Performance and engagement, nosey HR and strategic pivot points in this week's Three To See.
The relationship between Performance Management and Employee Engagement is neatly illustrated in the Dilbert cartoon below - my first pick of the week.
My second pick, Facebook Is None of HR's Business, was posted by FrankRoche to the KnowHR blog and is entertainingly forthright. The snippets below give a flavour of Roche's rant:
"I have some news for you, HR. You have no business looking at your employees’ Facebook posts. Ever."
And:
"Stop being little Facebook Stalkers and get back to the real work of HR. Solve problems. Help managers be good managers. Then get out of the way. Being an HR Voyeur is just so icky"
Are you an HR voyeur? Is Roche right?
My third pick came via the bNET blog. In HBR Ideacast: The Science of Human Capital, a 14 minute audio interview, Julie Devoll interviews John Boudreau, author of “Beyond HR: The New Science of Human Capital.” about the pivot points that link corporate strategy to talent strategy. Boudreau does a good job of bringing the concept to life by describing how Disney Corporation has adopted this thinking.
You'll need to zoom in (Ctrl+) to see the details but the colour coding helps to give an at-a-glance overview of 10 of the most well known brands.
My second pick appeared on Malaysia Tomorrow and was authored by Sara LaForest and Tony Kubica. In Succession Planning: How to Meet Future Talent Needs the authors provide 3 reasons "why you need to immediately implement a succession planning strategy":
In Three To See this week contributions on changing behaviours, workforce planning and research into how companies are using social media.
My first pick is Clay Shirky's 2005 Ted Talk: Institutions vs Collaboration. Its a fascinating presentation about value creation that touches on the Pareto Principle (AKA the 80/20 rule), employee engagement, performance management and the cross-over of social and human capital. Is it really five years old?
My second pick, Recruiting Needs to be Part of Something Bigger was posted by Kevin Wheeler to ERE. Wheeler shares his views on the state of Strategic Workforce Planning and offers up four recommendations.
"An effective workforce planning process should focus on the following four areas:
Gaining market awareness in order to better understand emerging trends and to do competitive analysis around skilled talent.
Integration of talent planning with business planning so that business needs can be translated into needed skills and abilities and so that an understanding of available skills can be included in the business plan.
Development of a system-level focus on identifying key positions and integrating employee development, internal mobility, succession planning, and recruiting.
The use of scenario planning and dynamic modeling to help focus activity and justify investments in a variety of approaches"
"Rockstars", employee engagement and peeping on personal (social network) profiles in this week's Three To See.
My first pick came via Chris Ferdinandi who posted The Brand is the Talent to the Renegade HR blog. The post features the clip below of Tom Peters presenting on "a thing called Leadership".
Sticking with heavy hitters, my second pick: Control is waste & trust drives value creation was posted to The Content Economy blog by Oscar Berg who positions his post with a quote from Gary Hamel:
"It's standard practice at many companies to conceal information as a way of controlling employees - a formula that's toxic to trust" - Hamel
Berg then writes:
"Trust is the fuel for any enterprise. Trust in your purpose, trust in your peers, trust in yourself.
Trust drives value creation.
Control is a sign of trust failure. Control does not add value. Control is waste. Control restricts value-creation. It is something management adds when they don't trust their employees to perform as expected."
Adding:
"We must help management to redefine their purpose, making it about empowering colleagues instead of controlling employees."
He ends with another quote, this time from Peter Drucker:
“In the knowledge economy everyone is a volunteer, but we have trained our managers to manage conscripts." - Drucker
This week's Three To See is solely social with posts on the decline of the website as the single point of online audience engagement and the need for organisations to embrace Enterprise 2.0.
Hepburn provides some interesting graphs, such as the one above, that shows the rise in social media traffic (red line) against the decline in traffic to destination websites (blue line) and suggests that the reasons for these trends are:
"Social Networks (obviously) are growing and most people prefer to hang out there instead of searching the big brands websites for content to interact with. Your friends on Facebook and Twitter share what you’re already interested in. Everything is relevant and you don’t have to leave to get the best content from 10 of your favourite brands / websites.
Off-Site Content Distribution is rapidly growing, I’m talking RSS Feeds, Twitter, YouTube Channels, Facebook Fan pages and so on… All the best brands and websites now actively push their content (the same stuff you use to get from their website and still want to access) to as many various “off-site” sources and platforms as possible.So naturally this removes unique visitors from their main sites, channeling them into a maze of various networks, feeds and tweets…Oh, and ofcourse, widgets/apps – we’ve only just seen the start of these."
In the post Hepburn goes on to make observations about what organisations need to do to connect with target audiences in an increasingly distributed environment and what that means for the corporate website and microsites.
In The Uber-Connected Organization: A Mandate for 2010 posted to Harvard Business Publishing this week, Jeanne C Meister and Karie Willyerd put forward an excellent case for organisations sponsoring use of social media, citing three business benefits:
Access to social media improves productivity
Companies that provide access to social media create a more engaged workforce
Millenials will seek jobs that encourage the use of social media
The last of these points reminded me of something that I heard at the HR Technology Conference - Day 1. In the HR Technology Doesn't Stop In a Down Economy session a panellist was describing a conversation with a candidate who was adamant that he needed access to his social network at work, explaining that he had attended a top University, then completed his MBA at another prestigious institution and not having access to such a valuable support group could hamper his performance. I think its a great point - by the same token, would organisations stop employees from interacting with peers in other organisations such as professional bodies?
If you don't buy the arguments put forward by Meister and Willyerd, there are useful references to related research in a recent whitepaper from Messagelabs: Is Social Networking Really Bad For Business?
The whitepaper (available through Computing.co.uk) not only suggests some of the benefits of Enterprise 2.0 but also highlights some of the risks in terms of productivity, cost, security, legal and brand impacts.
The paper concludes that use of social tools in the work place is unavoidable and that organisations need to accept this and develop sensible and acceptable ways of mitigating the risk.
The majority of HR-related-posts about the "evils of social media" tend to be based around the issues of trust and productivity and so I have to ask - are these the concerns of organisations that lack appropriate performance management processes?
