Three New Strategic Roles Defined

Driving Change: Three New Roles Defined

While breaking down the barriers between the existing HR functions that impact talent management is in itself a profound success, leading organizations are also formalizing a number of proactive activities that add true strategic power to talent management.

By creating a formal workforce planning role, organizations are empowering staffing departments, training departments, and operations departments to take the guesswork out of how it will happen, and they are managing using robust forecasts that scientifically demonstrate the correlation between workforce utilization/composition and organizational capability and capacity.

To further support strategic talent management, workforce planning is coming online with two other proactive roles. Employment branding is becoming more mainstream as organizations recognize the need to make themselves more visible and attractive to top talent, and to motivate existing employees. Retention efforts are formalizing not just to stave off the need for hard-to-find replacement talent, but also to support knowledge management and knowledge transfer between several generations of talent.

Each of these new roles is outlined here:

Vice President/Director/Manager of Workforce Planning

This role will be responsible for developing systems that ensure that the organization has an adequate supply of talent to support planned business objectives in both existing and new markets. (Note the emphasis here is not to run statistics and create reports, but rather to ensure an adequate supply of talent.)

Specific responsibilities for this role include:

· Overseeing the creation and management of all strategic HR goals, management practices, organizational policies, and talent management systems to ensure the organization has the capability and capacity to secure an adequate workforce when needed.

· Participating in organization-wide strategic planning and operations-planning sessions to provide input on workforce-related touch points.

· Projecting the organization's supply and demand for talent on a moving one-, three-, or five-year basis (timing dependent upon industry).

· Identifying gaps in projected supply and demand for talent and developing strategic and tactical plans to acquire the labor needed to meet objectives.

· Marshaling the cooperation and integration of HR deliverables.

· Establishing and maintaining the business case for organizational change needed to retain a position as the "employer of choice" among key internal and external talent constituencies.

· Analyzing data from all internal functions to determine the relationship between talent availability or utilization and productivity, or the occurrence of sentinel events. (A sentinel event is any unexpected occurrence that results in a severely negative outcome.

Vice President/Director/Manager of Employment Branding

This role will be responsible for developing systems that identify and manage how the organization is perceived by both internal and external key talent constituencies to ensure that the organization develops and maintains a dominant position in relevant labor markets as the employer of choice. (Note that the emphasis of this new role is not on employment advertising but on understanding and managing perception among key constituents.)

Specific responsibilities for this role include:

· Developing and implementing an employment branding strategy that ensures key constituents continue to perceive the organization as an employer of choice, thereby simplifying talent retention, motivation, and attraction.

· Marshaling internal management practices and people programs to ensure that the employment experience delivered is one capable of sustaining projected talent needs.

· Overseeing the creation and integration of employment branding messages in all public relations, media relations, marketing communications, community relations, special events, and recruitment advertising campaigns.

· Identifying and developing storylines around company management practices that can be repeated internally and externally through employee referral campaigns, public speeches by executives/managers, news stories, and select awards program applications.

· Periodically assessing employment brand internally and externally to ensure alignment between current strategy and labor market conditions.

· Establishing and maintaining the business case for organizational change needed to develop the required employment brand.

Vice President/Director/Manager of Retention

This role will be responsible for developing systems that identify mission-critical talent stores within the organization and a stable of tools and approaches that can be used on a one-to-one basis to retain them. (Note the emphasis here is not to develop organization-wide approaches that treat employees equally, but rather to provide differentiated treatment to top performers in key roles that have been characterized as critical to the success/failure of organizational objectives.)

Specific responsibilities for this role include:

· Overseeing the development and implementation of talent management methodologies to identify mission-critical roles within the organization based on objective assessment versus speculation.

· Overseeing the creation and deployment of tools and approaches on a case-by-case basis to ensure the retention of key employees.

· Analyzing internal data from all functions to identify relationships between organizational practices/events and turnover.

· Developing and administering knowledge management and transition processes for planned turnover.

· Developing and maintaining systems that monitor and report on managers' abilities to develop and retain top performers.

· Establishing and maintaining the business case for organizational change needed to drive retention efforts.

Conclusion

It's a brave new world, one with few barriers to competition, which is why barriers to strategic talent management must be removed. Existing barriers include isolated HR functions, lack of strategic mindset, and lack of infrastructure to power true strategic talent management. Removing these barriers isn't easy, but is a necessity for survival in a global economy. Many professionals in HR are not adequately equipped and will not survive in a modern HR function. Organizations cannot let those incapable of transitioning become barriers themselves.

It is time to step up to the plate. It is time to embrace new proactive activities. It is time to stop talking about being strategic and actually be strategic! Enjoy the future — it your turn to be the corporate hero.

HR to become a Strategic Partner

Challenges for HR to become a Strategic Partner

1. Avoid Strategic Plans On Top Shelf (SPOTS).
More strategies are written than acted upon. More visions are created than realized. More missions are espoused than executed. More goals are stated than accomplished. Becoming a strategic partner means turning strategic statements into a set of organizational actions. Overcoming the challenge of SPOTS requires that HR professionals force organizational issues into the strategic discussion before strategies are decided. HR needs to facilitate organizational diagnosis that highlights how aligned business strategies are to organization culture.

2. Create a Balanced Scorecard
The concept of Balanced Scorecard is not new but its application has become increasingly popular. A balanced scorecard focuses on serving multiple stakeholders (investors, customers, and employees) and can be a total performance index assessing executive performance. HR executives, for example, are judged on the extent to which they add value for each stakeholder. The categories apply to any large or complex business.

• Economic Value Added (EVA): Meeting the financial numbers expected of the executive.
• Customer Value Added (CVA): Meeting Customer-service goals.
• People Value Added (PVA): Meeting employee expectations.

These three indicators form an overall, balanced scorecard measure for tracking executive performance. If HR executives are to be strategic partners, they need to absorb and apply the concept of the balanced scorecard in two ways.

First, they need to be equally accountable for all segments of the balanced scorecard, not just for the employee dimension. As the balanced scorecard indicates, employee commitment is only one criterion for effective HR performance, and HR professionals in strategic partnership will be held accountable for the same dimensions as other managers.
The HR professional’s performance is no longer judged by his PVA score alone, but by all three scores. This approach requires that HR professionals master their business’s financial and customer issues and recognize their contribution to attaining these goals.

Second, although accountable for all three dimensions of the balanced scorecard, HR professionals should provide intellectual leadership on the employee dimension. This means that we as HR professionals should not restrict ourselves in measuring employee commitment and satisfaction index alone. Rather, we need to define the employee dimension of the balanced scorecard not only in terms of employee attitude, but also in terms of organizational processes. The processes represent those activities that affect employee attitude, such as leadership, teamwork, communication. Empowerment, shared values, mechanisms for treating individuals with dignity and so on. By measuring these processes and employee attitudes, HR professional fully define the employee stakeholder dimension of the balanced scorecard.

3. Benchmarking, or learning about best practices, has become increasingly important when it comes to evaluating Human Resource management. With great fervor, teams of employees identify and visit other companies recognized as world class. These field visits provide businesses with information on how to gauge their work relative to the best in class.
Traditionally, benchmarking was done on the harder, more objective aspects of a business, for example, technologies, systems, financial ratios, or quality. Increasingly, firms also benchmark softer management practices.

Firms like General Electric and Digital Equipment Corporation deploy a senior management team to examine management practices in some of the best managed firms in the world to identify key processes for improving productivity. It was concluded that best practice in human resources should focus less on a particular practice than on a set of general principles. This involves leveraging a system of HR practices by focusing on two or three key strategic initiatives that promote the integrative theme. This way the HR function adds value that is credible and understood by both line and HR management.

Scientific Management progression in HR

HR Administration and Human Relations are the things talked about and written about whenever the management of worker and work is being discussed. They are the things the HR Department concerns itself with. But they are not the concepts that underlie the actual management of worker and work in industry. This concept is Scientific Management. Scientific management focuses on the work. Its core is the organized study of work, the analysis of work into its simplest elements and the systematic improvement of the worker’s performance of each of these elements. Scientific Management has both basic concepts and easily applicable tools and techniques. And it has no difficulty proving the contribution it makes; its results in the form of higher output are visible and readily measurable.

Indeed Scientific Management is all but a systematic philosophy of worker and work. Altogether it may well be the most powerful as well as the most lasting contribution America has made to Western thought since the Federalists Papers. As long as industrial society endures, we shall never lose again the insights that human work can be studied systematically, can be analyzed, can be improved by work on its elementary parts.

Like all great insights, it was simplicity itself. People had worked for thousands of years. They had talked about improving work all that time. But few people had ever looked at human work systematically until Frederick W Taylor to do so around 1885. Work was taken for granted; and it is an axiom that one never sees what one takes for granted. Scientific Management was thus one of the great liberating, pioneering insights. Without it a real study of human beings at work would be impossible. Without it we could never, in managing worker ad work, go beyond good intentions, exhortations or the “speed up”. Although its conclusions have proved dubious, its basic insight is a necessary foundation for thought and work in the field.

It is one concept that has penetrated the entire world. It is practiced in India and in Soviet Union, in Argentina and in Sweden. The Germans have made pseudo-metaphysics out of it; they call it “rationalization.” The critics of America everywhere think that they are attacking the “real America if they attack Scientific Management”. When America started, after World War II, to give assistance to Western Europe’s attempt to improve productivity, they thought that is meant primarily the exportation of scientific management techniques. America preached that “productivity is an attitude” and stressed the importance of mass distribution, of capital investment, of research. But what they actually did was to send over industrial engineers equipped with Scientific Management tools and imbued with its philosophy. And where the European industrialist on the whole turned a deaf ear to their recommendations of mass distribution, capital investment or research, he took to Scientific Management techniques with alacrity. For, in common with the rest of the outside world, he had come to believe – though wrongly – that Scientific Management was the essence of America’s industrial achievement.

Yet, Scientific Management, too, has been stagnant for a long time. It is the oldest of our three approaches to the management of workers and work; it rose together with the new profession of engineering in the last decades of the nineteenth century. It also ran dry first. From 1890 to 1920 Scientific Management produced one brilliant new insight after the other and one creative new thinker after the other – Taylor, Fayol, Gantt, the Gilbreths. During the last thirty years, it has given little but pedestrian and wearisome tomes on the techniques specialties. But on the whole there have been oceans of paper but few, if any, new sights. There has been a great deal of refinement; yet the most mature and most cogent statement on Scientific management is still the testimony Taylor gave before a special Committees of the House of Representative in 1912.

Training and HR Technology--Retrain the Brain.

As aging baby boomers look to keep on working, producers of `brain fitness' software—aimed at improving memory and keeping the mind sharp—see an opportunity to pitch their products to employers.

Software tools to keep the brain fit are headed to the workplace.

The products have been making a splash in the consumer market in recent years as older Americans wrestle with memory loss and other cognitive declines. And now vendors of "brain fitness" software are beginning to see employers as another fertile market, especially given the desire of baby boomers to stay in the workforce for years to come.

A host of challenges face this nascent industry. They include doubts about the effectiveness of the software, concerns that exercises in front of a computer will bore people, and the prospect that employees in their 40s, 50s and 60s will feel stigmatized signing up for what could be considered brain rehab.

But advocates are confident the burgeoning field of brain health is far more than a fad, and companies are likely to see significant benefits in areas such as productivity and retention through the use of the new software tools.

Posit Science, a San Francisco-based firm, says several employers are testing its software this year. Posit Science's Brain Fitness Program has been shown to improve the memory of people 60 years or older by 10 years or more, and the company's CEO, Jeff Zimman, expects solid results in corporate trials as well. "This is going to be a hot area," he says.

The Players

The brain fitness arena has its roots in scientific findings during the past two decades that the brain is fundamentally "plastic"—capable of rewiring itself even late in life. That's good news, because experts also note that brain functioning begins to fall off as early as age 25. Among the key researchers in the field is Posit Science founder Michael Merzenich, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco who was recently featured in a PBS program on brain fitness.

To combat the dulling of the mind and stave off the horrifying effects of dementia, a host of vendors now tout brain training software programs, including Happy Neuron.com, CogniFit, Posit Science and Fit Brains. Video game company Nintendo also is a player with its Brain Age software.

Posit Science expects solid results in corporate testing trials of its software. "This is going to be a hot area." --Jeff Zimman, CEO, Posit Science

The content of these programs varies. Happy Neuron.com, for example, offers games designed to work out five major brain functions: language, attention, memory, visual processing and "executive function," which includes logical reasoning. One of Happy Neuron's language games, "Split Words," asks users to match the parts of words divided into two or more sections, with the help of a general category for the session such as "gardening."

Fit Brains plans this month to introduce games for a range of cognitive functions. By the end of March, it intends to add games as well as other features such as brain fitness metrics.

Brain Age, built for the Nintendo DS mobile game device, runs users through activities such as solving math problems, playing sudoku puzzle games and reading literature aloud.

Posit Science, meanwhile, works to improve memory and train the brain on basic processing skills. In one activity, users are asked to listen to two tones played in rapid succession, then decide whether the second was higher or lower than the first.

Benefit Questioned.

The brain training software industry is new but promising. Brain Age and its sequel Brain Age 2 have together sold more than 14 million copies worldwide since 2005, says George Harrison, who was senior vice president of marketing at Nintendo of America before retiring from the company at the end of 2007. Nintendo's brain games are inspired by the work of Japanese neuroscientist Ryuta Kawashima, and they estimate the "age" of users' brains based on their performance. But the products are pitched primarily as fun, Harrison says. "We haven't done any scientific research to demonstrate any health claims," he says.

On the other end of the spectrum, Posit Science has had its software tested by researchers who have presented findings in scholarly journals and at conferences. In November, the company touted results of a study of 524 healthy adults 65 and older. Half of them completed up to 40 hours of the Posit Science program. The other half followed the advice that older people will benefit from new learning in different subject areas, and completed up to 40 hours of a computer-based educational training program on topics such as the history of Great Britain.

Those in the Posit Science group showed "significantly superior" gains in standardized, clinical measures of memory equal to roughly 10 years, the company said in a statement. The company also said participants in the Posit Science program showed significant gains in how they perceived their memory and cognitive abilities, such as remembering names and phone numbers or where they had left their keys, as well as communication abilities and feelings of self-confidence.

Even so, the degree to which software programs can slow the cognitive decline associated with aging has been questioned. Sandra Aamod, editor of the journal Nature Neuroscience, and Sam Wang, professor of molecular biology and neuroscience at Princeton University, offered a critical view of the products in a November New York Times opinion piece. A better bet, the authors argued, is physical exercise.

"So instead of spending money on computer games or puzzles to improve your brain's health, invest in a gym membership," the authors wrote. "Or just turn off the computer and go for a brisk walk."

Some advocates for computer brain fitness products say software training should be part of a broader range of brain health activities, including walking and swimming.

Paul Nussbaum, a neuropsychologist and chief scientific officer of Fit Brains, suggests a five-part program for brain health, with attention to socializing, physical activity, mental stimulation, nutrition and spirituality.

Targeting the workforce

Until now, companies haven't paid much attention to brain health, Nussbaum says. He notes the way corporate health fairs typically have tables set up for diabetes and bone density. "There's nothing at these health fairs focused on the brain," he says.

Corporate training departments also have ignored sharpening basic employee mental skills such as memory or language processing.

The graying of the workforce may change that. The number of U.S. workers 55 and older is projected to grow by 46.7 percent between 2006 and 2016, according to a December report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The rate of expansion in the number of those older workers is nearly 5.5 times the 8.5 percent growth projected for the labor force overall. People 55 and older are expected to make up 23 percent of the workforce in 2016, up from 17 percent in 2006 and 12 percent in 1996.