Talent Intelligence During the Onboarding Process

It is widely accepted that, in small pockets around the world, the second iteration of the war for talent is well underway. Emerging companies in China, for example, are invading small rural villages in an effort to convert agrarian citizens into knowledge workers, and professional service firms are eagerly grasping at once undesired college new grads.

It would be logical to assume that growth-oriented firms would be devising new methods to uncover hidden sources of talent and fend off poachers from other organizations, but in reality few are. At a time when most organizations should be abandoning the conservative approach of continuous improvement and embracing innovation, too many are still focused on miniscule efficiency gains.

At no time since the final years of the Roman Empire has the world population mimicked its current state. With a huge population of aged workers and a significantly smaller influx of youthful workers, it is well known that something will have to change. Innovation will take place.

The world is full of people who look back and say, "If only I had thought of that," or, "If only I had leveraged that missed opportunity, where would I be today?" It is also full of people who routinely try to reinvent the wheel.

Unfortunately, the recruiting profession seems to be a magnet for these types of people. For years now, thought leaders have been advising organizations to embed formal competitive-intelligence-gathering activities into their onboarding processes, yet few actually have. When a recruiter learns of actions in a competitor, rarely do the managers who could leverage such information hear of it. What is even more disappointing is the lack of talent intelligence gathering that takes place during the onboarding process, and the shear volume of missed opportunities that go unnoticed.

The Problem With Most Onboarding Approaches

Like many programs in human resources, onboarding programs suffer from narrow perspective design. Quite frankly, they are designed by people who truly have no idea what value talent provides or how to maximize the value of that talent.

The most common evidence of this design flaw is the scope and direction of information flow during the onboarding process. In most organizations, information flows only one way, with the exception of benefits enrollment data. Few organizations look at the onboarding process as an opportunity for both parties to exchange in a dialogue where both parties learn something of value.

In short, we add another element to the list of missed opportunities in HR.

The New Perspective

The first week on the job can play a crucial role in motivating and retaining new employees, helping them contribute not only to their own success, but their new employer's as well. Organizations often spend lots of time and money recruiting and wooing new employees, but as soon as they start they turn around and treat them like barely welcome strangers.

In the new perspective, recruiting is viewed as only half of the task of hiring. Orientation is the other, often ignored element.

The new hire's first week on the job is too important to delegate to human resources or to devote to "reading the manual." Managers need to take control of the process of bringing a new employee on board and engage in what we call "talent intelligence gathering." Just like a parent adopting a new child, the role a manager plays during the first week is of critical importance if the value of the new hire is to be maximized.

Talent Intelligence Onboarding Areas

The following is a short list of areas for which managers interested in performance should take responsibility and for which they should make use of intelligence that is gained:

· Accelerating time to productivity. Coming into a new environment can be stressful for even the most adept change seekers. Any delay in providing new hires with the guidance, equipment, and training they need to get started on what they will be held accountable for can slow the time it takes for a new employee to reach a minimum expected level of productivity. Each day of delay can frustrate the employee and may also mean the loss of thousands of dollars in revenue if product development or sales are impacted. During the intelligence-gathering process, managers should engage with the new hire to uncover his or her desired management style, perceptions of company processes (good and bad), and insight about how other organizations may have approached the new hire's role differently.

· Continuous recruiting. Having recently changed teams, the new hire has an innate interest in helping their new team succeed — and that gives both managers and recruiters a perfect opportunity to discover leads for other potential hires. By asking new hires on their first day who else is good at their former firm, managers can easily increase their supply of talent. New hires can also be asked (when appropriate) to directly help in recruiting their former colleagues.

· Competitive intelligence. By asking new hires about the best practices of their last firm, their new managers can gather some new benchmark.

· Setting a manager's expectations. On the first day, it is important for the manager to make sure that the new employee knows the manager's expectations, the departmental goals, and what important contributions the employee can make to the product and the firm.

· Understanding the employee's expectations. It is equally important for the manager to find out what expectations the new employee has in the areas of training, promotion, and preferred management and communication styles.

Conclusion

Innovation is an activity without boundaries, so there truly are no limits as to what opportunities can be created and leveraged during the onboarding process. But organizations must abandon the useless activities that most onboarding programs consist of, and instead embrace programs that immediate create value for both parties.

Gone are the days when an organization could afford to wait six months or longer for a new hire to become productive, or when they could pay recruiters to spend months researching potential hires when the information could have been mined in a matter of hours from existing employees. Take advantage of the opportunities before you to map the competitive landscape, using the expatriates you have just recruited. A war is underway, and you need to adopt warrior-like approaches.

Ref: Dr. John Sullivan and Master Burnett.

Employee Orientation

Employee Orientation - Keeping New Employees on Board

Orienting employees to their workplaces and their jobs is one of the most neglected functions in many organizations. An employee handbook and piles of paperwork is not sufficient anymore when it comes to welcoming a new employee to your organization. The most frequent complaints about new employee orientation are that it is overwhelming, boring, or that the new employee is left to sink or swim. The result is often a confused new employee who is not productive and is more likely to leave the organization within a year.

With an ongoing labor crunch, developing an effective employee orientation experience continues to be crucial. It is critical that new hire programs are carefully planned to educate the employee to the values, history and who is who in the organization. A well thought out orientation program, whether it lasts one day or six months, will help not only in retention of employees, but also in productivity. Organizations that have good orientation programs get their people up to speed faster, have better alignment between what the employees do and what the organization needs them to do, and have lower turnover rates.

Purposes of Orientation

Employers have to realize that orientation isn't just a nice gesture put on by the organization. It serves as an important element of the recruitment and retention process. Some key purposes are:

1. To Reduce Startup Costs
Proper orientation can help the employee get "up to speed" much more quickly, thereby reducing the costs associated with learning the job.

2. To Reduce Anxiety
Any employee, when put into a new, strange situation, will experience anxiety that can impede his or her ability to learn to do the job. Proper orientation helps to reduce anxiety that results from entering into an unknown situation, and helps provide guidelines for behavior and conduct, so the employee doesn't have to experience the stress of guessing.

3. To Reduce Employee Turnover
Employee turnover increases as employees feel they are not valued, or are put in positions where they can't possibly do their jobs. Orientation shows that the organization values the employee, and helps provide the tools necessary for succeeding in the job.

4. To Save Time For Supervisor & CoWorkers
Simply put, the better the initial orientation, the less likely supervisors and co‑workers will have to spend time teaching the employee.

5. To Develop Realistic Job Expectations, Positive Attitudes and Job Satisfaction
It is important that employees learn as soon as possible what is expected of them, and what to expect from others, in addition to learning about the values and attitudes of the organization. While people can learn from experience, they will make many mistakes that are unnecessary and potentially damaging.

NEW TRENDS IN INTERNATIONAL HRM

International HRM places greater emphasis on a number of responsibilities and functions such as relocation, orientation and translation services to help employees adapt to a new and different environment outside their own country.

. Selection of employees requires careful evaluation of the personal characteristics of the candidate and his/her spouse.

. Training and development extends beyond information and orientation training to include sensitivity training and field experiences that will enable the manager to understand cultural differences better. Managers need to be protected from career development risks, re-entry problems and culture shock.

. To balance the pros and cons of home country and host country evaluations, performance evaluations should combine the two sources of appraisal information.

. Compensation systems should support the overall strategic intent of the organization but should be customized for local conditions.

. In many European countries - Germany for one, law establishes representation. Organizations typically negotiate the agreement with the unions at a national level. In Europe it is more likely for salaried employees and managers to be unionized.

HR Managers should do the following things to ensure success-

. Use workforce skills and abilities in order to exploit environmental opportunities and neutralize threats.

. Employ innovative reward plans that recognize employee contributions and grant enhancements.

. Indulge in continuous quality improvement through TQM and HR contributions like training, development, counseling, etc.

. Utilize people with distinctive capabilities to create unsurpassed competence in an area, e.g. Xerox in photocopiers, 3M in adhesives, Telco in trucks etc.

. Decentralize operations and rely on self-managed teams to deliver goods in difficult times e.g. Motorola is famous for short product development cycles. It has quickly commercialized ideas from its research labs.

. Lay off workers in a smooth way explaining facts to unions, workers and other affected groups e.g. IBM , Kodak, Xerox, etc.

Employee Engagement: Doing It vs. Measuring

It seems today that employee engagement is in vogue. Everywhere I look I hear about balanced score cards that include a placeholder for employee engagement, and I learn about organizations making their living out of measuring engagement and trying to explain it to their clients. I like the idea, but I worry about it. I worry that this is what employees would call “another HR thing.” Let’s face it – we have lots of “HR things.” They are called fads. These are the bandwagons upon which we hop.

Perhaps it’s time to evaluate whether employee engagement is a fad or a new knowledge domain from which HR executives can help make their companies a better place to work. One key difference between an HR fad and a real intervention is who owns the new process. Therefore, in this article I would like to evaluate who owns employee engagement with the goal of deriving ways in which we can make employee engagement a useful process and not just one more fad. But before going further, I want to define employee engagement.

Defining Employee Engagement

I like to define engagement in terms of what people do at work. I use something called role theory to elaborate on that definition. Role theory reviews different roles that people engage in at work, and it explains reasons why people engage in certain roles and not in others. My colleagues and I have been able to use role theory to understand conditions under which employees are either engaged or disengaged and examine what happens under both conditions. In particular, we uncovered five work-related roles that exist in any company. These roles are:

1. Job holder role – employees come to work and do the job that is listed in their job description.

2. Team member role – employees go “above and beyond” to help members of their team work toward common goals.

3. Entrepreneur role – employees come up with new ideas and processes and try to get those ideas implemented.

4. Career role – employees do things to enhance their career in the organization; they learn, they adapt new skills, and more.

5. Organization member role – employees do things that promote and help the company even if it’s not part of their jobs or their team’s duties.

Employees are in a highly engaged state when they are doing the nonjob roles. In general, we find that most employees have a sense of fairness, and even if their employer treats them poorly, most will show up to work and do the job role. But having employees show up at work simply doing their jobs gets an employer nowhere in terms of long-term competitiveness. If all of your employees show up and only do their jobs, then you are not building organizational strength and long-term competitiveness through people because anyone can hire those same employees and duplicate what you are doing.

It’s the synergy that comes from people working together and gathering creative ideas that leads to long-term organization wealth creation. That synergy and “above and beyond” behavior is evidence of employee engagement.

The question that we must ask ourselves is: “what are we doing to engage employees?” I’ve seen some approaches that involve using magical survey questions (the super 15, 30, 100, or more questions) to investigate and understand what you have to do in order to transform your workforce from disengaged to engaged. This means the process of engagement is dictated by the specific questions that one chooses to measure engagement. This approach worries me because it seems that we are trying to MEASURE engagement without necessarily helping individual managers really AFFECT engagement in their day-to-daywork.

Ref: Theresa Welbourne

Right people at the right time at the right place

The business success is about taking right people to the right place on right time. So what is the problem? Actually, if you need to manage not one, but five employees or better five groups of employees, then you face the problem of measuring and control. It's hard to tell whether one group is performing better or not, it becoming hard to compare one employees success against other one, it's hard to see the unique features of people. So what the solution is? The key metrics and key indicators, which will tell you how to manage your stuff right.

There are two approaches I suggest to take into account when thinking about human resources (HR) at your company. First, you can think in terms of process, second you can think it terms of how do employees affect the whole business.

The processes of working with employees include: hire, education, management, retire. All the stages must be processes carefully, as they could fully change your business. For instance, if you will have the best system to hire stuff, but it will be working slowly, then you will fail. If your education system will allow to train everyone, but will not allow to check the actual performance generated by training processed, then you will fail. If your best people will retire, then you will lose.

So, that's why it's really important to measure and control all processes involved into employees relationship. People who you work with, should understand what your goals are and how they will help to achieve these goals. This is the key idea of manage and control in employees management processes.

Another approach is focusing on how someone's job affect the company. It's obvious that even if someone works in a Sales then he or she will affect not only the financial part of the business by generating sales, but also all other parts.

For instance, sales person will be involved in entire company processes, such as education and knowledge sharing. This person will also work directly with customers, so he or she might not just sale, but get a valuable feedback from end users of your product. These people will also help your company to grow not just in terms of sales, but in terms of better business processes and business efficiency.

So how to measure and control HR department at your company. The answer is very simple - you should develop some key indicators that will represent company business and then pay attention to what is working good and what should be changed. There are many names for this system, for instance KPI (Key Performance Indicators) or Balanced Scorecard. The result is having the clear view of what is going to happen in company and how it will steam-line your business.

What should be the first step? Actually, I think you have already had some important information for scorecard. For instance, you have document called "mission", this is a general definition of your principles, you can some business goals, you have business processes described and formalized. What you need now is to gather all this important information into a easy to manage system, which will take in account the importance of each metrics. This system (Balanced Scorecard or KPI) will help to manage and control the performance of your HR department.

The Role of HRM in Knowledge Management

Knowledge management has become a fashionable term in organizations today. We can define knowledge management as the discipline that promotes an integrated approach to identifying, capturing, retrieving, sharing, and evaluating an enterprise’s information assets. These information assets may include databases, documents, policies, and procedures as well as uncaptured, tacit expertise and experience resident in individual workers.

HR and Knowledge Management

There are several roles that can be played by HR in developing knowledge management system.

First, HR should help the organization articulate the purpose of the knowledge management system. Investing in a knowledge management initiative without a clear sense of purpose is like investing in an expensive camera that has far more capabilities than you need to take good pictures of family and friends. Too often, organizations embrace technologies to solve problems before they've even identified the problems they are trying to solve. Then, once they realize the error, they find it difficult to abandon the original solution and difficult to gather the resources needed to invest in a solution to the real problem. Effectively framing the knowledge management issue, before deciding on a course of action, is a crucial prerequisite for success.

Second, as a knowledge facilitator, HRM must ensure alignment among an organization's mission, statement of ethics, and policies: These should all be directed toward creating an environment of sharing and using knowledge with full understanding of the competitive consequences. Furthermore, HRM must nourish a culture that embraces getting the right information to the right people at the right time.

Third, HRM should also create the "ultimate employee experience." That is, by transforming tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge through education, organizations must build employee skills, competencies, and careers, creating "bench strength." This combines the traditional training and development responsibilities of HRM with the new responsibilities of human capital steward: using all of the organization's resources to create strategic capability. Disney's new staff orientation, which emphasizes the firm's mission, values, and history within a context of the "magic kingdom" experience, is an example of this process of making tacit knowledge more visible.

Fourth, HRM must integrate effective knowledge sharing and usage into daily life. That is, knowledge sharing must be expected, recognized, and rewarded. For many individuals and organizations, this reverses the conventional relationship between knowledge and power. Often, the common pattern was to hoard knowledge because it made the individual more valuable and more difficult to replace. Effective knowledge management requires this trend to be overturned and requires those with information to become teachers and mentors who ensure that others in the firm know what they know. Teaching must become part of everyone's job. Clearly, for such a cultural shift to take place, HRM must overhaul selection, appraisal, and compensation practices. Human resource management has the capabilities for creating, measuring, and reinforcing a knowledge-sharing expectation.

Fifth, HRM must relax controls and allow (even encourage) behaviors that, in the clockwork world of industrial efficiency, never would have been tolerated. For example, conversations at the water cooler were viewed in the past as unproductive uses of employee time—after all, employees were not at their desks completing specified tasks detailed in their job descriptions. In the knowledge economy, conversations inside and outside the company are the chief mechanism for making change and renewal an ongoing part of the company's culture.

As another example, consider individuals in organizations described as "gossips," who would rather talk than work. Frederick Taylor's industrial engineers would have eliminated these gossips from workplaces in the early twentieth century, since they did nothing that was perceptibly valuable. However, in the knowledge economy, if the conversations are relevant to the firm's strategic intent, these same people may be described as "knowledge brokers": those individuals who like to move around the company to hear what is going on, sparking new knowledge creation by carrying ideas between groups of people who do not communicate directly. If the topics serve organizational needs, these individuals play a role similar to bees that cross-pollinate flowers and sustain a larger ecosystem.

Organizations should selectively recognize and reward, rather than universally discourage and punish, these types of behaviors. Clearly, not all conversation is productive and constructive. Human resource management still must play a role in discouraging gossip that undermines, rather than promotes, a learning community. Human resource management will need to adjust both its own perspective (from rule-enforcer) as well as that of managers and others who hold outdated notions of what is "real work."

Sixth, HRM must take a strategic approach to helping firms manage email, instant messenger, internet surfing, and similar uses of technology. Clearly, the Internet has a role in generating and disseminating knowledge, and therefore is an integral part of knowledge management. But what are the unintended effects of monitoring email, tracking employees' web searches, and similar issues related to privacy? Certainly some control is needed, but the larger question for HRM is determining appropriate boundaries. When does control become counterproductive? When does excessive monitoring become an inappropriate invasion of privacy?

A related issue is HRM's role in helping firms manage the distancing consequences of electronic communication. As employees increasingly rely on technology to communicate, they lose opportunities to develop the rich, multifaceted relationships that encourage the communication of tacit knowledge. Human resource management can contribute to developing social capital by sensitizing employees to the negative consequences of excessive reliance on electronic media and by creating opportunities for face-to-face contact.

Seventh, HRM must champion the low-tech solutions to knowledge management. Although it should not ignore the high-tech knowledge management tools, HRM contains the expertise to develop low-tech knowledge management strategies. For example, when the team that developed the Dustbuster vacuum tool was created, they were given a "war room" in which they could spread out their materials and leave sketches, models, notes, and so on plastered on walls and throughout the workspace. These visible outputs of their thinking processes helped create a shared context for their efforts and turned the room into a truly collaborative workspace.

Some Asian firms, such as Dai-Ichi, create special rooms (with green tea and comfortable places to sit), where researchers are expected to spend a half-hour daily, telling whomever they meet about their current work. Neither of the two preceding examples requires large financial investments in technology that will rapidly become obsolete. Yet both examples demonstrate how HRM could help a firm orchestrate and facilitate knowledge sharing.

As can be seen from the previous discussion, the knowledge facilitator role cannot be easily slotted into traditional HRM functions, such as training and development or compensation. The knowledge facilitator role is much more broad and requires creative integration across traditional HRM activities. It entails both rethinking old ways of managing the workplace as well as using innovative approaches outside the box of traditional HRM. Most important, becoming an effective knowledge facilitator requires conceptualizing HRM as a vehicle for creating capabilities and capitalizing on the human factor to create a community of knowledge workers.

Realistic Job Preview (RJP)

The realistic job preview (RJP), a new concept in recruiting and selection, is a method of communicating to an applicant or new employee what it will be like to actually perform a certain job. RJPs perform a valuable function in employee orientation, reducing reality shock and thus speeding the socialization process.

Realistic job previews can be developed in a number of ways. The most common method is to interview current employees, asking them to state actual experiences (good and bad), and attitudes toward the job. Another way is to film or videotape employees at work and ask them for comments. Information provided in an RJP should not be all positive; employees are encouraged to state some of their problems and frustrations. This information is presented to applicants or new employees verbally or in films, videotapes, or booklets.

Research shows that RJPs lower job expectations without completely "turning off" applicants to jobs. Additionally, RJP advocates argue that previews will create more positive job attitudes and contribute to reduced turnover. From a cost/benefit standpoint, it is advantageous for employers to provide applicants with realistic job previews as early in the employment process as possible. If applicants have a realistic perception of the job they are applying for, they are in a better position to determine if they are a good match for the job. An organization can save selection, hiring, and start-up costs if an applicant discovers that a poor match exists early in the process.
The currently limited use of RJPs in the recruiting and selection process stems from management's concern that too many applicants will reject job offers if they are provided with a true picture of the job. However, empirical study found that realism of job previews did not "drive away" applicants or cause candidates to reject job offers. RJPs need not be used exclusively before hiring; using them after hiring, as part of the orientation process, provides benefits as well.