In this month’s Jeitocast Karen Beaman interviews Mike Kent on change management, why it’s important, and why people should care about managing change. Mike talks about the key components of a change management program, who should be involved in the change management process, and who should manage the overall effort.
Thank you to those of you who commented on my previous post on this topic. Continuing this theme with one last look back to some of the lasting impacts of the 2008-2009 recession on the HR function, I offer three additional perspectives:
With the reduction in funds for new capital investments, organizations started looking closer at what they already had in place and how they could improve on it. While the vast majority of companies have systems in place for core HR, Benefits, and Payroll, most started looking at what additional processes could be automated or self-service-enabled in order to gain efficiencies and effectiveness, but mostly to reduce costs. Moving from transaction-oriented, organizations today are becoming process-oriented, meaning they are taking a holistic view of business activity and integrating processes across functions, such as pay-for-performance, development and succession planning, and staffing and workforce planning. While we still have ways to go, there is a definite movement toward process-oriented HR.
Talent Management has been the fastest growing area in the HR space for the last several years. Organizations are finally executing on what they have long maintained, that people are the most important asset. Gartner’s Jim Holincheck at IHRIM’s Global Forum in Chicago this past year reported that Talent Management grew ~7% through Q2 of 2009 while core HRMS revenues grew just ~4.5%. Clearly the HRMS market has matured while talent management is still in its infancy, but there is a definitive movement toward a more talent-focused HR approach and there will be no turning back. With a talent-focused approach, HR moves another step closer to becoming that elusive HR business partner.
The successful HR professional today, post-recession, is a hybrid developed out of varied experiences who realizes the need to be business-centric, metrics-minded, systems-savvy. While many HR professionals may be stuck in an administrative quagmire, unable to focus on more strategic issues due to a lack of tools and strategies to eliminate and automate much of the administrative backbone of HR, there are few who don’t realize the importance of business knowledge and financial acumen to be a successful strategic partner to the business. Business-centric means understanding the role that HR strategies and services play in driving business growth — sales, revenues, and profits.
Other ideas? What do you think has changed forever for HR as a result of the last two tumultuous years? I’d love to hear from you!
The end of the year is a time to look back and reflect on what we accomplished (or didn’t!) and look forward to what will be different (we hope!) in the new year. So here are three things that I think have changed for HR and HR systems during this rough, recessionary year — the worse economic year for business since the Great Depression. And I think these are lasting changes. While the recession will abate and the economy will slowly recover, I think these are some fundamental things that have changed for HR forever.
Unemployment reached its highest level in 26 years (November 6, 2009 New York Times). And while it’s not front page news anymore, organizations are still continuing to “rationalize and rightsize.” I think HR as a function was particularly hard-hit. Our continuing inability to justify the HR function as a value-added business partner has caught up with us. There seem to be as many VPs and Directors of HR out of work as there are real estate agents without houses to sell. Yet being lean is a good thing. It teaches us to work smarter and be more efficient and effective in everything we do.
This difficult economic year has taken its toll on the people left behind in the organization. Called the “survivor syndrome“, the people left behind have a whole new set of challenges they have to deal with. In most cases, they have to pick up additional responsibilities because the work doesn’t simply doesn’t go away when people leave. In other cases, they may have lost a close friend or ally at work. As a result, I think organizations have gotten meaner. At a recent HR Breakfast Club meeting participants said that their companies no longer feel any obligation to provide training or development opportunities for their employees. The feeling was that the employees should just be happy they have a job at all! Being mean is NOT a good thing. Environments where everyone looks out for their own self create anarchy and breed situations such as Enron. While it is definitely a cold hard world out there, as the economy rebounds and as companies must again compete for top talent, I believe (hope!) that this change will soften. While I believe that people are ultimately responsible for driving their own careers, organizations have a responsibility to support and develop their workforce to help individuals achieve their greatest potential — which study after study has shown, contributes to company performance — that means growth and profitability.
The sustainability movement accelerated considerably in the last decade as people are now realizing that the earth doesn’t have an endless supply of raw materials and as organizations are now learning about the savings that can be accomplished through more effective re-use of materials (e.g., recycling paper and printer cartridges). process automation (e.g., eliminating paper forms), and implementation of self-service strategies (e.g., eliminating duplicate paper forms with multiple signatures/approvals). The annual CedarCrestone Technology survey has consistently demonstrated that automation and self-service enablement can bring 25-75% savings, depending on the process. Becoming “greener” and providing more direct access through process automation is definitely a good thing!
So what lasting impacts do you think the recession has had or will have on HR, HR systems, and business in general? I look forward to hearing from you!
We have just completed the preliminary analysis of our second annual Going Global Readiness Survey. Over 100 global organizations responded to the survey with companies ranging from 500 employees to over 200,000 employees and covering a broad range of industries. Three-quarters of the organizations are North American multinationals and 14% are based in Europe, Middle East and Africa.
We haven’t finished all of the analysis yet, but there are few interesting highlights that I can share with you now:
Greatest Challenges: The greatest challenges that companies are facing when going global are:
Interestingly, the greatest challenge companies face in going global, they also cite as their greatest success: developing and appreciating global diversity. The good news, as with most things in life, the more you work at something, the better you get at it!
Strategic Planning: Top-performing organizations involve HR from the local business sites in the company’s strategic planning efforts: they are 20% more likely than the average and a third more likely than bottom-performing organizations to involve local HR in strategic planning efforts. Clearly the more you involve the right people in the company’s planning efforts:
Service Delivery: Top-performing organizations in the Going Global Survey make greater use of key organizational constructs:
They are 18% more likely to implement Shared Services and outsourcing strategies and 14% more likely to have a Center of Excellence in place. This finding also corroborates many other studies that show that top-performing organizations deploy a multi-sourcing approach, ensuring that the right work is performed in the right place, by the right people, at the right time. Segregating work in to transaction-oriented and strategic/ knowledge-based work helps organizations achieve economies of scale and allows the transition of HR into a more strategic business partner role.
Thank you to all of you who took the time to complete the survey for us. To read a preliminary copy of the full report, please click here. To participate in the survey, please click here. Stay tuned for more updates as we continue our analysis.
I have been honored to be selected to be among the many dignitaries to appear on The Bill Kutik Radio Show® to talk about going global with HR and HR technology. Bill Kutik himself is quite the globalist… having traveled to such exotic places as the Arctic, Labrador, Galapagos… you get the idea… really nice vacation spots where they all speak English! A true “globalist” in the making!
Not surprisingly, Bill starts off with his contrarian view asking just how global is the world anyway and aren’t I biased since all I see and work with are global companies. And indeed, according to a Harvard Business Review survey a couple of years ago, it is certainly the case that less than 30% of business interactions and communications take place globally. So I prefer to use Pankaj Ghemawat’s term “semi-globalized” when thinking about the world of global HR. While there are many commonalities around the world, there is also a lot of diversity in business practices, customs, cultures, languages, legislation, and regulations.
Working effectively in the semi-globalized world means balancing the often conflicting demands of multiple worlds: corporate headquarters, regional leadership, business unit leaders, and country management. Often the needs of these different groups can be diametrically opposed. So I often suggest to organizations to focus on being “as global as possible, as local as necessary.”
But the fact is that the vast majority of the Fortune 1000 companies do have some amount of global operations. So just how global the world really is depends on how you define “global.” Global can mean the company has 500 people in two or three countries or 30,000 people across 20 countries or 300,000 employees across 170 countries.
But no matter how many people and how many countries, Corporate HR still wants to be able to get a global headcount report, to understand where there top-performers are for succession planning purposes, and to have some degree of standardization and oversight into hiring and staffing practices around the world. So my answer is that every company needs a global strategy for their HR service delivery, operations, and infrastructure.
So whether you work for a 3,000 or 300,000 person organization or are globe-trotter like Bill, check out our fun and informative discussion about going global in HR today, Wednesday, December 9, 2009, at 9:00 Pacific, 12pm Eastern, 6pm Central European Time. As with all shows, it will be recorded so you can listen to it anytime that’s convenient for you.
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