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Category: People Analytics (page 2 of 2)

Measure Twice, Cut Once

April 3, 2013 / / 2 Comments

Cigar box guitar

My biggest hobby outside of work is building musical instruments. I don’t have a woodworking or lutherie background. In fact, I’ve never taken a single class on either, and my dad is more shade tree mechanic than wood worker. So my instruments are generally pretty primitive.

I started building instruments out of cigar boxes. The practice of building instruments out of found objects is nothing new, in fact there is a long history of improvising to create something that you couldn’t afford for less than the cost to acquire that item. If you don’t have anything good to work from, then use what you have and improvise.

While this is a rewarding hobby for me, and it keeps me sharp in a lot of areas in my business life, my HR clients are not dealing with “found objects”. They don’t need to, and can’t afford to improvise on their talent to meet the needs of their companies. They are more mature at the practice of HR than a proverbial cigar box guitar.

The thing about learning slowly through experience alone is that while it takes a while, the journey is fairly rewarding. But the costs to get the experience are astronomical. Part of that cost is time, some of it is materials, tools have been a major expense, and some of it is lost to mistakes made.
As my skills have improved, the instruments I build take more time,
and the cost of materials I used have escalated rapidly.

Maple guitar

Measure twice, cut once is an over-used cliché, especially when we are talking about ruining a 99 cent 2×4 that is part of the unseen interior hidden by drywall. But when I’m using a $100 set of spalted curly maple (as seen in the picture to the right), that over-used cliché suddenly means something. I measure multiple times from multiple directions because there are real consequences if I make a mistake. But it’s more than the cost of wood. That piece of wood directly determines how the instrument sounds, how it plays, and how attractive the end result is. It also determines, if I choose to sell it, how much I can sell that finished instrument for.

Companies spend more on their people than any other expense on the balance sheet, yet too many of them treat people like a 99 cent 2×4 and not like a beautiful set of unique one-of-a-kind wood that directly affects their profitability. That’s not to say that they treat those employees poorly, it’s that they fail to measure, let alone twice, what the real value of that person to the organization really is.

This is also more than a “cut” metaphor; this isn’t about “staff reduction” as much as it’s about being smart about how people are applied to the end result.

I want to build better guitars. If you want a better HR function, measurement that means something
needs to be part of your approach. You will never improve without it.

 

Why Measure HR?

March 20, 2013 / / 0 Comments

Think about this for a second. Are you measuring HR? What are the measurements you are tracking?

If you aren’t measuring HR, why would you want to start?

Many companies are trying to track employee satisfaction with HR services or transactions. Even more are capturing volumes of services.  Those are excellent measures if you are trying to diagnose efficiency of a specific function or process for targeted improvement, but do you send those numbers to your boss? Do those numbers reach the C-suite?

The brutal truth is that the only reason you would ever send volume or satisfaction numbers up the line is to justify your own existence, to “prove” you are doing work of value. The problem with that approach is that it is very transparent in an “emperor has no clothes” sort of way. If you are fighting to justify yourself, it casts a shadow of doubt on your numbers. It does nothing to show the value HR brings to the business. It doesn’t matter how insightful your take on the numbers is, the business has no reason to trust you.

If you are going to measure HR, and you really should, you need to pick metrics that speak directly to the function of the business. Or at bare minimum, ones that can be directly correlated to a business measure. An employee being happy with a process is valuable to that process, but the business wants to know if that happiness made the company more profitable.

If you’re measuring the wrong things for the wrong reasons, stop. You are part of the problem by adding costs (labor) to something that undermines your credibility and at the end of the day isn’t helping your company be better.

Your Social Media Policy Is Useless

June 14, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Last week Heather Bussing from HR Examiner published the best article I’ve read yet on Social Media Policies.  I’m not going to recap the points she made because the article does a really good job of that all on its own. You really should go read it; however, my favorite line in the article is:

“Do you have a telephone policy? Do you control what employees say in email?”

When you take “new” technology out of the picture and you apply the standard to technology that is so ubiquitous that it is transparent, the ridiculous level just goes through the roof. The cold hard truth is that social media is not a passing fad and will become as transparent as the telephone to the way that we do our jobs.

Social media policies are just another example of focusing on the wrong things like measuring the consumption of learning rather than performance improvement. If you really need rules to reinforce good common sense, have the rule prohibit stupidity and forget the rule prohibiting how you share it.

You know what else besides social media isn’t a fad? Mobile.

But instead of having a mobile computing policy, most companies just seem to make sure there isn’t any way to do real work on our tiny transformative devices. But that is another topic for another post.

Measurement, Part IV: Four Characteristics of Measurable Performance Improvement

April 19, 2012 / / 0 Comments
In my last blog post, Measurement as Evidence, we looked at when it is necessary to measure training, and the dangers of creating pseudo-compliance courses that take our time and attention from actual performance. Fortunately, the vast majority of learning that happens and needs to happen in our organizations is not subject to legal requirement, nor are we legally compelled to track compliance with individual events. Since the measure of compliance doesn’t help us determine business results, we can completely alleviate trying to chase measurement based on volume of training delivered.

“What’s that? You mean, don’t to track training numbers anymore?”

No.

So where does that leave us on measurement? How do we measure performance improvement for the organization? Before we are able measure our efforts towards improvement we need to make sure our efforts embrace these four core characteristics of measurable efforts:

  1. Aligned — We start by aligning ourselves to our business. Too many people in HR and training see what they do as a cost center that is disconnected from the day-to-day operations of the business. The Kirkpatrick model enables us to perpetuate that separation by giving us a measurement system that allows us to look at training as something disconnected when in fact it’s usually only one of the factors that leads to meaningful performance. The only measures we should use are the same measures we use to determine if the business is successful or not. That means, first and foremost, profitability. As part of an overall solution mix, learning systems can help build real performance improvement once learning objectives are linked with performance objectives that have a direct “line of site” link with business performance measures. This means we have to start with defined business metrics and make sure that we’ve provided a performance environment that maximizes each person’s ability to meet those needs. This type of total alignment helps further align our performance management and career development processes toward performance improvement.
  2. Identified Performance Improvement Factors — The role of learning in organizations is drastically changing. It’s no longer our job to simply pick out knowledge gaps and develop content that will fill those gaps. In an aligned state, we look at places we want the business to improve; we identify the performance factors and curate the solution.
  3. Integrated, Continuous, and Connected Experiences — When it becomes clear to us that training events are no longer the panacea (never were) and content context is where we add value, we create contexts that are meaningful to individuals in focused ways; we can then build environments that enable performance improvement. This includes solutions like cohort systems and portals that are about more than just learning.
  4. Agile — We need to embrace the need for constant change. Business needs continually change so our new role is to say aligned and be agile enough to change with it. The days where we have multi-month engagements to create large, formal training offerings are gone or greatly reduced.

If we are aligned with the business and can accurately identify the performance factors that contribute to business goals, our efforts to improve performance can be integrated, continuous, and connected.

If we live up to these core principles, then the evidence we need to measure those efforts are the same measurements we use to gauge the success of the business as a whole. Profitability as measured by the business is a very good and accurate measure of the relative success of integrated efforts towards performance improvement.

Proper execution and inclusion of these four characteristics also has a dramatic and positive impact on trust because it allows others in your organization to directly witness behaviors that confirm you are all paddling on the same tributary and in the same direction.

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