You have likely heard the whining or bashing around the topics of “Why isn’t HR doing more with Workforce Planning and Workforce Analytics?”  If you are in these conversations you know there is a lot of banter about “people-people” not pursuing the science of the numbers in analytics; or that HR has a fear of the numbers, etc.

There are times when this positioning or these opinions are accurate.  I have seen it myself when talking to human resource professionals about their analytics and workforce planning initiatives.  There were times when I was really surprised at how ill prepared professional HR departments were to answer tough scenario questions about their workforce of the future.  So, I went on a quest to figure out why they were unprepared?  Why were they scared to tackle the numbers.

Just like our advice to HR departments launching workforce planning projects, you have to ask the right questions to get the right results.  In this case, it was asking the questions of ‘Why?”  It opened up an entirely different perspective.

They are not ready to attach workforce planning and workforce analytics, because read more »

Guest post by Alvin Ee, Aquire Product Support

For the past year or so, the business news has reported that, although the U.S. economy was struggling, productivity was increasing.  Businesses were making the most of the people and resources that survived the layoffs and cuts in expenditures.  That was always the silver lining.

Then, in August, I heard a report that productivity had started to dip.  More recently, on October 18, Bloomberg reported that “worker output per hour has fallen for two consecutive quarters…” The figures are derived from manufacturing jobs but I think it is true across the board.  Look around your workplace. Do you notice that everyone’s plate seems to be overflowing?  Productivity is waning and its cause is productivity fatigue.  read more »

No one likes regrets.  It’s that feeling that we could have done better.  We should have done something different.  It creates stories that begin with “If only we had…”.

The discomfort of having to admit that we didn’t do things right often leads employers to measure all attrition together and not break the number out to Regret Attrition and Good or Acceptable Attrition.  The managers often know the stories of ‘The one that got away…” when a key player quits.  It is critical that a company track  the loss trends of valuable, high performers or high potential employees. read more »

Much of Talent Management can be summed up by paraphrasing Jim Collins in “Good To Great”.  It’s about getting the right people on the bus and in the right seats on the bus. It is paramount that you build the right paths for your talent pool to ensure that critical roles in the company stay filled and filled with the right people. Here are two  key metrics to help you get there:

Successor Pool Coverage:  How deep is your bench for critical roles? This is not just for succession planning in the highest levels of management.  This is about replacement planning throughout the organization.   read more »

Why should we measure employees birthdates? And, I am not talking about the cake and ice cream day.   That is a day that comes around once a year and although it is a set of numbers, it doesn’t tell you much about your workforce.   I’m talking about the date that raises awkwardness and discomfort. We need to talk about the date of one’s birth.  The day that tells us how old we are.  Squirming about this conversation tells me a few things about you.  One, you are most likely American if the age of your workforce discussion makes you nervous.  Or, two, you are self conscious about your own age.

The age of our workforce is very important.  It is often a number that is VERY relevant in aggregate, sliced by departments, regions, territories or expertise.  The marching of time cannot be ignored nor can the fact that in Western Europe, Japan and the United States, we will be facing the largest percentage of retirement eligible workers we have EVER faced! read more »