If you haven’t been bitten by the Periscope bug yet, let me coax you to join me this upcoming Thursday, 10/22 as I kick off my weekly Periscope show: “Ask Czarina Live”. This will be an opportunity for me to tackle topics both in the HR realm and some things that may be a little bit more mainstream. Either way, I’m looking forward to connecting with you (my readers) and others on a different level.
To date, I have braved my way through over 20 Periscope videos. I can assure you each have been recorded with the same spirit and heart as this blog. I’m not claiming to be a “guru”,”ninja”, or ” a professional who will teach you how to make a million dollars in one day”. What I can promise you is information and dialogue that is truthful and helpful. Sound too simple? Then, this may not be the show for you. That’s all I have. I am willing to share what has helped me to be successful in various aspects of my life- in the hopes that it may help you as well.
Whether it is sharing my thoughts on keeping it together during crazed days of parenting to the latest world of work headline, I will be spending 30 minutes with you every Thursday sharing my thoughts and taking your questions. There are so many topics and so little time to capture it all in blog posts. Sometimes you just want to chat with good people about ideas and things going on in your life in real-time.
1) 15 minutes of dialogue around my topic of choice.
2) 15 minutes Q&A on any topic you choose to probe me about.
This week’s topic is: What Would It Take For An Employer To Keep You?
There was a recent article by Inc.com called: “Do These 8 Things and Your Employees Will Never Want to Leave“. It simply lists 8 actions that employers should take to retain their employees. It’s an interesting read and worth exploring on Periscope to see if any of it matters a lot or just a little. There are many valuable points in the article and yet there is at least one that makes me uncomfortable. We will explore why and I hope to hear your thoughts and rebuttals as well.
Join me on Thursday at 11pm EST/10pm CST/8pm PST for the first ever “Ask Czarina Live”. In addition to viewing it on Periscope, within the 24-hour window allotted, I will be posting the replays of “Ask Czarina Live” to “The Aristocracy of HR” You Tube Channel for those of you not ready to take the Periscope plunge.
It’s going to be fun, fresh, and insightful. I look forward to seeing you there.
Want more? Click here to watch the latest “Ask Czarina” episode. Subscribe to “The Aristocracy of HR” You Tube Channel to be notified when new episodes are published.
Today’s guest author is: Joanne Rencher, Founder of WGN in HR and Chief People Officer for Girl Scouts of USA.
Blow up HR. Disrupt it. Embed it in the business. Outsource all of it. Move HR Operations somewhere else in the company. Don’t talk about it so much. Talk more about it.
This article is tackling none of that. It’s all about you, HR professional.
Twenty-three years ago I was thrust into the world of business with only a dream and a belief that I could change the world. One bond insurance company, global NGO, consulting stint and two iconic institutions later – I still believe that. My dream has always been to lead. I view it as the highest calling in business. It is a responsibility to take others where there may not want to go, but need to be, as Rosalynn Carter once said.
The HR Journey (the field, but not the person)
The field of HR itself is a televised revolution of sorts. It has moved from 20th personnel administration and compliance as its textbook definition, to acquiring different territory with 21st century character. ‘Strategic business partner’ and ‘change agent’ increasingly reflect the fine lines of this newer model. Dave Ulrich, a leader in business and champion of HR, continues to push the envelope around how the field must stay relevant. In discussing one of his more recent books, ‘HR from the Outside In: Six Competencies for the Future of Human Resources’, Ulrich noted that ‘for the last 20 years, we have been enamored with “strategic” HR where the strategy is a mirror that reflects what HR should focus on. We now believe that HR should look through the strategy to the outside world. Strategy becomes a window on both the general business conditions and on specific stakeholder expectations so that HR can connect their work to external factors.’
However, as this wonderful evolution continues and businesses come to realize the importance of data analytics in their HR functions, and the next wave of marketing-based talent acquisition – HR leaders seem, in a word….stuck. In fact, I fear that the dreams of HR leaders to aspire to new and different heights are being deferred. What happens to a dream deferred? Langston Hughes has already explored the possibilities: rotted dreams, dried up dreams, those which fester or perhaps explode. We mustn’t let that happen.
Our HR Journey (the person beyond the field)
With amazing talent and skills in organizational effectiveness, talent development, and transformational leadership – in theory and practice – there should be far more HR professionals moving through the ranks of senior leadership, within and outside of HR.
The dearth of leadership development focus and opportunities is supported by a global executive survey recently released by Korn Ferry. The study, which included over 700 executives, asked about the state of professional development for human resource managers within their organizations.
Roughly two-thirds said that development programs for senior HR leaders were not “as rigorous” as programs for leaders of other functions in their organizations.
More to the point, just over half of respondents said HR people were considered for high-potential programs, but nearly 60 percent said there was no succession plan for their organization’s CHRO!
From Shoemaker to Runway
HR is the classic case of the shoemaker’s children. We take care of everyone else to the neglect of ourselves. But, it’s more than just benign neglect. I believe it’s the need to break the paradigm….that, in fact, is the thing which must be blown up.
I founded Who’s Got Next in HR?, Inc. (WGNinHR) to do exactly that. We’re blowing up the paradigm that says how rare it is for HR professionals to go to higher heights – whatever that means. The vision of WGNinHR (www.wgninhr.com) is to create the tools, the soil and practical advice for the tired, innovative, ambitious and business-oriented HR professional looking for ‘what’s next’.
No one will do it for us. We must create and sustain this movement ourselves. In fact, I often describe WGNinHR as a ‘Movement’. The world of business needs more C-Suite leaders – including CEOs – who have rich HR backgrounds and can lead through the toughest of terrains.
So, as you’re waiting for the next new model or opinion on the field of HR, abandon the ‘seat-at-the-table’ conversations and start setting the table. Join the movement!
Joanne Rencher Biography
With more than 22 years of experience across the profit, non-profit, domestic and global arenas, Joanne brings a wealth of executive leadership experience to her roles. She currently serves as the Chief People Officer of the national office of the Girl Scouts of the USA – the preeminent leadership development organization for girls – and is a member of the executive team. With a passion for developing business leaders across the HR field, Joanne recently founded Who’s Got Next in HR?, Inc. (WGNinHR) to challenge conventional wisdom around career paths for HR professionals. Joanne holds a B.S. in Business, Management and Economics from the State University of New York’s Empire State College.
We evolve as we go or so we hope. When I have led HR Technology implementations in the past, my recommendations have been countered at times by word-of-mouth recommendations and/or reports by some of “human capital” firms who make it a practice of regurgitating the same HR Technology vendors in their HR Tech state of the union reports year-after-year. I think we can all agree having more information readily available has not necessarily meant for more qualitative information. In fact, I would say it is harder than ever to find a reliable, factual or useful piece of information.
The “Best-In-Class” Racket
I have read many reports on HR Technology and how players in each segment stack up. As an HR practitioner, user and HRIS Analyst, I was often dumbfounded by the results I was seeing in these reports for the following reasons:
1) Many of the HR Tech vendors that have been touted as being “best-in-class” were the most troublesome to implement, lacked in customer service and many other attributes that would be important to consider when shopping for and implementing a new system. 2) The HR Tech vendors that were providing service as specified or even exceeded customer expectations were often left of this “best-in-class” roster or given marginal ratings. How? 3) Very little of the information presented in the reports I was reading resulted from a significant sampling of actual customers who have had the experience of working with these vendors.
Users Trump All
If you are going to position your company to influence consumers on HR Technology purchases via the reports, analysis and data you provide, you better make sure that you have got the experience right from the ground floor where the practitioners live and breath with the technology daily. Part of the issue with evaluating HR Technology is as follows:
1)Too many companies rush to make hasty purchasing decisions without carefully considering teams, resources and the product’s compatibility with their processes-resulting in a lot of poorly implemented systems. 2)At the enterprise level, you have extreme variability in approach and execution with regard to sales and implementation teams with a specific HR Tech vendor. That means that, I could have a great sales and implementation team for Vendor “X” in NY; but my colleague in Minnesota will have a different team and likely a difference in experience. Different teams are fine. Variability in approach and execution from an organizational and branding perspective is not.
The G2 Crowd Difference
I believe I have encountered a report that is as true to the users experience as it is evaluating HR Tech vendors performance. The company that produces the report is called G2 Crowd. I have made their reports available here before. Their use of crowdsourced feedback from actual users makes for a far different report than I have seen. Finally, I am reading a report on Core HR or Recruiting Software and I’m not cringing at most of the results.
They published their Core HR report in July and I am comfortable with most of their results. I say “comfortable” because there are at least two systems I am not intimately familiar with – so I have to go by their evaluation. Below I share the “Core HR category” grid; but before we get there- some transparency for you. While I love a lot about this report and G2 Crowd, I have to tell you that I have not been paid by them to share this information. As always, I merely seek to keep you aware of the best of the best in HR, HR Technology etc.
What does Core HR represent?
Core HR is defined in this report as the following: systems that automate organization management, expense management, salary structures, benefits administration and time tracking. Below you will find G2 Crowd’s grid for depicting how Core HR vendors stacked up. If you are in the market for a new Core HR system and would like to purchase the entire report of customer-sourced feedback- visit G2 Crowd’s site here.
I have personally combed through their reports and found it to be a valuable asset to have when deciding which vendors to engage based on your company’s needs. Consider making this investment next time you are in the market for an end-to-end Core HR system. I can honestly say I wish I would have had something like this during the implementations I have been involved in.
On Wednesday, Steve Levy and I kicked off the first of three webcasts hosted by College Recruiter called: Honest Diversity Conversations. The aim of these webcasts is to step outside of the realm of the typical diversity conversations. We want to open the eyes of business owners and HR practitioners alike to the issues and missed opportunities that exist when we don’t consider the impact of what’s going on in society, their homes and most importantly the impact of our policies and procedures.
One of the questions we didn’t get to was:
“Speaking of the racially-fueled riots in cities around the US, we can imagine most companies being tight-lipped about what was going on. In your opinion, does the company have a duty to address social issues of the moment?”
Allow me to answer. Remaining tight-lipped about the racially-fueled topics of late is both a mistake and missed opportunity. When 9/11 happened 14 years ago, there was not a person that I encountered at work or after 5pm that did not want to discuss what happened. I suspect that was the case because we were so blind-sided by the event. However, I also believe it was a constant conversation because it was not just an attack on one demographic; but an attack on people from all walks of life.
The fact is unless an event affects the majority we tend to ignore it or minimize it. Likewise in HR, we tend to ignore racial undertones, sentiments and even discriminatory speech until it is a bigger problem. In my opinion, companies have a duty to speak up about atrocities in society. However, I’d like to add that it is really a matter of preference and what you want to be known for. If you care that your employees see you as a company that genuinely cares about the trajectory of the human race; you may be inclined to tackle this. Conversely, if you don’t see current events or news headlines as connected to your business this may not be something you would address. Either way, all of us in HR must remember that silence is as much of an answer as a carefully crafted one.
If any of these recent events directly affect any portion of your workforce, they will remember your laughter and never-ending chatter during the typical and often-times nonsensical water cooler discussions. They will also remember that you said nothing- if that is what you choose. Both are equally damaging as we live in a time where social responsibility is an expected business competency.
Compliance and legal considerations aside, we work in the human side of business where it is inherently required that we ensure the well-being of our employees. It is our duty to see that people can come to work everyday as a whole person affected by the elements of life and society without judgment.
Steve and I had a spirited conversation about everything from HR not having the guts to have these conversations to why most diversity programs lack on this webcast. We hope you will join us for the remaining two webcasts. You can register here.
Check out the webcast replay below and join the conversation.
Want even more? Check out my preview of the “Honest Diversity Conversations” webcast series on “The Voice of Jobseekers” Podcast here.
I had the pleasure of attending SHRM National last week in Las Vegas, Nevada as a member of the blogger team. I found this year’s theme to be interesting. They chose: “thrive”. To set the stage for what I’m about to say, let’s examine the meaning of “thrive” by definition. Thrive means: “to grow, develop or flourish”. When I think of this in the context of HR, I take this year’s theme to mean that: HR must no longer just exist, but grow, develop and flourish as it seeks to be a key authority on the management of people.
There were no shortage of sessions geared towards helping HR achieve just that. Starting with Marcus Buckingham’s keynote, his talk was all about how most of our processes are flawed in HR. For instance, Performance Management is a flawed HR process. Let’s start with the fact that we conduct reviews once a year and couple that with the forced ratings and curves we impose on our employees. Marcus shares that this method not only does a disservice to the employee, but “says much more about the rater than the person being rated”. Additionally, the flawed data that results from those reviews leads to flawed decision-making which will inevitably hurt your retention efforts. I noticed a lot of people nodding their heads in concurrence with what Marcus was saying. However, the bigger question isn’t do we as HR practitioners concur, but what are we going to do about it?
The overall message from his talk was: Recognize the inherent flaws that exist when a human being is put in a position to manage and even evaluate another person’s work. Moreover, there needs to be a focus on a person’s strengths rather than their flaws. Performance Management as it stands is geared towards finding flaws in work behavior and tailoring performance improvement around those deficits. The baseline for improvement should come from an examination of strengths first not deficits.
The next session I attended was with Gregg Tate, Senior Vice President of Human Resources for Adidas. His talk was all about Adidas’s “New Way Of Work” concept. Adidas is already planning for 2020. During two separate instances at SHRM National, I shared with IBM that part of what HR suffers from when it comes to strategy is being bogged down in the details and fires of the day. I am 100% comfortable saying that the average Talent Acquisition group is so busy filling requisitions, managing hires, and chasing hiring managers that they have very little time to plan for the next year let alone five years from now. It’s not a matter of whether they have the interest in workforce planning- they do. The issue is: tactics. If you are so preoccupied with the present that you can never get beyond the present day’s struggles- you will find it hard to achieve what Adidas is proposing. Nevertheless, Adidas has a clear vision for how they plan to manage their people over the next five years and it is as follows:
1) Provide meaningful reasons for people to join their company and stay.
2) Deploy role models that inspire.
3) Bring forward fresh and diverse perspectives.
4) Create an organizational climate that empowers employees to make a difference.
If this sounds like pie-in-the-sky, I will respectfully disagree and remind you that engagement is stagnant as SHRM speaker Richard Finnegan pointed out in a private blogger briefing. I will also share one of my favorite quotes of the conference from Gregg Tate at Adidas which is : “The War for Talent is over. The talent won.” You have heard from me before about why I think the whole “war on talent” thing is employer propaganda. If you don’t believe that “meaningful work experiences” and “role models” make a difference I challenge you to conduct a very unscientific survey of your people by asking them if they feel their current job has a purpose and/or meaning. Whether they answer “yes” or “no”, it provides you with a window of opportunity to ask them about what does or would provide meaning or purpose in their current positions. If they can answer that question without further probing you are on the right track. If enough of them cannot answer that question easily, you may have a workforce in need of one or more of the four pillars to Adidas’s New Way Of Work concept or perhaps something else.
It is clear that success for HR is grounded in our ability to adapt to the rapid change and innovation we are seeing. Additionally, we need to be able to evolve with the times creating processes and procedures only where needed. More importantly, our call-to-action is to ensure that the right people continue to walk through the door and can be retained. One of the key ways that HR can try to ensure retention is through “stay interviews”. Richard Finnegan, CEO of C-Suite Analytics says: “we need to stop conducting exit interviews and start implementing regular stay interviews” to get a head start on retention in your organization. He suggests that new hires be debriefed twice within the first year so we can deal with any concerns or issues they have before they begin thinking about an exit strategy. Mr. Finnegan also shared that the immediate supervisors of employees should be held accountable to conduct these stay interviews.
This was one of many instances at the conference where there was an emphasis on line management accountability. HR may have oversight over stay interviews as a process, but would lose any direct governance over administering it. Who knows or should know their people better than the line manager? This marks an important shift in HR governance whereby we will likely have to start delegating some of the duties that we have traditionally handled to the departments. Does it make us obsolete to do so- not really? After working with hiring managers for years, I am certain they don’t want all of our burdens.
SHRM is correct. We need to continue to grow, and flourish as a profession, Part of the growing up and flourishing is grounded in discomfort. This discomfort is the sweet spot where we get out of the mindset and practice of doing what we have always done and start challenging the status quo. We have to execute. There was more than enough data to support the need for us to raise the stakes in our organizations. If it doesn’t work, change it. If people are unhappy, find out why. If productivity is suffering, have a conversation. We can no longer afford to sit idly by while society and work progresses beyond our grasps. Managing people is what we do; now all we have to do is own it.
Thanks to SHRM for a great conference and thought-provoking speakers. We now have more than enough food-for-thought to power us through the remainder of 2015 and into 2016.
Technology is evolving rapidly. HR Technology is a subsection of this innovation, and is also evolving rapidly in its own right. In addition to rapid expansion, HR Technology appears to be lucrative as well. According to a 2014 Forbes Article by Josh Bersin, the HR Technology market is a $15 billion dollar market. With that kind of money backing this industry, there are endless options and opportunities for both for HR Tech companies and potential buyers.
With more and more leaders shifting their focus to talent management strategies, having the right technology working for you is an operational imperative. The trouble with having all of these choices and options at our fingertips is it is overwhelming. From experts to reports, whitepapers and admittedly bloggers like me- it can be confusing to digest all of the tips, tricks and advice that is out there.
The purchase of HR Technology is one of the larger investments we make in HR. In many organizations, the request to purchase technology is enough to make your CFO gasp and that is even with the proper justification backing the request. If you’re going to invest money in new technology to facilitate your operations; it would make sense to do your homework on the market to ensure you are making the right investment.
You may be thinking ” well that’s obvious, Janine”. My experience has taught me that companies are not as dedicated to a proper selection and implementation process as you may think. More often than not, the purchase of HR Technology is lead by good intentions, distorted by unrealistic expectations and compromised by flawed decisions. One of the things that drives me mad about organizations is: when they choose a provider based on market presence or some other arbitrary factor without holistically considering other important factors like: customer satisfaction, customer retention, their specific niche, and how the technology will improve or facilitate operations etc. Instead, they end up making the wrong decision or poorly implementing a good system, because they were unclear about their requirements. Additionally, they forget to spend a fair amount of time thinking about the inherent limitations and opportunities involved with the purchase. The criteria I mention are just a few of the many things that should be considered when looking to purchase HR Technology. As an HR practitioner and potential buyer, half your battle is understanding how important it is to give yourself and your team adequate time to evaluate your HR Technology of choice before purchasing.
Now for some help…
Recently, I was fortunate enough to receive the G2 Crowd Grid for Recruiting Software from my friends at Ultimate Software. While it should not be your sole data point for deciding what to choose- it is certainly a step in the right direction towards making sensible HR Technology purchases. Perusing this report, you will find scores for satisfaction, market presence, number of ratings etc. You can even compare HR Tech providers to see how they stack up when it comes to implementations, contract terms and pricing.
If you are in the market for a new ATS or other HR Technology-this report is worth reviewing. You may even be surprised to find out who is leading the HR Technology landscape at the moment- I know I was. I will hint that some of my favorite Recruiting Technology providers are finally receiving the kudos they deserve.
You can get a glimpse of the report below. The grid as pictured below shows how Recruiting Technology providers stack up when it comes to ‘satisfaction’.
