The Current State of HR

The Current State of HR

Year-end 2008 is quickly approaching and all across the globe the news is dominated by negative stories about the dismal economy. We have all experienced irrational thinking and are guilty of doing it from time to time, but as we prepare to move into the New Year there is no greater threat facing global companies than irrational thinking in the HR function. Looking back, one thing was glaringly obvious more companies than ever before realized just how ill-prepared they are for the emerging labor climate. All throughout 2008 stories emerged from iconic organizations detailing just how out of touch they had become.

Moving Forward, No Reprieve

Despite night after night of negative economic news around the world, the vast majority of global companies (70% according to the most recent Gallup research) were actively trying to maintain or grow their workforce in December. Despite burgeoning unemployment, demand for top talent in skilled and professional roles is as tough as ever. Global growth combined with profound labor force demographic changes impacting more than 85% of the developed world are keeping competition for top talent fierce. While recruiters understand the challenge of recruiting today, and senior leaders understand the demand for continued investment, the vast majority of HR leaders appear to be doing business as usual.

Are You Prepared?

The near future requires robust and prescriptive action that cannot be influenced by irrational thinking. Do your measures reflect reality, or rather the perception you want others to have regarding your efforts? Are you comfortable standing up and saying the ship is already taking on water and a change in course is needed? These are the kind of questions VPs need to be asking right now. For every major strategic initiative, as well as all core deliverables, you should have objective evaluation processes in place that prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that your efforts are effective.

Three Most Important Things

While every organization has different strategic priorities and will undoubtedly work to achieve them in differing ways, there are three things that every world-class HR organization should be doing, including:

1. Prioritizing mission critical and key jobs. For far too long HR professionals have equated the terms equitable and equal. All jobs do not impact the organization the same when performed well, below average, or left vacant. While politically difficult, organizations must find a practical and accepted way to define mission critical and key jobs, and then to prioritize HR deliverables towards those roles and the talent that occupy them. Once identified, its a lot easier to deliver world-class service and demonstrate a profound impact on the business.

2. Macro level workforce planning. Too many organizations that have tried to implement workforce planning programs have gotten bogged down in the complexities that arise when the focus is too granular, i.e. every role, every employee. Granular workforce planning produces too much data and makes it easy to get lost in the statistics. Workforce planning programs should be actionable in nature, they should help answer several high level questions that establish whether or not the workforce in moving in the right direction to support the future needs of the organization and at the right pace.

3. Leveraging robust analytics and process yield modeling approaches to prove impact. With mission critical and key roles identified and macro level workforce planning initiatives in place, the next practice firms must focus on is yield modeling transformative processes such as development efforts and staffing programs. HR professionals should be able to respond with precise plans that include cost, timeline, and resources needed.

Final ThoughtsA perfect storm of environmental factors is lining up to make the next ten years very difficult with regards to recruiting and retention of top talent.

Ref: HR Funda

How HR Professionals Can Play a Role in Protecting the Enterprise

How HR Professionals Can Play a Role in Protecting the Enterprise

The story that made headlines this past summer of the San Francisco IT administrator who locked top administrators out of the city's network for several days should spark some serious discussion among HR professionals. The incident was a classic example of what a disgruntled employee with elevated privileges can do to take down the enterprise, such as encrypting data or changing passwords to restrict access to business functions.

IT professionals perform invaluable functions – without their services, organizations could not function. On the flip side, disgruntled IT employees are generally recognized as the highest risk an organization has, as they can do irreparable damage by stealing, corrupting or restricting access to data. A recent study indicated that an incredible 88 percent of IT workers would take company secrets and remote access credentials with them if they were fired. To mitigate this staggering statistic and avoid situations similar to the one in the San Francisco lockout, HR needs to develop a close relationship with their information security staff.

Once a disgruntled IT employee gets into a position where there are red flags that he or she might be a risk to the organization, steps need to be taken to restrict that person's access to the network. Having regular contact between the HR and information security departments will help management stay informed of potential "problem" employees, which is key to approaching the entire issue of insider threats.

Keeping your organization's data secure requires the cooperation of every employee – but HR in particular should play a critical role, especially with IT professionals, starting with the hiring process. When putting together a job description for a position that will have access to the organization's information assets, such as a network or system administrator, HR needs to clearly understand the duties and responsibilities of that position. For example, how much authority is vested in a particular job? What sort of access control will be in place for this position? Effectively communicating job responsibilities requires a close relationship between HR and the information security department, yet security professionals are often left out of the process.

The organization must also place a relative value of importance upon the information in the database that is being protected. Until an organization classifies what the data is worth, it will never know how valuable it is. What would be the impact of the damage to the organization if certain data was lost? For instance, what if the company's intellectual property fell into a competitor's hands? It could put your company out of business.

Another important factor to consider in the IT hiring process is to know more about the type of person you're putting in charge of your information assets. Thorough background checks should be performed before any hiring decision is made. That means more than a simple credit check and 15-second phone call, which is all that transpires in many cases. You need to look into the past of those employees requiring elevated clearance levels to determine if there's a history of disruption or any sign of previous instability. In many instances, this type of information is not discovered until after the person has already been hired; you may then have to alter their job or even terminate them.

Once employees have been hired and put in place, the next point of consideration for HR should involve separation of duties. Giving any one position too much power is rarely a good idea. For the IT professional, there should be a clear separation of duties, whereby one person doesn't have complete network control or authority. It is advisable to divide network responsibilities between at least two people to prevent significant changes within the IT infrastructure. Even if the two positions are totally independent of one another, the position descriptions should be linked to communicate that no one person will have sole responsibility for a particular function, such as access to changing passwords across the entire network.

Companies need to be especially aware of employee behaviour during difficult times. Actions such as layoffs, lack of bonuses or pay increases, or turning an employee down for a promotion can prompt some people to want to 'make themselves more important' – escalating their privileges to give themselves additional responsibilities and control. Companies need to be aware of suspicious behaviour within their network. Therefore, an independent, knowledgeable party such as an information security professional should consistently review network logs to check who has accessed various portions of the database and network. Your company's network(s) and databases must also be segmented with access control best practices in place.

If bad company news, or even the rumour of bad news, is on the horizon, HR should alert the security person to be on the lookout for suspicious behaviour. For example, if there is a massive change of passwords by one individual, or someone suddenly has more authority than they had before, that individual needs to be closely monitored or even isolated until a sufficient investigation can occur. Enforced vacations and job rotations are sometimes necessary for those holding highly sensitive positions.

Any time an organization tries to cut corners with their security and doesn't have enough people in place to provide a separation of duties, the organization runs the risk of putting all their eggs in one basket. The days when it was satisfactory to perform a 'minimum' level of security are gone. Having a second person in place that can understand the technology and undo any damage – or prevent the damage from happening in the first place – is crucial to any organization's well-being.

Source: http://www.hr.com

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.