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
Brian Chappell of Ignite Social Media shared geographic, demographic and traffic data from the 2009 Social Network Analysis Report's look at more than forty social networks. The data is displayed in a series of easy to understand charts with brief analysis on each of the social networks included in the report - useful information for anyone using 'social' for talent acquisition.
Staying with social, if you are thinking about using social media for pre-employment background checks then Steve Bruce's post to the HR Daily Advisor blog; Background Checks on Myspace - Dangerous or Due Dilligence is worth reading - not least for some of the sensational examples of what employers have found when conducting internet searches.
I hope that you enjoy this weeks Three To Read - if you'd like more, please see what else I've bookmarked at http://delicious.com/craigendicott.
This guest post comes from Josh Bersin, CEO and President of Bersin & Associates, a US Research and Advisory services company that specializes in enterprise learning and talent management. Josh shares his insight on the value of talent management.
New research shows that organizations with superior talent management strategies generate greater financial returns. In fact, research from our just-published 2009Talent Management Factbook shows that companies with sound talent management programs are performing far better in the economic downturn. These companies generate 26% greater revenue per employee, are 28% less likely to have staff layoffs, and have 17% lower voluntary turnover rates.
The question, then, is how does one rapidly develop an integrated solution? Where do you focus? What processes and systems should take the highest priority?
Enter benchmarking. One of the most powerful ways of prioritizing your investments and resources is to compare your organization's strategy, processes, and investments with those of comparable organizations achieving world-class results.
We have recently developed in conjunction with Stepstone an online assessment, http://www.talentstrategyassessment.com/, which allows you to benchmark your organization. This unique online assessment compares your organization's processes against our large research database of over 35,000 organizations. This information, along with StepStone's experience of implementing talent solutions, can help you determine how you stack up in key areas of talent management.
The goal of this assessment is not to solve specific problems. Rather, it is designed to give you a clear scorecard and reveal areas for further investigation and potential improvement. The tool can show you where you likely are ahead of the curve and where you could use some help catching up.
Only about 5% of organizations are in the advanced stage of talent management. These organizations have a senior talent manager leader in place, have multiple years of talent management experience, and have deployed a second- or third-generation of related processes.
Over 41% of responding organizations are in the intermediate stage. These organizations are currently developing and implementing talent strategies which are well-defined and already have some mature processes in place.
Forty percent are in the novice stage. These organizations have the beginnings of a talent plan and are starting to design and implement some processes.
Fifteen percent of responding organizations do not currently have any kind of talent management strategy and have not begun any planning.
In your organisation who is responsible for Succession Planning? Is it owned at C-level, is it owned by individual line managers or is it owned by HR?
OK, OK, this question is a lot like asking who is responsible for Talent Management. But for me, Succession Planning is an interesting topic because its an easy way to introduce the concept of Talent Management to people that are not HR practitioners because Succession Planning is all about managing risk.
Risk Management is something that anybody in the organisation can understand. Risk Management leads to conversations about Business Continuity, resilience and inevitably to scenario planning and at that point Succession Planning becomes a 'hard' topic with none of the 'fluff' of other talent management concepts (eg Recognition, Career Planning and Skills and Leadership Development)perceived by those outside HR. In the context of risk management Succession Planning is vital in keeping the organisation running through periods of forced change.
The traditional HR view of Succession Planning is fairly straight-forward. The short-term emergency is typically about filling a vacated seat, usually of a senior executive and sometimes of key technical staff. This point is well articulated in the clip: Refilling The Pipeline.
The medium-term is about mapping the current workforce to future organisational design and understanding the development needs of a group of 'High Potentials' that may go on to succeed members of the current senior management team. The long-term looks at the capabilities needed by the organisation and the career path from entry level jobs through to C-level.
The traditional approach to Succession Planning takes a linear perspective, based on 'business as usual' conditions, geared to the higher echelons, reinforcing the organisational 'chain of command'. It is biased towards seniority and strata as a framework and on filling vacancies as an outcome rather than replacing talented individuals. Replacing talented individuals is many times more difficult than filling a vacancy and, in organisations with flatter structures, Succession Planning requires more creativity.
My first pick comes from NBC's comedy The Office: An American Workplace (which I prefer to the British original). 
This guest post comes from Josh Bersin, CEO and President of 
