In Three To See this week we look to the impending challenges of acquiring, retaining and managing talent in the short, medium and long-term.
The Economist Intelligence Unit's report: Companies at a Crossroads is based on a December 2009 survey of over 400 senior managers in major organisations from across the world.
Amongst the findings of the report, which was sponsored by StepStone, it would appear that executives have identified economic recovery, credit availability and the availability of talent as the top three priorities for growth and are planning to tackle this by investing in Performance Management (46%), leadership Development (41%) and Training and Development (36%) in 2010.
41% of respondents agreed they have a shortage of talent in their organisation
44% agreed they find it increasingly difficult to recruit talented employees
50% plan to ramp up recruitment over the coming year; only 18% still plan to reduce or freeze headcounts
Only 16% of line managers said that staff were fully engaged with the business, yet this is not recognised in many boardrooms, with 38% of CEOs saying that trust is ‘high’.
The report suggests that a workforce increasingly dominated by older staff, with changing motivations for staying with an employer, is compunding these issues, adding to talent retention problems for managers in companies that fail to recognise the different priorities of young and old workers. For example 50% of younger workers cited career development as their biggest priority, but in the over 50s this dropped to just 1%. Conversely almost 40% of older workers cited non-salary benefits as important, dropping to just 2% among 20-30 year-olds.
Matthew Parker, Managing Director of StepStone Solutions commented on the report:
"It is particularly worrying to see low trust among middle-level employees going hand in hand with low graduate recruitment and an ongoing demand for senior executive talent. Left unaddressed these problems constitute a perfect storm for businesses, as the most capable employees head for the exit and fresh talent is not recruited. These trends have serious, long-term implications for any business in a recovering economy and they require urgent attention."
The Coming Talent War: Young, Global, Diverse posted by Josh Bersin echoes some of these points suggesting that readers think about some of the factors that will influence what Bersin describes as the "new war for talent:”
Age: Every single organization (of any size), is going to become squeezed by the eventual retirement of the baby boomers and the need to compete for young professionals and managers
Diversity: Every workgroup, team, and leadership pool will be far more diverse than today. This means that diversity must be included in our talent management strategy, not in some “compliance group” in the organization.
Under and Un-skilled: More than 30% of the employers studied in a recent report by ASTD state that their new college graduates do not have the basic skills to enter their workforce without some form of remediation. Typical skills they need include communication, critical thinking, self-learning, and writing. We, as employers, are just going to have to deal with this and spend more time and money on remedial training, basic skills development, and partnerships with local universities and community colleges.
Youth Orientated: The turnover rate among workers under 30 is nearly twice the turnover of older workers. I do not believe this is because they are fundamentally different – rather I think our organizations have become too “old-oriented.” As we get older and have families we focus more on benefits, stability, progression, and other needs. We need to “youngify” the workplace we create.
In this context, Seth Godin's post on schooling; It's easier to teach compliance than initiative was interesting to me, not least for the parallels that can be drawn with the role of HR. Godin opines that:
"Compliance is simple to measure, simple to test for and simple to teach. Punish non-compliance, reward obedience and repeat."
He then goes on to observe that:
"The economy has rewritten the rules, and smart organizations seek out intelligent problem solvers. Everything is different now. Except the part about how much easier it is to teach compliance."
"The recency bias error occurs when an assessor (i.e. recruiter, hiring manager, etc.) is overly affected by information that was presented later (more recently) rather than earlier in any given selection process. In contrast, the primacy bias error occurs when an assessor’s selection is made based on information that was presented earlier (primary information) rather than later in a process. And although the effects appear symmetrically opposing, the research shows that they occur because of different reasons, and that their implications can differ drastically. They are not equal but opposite."
He goes on to say that:
"The body of research points to two process models on how decisions are made in the interview process. The first we will describe is the step-by-step (SbS) decision-making model, and the second is the end-of sequence (EoS) decision-making model. We call those models response modes."
My third pick is Jon Ingham's post to Human Capital League: Developing New Talent Management Strategies for 2010. In the post Ingham shares the highlights of two recent pieces of research; IRS Employment Review’s HR roles and responsibilities: the 2010 IRS survey and PWC's 13th Annual Global CEO Survey and provides some interesting anecdotes and stats such as this from PWC: "78% (of CEO's) plan to changes their talent management strategies in the wake of the financial crisis" .
PWC asserts that: "CEOs have begun to reshape not only their strategies, but also their capabilities. It takes strategic flexibility to address risk at a deeper level. And it takes organisational agility to respond to volatility. That doesn’t mean CEOs will become risk averse; rather, they may become more deliberate in examining alternatives, formulating a Plan B, and ensuring they can execute on it"
Ingham himself opines:
"I’m not sure HR appreciates the scale of the challenge (or the opportunity). CEOs want you to make a difference, if you’ve got the ambition and imagination to do this!
The change isn’t all about restructuring and engagement. CEOs want to increase investment in talent management, but they want to manage talent differently too."
In this week's Three To See: Productivity, performance and changing expectations.
There is a touch of levity in my first pick which comes via Andy Headworth's blog Sirona Says: Xerox'sInformation Overload Syndrome video raises some serious points on productivity and performance wrapped-up in genuine comedy (although I'm not comfortable with the dart scene at the end).
Holincheck skims the touch points in the employment lifecycle where performance factors (Hiring/Onboarding, Learning/Development, Career Path/Planning, Succession Planning and Compensation) and determines that:
"The answer, to me, is not to get rid of the performance review. It is to do a better job of appraising performance and communicating with employees."
He goes on to share the following options:
Get rid of forced ranking, but keep calibration
Make sure that total compensation alignes with performance, value delivered, and the market
Find other ways to recognize the highest performance other than just compensation
Keep an ongoing performance dialogue going
Before concluding that:
"The bottom line is that I do not think performance reviews will go away because the feedback loop is critical to talent management success. What needs to improve is the performance conversation. Technology can help in some respects, but managers and executives need to step up their game."
Kevin Wheeler's post to ERE: Why Recruiting Good People Will Get Harder and Harder explores the changing attitudes to work of some professionals who are choosing blended careers over full-time work with a single organisation.
This phenomenon, fuelled by recent experiences of the recession, see's some workers engaged in multiple jobs, partial self-employment or other self-sustaining activity that acts as a hedge against economic uncertainty and engenders lifestyle resilience.
Wheeler observes that:
"Individuals are finding new freedoms and exploring their own capacity and taste for change and entrepreneurism. Some organizations are looking for ways to adapt to all of this without endangering their own success, but it may be that these two different needs are not compatible. We will find out over the next 10 years or less. Certainly manufacturing firms and companies where hands-on work is required will not be able to flex to these changes. They will face friction between the workers whose jobs allow them to be virtual or part-time or flex-time and those whose work does not."
This week's Three To See features contributions on employee loyalty, motivation and succession planning.
My first pick comes from NBC's comedy The Office: An American Workplace (which I prefer to the British original). Episode 8 of Season 2 is a classic and deals with Dunder Mifflin's annual performance review day. One of the characters, Dwight Schrute, delivers this stunning line:
"Would I ever leave this company? Look, I'm all about loyalty. In fact, I feel like part of what I'm being paid for here is my loyalty. But if there were somewhere else that valued loyalty more highly, I'm going wherever they value loyalty the most. "
Roesler shares some interesting observations on how Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs model has been mangled by some managers and suggests that:
"1. Physiological and Stability/Safety needs are met through corporate policies: adequate pay, benefits, and safety procedures. These are satisfied when organizations who claim "People Are Our Most Important Asset" back up the statement by ensuring that these needs are met as a matter of policy and philosophy.
2. The higher level needs can only be satisfied by assignments, development, and solid day-to-day management. This means that "Managers are the Mediators of Meaning" for their people. Surveys and research data consistently show that the immediate supervisor has the most impact on one's performance, productivity, and feelings about the workplace."
"There are three reasons to do a succession plan, and identifying a replacement for the CEO and select top executives is only part of one of these reasons. The three reasons are:
Replacement for key employees
To support anticipated growth
To address and deal with talent shortages"
Kubica and LaForest expand upon each of these three points and make several recommendations to managing succession:
Assign responsibility for succession planning to the executive team members (and make its success part of their evaluation process)
Identify needs/key roles currently and in the future that reflect several layers deep
Develop and use methods/tools/techniques for identifying employee competencies and aspirations
Implement a structure for developing potential successors
Implement a structure for transitioning successors to and in new role(s)
Identify and emergency or interim process to fulfill a role if for some reason the potential successor does not work out.
Align your recruitment initiative to succession planning by forecasting key needs and interviewing for growth orientation and adaptability
Evaluate plan effectiveness and update the plan as required, at least annually
"Our old reality focused on the individual. Our "New Normal" focuses on the 'network', or the collection of individuals, as well as what flows between them. Where the "War for Talent" is dying, "War for the Network" is emerging."
I was a little concerned when Letourneau introduced Newtons' 2nd Law, "Force equals Mass times Acceleration" (F = MA), as a means of explaining the thesis (Physics has never been one of my strengths) but it proved to be a useful device:
"Let's say Force (F) correlates to the ability to get things done. Mass (M) correlates to "Human Capital", while Acceleration (A) speaks to "Social Capital", or the ability to quickly mobilize the network.
Let's look at 3 candidates:
"Candidate A (M = 8, A = 4). F = MA, or F = 8x4 = 32.
Candidate B (M = 5, A = 7). F = MA, or F = 5x7 = 35.
Candidate C (M = 7, A = 5). F = MA, or F = 7x5 = 35."
I think its a helpful contribution to the conversation that some in the HCM community, such as Jon Ingham, have been engaged in.
Libby Sartain posted Academic Evidence: Layoffs Are Bad For Business! to the Brand for Talent blog. In the post Sartain shares recent work by Jeff Pfeffer, a professor of organisational behaviour, whose research indicates that:
Layoffs do not reduce costs
Layoffs do not raise a company's stock price
Layoffs do not increase productivity
Layoffs do not increase profits
Companies do not permanently get rid of the employees
Layoffs do nothing to strengthen the organization
Sartain adds an observation of her own: "Layoffs weaken an organization's employer and consumer brand." Interesting opinions - I wonder how they compare with the recent experiences of many HR pros?
My first pick comes from NBC's comedy The Office: An American Workplace (which I prefer to the British original). 
