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The Future of HR
Have we reached a tipping point for HR?
In an article for Human Resource Executive Online, Peter Cappelli, Professor at the Wharton School, examines two recent studies on the future of HR.
The first study, Working Beyond Borders: Insights from the Global Chief Human Resource Study, was conducted by IBM and is based on interviews with 707 chief HR officers from around the world.
The overwhelming priority at the moment for HR leaders worldwide is to cut costs. A potentially big realignment of resources is associated with globalization. Cappelli notes that in the IBM report there was much less concern with the ability to hire than with the ability to retain employees globally.
The second study, SHRM Foundation Leadership Roundtable: What's Next for HR?, was conducted by the SHRM Foundation and was based on a focus group of HR heads and thinkers and observers of business. The group's task was to anticipate future challenges for HR.
This group saw three important issues facing the HR side of business. The first echoes the IBM study: globalization and the challenge of managing workforces in many different countries. The other two are quite different.
The first has to do with managing risk. The financial crisis has made most businesses pay more attention to the financial risks they are exposed to. As with most aspects of business, managing these risks comes down to managing people differently. Cappelli notes that hiring, retention and development -- the focus of HR executives surveyed -- are age-old tactical, as opposed to strategic, issues.
The other issue is how to manage the avalanche of metrics and business-related data. Cappelli says that in HR, too many costly and strategic bets are still made on the basis of hunches. "Can we harness these data in ways that improve our decision making, finding the value and reducing costs?," he asks. (See the article in this newsletter on how Google uses data to improve managers.)
 Cappelli closes his article by wondering "whether we have reached something like a tipping point for HR, where the innovation, ideas and energy shifts clearly from HR departments to HR vendors. Perhaps HR departments are now so starved for resources and so focused on the operational goal of cost containment that thinking about the future has to be ceded to some other group." |
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| Greetings!
We read over 500 articles every month, just to select the handful that appear in this newsletter. We've been doing it for a decade, but now it has a title - "Information Curator" - and apparently it is a high growth job category. (I simply must update my resume...)
Here are the top 5 articles from our blog this month:
Also, please join me on April 14th for a lively debate about employee engagement at The Staffing Alliance of Maryland Employers - Project SAME. |
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Building a Better Boss
 "Project Oxygen", a project at Google, started up two years ago to analyze data to produce what might be called the Eight Habits of Highly Effective Google Managers. In an article by Adam Bryant at The New York Times, he lists the directives that emerged, in order of importance:
· Be a good coach.
· Empower your team and don't micromanage.
· Express interest in team members' success and personal well-being.
· Be productive and results-oriented.
· Be a good communicator and listen to your team.
· Help your employees with career development.
· Have a clear vision and strategy for the team.
· Have key technical skills so you can help advise the team.
No big surprises here. Note that having technical expertise was the least important directive.
Bryant points out that HR in most organizations has long run on gut instincts instead of hard data. But a growing number of companies are trying to apply a data-driven approach to the unpredictable world of human interactions. Because Project Oxygen is based on Google's own data, it feels more valid to Google employees who might scoff at conventional wisdom. "We want to understand what works at Google rather than what works in any other organization," says Prasad Setty, Google's VP for people analytics and compensation.
Once Google had its list, the company started teaching it in training programs, as well as in coaching and performance review sessions with individual managers. It paid off quickly. Google reported a statistically significant improvement in manager quality for 75% of its worst-performing managers. More about Project Oxygen. |
Keep Your Administrative Assistant Happy
 As we approach Administrative Professional's Week (April 24-30), it's a good time to think about how to keep your administrative assistant happily employed. If you are lucky enough to have a good one, you know how essential a good assistant is to keeping your business running smoothly. RMA offers a list of useful tips for retaining an administrative assistant and for making him or her even more critical to your business.
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Don't Believe Everything You Think
In turbulent times like these, it's critical to hire people who have a growth mindset. But growth is not always easy. Before we can learn something new, we must often "unlearn" what we think we know. That makes unlearning a business imperative.
 To adapt to rapid change, we must learn how to view things from new perspectives, and find ways to regularly challenge our out-dated assumptions.
"The illiterate of the twenty-first century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn."
-Alvin Toffler
In a brilliant paper on unlearning, professor William Starbuck notes that senior managers, technical experts, and organizations are all very resistant to evidence that contradicts their beliefs.
In that the essential requirement for unlearning is doubt, any stimulus that creates doubt can be helpful. In your own thinking, you may find that adopting some new mental practices will be particularly helpful. Starbuck lists eight, and here are a few of them:
- "It isn't good enough." Dissatisfaction is the most common reason to doubt current methods, but often it is the slowest to bring change.
- "It's only an experiment." When people see themselves as experimenting, they find it easier to test their assumptions, and listen to feedback.
- "Surprises should be question marks." Both disruptions and pleasant surprises can reveal weakness in current thinking and stimulate improvements ... but only if you use the opportunity.
- "Assume all dissents and warnings have some validity." Organizational hierarchy sends good news up the chain of command, but often blocks bad news from rising. The paper outlines four sensible ways to address warnings.
Admittedly, I am "often wrong, but never in doubt." That said, I can attest to the profound impact of incorporating just a few of these practices into how we run Staffing Advisors. Can you imagine what would happen if your organization adopted all of them?
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Think You're Good at Multi-Tasking? Try These Tests
We humans aren't as good as we think we are at doing several things at once. As technology allows people to do more tasks at the same time, the myth that we can multi-task has never been stronger. But researchers say it's a myth - and they have the research to prove it.
Aza Raskin, writing for Fast Company, says humans don't do lots of things simultaneously. Instead, we switch our attention from task to task extremely quickly.
 Still not convinced? He suggests you try this experiment: Think about the taste of chocolate (that glorious silky rush of sweet earthy flavor) at the exact same time you add 47 and 56. Really try. At the same time. if it makes your brain fuzzy, you're in good company: it's impossible. You can switch back and forth really quickly, but you can't actually think about both things at the same time.
Want another experiment, asks Raskin? Try saying "I cannot do two things at once very well" out loud while reading the next paragraph. If you are like most people (i.e., not a practiced speed reader), you'll end up reading the paragraph very slowly, one word at a time in between your spoken words.
Not being able to think about two things at once means that we can't truly "multi-task" things that we need to think about. Instead, we cycle through tasks in quick succession. But be warned, there are costs. At each switch we risk losing our train of thought and even if we remain on track, it takes time to re-situate ourselves with where we were before the switch. The net effect is that it takes more time to multi-task a set of actions than it does to do them sequentially.
What's the lesson to be learned? If you want a boost in productivity, try rethinking how you multi-task so that you only ever need to think about one thing at a time.
More, plus another test ...
Here's a second view of the benefits of focusing on one thing at a time, from Lifehacker.com ... |
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The Plight of Young Males
 With all of the attention and focus on supporting equal opportunities for women, some may have missed an alarming trend. Young men in the U.S. are in trouble by any measure of educational attainment.
Saul Kaplan writes about this problem in a blog for the Harvard Business Review. Some of his key points:
· Males comprise 51% of the total US population between the ages of 18-24. Yet, just over 40% of today's college students are men. Over the last decade two million more women have graduated from college than men.
· The gender achievement gap is astounding. The average 11th grade boy writes at the level of the average 8th grade girl. Men are significantly underperforming women. Women dominate high school honor rolls and now make up more than 70% of class valedictorians.
· The current recession has hit men hard. Of the jobs lost over the last four years, 78% of them were held by men. That leaves 20% of working age men out of work. These jobs are not coming back and men are ill prepared for the 21st century workplace.
Read the blog -- The Plight of Young Males -- to see what Kaplan has to say about how this education gap will affect the economy. He also examines the heartbreaking trends for young men of color, and notes the urgent need for changes to the education system.
And here is an interesting - and quite different -- view on the gender gap in hiring. Author Dumont Owen asserts that women are at a distinct disadvantage in post-recession hiring. |
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Follow us in The Washington Business Journal
Now you can read our blog posts in The Washington Business Journal. Here are a few of the topics already posted:
- Who is the heart of your company?
- What part of HR should you outsource?
- How to handle multiple job offers
Read more . . . |
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