Talent Graffiti

Drive (and Measure) Employee Engagement

Employee engagement is a concept that is generally viewed as managing the discretionary effort of your employees. That is, when given choices, employees will act in a way that furthers the organization's interests. An engaged employee is a one who is fully involved, enthusiastic, and finds personal meaning and motivation in his or her work. 

Employee engagement affects the bottom line because engaged employees deliver high-quality, committed service and they form work teams that produce high-quality results. Further, when engaged employees come into contact with the public, their commitment comes across and the people they're serving respond by becoming engaged in kind. 

To measure engagement companies need to ask employees for opinions and feedback on multiple issues that influence their attitudes at work. Often, disengagement occurs due to issues of communication and trust. According to a Towers Perrin survey on employee communication just over half of employees say their employers try too hard to "spin" the truth instead of giving it to them straight. 

What can you do? 

• Connect the work employees do as individuals to the big picture. Research shows that employees who are motivated will rally behind their employers, through good times and bad.
• Give your employees challenging work. Put people in roles that use their strengths.
• Provide training and opportunity for advancement. Assign projects that let employees grow and allow more authority over how they do their job along with clear measures of accountability.
• Ask the Gallop Q12 and analyze the results.   

How can you do it with TM Technology? 

• Utilize the goal linking functionality in your Performance Management solution to clearly communicate how individual goals align with, and affect corporate goals. 
• Access  coaching ideas and development planning resources offered by your Performance Management vendor to create succession and development plans that clearly lay out career path and development opportunities.
• Utilize the more strategic features of your Onboarding solution to deliver clear objectives (job description) and automate the provision of tools employees need to be successful from day one. 

Need to go deeper? 

• Access The Conference Board’s "Employee Engagement, A Review of Current Research and Its Implications" 
•  Read the white paper: Getting Engaged: The New Workplace Loyalty  
• Read the DDI research, Measuring Employee Engagement  

Deliver Metrics That Matter

To turn HR data in to essential business intelligence, first determine what workforce metrics matter to the business. These will vary widely based on many factors, including your industry, company size, culture, business goals, organizational structure and other factors.

And the impact of these metrics can differ within the same organization. Operations leaders may want to better understand staff development, while sales leaders may need to see the impact of compensation plans on deal closing.

These measures can be grouped into transactional (HR quantity metrics like head count, number of reviews completed, hours of employee training, etc.), operational (outcome metrics like time to hire, talent retention, employee satisfaction, etc.), and effectiveness (business performance metrics outside of HR like cost of turnover, effect of competency alignment on key positions, effect of training programs, etc.).

What can you do?

• Work with your internal stakeholders to determine what to measure and deliver it in a way that they can adopt (fancy word for use). List the requirements as must-haves and nice-to-haves to help design your solution.
• Determine how often your stakeholders need new data to analyze – daily, weekly, quarterly, etc.
• Use the communication method they use to access and share information. Email, web-based self service, formal presentation, slide show, printed report with charts and graphs, whatever works for them.
• Establish the form that will help users derive the best insight into the data to make better decisions – dashboards, detailed reports, drill down, etc.
• Understand their place in the organization to ensure they have the right level of access to the data you provide – department, organization, which employees, etc.

How can you do it with TM technology?

• Utilize existing reporting/analytic applications – and people who know how to use them – already in use in other areas of your organization. These systems already manage data, ensure its integrity and security, and facilitate its use for statistical analysis and modeling.
• Explore the feasibility of using service providers that specialize in data extraction from business applications, delivering analysis and extending your HRMS’s reporting capabilities.
• Establish a pilot program using manual data extraction and analysts (spreadsheets), wow the C-suite and start building your technology road map and business case.

Need to go deeper on this topic?

• Take the online Human Capital Institute course, Talent Metrics That Matter 
• Visit the Knowledge Infusion Center of Excellence and check out On-the-Money Metrics Corner – What Matters to You? And get involved with the discussion. 
• Check out HRMetrics.org for a growing list of metrics that matter.

Find Gen-Y Superstars

Using outdated techniques to interview Gen-Y workers, who do not hold the same values as their older counterparts, may not provide the insight you’re looking for. Millenials often do not connect with long-range types of interview questions, nor do they respond well to being pressed for information regarding their experience – mainly because they have little, yet expect to contribute from day one.

Attracting this segment of talent is critical for many companies facing a talent shortage, forcing organizations to move away from the, “Where do you see yourself in 3/5/10 years,” type of questions and engaging Millenials with the kinds of questions that speak to their unique values.

What can you do?
Ask questions like…

• What does your ideal job look like?
• How does this job fit in with your overall career goals?
• In whatever opportunities arise, how do you see yourself making a difference here?
• Where would you like to see this company in 5 years?
• How long do you think you’ll stay here?
• BONUS: Be willing to say, “It’s OK if you don’t know or haven’t thought about that.”

 
How can you do it with TM technology?
Competency Management applications allow job models/templates to be created that contain the requisite skills and competencies for the position. Interview questions can automatically be defined for each job/role.  These can be integrated directly into your Recruitment solution making it easy to provide recruiters and hiring managers with a list of interview questions, based on job category, family or individual position along with interview guides, JIT training, and support right where they need it.

Need to go deeper on this topic?

• Read the article, Getting in Sync with Gen Y
• Read the article in USA Today, Generation Y: They've arrived at work with a new attitude
• Watch the HCI webcast: Back to School: Marketing Your Careers to College Students

Use Web 2.0 to Spark Talent Management

Web 2.0 refers to a second generation of web-based communities and hosted services which aim to facilitate creativity , collaboration, and sharing between users. This includes social-networking sites, wikis, and folksonomies (also known as collaborative tagging , social classification, social indexing, and social tagging, and is the practice collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content ).

Collaborative technologies have the potential to positively impact nearly all facets of talent management. Social networking sites are dramatically changing the way companies connect with potential talent, while communities, discussion groups, learning-specific blogs and wikis have turned stagnant information into dynamic exchanges of ideas.

What can you do?

• Provide more efficient access to HR information (job opportunities, training & development opportunities, policy changes, etc.) through syndication (RSS).
• Create a job description WIKI where managers & employees contribute to every-changing job profiles.

      How can you do it with TM technology?

• Join an online user group, offered by your HCM solution vendor to tap into the power of dynamic, customer-led online communities and to drive collaboration between coworkers, business colleagues and market leaders.
• Collaborate with your vendor through their online customer portal to suggest new product concepts, discuss and vote on posted product suggestions and new concepts, suggest enhancement items, interact with product managers and other customers, and preview forthcoming product enhancements and new features.

Need to go deeper?

• Read Don Hinchcliff’s Enterprise Web 2.0 Blog  
• Get involved with Jason Averbook’s discussion on Web 2.0 in HR
• Get The Executive’s Guide to Corporate Social Networking