TalentedApps Turns Two!

It’s been two years today since Meg, Mark, and Amy began this blog. While the first year was about us finding our voice and building up our readership, this second year has been a bit more about us drilling deeper into the areas that we see as key in organizations achieving strategic impact from their talent.

This second year also found us building relationships with the rest of the HR, Talent, and Enterprise blogging community. That has been personally rewarding for each of us as well as a terrific way to help get our thinking to a broader audience. We are honored to be part of such an incredibly gifted group of contributors committed to the improvement of this craft.

Our mission continues to be to help create change by improving the awareness and knowledge of our community, in an entertaining and informative way, of how to better achieve your goals through talent. Our thanks go out to our readership, friends, colleagues, and family for their support. We look forward to the upcoming years working together on this mission.

Graphic by Vivian Wong

The New HR Carnival is here!

Ben Eubanks has done a terrific job of collecting and assembling a brand new set of HR blog posts covering a wide range of topics. To top it off, he also enlisted the help of Allen Robinson in the creation of an official HR Carnival logo!

Here’s a excellent opportunity for you to sample a variety of ideas, thinking, and opinions from a diverse set of excellent minds. It will save you time as well as help you discover a blog you might not have known about before.

Be sure to check out the carnival! In addition, take on Ben’s challenge and share what you’ve found with others!

HR: Why Improve Your Analytical Intelligence?

Hey! Come back!

Before you roll your eyes on this one, start having flashbacks to terrible experiences with calculating standard deviations, or trying to wrap your head around multiple regression analysis, and then run screaming from this post, this is not about you trying to become an expert at statistics! Trust me!

It’s about you understanding how analytical tools and methods can help HR have an impact on applying talent to strategic success. Besides, no less than Josh Bersin said at the recent HR Technology Conference® 2009 Talent Management Analyst Panel, “Get used to it.” And that’s a good way to look at it. Too often, HR has been shut out of strategic input because of the perception that it doesn’t speak the language of analytics sufficiently to measure and understand the relationships between various parts of the business (e.g. Human Capital) and profit (or whatever financial result you wish.) Once you have that better understanding, it will enable you to make a stronger case for why HR can provide valuable input and leadership in business strategy and execution.

By now, we’ve had the importance of measuring pretty well pounded in, particularly in the context of Finance. Increasing your financial intelligence is key to participating more in driving strategic decision-making around applying talent to improve business results. Being able to show to senior management the link between what you know about your company’s talent to financial results entails both measuring talent in terms of levels of performance, competency, skills, connectedness, etc. as well as measuring relationships between those measures and the other parts of the business that drive financial performance. What do analytical skills have to do with measuring those parts and their relationships?

Measuring is not Counting

To help answer that question, let’s take an example from “How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business” by Douglas W. Hubbard. Picture the problem of measuring the population of fish in a lake; let’s say in order to know if a restocking effort was successful or not (a good ROI problem). A lot of people will say, “Drain the lake and count the fish.” They could then report there were exactly 22,573 fish and we’ll say that confirms the restocking investment was a success, although all the fish are now dead.

A better approach (certainly for the fish) entails using analytical methods to estimate the population of fish in the lake. If there is sufficient confidence in the estimate of the population before and after the restocking effort, you will be able to tell if the restocking effort was a success or not. Did you have to know every tiny detail of statistics to make a decision based on these estimates and the confidence level? No. How about to show the before and after picture to some “lake executive” who had to give the green light on the restocking effort? No. You just had to know enough about analytical methods to know that the application of them made sense in this case, and either determine you made the right call or get the point across to that executive.

As the authors of “The Differentiated Workforce: Transforming Talent into Strategic Impact” quoted a general manager, “I couldn’t do a regression analysis, but I knew what one was. And the results…made sense to me.” Further, they write, “Improved analytic literacy has a direct impact on the decision making at several levels in a typical HR organization…At the highest level, improved analytical literacy changes the perspective on the financial resources committed to HR…they consider a significant portion [of the HR budget] an investment.”

Principles of Uncertainty

HR labors under the false assumption that everybody else has “precise numbers” and there seems to be a perception that HR can’t come up with the “hard numbers.” The classic story is of the CEO asking the head of HR if they know the company’s headcount and the response is wishy-washy. The thinking is that people are either working for the company or they are not, so what’s the problem? What’s the count? Sure, in a company of a few hundred people, you might actually have a very precise figure. However, we know that depending on the industry, economic conditions, etc. as the number of employees gets larger, it gets a bit trickier to know the headcount with precision. There is a lot going on and even if you are using an HRMS system, the simple fact that humans are involved and entering transactions (or not), makes the number transient and constantly changing. In other words, one minute, you could see 59,268 and a minute later see 59,273.

This is not that different from the folks in Accounting keeping track of Receivables, the folks in Production keeping track of Inventory, or the folks in Development keeping track of Project Completion. In the case of Accounting and Finance, it gets even more interesting when it’s time to report; for instance, general accounting principles require the company to estimate the amount of Receivables that will be uncollectible and there isn’t any hard and fast equation for doing that. Different methods are used to estimate these values, some of them analytical.

The point, as Hubbard writes in his latest book, “The Failure of Risk Management: Why It’s Broken and How to Fix It” is that measurement is better understood as the reduction of uncertainty about the value of something. Once you see it that way and gain enough analytic literacy to feel comfortable with the results from those tools and methods, you’ll be able to move forward more readily with driving and demonstrating positive impact on strategic business results.

Photo by The Michael

The Failure of Risk Management: Why It’s Broken and How to Fix It

The new Carnival of HR is up at HR Bartender!

Make sure to take a tour of HRBartender’s Carnival of HR! Blogger Sharlyn Larby has assembled a tasty “Halloween Spirits” theme, categorizing a huge number of diverse posts from a wide sample of blogs by drink type (e.g. soda, hot beverage, mixed drinks, etc.)

This collection both saves you time by bringing together submitted posts into one place for you to quickly scan (Sharlyn introduces each with a brief description) as well as provides you with an opportunity to discover blogs you might not already know about.

In addition, Sharlyn has taken the effort to gather all the twitter accounts of the blog authors and put them into a TweepML list so that you can easily follow them all in one fell swoop. Thank you, HR Bartender!

Photo by Bisayan lady

HR: Why Increase Your Financial Intelligence?

When in Rome…

si fueris Romae, Romano vivitomore; si fueris alibi, vivito sicut ibi*

My last post asked: how can the perception of HR’s function as being primarily about governance and compliance oversight be dealt with, in order to allow and encourage its role in maximizing the strategic impact of talent?

A key first step is to learn “the language of business” i.e. Finance. Why? Here’s a list from a book** I recommended a while back, outlining the benefits of financial literacy to HR:

• Move HR from a Tactical to a Strategic Organization – be trusted with organization and talent development investment decisions.
• Evaluate Your Company Critically – spot trends or problems and understand more of the stories behind the numbers.
• Understand the Business – knowing how your company makes money is key to your HR strategy.
• Understand the Bias in the Numbers – have the power to challenge, when called for, the assumptions made by the finance and accounting departments.
• Form Relationships with Finance – help to align more the efforts of finance and HR for their mutual benefit.
• Use Numbers and Financial Tools to Make and Analyze Decisions – improve your ability to make better investment choices regarding projects and programs.

It turns out that Trish McFarlane at HRRingleader is addressing this same step in an “HR 101″ series on the Creative Chaos Consultant blog, devoted to what an HR professional really needs to know to be successful. There’s also a great article, “Do HR Managers Have the Skills They Need?” by the same authors of the book, which covers exactly the discussion Beth Carvin and I were having here. Namely, it isn’t all on HR’s head or senior management’s head to enable HR to have a positive impact on strategic use of talent, but a shared responsibility. Here are the factors they listed at the root of the problem:

• Avoidance – HR folks not “dealing with it” and learning about the numbers (as  Josh Bersin and Naomi Bloom said at last month’s HR Technology 2009 Conference(r) Talent Management analyst panel and Naomi’s closing keynote).
• Perception – Even when HR professionals do know the numbers, the business side still retains the outdated notion that they don’t.
• Assumptions – Exhibited when companies don’t encourage their employees to be on the earnings call, for instance, because “it’s too complicated” and “they wouldn’t understand.”
• Trust – A common theme repeated in this blog. In this case, not sharing financial data with employees because you don’t trust them results in people having nothing real to learn from or apply their learning to. Maybe that was the intended effect.

Note that some of the last two issues are not limited to HR, but can be universally applied to all company managers and employees. In fact, there is another article, “The Dismal Financial IQ of US Managers” that covers this pervasive problem and its consequences in more detail. Even though the authors have a vested interest in pointing out these problems (they have a couple of books and a consultancy that address them), the impact is unmistakable.

*”If you are in Rome, live in the Roman way, if you are elsewhere, live as they do there”

- attributed to St. Ambrose (from Wiktionary)

**Financial Intelligence for HR Professionals: What You Really Need to Know About the Numbers by Karen Berman, Joe Knight, and John Case. Despite the drab title, this book is actually quite fun to read (really!) and does not take very long to read (a few hours.) It’s written in a friendly style that comes right out and tells the HR reader which things matter, how they matter, and which things really aren’t as crucial to know so you don’t get distracted by them. Each section is loaded with examples from recent history (especially scandals) linking HR areas of responsibility to financial problems for companies.

Photo by pdbreen

Join the Internal Enterprise Conversation, Already in Progress

Conversations among employees (vs. broadcasts from corporate) have always taken place in organizations – they just haven’t always been easily seen by the leaders. These conversations continue to take place inside, outside and across organization boundaries and recently, social technologies have substantially amplified their volume. These amplified conversations then get the attention of management, and not always in a constructive way.

The enterprise’s interests are better served by participating in these conversations, particularly through the effective use of social technologies, rather than by ignoring, rejecting, or banning their use. The result is not only higher employee productivity, more effective innovation, and greater employee engagement. It also results in the organization making more informed business decisions by having a better understanding of what makes the company “tick” and by being more aware of key events and conditions. Finally, the organization can have at least some input into the conversation as well, but only if it participates.

What are the conversations about?

Steve Boese posted a great summary of the findings in an IBM research paper on how employees were using social networks and why. One of the paper’s most eye-opening findings, and one that organizations should note, is that employees appear to use social network within the enterprise more for reaching out to employees they don’t already know and for building stronger bonds with them and their other “weak ties.” This is interesting to know as it is in contrast to what most detractors cite as why social networks within the enterprise would be a productivity drain. Those detractors often label it “Facebook for the Enterprise” and point out that a primary use of Facebook is just to keep current on what close friends are doing and gossip on things that have nothing to do with work, ergo it is a waste of time in the workplace. The research paper shows the error in thinking that is the primary use.

Beyond reaching out to create and build stronger ties, what else is happening? As mentioned in this earlier post on last month’s HR Technology® Conference, Nokia’s Matthew Hanwell related how his company gradually adopted internal use of social technologies. Steve also has a terrific summary of the points from that presentation. It turns out that employees sometimes also used the social technologies for general discussions about work. For instance, they might discuss overall state of the market, business profitability, and so on. They might discuss various benefit programs. In general, topics often on employees’ minds regarding things that impact their employment.

The upshot is that employees use social technologies to discuss the things they would still talk about even if the technologies didn’t exist or were banned. It’s the same thing they have always talked about and for good reason; it’s their career and their livelihood. For instance, the IBM paper shows that why employees have these conversations over internal social networks is reflected in the way they use them. Both developing one’s career and campaigning for a project are particularly assisted by reaching out and strengthening weak ties. That notion was covered in this previous post about the advantages of being more “central” in a given network through the creation and maintenance of diverse networks. You get more benefit from diversity of connections than simply pure quantity. (More to the point of this post, it’s about the diverse conversations and not just the connections themselves – you have to actually use the connections.)

How can the enterprise join the conversations?

Hanwell’s presentation showed that at first, fear drove much of the reluctance to permit social technologies in the enterprise in the first place. What would employees say? Could moderators keep up? In other words, worst-case thinking that in turn triggered further rationalizing rejection – such as governance costs – of the technologies. However, once key stakeholders understood that the conversations were happening anyway (including using external social technologies like Facebook) and that there was much to be gained by observing and participating in them, they gave the green light.

Most obstacles to the enterprise joining the conversation are self-inflicted. During the HR Happy Hour at the HR Technology conference, we talked about how organizations need help in overcoming the fear that puts up obstacles to successful adoption and use of social technologies. Jason Seiden pointed out the “risk-aversion” obstacle – in particular how it surfaces in staff departments like HR – which in many cases see only downside in backing an initiative like this. This is very much driven by how HR is viewed by the organization. As long as a given HR department is exclusively chartered with (and therefore measured on) compliance and governance oversight, and not with maximizing the strategic impact of talent, putting social technologies under its control will likely result in not much adoption, use, or benefit.

How can that perception be dealt with? We’ll hit that in another HR Technology – themed post soon.

Photo by cliff1066™

See the Outstanding HR in the Social Business Carnival!

Jon Ingham has always done a terrific job at bringing useful knowledge to everyone, whether it be in Strategic Human Capital or Social Media in Business. He’s done it again with the latest HR Carnival, which focuses on social business and includes my post on social business thinking at HR Tech.

Jon has collected and organized approximately 50(!) submission from a combination of well-known blogs in this space as well as some that are likely to be new to you. This presents you a tremendous opportunity to efficiently sample a diverse set of observations, opinions, tips, insights and both decide to add them to your feed subscriptions as well as simply add to your knowledge and improving your thinking. A special bonus for Twitter users – Jon has also included a “Follow List” of Carnival contributors – truly a gold mine of useful info!

Kudos to Jon for assembling such an enriching Carnival! Be sure to check it out!

Photo by McBeth

Thinking at HR Technology 2009

What HR Technology 2009 provided best and better than most conferences was convergence of much of the diverse thinking that’s going on in our industry, and it was energizing. Bill Kutik deserves huge props for balancing expectations with the unexpected, which for the most part kept HR Tech lively and provocative.

Naturally, HR Technology 2009 had a lot of the standard offerings, as always, “table stakes” as it were, including vendors touting their wares, industry rumors, informative sessions, and so on. Of course, the “Shoot Out” is viewed as a major differentiator and it is an interesting exercise to watch. As many have already pointed out, it’s a difficult challenge to provide a head-to-head comparison that covers “real world” scenarios that interest a broad range of customers, in a fair and balanced manner among the competitors, fit it all into a very short period of time, and not have it all appear extremely scripted (and fast!). Kudos to Bill and Leighanne Levensaler for working on developing a great set of scenarios and to Bill for continuing to experiment with the formula in an effort to address the issues people have expressed.

Here’s some standout thinking that was shared regarding getting real business results from HR technology, which will be further explored in upcoming posts:

• Suite Thinking: This is recognizing the emerging power of an integrated talent management suite. It’s about the challenge of how to have a stable, secure system of record that supports core HR transactions yet also provide dynamic innovation around achieving strategic success through talent. The industry analyst panel with Josh Bersin, Naomi Bloom, Jim Holincheck, and Lisa Rowan, and Leighanne Levensaler’s session in particular raised important thinking about how integration can impact strategic success, what are the key objectives, what are the required components, as well as what are the challenges and tradeoffs (e.g. extracting data vs. initiating HR processes.)

• Social Thinking: This is accepting and adopting social media’s value and learning its various features, implementations, policies, and practices. It’s also about understanding how compliance and governance issues must be addressed not by banning and rejection, but by promoting purpose and accountability. Once those basics are in place, it’s about how to ignite gains in productivity, innovation and employee engagement. Don Tapscott’s keynote showed how the digital natives coming into the workforce are not a threat or distraction, but rather a source of learning and new, more effective approaches to creating value from talent. Nokia’s session shared real-world examples of how that happens.

• Business Thinking: This is knowing that while technology is a key component of solving business problems, and some technologies are more capable than others, it’s only if companies are ready and can commit to make the necessary substantive organizational changes and then actually do it, that they’ll reap the full return on their technology investment. The corollary is that technology itself does not cause the ill effects experienced by companies that don’t make the right changes, but it can certainly amplify those effects to the point of getting everyone’s attention. Great points were made by both Josh Bersin and Naomi Bloom in the industry analyst panel and by Naomi again in her closing keynote about how learning and applying key business skills and language like statistics and finance as well as really understanding how your particular business makes a profit and how that affects your workforce strategy are essential for HR if it really wants to play a strategic role.

• Community Thinking: This is having unity of purpose in improving the effectiveness of human capital, even while participants still pursue their goals and contribute their particular strengths. This is not a re-hash of Social Thinking, but it’s a meta-level of thinking that leverages social thinking. Much of what stalls progress is about people and organizations getting overloaded, which not only “jams the gears” but can also trigger a fear and rejection reflex. Finding sources you can trust who can help process the flood of information and innovation goes a long way to help overcome that fear and rejection, which social networking tools can help address. This takes us back to the initial point about the major value that HR Tech provided us: a way in which folks with all their varied agendas and priorities can gather together and share their experiences, their products, their vision, and even their disagreements, to that major purpose that we all share.

If you haven’t seen them already, here are some excellent observations made by some really terrific folks:

• Mark Stelzner has two “bookend” posts here and here with terrific insight into the value the conference really brought and where things could be “even better.”
• Steve Boese hit us with three awesome posts covering the special HR Happy Hour, Technology Risk, and Integration Obstacles.
• Lance Haun reminds us that It’s Not Just About the Technology.
• Kris Dunn covered the TM-HR Integration Challenge, an interesting Marketing Approach, and the Shoot Out. He also talks about Clouds, and has a summary.
• Trish McFarlane introduced us to the Tweeps at HRTech and gave her Closing Thoughts.
• Michael Krupa highlights the Tweep Effect at the conference.
• Laurie Ruettimann provides a wrapup of the conference.
• Jason Seiden writes about the wonderful HR Happy Hour at the conference.

If you want to learn more, have your voice heard by those who would listen, and contribute to this purpose, then join us in whatever way you can that suits you. Comment on our blogs or start your own, create a Twitter account if you haven’t already and follow us. Whatever way works for you. We look forward to getting to know you!

Photo by florriebassingbourn

Check out the Carnival of HR – Talent Management Edition

Be sure to visit Jessica Miller-Merrell’s hosting of the Carnival of HR. This carnival highlights Talent Management and includes our own Ken Klaus’ post on engagement and choice.

The Carnival of HR gives you a great opportunity to discover new, thought-provoking blogs you weren’t aware of before, as well as saves you some time by gathering together the best from around the blogosphere is one convenient location. Jessica has taken the effort to organize the 20 posts into six categories to further help you focus on your particular interest.

Go check out the carnival!

Photo by infomatique

Talking About OraTweet in Social Media at Work

Jake from our friends at AppsLab, posted earlier this week about the soon-to-be-released book, Social Media at Work: How Networking Tools Propel Organizational Performance. It’s authored by three of our Oracle colleagues who specialize in organizational development: Arthur L. Jue, Jackie Alcade Marr, and Mary Ellen Kassotakis. Connect is cited frequently and there are quotes from both Paul and Jake.

There’s a quote in the book from me related to how we use OraTweet, written by Noel Portugal, internally to help developers improve their productivity. I had first written about OraTweet a year ago in a post describing how companies were finding business value in using Twitter, both externally as well as internally.

Arthur, Jackie and Mary Ellen have put together a practical, use case-based guide that provides strategies for how to effectively deploy these tools in order to achieve your productivity, innovation, development and engagement objectives.

If you are attending the upcoming Oracle OpenWorld, you can find the authors at two 30 minute book signing slots:  Tuesday 1:00 – 1:30, and Thursday 1:30 – 2:00. The book is available for preorder now and should hit store shelves mid-October.