Facts are needed to give the proper perspective.  Understanding the make-up of the organization based on the demographics of the workforce can support many other inquiries and understandings.  There are those who want to regulate systems from collecting or reviewing various types of demographics of our workforce, but that prevents us from getting a holistic view of the team.  It is important that we are able to review and understand the DNA of our workforce.

What are the components that are impacting our workforce decisions?

The businesses and governments throughout developing nations are facing the aging population of their workforce.  Retirement of skilled, knowledgeable employees is going to be a challenge for a long time to come.  There are many decisions that need to be made to help lessen the impact of this demographic. Knowledge that some could use for discrimination should be used by most to create better work environments.  We can’t regulate ourselves with the notion that our employees are exactly alike, rather we need to know what makes them unique.

Age, gender, education levels, country of origin, life abroad and desired education level are all qualities that enhance the characteristics and dynamics of our teams.  So, why are we afraid to analyze the facts?  If 2% of your staff has children, would you throw a family picnic with clowns, bounce houses and face painters for your team-building summer gathering?  No, you wouldn’t.  If 100% of your lab staff boasts advanced degrees, would you invest in offering Chemistry 101 classes?  Not likely.  You need to know details about your team before you make assumptions.

Embrace diversity and commonalities in order to fully support your investments in your team.  This means you need to know the trends of the types of people you are hiring.  What are the demographics of those you are losing?  What are the commonalities among your star performers?  What are the demographics of your most satisfied employees?  Put your questions into the context of your staff demographics and not only will you reach your decisions much faster, but you will also realize better success with your initiatives.

This is not a utopian view.  If you are concerned about how people will use the information, then you have the wrong people making impactful decisions that will impact your employees.  Utilize the data, train people how to use it and reap the rewards.

Cheers,

Lois

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 they have not had the right tools to do the job.  A melon-baller can create great holes, but you wouldn’t use it to dig a ditch.  So, why are companies pretending that reporting tools are giving you data in the right context or that they are providing you with analytics, when they are providing you with rows of data?  Why are companies telling their HR departments that their BI tool that is used for data mining customer data or manufacturing details is good enough because there is a shiny little HR dashboard and a few tables dedicated to employee data included?

Workforce analytics are a breed all their own, and they require the focus and dedication of those tools that are designed for their purpose and are usable for far more then the finance department’s analyst.  They need to be understandable for the managers that are dealing with the people.  They need to be secure so that you can get to the right data and drill down to the information that allows you to make decisions, without a PhD.  They need to segment the data by the types of demographics and organizational structure, so that you can get to the root of the troubles or triumphs you are studying.

In a conversation with Bill Kutik, he asked me why there is a need for standalone solutions for workforce analytics, when it would appear more critical to build analytics into point solutions.  I agree that nearly all talent management and HRIS systems greatly need to improve their reporting and their representation of trends and data in their vast tables of data.  However, analytics, especially those that are going to support workforce planning initiatives, need to contain far more data than is typically housed in one system.  You need talent management data in context with the HRIS data, in connection with corporate scorecard trends and productivity numbers.  Costs from payroll and financial data need to lay alongside the performance management data and the satisfaction information of many stakeholders.  To unify this type of data, you need a powerful analytics tool that can take the information from these disparate systems and position them in a logical, meaningful representation that allows comparison and contrast leader by leader throughout the organization.

Frankly, this is why Aquire built our offering of InSight and offer it with specialist and technology in our “InSight as a Service”.  You have to have the right tools for your HR department, if you want them to deliver the promise of powerful workforce planning and analytics.

Cheers,

Lois

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.  In the Bloomberg article, according to Michael Mandel, chief economic strategist at the Progressive Policy Institute in Washington,  “Output per employee hour will continue to lag behind until companies start spending more on technology and ideas that boost production without requiring more input.”

The manufacturing world has metrics down to a T – information as granular as how many bad screws were rejected and how many turns the good ones will take before they break.  This type of information isn’t easily captured in the non-manufacturing realm but is vital intelligence to have when upper management must make decisions on a company’s direction.  Rather, information that gets percolated up the chain tends to be less than objective, colored by the person gathering and disseminating it.  Ross Melbourne, Aquire’s CTO often says, “It is more important to carefully select things to measure which directly affect your goals.  So, first decide what you want to improve or fix and then decide on how you will actually measure if improvements actually occur. “

Just as in manufacturing, efficiency is key in non-manufacturing jobs .  When your workforce has reached a plateau in productivity, what can you do to get to the next level?  Improving upon existing best practices, processes, and tools will definitely be a boost. Knowing where and how resources are used becomes even more important to upper management.  How do you currently track resources and productivity?
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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. Regret Attrition is the metric to track.  It isn’t valuable enough to just have the snap shot of regret attrition for the entire company.  You need to drill in and compare how different leaders are impacting the brain drain.  Are some leaders retaining the future executives of the company while others are building a feeling of hopeless career paths, thus playing ‘blocker’ for the best and the brightest?  Can you tell if you are not measuring the regret attrition leader by leader?  I doubt it.

Some attrition is good.  If you have under-performers who are over their head in their position and they leave, this is good attrition.  This can be a healthy churn.  It is important to measure this attrition and put it in context.  Attrition within the first year of employment may be a problem.  This measurement should lead to further analysis of the on-boarding process, the source of the hire for those that leave the company or the reasons given for leaving during the exit process.  Even the loss of an employee base that you want to  leave needs to be investigated.  How did you get those people onboard to begin with?  What changes can be made to avoid miss hires in the future?

The context of attrition should be very valuable.  The quality of the people leaving, the tenure of the crowd, voluntary versus involuntary exits, the trend of each of these demographics, the reasons given for leaving, the timing in relationship to the exits, the management these people reported to and the percentage compared to the control group (their peers that stay with the company) should all be evaluated to build appropriate workforce analysis.  There are many variables that can impact the attrition trends within an organization.  You need to start with these measurements so that you can drill down to ways that you can positively impact attrition of your workforce.  If you can reduce the feelings of regret and avoid the wasted energy of the “If only…”. There will be positive impact in productivity and profitability.

Cheers,

Lois

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.  Can you fill critical roles quickly with ready talent?  What will be the cascading effect of these moves and are you prepared for outside searches where necessary? Monitoring your successor pool or employee bench strength mitigates the severe risks of changes in critical roles and puts you in a good position for long-term strategic goals.

Promotion Rate: Are you measuring your rate of internal hires and how many are promotions?  Are you developing your people enough to move them up? Do you know the Time-to-Fill numbers if you hire externally?  Do you know how long it takes you to fill the positions when there are internal candidates? Promotion rate gives you insight into how well you develop your talent and how prepared you are to deal with personnel changes.

These numbers will help you assess your risk of dangerous open positions.  They will help you measure the effectiveness of your talent management initiatives.  Are you building your talent so that they will be ready to move to the next level or into another positions?  Are you prepared for change in your workforce even in the current structure of the organization?  What happens if you add more products or services, will you have the bench strength to support the new initiatives?

Don’t guess or assume that the investments you have made in talent management tools, training or assessments are paying off.  Measure them and make sure your workforce is prepared for today and for the future.

Cheers,

Lois

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! 2011 has been the start of the big retirement curve we have been hearing about for decades.  Knowing how your workforce population is balanced in this aging workforce dilemma is important for many dynamics.  Recruiting, training, mentoring, outsourcing, succession planning are all very obviously impacted.

Benefits offerings and costs are significantly impacted by the age of the workforce, along with gender and many other dynamics.  While stereotyping and discrimination can be a problem, fact-based decision making should not be hindered by the inability to look at age impacts.  All ages might like to bring their dog to work, but some age groups are more likely than others to be impacted by changes in the maternity/paternity policies.

We use age of our audience to make decisions all of the time.  This is how we avoid booking Pink for our holiday party.  If you don’t know who Pink is – then she and I may have just made our point together.  So, don’t pretend you don’t need to know the demographics of your workforce and stop pussy footing around.  You need to give your workforce planners the ability to project appropriately, and your workforce demands and age is a critical component of that.

After talking to a lot of people in and around the human resource industry I have found that there is a great grasping for information about what is important to measure, why should you measure them and what do you do with the information once you have it.  So, over the next few weeks,  we are going to explore the need for and wonder of, critical workforce numbers.

Absenteeism:

When you mention measuring absenteeism to a business leader, the first thing that comes to mind is who do you fire because they missed too many days.  But, what about aligning absenteeism with other trends or metrics to get a better picture of why things might be happening?  If productivity in a plant has not been steady, and you can’t align it with equipment issues, you should likely be checking on absenteeism or other factors.  That trough in productivity in 2010 happened at the same time that the plant staff was ravaged with a flu epidemic – so don’t beat up the guy that was training on the new equipment, it may not be his fault.

While some industries need to track absenteeism trends to plot their future scheduling and hiring plans, for others it might just be a temperature gauge of policy, morale, or planning.  As with most metrics it often means as little as a snapshot or stand alone, but when put together with other elements of data it can really assist in workforce planning.

Cheers,

Lois

But, what about when you need helpful measurements?  It is interesting to me where measurements and metrics can go so wrong.  So, I am going to try and be helpful, as you face the umpteenth report for counts of this and lists of that being demanded from your organization.  Beware and be prepared!

Why First…Then What

It is first important to look at why we need to know information about the workforce before we race off to create reports.  Let’s face it, most data pulls are not that informative or that interesting.  However, if we understand the goals for the organizations and the struggles the leaders are noodling, then we can start assessing what information would be helpful towards solving those problems. These conversations require a real dialog to get the best results.

Can you remember when you were a kid and were told to clean your room and you asked Why?  The result and motivation was very different if you got the annoyed parent “Because!!!”, then if it was explained that Grandma was coming and she was staying in your room over night.  The latter answer received much more care to the details.  The same is true when needing to understand why the organization or individual is seeking information.

The Right What

After understanding the needs of your internal customer you can design the proper information content and put it into context.  Take this real example of a lack of information making the problem worse.

A finance director is concerned about productivity and asks HR for the number of employees in each deparment.  He runs his numbers and produces a cost and profit per employee and compares it to industry standards and his predecessor’s numbers. He thinks he has the right picture of productivity, but there were several problems in this scenario.  He asked for the number of employees and that is what he received.  However, the data didn’t include the differentiation between full-time and part-time employees, so his number was skewed.  He didn’t include the number of contract workers being used in each department, thus he missed 8% of his workforce in the packing and office administration areas of the companies.  He also didn’t get a picture of the trends over time on this number, he just received a single data point.  This is a problem because the snapshot in time was right after the busiest part of the season was over, and the student workers were no longer on the payroll, so his numbers couldn’t measure the busy season’s productivity.

How successful do you think his recommendations are going to be based on these numbers?  Without context of the information and proper comparisons to the historical data, his analysis is going to be significantly flawed.  He was focused on his numbers and didn’t focus on the dynamics of the organization’s workforce.  It is critical that HR participate in the analysis of any details involving the workforce.  Bring your talent, knowledge and data to the discussion.

Cheers,
Lois

Measurement needs to happen in talent management from many perspectives. Two of them are very obvious.

1. We need to measure the success of talent management initiatives.
2. We need to measure current and historic states in order to plan for changes to our talent management initiatives.

The Blame Game

What happens when Training is taking the blame or the credit for the change in trends?  While at the same time the Benefits Department is caught in the same siloed argument of blame or credit.  If you are not conducting holistic workforce analytics and bringing data from as many impactful sources as possible, the real discussions cannot begin.  And when you get right down to it, the measurement is there to start the conversations.  Get the facts and then go exploring.  Learn what people think and feel.  Data in context and with nuance is the real information.

Managing and leading talent is a relationship game as well

In order to find the most impactful leaders (positive or negative), you need to look at the numbers and compare them over time.  The right analytics delivery can make that straight forward and very transparent.  When you compare the trends between leaders, who had the same programs applied to their talent management, you will find which elements are impacting your talent the most. Was it the programs or the leaders themselves.

Now you can start making your changes.

Cheers,

Lois

Halloween is not far away and the horror stories are mounting.  Oh, bad data will really mess you up!  Here are bad decisions or issues seen recently due to bad or no hierarchy data or lack of visibility to data:

1. Company could not implement automated performance reviews because the data didn’t provide who reported to who.
2. Company could not implement manager’s self service, because the data was so messed up regarding who the managers should actually serve.
3. Raises were not approved for 10% of the employee base in time for them to be implemented, because the system data didn’t have them connected to any specific boss.
4. Payroll and HRMS was way to difficult to integrate. Due to the inefficient implementation of terminations in the payroll system, the firm paid at least $800,000 year in excess payroll
5. 15% of high performers were cut during layoffs, because decision-makers did not have visibility to performance data until after announcements.

The list could go on and on.  Aquire has seen these errors and many more because companies were not paying attention to the quality of their data.  When I created the list, it actually hit 15 horror stories, and I decided to cut it back to 5.  By enabling rapid data clean up, identification of data issues and visualization of data, we have helped companies recover from these problems and overcome barriers to progress.  It is really difficult to address data you can’t see.  Visibility and awareness of true information (or lack of information) are critical enablers we are experienced at delivering.

I don’t usually put real blatant marketing messages in this blog.  But when we share some of these horror stories with a client, it made me realize that things we help with every day can be often overlooked by really great organizations.  Sometimes, you have to step back and think about the problems being created by what you don’t know.  Let me know how we can help.  Don’t let the spooky bad data be your ‘trick’ this year.  It can be VERY costly.

Cheers,

Lois

We are really at the early stage of another powerful industry explosion.  The Talent Management processes are being taken more seriously than ever.  Yes, there have been processes, employee development programs, etc., for as long as companies have had employees.  However, the heat is rising in the real attention the processes are getting.  Organizations are understanding that it is critical to track and manage the development of their employees.  A lot of activity and dollars are being spent on these initiatives.  These projects and systems are generating a LOT of data.  Everybody loves data.  I am sure your favorite item in your inbox is the huge spreadsheet with the reams of data in rows and columns, and occasionally, a pie chart or bar chart helps make the data consumable.  But what does it mean????

Aquire is addressing this problem of the burgeoning heaps of data.  Aquire InSight is making the measurement of talent management and all of the ancillary workforce projects possible. By watching trends of anything related to the employees divisible and visible by any portion of the organization, the data springs to life.  When you can finally understand your success at moving people into, around, up through and out of the company, you can tell if your workforce investments are providing the ROI you were looking for.  You can tweak and make better decisions.  You can asses leaders for the ability to embrace the critical employee development projects.  Analyze the data from every ERP HCM system, any performance review system, on-boarding technology, or employee survey brought together to compare the trends of workforce actions.  Annotate the impact decisions are having on the employees choices in aggregate.  THEN, you and any leader in the organization can start seeing the value of your employee initiatives.

It is a VERY exciting time for workforce relationships and I am glad to be a part of it!

Cheers,

Lois

Then the chatter began about the importance of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and a great tweet from @MikeBBoston, “while lagging indicators aren’t sexy, what do they say about those who ignore history? not to mention base-lining/modeling.” This is so true. We must learn from history or we are destined to repeat it. If your turnover rate stinks – learn from it.

Headcount analysis, turnover rates, wanted or unwanted attrition, all have their place in workforce planning. You simply need to know if they are the right things to be focusing on and verify you’re using them in context to make them meaningful. Do you have bench marking and goals you are trying to reach? Then there is my favorite – are you looking at your metrics as they tie to your leadership?

My comment in the Twitter chat was, “Turnover is often a symptom of poor leadership or poor hiring practices – ignore at your own risk!” This obviously struck a chord because I started getting tweets and e-mails from many people about how true this statement is.

People don’t leave companies – they leave their leaders. If you are experiencing turnover problems – can you see the numbers as they relate to each leader? We find you can pinpoint a lot of problems to the leader if you look at your numbers as they fit within the hierarchy. Those bad turnover numbers often roll up to point right at the decision makers and the communicators causing the problem.

Can you visualize your numbers this way? How much better might your decisions be if you could see your metrics this way?

Cheers,
Lois

When you can provide tools designed for specific tasks, people enjoy doing their job and they can do it much more efficiently. When data isn’t hidden or scattered, but is clearly visible and at your fingertips, getting the job done is a lot easier. We have seen merger integrations speed up by months. We have seen reductions in force modeled and handled more efficiently and with better communications. We have seen succession planning span the entire organization because individuals could be identified for positions they were not otherwise considered for; all because the right tools were available and easy to access.

Now, more than ever, is the time to work with efficiency and accuracy. Please make sure you have the right tools on your workbench.

Cheers,
Lois