumptions lie beneath the vision statement:

• Leading measures are defined by performance, not competencies. Competencies are an important means to an end and should be measured and managed as such; but success is industry-best performance, not industry-best people.

• Success is measured against industry benchmarks or primary competitors. Being world-class is ideal, but it is not required to deliver business results. Burger King’s performance in site selection must be better than McDonald’s; it does not need to be better than Marriott’s.

• It is often, but not always, possible to compare performance of non management roles to similar roles in competitor companies (e.g., sales, customer service). It may be more difficult to com- pare performance of some leaders to their competitor peers. Can you compare cross-company performance of sales executives or product development leaders? Probably yes, but it might be more difficult to compare the performance of internal communications managers, retail store managers, or sales managers.

• When performance to competitors cannot be assessed, measure year-over-year changes. Note that performance metrics will not be perfect. Start with a “B” and improve until you get an “A.” If you wait for an A to begin, you might never do so.

Source : Bradley W Hall, PhD. The new human capital strategy : improving the value of your most important investment—year after year. AMACOM. 2008

The Human Capital Vision (Bradley W Hall,Ph.D)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 29 Oct 2015 13:00:00 +0000

The important question to answer here is: What does success look like?

In the mid-1990s, Taco Bell, then a PepsiCo company, was one of the hottest companies on earth. In the middle of its success, John Martin, Taco Bell’s CEO, assigned seven of his highest-potential middle managers to a two-year, full-time, multidisciplinary team to rein- vent Taco Bell’s business model. Martin’s vision was “250,000 points of access by the year 2000.” He defined a point of access as “wherever someone can buy a Taco Bell product.” Taco Bell’s new vision was clear, memorable, and measurable.

Given that Taco Bell had about 4,000 stores at the time, 250,000 seemed to be an unrealistic goal. However, the team energetically be- gan work and within a few short months had created a new process that increased store openings from 700 each year to more than 1,200. Martin thanked the team but told them that while that was very good news, the goal was still 250,000 points of access.

The team decided that it needed to think more creatively. At the time, cafeterias were the only place to eat in airports. “What if we put Taco Bells in airports?” the team members wondered. “Let’s call them SPODs” (special points of distribution). Soon, Taco Bell SPODs were popping up in airports, stadiums, and strip malls. SPODs quickly added more than 1,000 points of access each year. Again, Martin was grateful but unmoved. The vision was still 250,000.

The team had a few failures—Taco Bell vending machines, frozen burritos—but then they had a brainstorm. Why not use Frito-Lay, an- other PepsiCo company, to produce and distribute Taco Bell chips and salsa? Within a few months, Taco Bell chips and salsa hit grocery store shelves. Another 50,000 points of access. Good, but still not enough. The team added another 5,000 points of access through Taco Bell carts, designed to sell products in parks and on street corners. They also created a program for selling burritos to schools for sale in school lunchrooms. This increased store utilization during the morning hours and turned thousands of schools into points of access.

The team missed the 250,000 mark, but they increased points of access from 4,000 stores to well over 100,000 points of access. But innovation isn’t free. The effort required a two-year commitment of the highest-potential managers from each function, plus significant consulting fees. The investments were significant; the results were breakthrough.

The Taco Bell story is an example of a clear vision of success that created an explosion of innovation. The story provides three important lessons for setting and executing a human capital vision:

1. An unambiguous statement of success is required.

• The end-state must be quantifiable and include a measure- ment of success.

• The end-state must be time-bound.

• The statement must be simple and unforgettable.

2. Organizational transformation requires an organizational in- frastructure that maximizes the probability of success (e.g., a full-time, dedicated team of the highest-potential performers).

3. Significant and focused investments in time and money are required.

Does your organization have an unambiguous definition of human capital success—what success looks like when you have arrived? If so, is your performance to the vision improving year-over-year?

Source : Bradley W Hall, PhD. The new human capital strategy : improving the value of your most important investment—year after year.AMACOM. 2008

The Human Capital Theory (Bradley W Hall,PHD)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 26 Oct 2015 13:00:00 +0000

The first question to answer is: How does HR create business value?

Several years ago, while involved in a project with a large retail company’s HR department, I noticed that the labor law team was the largest corporate HR department. The company employed eight to ten times the number of labor lawyers per employee as its competitors, and four of its six corporate HR executives had been promoted from the legal department. Attorney telephone numbers were on the speed dial of every HR generalist, and daily decisions were routinely screened for legal exposure. HR generalists complained incessantly about the legal team obstructing their work, but the checking and approval process remained intact. What would you say was HR’s theory on how it added value to the business?

A second company I supported had been a lead company in a regulated industry for many years. In this company, the focus of HR staff meetings was policy and policy enforcement. Before meetings and on breaks, HR generalists playfully sparred with one another on policy details. “. . . That’s right, but she only gets 30 days if she has more than two years of tenure at a company merged before 2001.” Peers looked on and cheered as one bested the other. How might you describe the human capital theory at this company?

In the first company, the human capital theory was that lawsuits hurt the bottom line and brand equity. HR added business value by reducing the number of lawsuits. Actual data showed that the total spent in all employee-related legal costs was 1/10,000 of the company’s total revenue, a ratio consistent with competitors. Not only did the heavy legal staff not create best-in-class results, it blocked many efforts to improve productivity.

In the second company, the human capital theory was a legacy from a time when the company did not need productivity improvements. Such improvements were seen as creating excessive profits and spurring government-mandated price reductions. The human capital theory was that trouble-free operations were a result of stable processes and relationships. HR added business value in this closed system by improving employee perception of internal fairness and equity. HR executives at both companies talked about business value and strategic HR and truly believed it, but their activities, proj- ects, and decisions were rationally aligned to a deeper, unstated human capital theory. Outside hires who were brought in to add the missing strategic component were quickly rejected as their activities and decisions aligned to a different theory and were viewed as irrational.

What is your organization’s human capital theory? Here are a few ways to find out:

• Ask HR executives why they chose a certain decision. Continue asking why over and over until you hit the root.

• Look at the performance objectives of your boss and peers. If you distilled them down to a “main thing,” what would it be?

• Look at who gets promoted. What makes them stand out?

• Which are the most powerful HR departments?

• How does the Chief Human Resources Officer spend his/her time? What are the topics of the last ten to twenty all-points CHRO e-mails?

• Ask an HR professional, “What is the most important thing HR needs to get right?”

• Run an activity analysis on HR generalists.

The human capital theory you choose for your company will vary depending on your business circumstance. It is important that you surface and debate the theory as it is and will continue to drive the activities of every HR professional.

Source : Bradley W Hall, PhD. The new human capital strategy : improving the value of your most important investment—year after year.AMACOM. 2008

Today’s Approach to Human Capital Management (Bradley W Hall,Ph.D)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 21 Oct 2015 05:06:00 +0000

Today’s approach for improving workforce performance is failing. There are three reasons:
1. No one is accountable for year-over-year human capital performance.
2. Results require a system, not world-class programs.
3. Today’s HR model is misaligned to deliver business results.

Let’s look at each of these reasons.

No One Is Accountable

The head of manufacturing is accountable for year-over-year improvements in manufacturing productivity. The head of marketing is ac- countable for year-over-year changes in brand equity. The head of sales is responsible for revenue growth. But who is responsible for year-over- year improvements in the company’s most valuable asset—its people? Nobody. Line managers see HR as accountable, but HR sees itself ac- countable for programs that must be converted into business results by line managers. No one is in charge of human capital performance.

Systems, Not Programs

The HR profession is very adept at program development. Success is most often defined as creating and/or adopting best-practice programs, and HR is organized and managed accordingly. HR consulting firms align their practices with the way their clients are organized: They de- liver products and programs for HR subprofessions (such as training, staffing, and compensation). But the data is indisputable: Decades of new and better programs have not delivered great results. The reason is that “world-class programs” cannot deliver performance results. Only systems deliver results.

An automobile engine is a system that requires great parts. All parts must be fully integrated and aligned to the purpose of the engine, whether that be high performance or a fuel economy. A well-built en- gine uses just the right parts and no more. Likewise, succession plan- ning, training, and appraisal can be viewed as parts. Just as throwing pistons and spark plugs into an engine compartment will not deliver a satisfactory engine, neither will “world-class” HR programs deliver acceptable customer results. More and better HR programs will de- liver no better performance in the future than they have in the past. Performance results require a system.

A Misaligned Model
There is plentiful data demonstrating that HR is not delivering to expectations. The Economist’s “2006 CEO Briefing” cited HR as tied for the least important corporate function, the worst performing of all corporate functions, and second to last in importance for achieving business results for the next three years.4 In addition, the consulting company Accenture’s 2006 High Performance Workforce study found that only 5 percent of CEOs and 4 percent of CFOs are very satisfied with their human resource function.5 The same study indicated that 3 percent of CEOs and 4 percent of CFOs are very satisfied with their corporate learning function.6 The most important variable for business success is being managed by the least effective corporate function.

HR is not getting better. From 1995 to 2006, USC’s Center for Effective Organizations has monitored changes in the HR profession. Since 1995, each time participants were asked, how much time they spend on strategic activities today versus 5–7 years ago, the participants answered 9 to 10 percent. When the participants were asked how much time they currently spent on these activities, they answered 20 to 23 percent. Each time, participants said they spend twice as much time on strategic activities today than 5–7 years ago—to many, it feels like their job has changed, but it hasn’t. According to the data, they spent 21.9 percent of their time on strategic activities in 1995 and 23.5 percent in 2004—no significant change. The profession has talked about being strategic, trained for it, and outsourced administration to make room for more strategic work., but there has been very little change in the time spent on strategic activities or the perceived business added value of the function. What’s going on?

For decades, HR has claimed to be on a path to a more value- added function and has asked business leaders for time as it builds new capabilities. There is little convincing data to indicate that the profession’s current path is delivering more business value than in the past, and more time will not solve the problem.

Many line executives place the blame on a lack of accountability or substandard people. I disagree on both accounts. Neither more accountability nor different people will fix the problem. The problem is HR’s model—the structure, shared values, systems, and skills. Sure, HR programs are better, administration is being outsourced, and e-learning is replacing classroom learning. But these are all parts that fit the old engine. Today’s model has never changed, and it continues to produce precisely what it was originally designed to produce—good policies, programs, administration—but that’s not what today’s business leaders need. The solution is a new approach—a new Human Capital Strategy (HCS)—that delivers performance improvements that produce a sustained competitive advantage.

Source : Bradley W Hall, PhD. The new human capital strategy : improving the value of your most important investment—year after year.AMACOM. 2008

Career development issues

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 02:33:00 +0000

There is little question who is responsible for assessing training needs and planning strategies to meet these needs. Most organizations hold the supervisor responsible for seeing that subordinates are trained to do their jobs. However, assessing career goals and the education and skill development needed to achieve these goals is another matter. Who is responsible for employees’ career development is very often not clear.

In helping employees assess career goals and education and development needs, the supervisor has to decide how far his or her responsibility in career counseling extends and how far he or she is willing to go to provide help.

Most experts on career development believe the employee should have final responsibility for managing and developing his or her own career. The supervisor can help in many ways but should remain a helper–not a decision maker, but a facilitator of decisions. In this role, supervisors should follow good counseling practices:

• Ask questions

• Listen actively

• Provide information

• Help focus ideas

• Give feedback on strengths and weaknesses as they are perceived

• Refer the employee to other sources of information (and perhaps a professional career counselor if

needed and if available), and

• Assist the employee in developing action plans

Supervisors should avoid overdoing the following:

• Evaluating the employee’s future (as the supervisor sees it)

• Criticizing the employee’s evaluation of his or her own future

• Trying to solve the employee’s career problems, and

• Stating opinions about what the employee “should” do.

A potential problem in career development discussions is that of raising hopes about promotions. Many organizations and many supervisors avoid career discussions for this reason alone. They fear career development discussions will raise unrealistic expectations about promotion. Although many employees are not interested in promotions, this is indeed a possibility.

However, it can be dealt with by explaining very clearly to the subordinate what can and cannot be expected as outcomes of the discussions. For example, a supervisor could say to an employee: “Obviously, the more you develop your skills, the more prepared you will be if openings occur. But, frankly, there are no openings at present, and my main interest is to help you grow in your present job.”

Source : Cliff F. Grimes E-mail: cfg@accel-team.com http://www.accel-team.com/

A Learning Organization...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 02:29:00 +0000

· Is not a label but a philosophy to embrace;

· Nurtures new and expansive patterns of thinking;

· Sees reality objectively;

· Has the capacity to multilaterally create and focus upon a shared picture of the future;

· Has the ability for a team to synergistically produce extraordinary results through coordinated action;

· Is a workplace safe for thinking;

· Gives rewards for risk-taking...without intelligent risks, success becomes impossible;

· Is a powerful link between personal mastery and organizational success;

· Creates empowered teams that share, grow, and learn together;

· Has a full awareness of the power and relevance of “systems thinking”;

· Results in changes in our knowledge, beliefs, and behaviors;

· Enhances an organization’s capacity for innovation and growth;

· Turns crisis into opportunities;

· Has a norm energy, passion for the future, and capacity to take risks;

· Frequently asks “What if....” questions;

· Will envision possibilities and alternative scenarios;

· Will be looking for people excited about thinking through all aspects of “what is” at the present and “what could be” in the future.

(Jones, 1998)

Source : Doris “Katey” Walker,Extension Specialist.Family Resources and Public Policy. Kansas State University

LEADERSHIP IN A LEARNING ORGANIZATION

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 02:22:00 +0000

A Learning Organization can be defined as an organization where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning how to learn together (Senge, 1990).

Learning organizations use shared leadership principles to maximize their resources and develop leadership capacity within individuals. The organization can be described as one that learns continuously and transforms itself. Current literature on leadership development characterizes the leader as a coach, facilitator and guide. Images of leadership have shifted from expert, director, and controller to catalyst, information sharer, and coordinator.

Leadership in learning organizations is based on cooperative and collaborative partnership approaches.

Individuals and their actions are the basis of a learning organization. The culture of the organization, including its history, vision and mission, and both official and informal policies and procedures, forms the

context for individual activities and their impacts.

Senge described five disciplines:

1.) Systems Thinking;

2.) Personal Mastery;

3.) Mental Models;

4.) Building Shared Vision; and

5.) Team Learning as the foundation of a learning organization.

A similar view is expressed by Watkins & Marsick, 1993. Some basic characteristics are that learning takes place in individuals, teams, the organization, and even the communities with which the organization interacts. Learning is a continuous, strategically used process - integrated with, and running parallel to, work. Learning results in changes in knowledge, beliefs, and behaviors. Learning enhances organizational

capacity for innovation and growth. The organization has embedded systems to capture and share learning.

A comprehensive view of a learning organization is that it is an organization in which learning begins at the level of the individual, proceeds through the level of the team, and is internalized, codified and stored

at the level of processes and systems so well established that everyone who comes in contact with them is able to participate in them in a consistent manner.

Ten Action Steps you can take as an individual are to:

1.) Assess Your Learning Culture;

2.) Promote the Positive;

3.) Make the Workplace Safe for Thinking;

4.) Reward Risk-Taking;

5.) Help People Become Resources for Each Other;

6.) Put Learning Power to Work;

7.) Map Out the Vision;

8.) Bring the Vision to Life;

9.) Connect the Systems; and

10.) Get the Show on the Road

(Kline & Saunders, 1993).

Source : Doris “Katey” Walker,Extension Specialist.Family Resources and Public Policy. Kansas State University

Match employees to target customers

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 07:26:00 +0000

Every business interaction is ultimately between two people – an employee and customer, or the employee who designs the customer interface and that customer. Most high-performance business relationships are heavily influenced by emotional compatibility.

Therefore, the employee selection process should begin with carefully selecting employees who will first best match the targeted customers, then the company. Although we lack understanding of the emotional state of the customer at the beginning of an interaction, it is possible to hire for and then match emotional predispositions of employees, e.g. sales, service to particular customers. This entails matching employee human attributes with customer human attributes. After a firm segments their customers by human need, it can then match the emotional attributes of employees to emotional attributes of customers. One of the ways to accomplish this is through applying classic personality typing during employee screening. The firm can then hire ‘‘personalities’’ who best match how the firm delivers its value to a certain segment of customers.

When employee and customer human attributes are not matched, it is stressful to the employee and increases the chance that the customer will not be satisfied. In many cases, management will end up chastising the employee for apparent performance shortcomings when in fact it is simply a mismatch of emotional attributes between employee and customer. Matching can be accomplished by creating customer needs profiles and employee needs profiles for particular customer ‘‘need’’ segments and employee roles respectively. The critical component of matching employee to customer is the first focus on what emotional end state the customer desires; next is hiring employees whose natural ability is to create such an end state. This goes far beyond the conventional job description of roles and tasks. When customer/employee emotional matching is embedded into core hiring practices, not only does customer and employee fulfillment increase but so does employee efficiency and effectiveness.

Ultimately, employees’ ability to fulfill customers is determined by their inherent human characteristics. Below is a comparative table of people with high self-esteem versus low self-esteem illustrating this principle.

Employees with high self-esteem are:

1 Likely to think well of others.

2 Expect to be accepted by others.

3 Evaluate their own performance more favorably than people with low self-esteem.

4 Perform well when being watched: not afraid of others’ reactions.

5 Work harder for people who demand high standards of performance.

6 Inclined to feel comfortable with others they view as superior in some way.

7 Able to defend themselves against negative comments of others.

Employees with low self-esteem are:

1 Likely to disapprove of others.

2 Expect to be rejected by others.

3 Evaluate their own performance less favorably than people with high self-esteem.

4 Perform poorly when being watched: sensitive to possible negative reaction.

5 Work harder for undemanding, less critical people.

6 Feel threatened by people they view as superior in some way.

7 Have difficulty defending themselves against others’ negative comments; more easily influenced.

(Adapted from Don E. Hamachek, Encounters with the Self, 2nd edn (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1982), pp. 3–5)

Source : Costumers are People, The Human touch. John Mckean 2002