Human Resources (5)
Human Resources
The 4 Most Common Hybrid Work Models
It hasn’t yet displaced the tradition of working in an office for 40 hours a week, but the hybrid work model is rapidly being adopted by companies of all sizes. Here’s some examples of how companies are tackling the issue. Ford is allowing its 30,000 salaried office workers to work from home most of the time, coming into the office for meetings and group projects only when face-to-face interaction is considered essential. Microsoft transitioned to a hybrid work model allowing the majority of its 160,000 workers to work from home up to 50% of the time. Managers are able to hire from anywhere and establish their own team norms, which could mean working remotely most of the time. Google adopted a modified hybrid work model of three days in the office and two days working remotely. Workers can apply to go completely remote based on what they do and the needs of their team. CEO Sundar Pichai said, “60% of Googlers are coming together in the office a few days a week, another 20% are working in new office locations, and 20% are working from home.” These are just a few of the companies that have adopted flexible work policies combining remote work with some office time. While several companies – Slack, Twitter and Spotify among them – have decided to go entirely remote, the majority are adopting a “hybrid work model.” The name can be misleading, suggesting there is one formula when, in reality, there are several. What they have in common is that employees get to work from home at least part of every workweek. Hybrid Was Already in Demand Hybrid work began gaining momentum long before the Covid pandemic made remote work a necessity. Gallup’s State of the American Workplace found that in 2016 43% of workers spent at least some of their work time away from the office. By 2019, 48% said they worked remotely at least one day a week; 30% did so full-time. One of the obstacles was management concern that productivity would slip with too many remote workers. The pandemic proved just the opposite. Workers were more productive. They invested some of the commute time saved in work. With the majority of workers preferring to work remotely at least three days a week, 83% of companies in a PwC survey said they were adopting a hybrid work model. A quarter said they would be fully or mostly remote. Photo: PWC It’s not just U.S. workers who want to work remotely at least part of the workweek. Adecco found workers globally echoing the PwC findings about remote work preferences. Globally, 53% of workers want to work a hybrid week where at least half their work time is remote. What Employees Want from Hybrid Work “The last 18 months has proved that remote work does not come with a loss of productivity, and that a more inclusive and flexible way of working is possible. More than three quarters of workers want to retain flexibility over their own schedule, going back into the office, but on their own terms,” said Adecco. Now, that the discussion has shifted from “Should we do it” to “How do we do it,” organizations are tinkering with various iterations of the hybrid work model. Here are the most common types: Remote focused – In this model, the default is for everyone to work remotely. Meetings are conducted online. Only workers with jobs that cannot be performed remotely will be required to be on-site. This model is most appropriate for companies with knowledge products, such as software development, consulting, accounting and creative services. Office focused – Workers at companies with this model are expected to be on-site, with exceptions determined on an individual or team basis. This model is common where the majority of employees routinely deal with customers face-to-face, such as in retail, consumer banking, food service and hospitality. Companies may provide flexible work schedules and in some cases, are establishing co-work spaces to reduce employee commute time. Professional staff or salaried office workers may be offered more opportunities for remote work. Employee option – This is the Ford model. Employees who have worked remotely during the pandemic can choose to continue working from home. They’ll come into the office for meetings and certain other activities as determined by their manager. Mixed – This is the most common type of all the multiple hybrid models. Employees spend part of the work week in the office and part working remotely, which may be at home or at a co-work space. How many days in the office vs. working remotely vary with the company, though the majority seem to be leaning toward three days onsite and two days remote. All these hybrid models are a work in progress. Each company will experiment with the right mix of remote, onsite and flexible co-working arrangements. The only certainty, as PwC said in its most recent Pulse Survey is that “an all in-person workplace is no longer the norm. “The challenge for leaders: bringing out the best aspects of face-to-face teaming for all employees, whether in the office or not.” ### John Zappe Contribution ###
Continue reading
behavioral interviews
What Is a Behavioral Interview?
Despite the widely cherished view that an interview is critical to hiring the best candidates, nearly every study of the question has found practically little predictive value to the usual interview methods. A 2013 research paper bluntly declares, “Unstructured interviews are a ubiquitous tool for making screening decisions despite a vast literature suggesting that they have little validity.” Wharton Business School Professor Peter Cappelli echoes that observation in the Harvard Business Review: “Just winging it and asking whatever comes to mind is next to useless.” Is there an alternative? The answer is the behavioral interview. Defining Behavioral Interviews What is a behavioral interview? It’s a disciplined approach to predicting future performance by evaluating a job candidate on how they handled specific situations in the past. Instead of a free-wheeling interview focusing largely on technical skills or answering hypotheticals, a behavioral interview aims to learn how a candidate used their skills, knowledge and talent by asking for specific examples of what they did to accomplish goals. When structured, meaning every candidate is asked the same set of questions, studies prove behavioral interviews have a predictive value significantly higher than nearly every other method of evaluating performance. What is a behavioral interview like in practice? Here’s an example drawn from a guide published by the Society for Human Resource Management: Interview question: “Describe a situation in which you used persuasion to convince someone to see things your way.” Follow up questions to ask: “Tell me a little more about the situation” “What exactly did you do? “ “What was your specific role in this?” “What was the result?” In this example, the interviewer is probing for how the candidate works in a team setting, how they handle conflict and how they communicate their ideas. How they behaved in the past is a strong predictor of how they will in the future. According to Professor Katherine Hansen of Albright College’s Experiential Learning & Career Development Center, behavioral interviews accurately predict future job performance as much as 55% of the time compared to 10% for the typical situational or conversational interview. To be successful, behavioral interviews require planning to determine the competencies to look for. SHRM’s guide tells us recruiters and hiring managers need to identify the “knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics (KSAOs) most critical for success” for the specific job, as well as the behaviors that are important to the organization. This latter point goes to the question of cultural fit. One of the most common approaches to developing the behavioral questions to determining competencies is STAR: Situation, Task, Action and Result. In the example above, the initial question asks about a situation. The second question in the follow-up list asks about the action the candidate took. The third question seeks to elicit details about the task, while the last asks about the result. SHRM’s guide recommends creating a rating scale, and offers a sample template. There are multiple other templates online, many from assessment vendors and colleges. What they all have in common is an insistence that ratings be clearly defined and supplemented with notes and comments in real-time. A rating system allows for easy comparison among multiple candidates and, if multiple interviews are involved, among each of the evaluators. Structured behavioral interviews can reduce bias Besides improving the predictive value of job performance, structured behavioral interviews can reduce bias because all candidates are asked the same questions and all questions are directly tied to the competencies required for the job. For that same reason, candidates will get a better feel for what the job entails. Despite their superiority over unstructured situational and conversation interviews, the relevance of what is a behavioral interview to what it was in the past is becoming less clear. Job seekers can easily find lists of stock behavioral questions, many with suggested answers. Though SHRM’s guide explains how to tailor questions to the specific organization, job requirements and culture, too many organizations will simply choose their questions from these lists. Savvy candidates will practice their answers, using the STAR system to give hiring managers the answers they want. There’s also a suspicion that past performance may no longer be as compelling a predictor of future performance as it once was. Artificial intelligence, globalization of markets, the nature of competition as well as the effect of the Covid pandemic are changing the nature of work dramatically. With workers having to learn new skills and evolve competencies sometimes in months, how a candidate handled a situation last year may be less important than how they will handle something entirely new and unforeseen next year. Rather than walk away from examining past behavior entirely, behavioral interviews may need to include questions about how a candidate would apply their experience to similar situations complicated by today’s changing workplace. As professor and recruiting thought leader Dr. John Sullivan says, “Hiring managers should be less concerned about how someone acted in the past and more concerned about how they will modify their behavior and act differently in today’s completely changed environment at your company.” *** John Zappe Contributed
Continue reading
Human Resources
Why New Hires Fail and What to Do About It
One of recruiting’s secrets is that 46% of new hires fail within 18 months. It’s a shocking statistic that was first reported in 2005 by the leadership training and employee engagement firm Leadership IQ. It’s been confirmed by multiple studies, including several that broke new hires down by type and level of responsibility. Dr. John Sullivan, professor of human relations and a recruiting advisor to many of the largest companies in the world, reported that these studies found: 50% of hourly new hires quit or are fired in their first six months Between 40% and 60% of management new hires fail within 18 months. 40% of new CEOs fail in their first 18 months. Kevin Kelly, CEO of the global executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles, told the Financial Times, “We’ve found that 40 percent of executives hired at the senior level are pushed out, fail or quit within 18 months. It’s expensive in terms of lost revenue. It’s expensive in terms of the individual’s hiring. It’s damaging to morale.” As serious as the new hires fail rate is, recruiters and hiring managers are now coping with an equally troubling trend: candidates are “ghosting” recruiters – disappearing from the hiring process without notice — or just not showing up on the first day. At the same time, an increasing number of new hires are quitting within a few months, some within days of starting a new job. A Jobvite survey of 1,500 workers found 3-in-10 had quit a job in the first 90 days. 7% admitted to “ghosting” an employer after the interview. An Indeed survey of 4,000 job seekers found 29% of them had ghosted and nearly a quarter had accepted an offer but didn’t show up. As troubling as the ghosting trend is for employers, having new hires fail or suddenly quit is worse. Besides having to begin the recruiting process all over again, there’s a loss of productivity, a hit to team morale and the potential that others may choose to leave, a phenomenon known as “turnover contagion.” Estimates of the cost of turnover range from a low of around $4,500 for entry- and lower-level workers to more than 200% of salary for senior management. It’s tempting to blame the recruiting process. And there is some truth to that. The Leadership IQ study found poor interpersonal skills were most often the cause of new hires failing. They fail because: 26% can’t accept feedback 23% were unable to manage emotions 17% lacked motivation to excel 15% because of the wrong temperament for the job The lack of the right set of skills was the cause only 11% of the time. In hindsight, 82% of the 5,247 hiring managers surveyed admitted that in the interview there were “subtle clues that these employees would be headed for trouble,” but they were ignored. Other research suggests that the onboarding process bears as much responsibility, as well as an unrealistic or incomplete description of the job and the company culture. What can employers do to reduce the new hires fail rate? Leadship IQ offers this: “If managers focus more of their interviewing energy on candidates’ coachability, emotional intelligence, motivation, and temperament, their hiring success will improve.” Dr. Sullivan said employers must redesign their recruiting process to use “data that reveals which process elements accurately predict future success on the job.” He estimates that as much as 75% of the hiring decisions involve human intuition – a “gut” feeling – rather than hard data. Preventing new hire failures and quits starts with how the company portrays itself. Candidates need to get an accurate feel for what it’s like to work for the organization. “You want to give them the ability to self-select in, as well as self-select out,” says a whitepaper on “How to Hire for Success.” The guide echoes Sullivan and other experts in emphasizing the use of data in selection. Survey both top performers and those at the bottom to discover the work ethics, attributes and traits of each. Use these to develop a process to know exactly what qualities to look for – and what to avoid – in hiring. Train managers in behavioral interviewing. Develop a series of questions around the most common reasons why new hires fail, and probe for examples and situations where the candidate can show how they set and achieve goals, collaborate and handle disappointment. Onboarding is also key to reducing both the new hires fail rate and improving the retention of new workers. Sullivan and others advise making onboarding a long term process that includes career pathing and personalized training to give your new worker the skills – both hard and soft – to move along their own career path. Managers need to act as coaches, meeting frequently with their new team member to give them feedback on their performance and especially to get their feedback on the job. Bamboo HR research says what would make new hires want to stay is more attention from their manager, recognition for the work they do, clear guidelines and effective training. As professor and author Michael D. Watkins writes in the Harvard Business Review, “Onboarding is among the toughest types of job transitions. Why? Because new hires, even if they are experienced professionals, are unfamiliar with the business, don’t understand how things really work, lack established relationships, and have to adapt to a new culture. Research has shown that challenges in the latter two categories are the biggest reasons for quick turnover.” “Being systematic in onboarding,” he says, “Brings new employees up to speed 50% faster, which means they’re more quickly and efficiently able to contribute to achieving desired goals. Effective onboarding also dramatically reduces failure rates and increases employee engagement and retention.” Contributions by John Zappe
Continue reading
Human Resources
The Importance of Employee Benefits
It’s almost impossible to overstate the importance of employee benefits. Especially in today’s recruiting conditions. Target and Walmart recently announced 100% paid tuition programs in an effort to attract (and retain) more frontline workers. Surveys find employees consistently say benefits not just important, but often a deciding factor in whether to look for a new job or accept one. The Society for Human Resource Management found 92% of employees rank the importance of employee benefits as key to their overall job satisfaction. A survey last summer by Prudential Financial found the importance of employee benefits so significant that 73% of workers report they are a big reason for staying at their job. The importance of employee benefits to workers is so great they overestimate their economic value by almost 30% according to the American Institute of CPAs. Benefits also play a key role in recruiting talent. Job candidates have turned down offers that pay more, but don’t offer the benefits they want. Glassdoor says 57% of adults report benefits and perks are among their top considerations before accepting a job. In industries desperate for workers, especially those in retail and hospitality, employers are extending at least some benefits to their part-time workers. Amazon, for example, now gives 20 hour a week workers partially paid health insurance, fully paid vision and dental insurance and life and disability insurance. Chipotle has long provided basic benefits to all its workers and this year began offering to cover college tuition costs. Many other companies, Starbucks among them, are doing the same or, more commonly, are offering to help pay off student loans. Why are companies doing this? They recognize the importance of employee benefits in recruiting top talent and retaining workers. Because hiring demand is high and the supply of skilled workers so short, retention has become a top priority for most organizations. The technology sector long ago led the way, providing free food, unlimited time off, paid parental leave, child care and time off for volunteer work as a way of attracting and keeping their workers. The importance of employee benefits varies by generation. Older workers with grown children would rather have higher contributions to 401(k) than child care. Millennials place a premium on student loan repayment assistance. Medical, dental, vision and life insurance and some form of a retirement plan are must haves regardless of age. No company that doesn’t offer these basic benefits can hope to successfully compete for the best talent or retain workers for long. Without these, even a 30% pay premium isn’t enough to attract workers, according to the American Institute of CPAs. These are also the most expensive of benefits for an employer to provide, a primary reason why most companies today have shifted some of the cost to the employee. Not all benefits, however, have an out of pocket cost. Surveys just in the last year by Unum, Staples and SHRM found workers most want flexible schedules and the ability to work remotely most or at least part of the time. The 1,549 participants in the Staples survey declared them to be “must have” benefits. Paid time off and paid family leave were listed as top benefits by 35% and 24% respectively of the workers in the Unum survey. Some of these valued benefits don’t have a direct cost, though there can be some effect on overall productivity. However, as companies discovered during the forced pandemic shutdowns, productivity increased among employees able to work from home. Another type of benefit, so-called voluntary benefits, cost employers nothing, but add to the overall importance of employee benefits a company offers. Included among these are buying program discounts, hospital indemnity coverage that pays cash for each day of a hospital stay, long term care insurance and education savings plans. While some companies will pay the cost of one or more of these benefits, usually it’s the worker choosing the benefit who pays the full cost through payroll deduction. The advantage is that the price of the coverage or the benefit is much lower than if the worker were to buy it privately. The Covid pandemic has had a profound impact on the importance of employee benefits. It accelerated trends toward remote work and flexible schedules and has put a sharper focus on mental health benefits and wellness programs. Melanie Tinto, CHRO of the payment processing and information management services firm WEX, could have been speaking for all HR professionals when she told HRExecutive, “The pandemic has shown me that flexibility is impacting every part of the way we work, and our benefits packages are going to need to be just as flexible going forward.” ### John Zappe Contributed
Continue reading
Human Resources
Interview Feedback - How to Make it Useful
Interview feedback is one of the most important parts of the hiring process, yet it tends to be the one part most often overlooked or seen as a chore. The feedback we’re talking about in this article are the notes and written impressions interviewers make of the candidates. There are other types of interview feedback including feedback from candidates about the hiring process and interview feedback given to candidates to let them know how they did and how they might improve. Interview Feedback Essentials For the hiring team, feedback from each interviewer is essential to fairly evaluate candidates. Well written interview feedback forms provide a way to compare multiple candidates and to know why each interviewer scored a candidate as they did. This is equally true when only the hiring manager is conducting the interviews. Most of us have a hard time remembering what we had for lunch yesterday, let alone what a candidate interviewed a week or two ago said. Though most of us would agree that interview feedback is valuable, it has to be detailed and specific to be useful. A feedback form that recommends against hiring a candidate because “they don’t seem to be a good fit” is of no help to other members of the hiring team because it lacks a basis for the impression. Should a legal issue arise over a rejection, that lack of specificity could be seen as suggestive of bias. Writing good interview feedback doesn’t have to be difficult. Many organizations use standardized interview forms. Standardizing the Interview The Society for Human Resource Management has a sample interview evaluation form online that includes a scoresheet covering multiple areas of inquiry. A numerical rating is a quick, but perhaps too easy, method of scoring candidates. It’s tempting with that system to skip the details, which, most recruiting professionals agree, is where the emphasis should be. While there’s no lack of advice online about what should be covered and how to compile interview feedback, there’s no disagreement about the key points. Backed up by extensive research, HR leaders say structured interviews yield the best information and make for the most valuable interview feedback. Structured interviews are more effective in evaluating candidates and they make it easier to compare candidates, since all are asked the same important questions. That also makes it easier to craft an interview feedback form. Pulling from a broad variety of sources we’ve distilled the best advice to the five most important steps in crafting effective interview feedback: Take notes during the interview on what the candidate says in response to your key questions. If you use a numeric rating, give it to each question or category during the interview. Be sure to make a note why. Immediately after the interview, detail your impressions and the specific reason for each. Update and expand on the notes you took during the interview. Review the job description to compare what’s listed there to what you learned from the candidate. Set the notes and comments aside to give you time to process the interview. Most interview professionals suggest coming back to craft the actual interview feedback document the next day. In the meantime, avoid conferring with other members of the interview team. Don’t let someone else’s opinions influence yours. In writing the interview feedback, be specific and give examples. Focus on their professional attributes. Include your impressions only when you can back them up with concrete examples. The final interview feedback should have a clear decision about moving forward or not with the candidate with a summary of why you reached that decision. Indeed.com, the job search site has a brief guide to writing interview feedback that includes dos and don’ts and an example of useful feedback. The recruiting technology company Workable has several samples of how to provide specific feedback. And a Harvard Business Review article about removing bias from the interview process explains the value of structured interviewing in scoring candidates and creating fair and unbiased interview feedback.
Continue reading
career progression planning
The Benefits of Career Progression Planning
A decade ago, before Honeywell bought Sparta Systems, the company embarked on an aggressive growth program. With so many new hires and the tech company’s desire to keep its org chart as flat as possible, workers were understandably worried about their career advancement. To keep them engaged, Sparta Systems launched an equally aggressive career progression planning program that promoted lateral movement opportunities to round out future leaders and enable others to master new skills and explore new jobs within the company. This career progression planning involved customizing training and learning to meet not just the needs of the organization, but also the aspirations of each employee. In just a few years, the company’s annual loss of the talent Sparta didn’t want to lose plummeted to 1%, while the turnover rate fell below that of most of the rest of the industry. Modern Day Career Progression Planning Career progression planning, often called career pathing, used to mean the rungs on the corporate ladder. Today the process is broader, encompassing not just those expecting to become company managers and leaders, but those who want to improve their skills, take on new challenges or become subject matter experts in their current role. “Well-administered career progression [planning],” says The Croner Company, “is an effective means to help retain and continue to motivate key employees.” “The underlying mechanism of all such plans is the orderly movement of employees, either vertically to positions of greater responsibility or horizontally to positions encompassing a breadth of company functions.” A study by The Work Institute found a lack of career growth and development opportunity was the leading reason for voluntary turnover. It accounted for 21% of all reasons employees changed jobs in 2017, which was the 8th consecutive year it topped the list of the reasons for worker turnover. Four years later, it still led all other reasons for turnover. Leveraging Retention Retention of your best people is not the only benefit of career progression planning. When employees have opportunities to develop and grow in their skills and expertise, engagement improves and the more engaged workers an organization has the higher the productivity and the more competitive it is. Of equal benefit to the organization is having workers trained to move into the new jobs of the future. In the past, career progression planning was a time-consuming process that involved inventorying the skills and competencies of each job in the organization, then building development plans around each. Employees opted-in or were invited to participate in the program. Now, AI-enabled technology analyzes job roles and resumes and identifies next role candidates. The technology also builds the career path, detailing what skills each employee has and what they need to learn or improve for the next step, whether up or lateral. Writing in Forbes, Mahe Bayireddi, CEO of Phenom, a vendor in AI-enabled career pathing, explains, “By doing much of the heavy lifting, AI can efficiently match employees to suitable next-step positions based on their profiles.” All career progression planning must involve front line managers to encourage and coach their team members to investigate opportunities. Development programs must take into account the needs and strategic goals of the organization but be tailored to what employees need and want. “As career opportunities increase,” the Work Institute says, “Employers must take steps to understand the needs, preferences and goals of their workers or miss out on opportunities to keep workers that they need.” Bayireddi concludes his Forbes article with this: “Effective career progression plans will soon be the expectation, not the exception.” Contribution by John Zappe
Continue reading
Human Resources
Internal Mobility Is Now More Critical Than Ever
Employers waste millions of dollars each year recruiting when the best people for the jobs are often right under their nose. Deloitte tells us it costs a single large company upwards of $400 million in recruiting costs, training and lost productivity to replace workers. An internal mobility program would save $31 million by shaving just one point off the organization’s 13% turnover. The cost of turnover due to a lack of career development and internal mobility to just an average-sized company is $49 million, says Gartner, the global research and consulting firm. Retention and the savings it offers is a powerful incentive for companies to have a strong internal mobility program. In 2015, as recruiting talent was getting ever more difficult, Korn Ferry’s Futurestep found 87% of 1,189 corporate executives that a strong internal mobility program would “definitely help with attraction and retention efforts.” Remarkably, fewer than a third admitted their company had an internal mobility program. Fewer still use some kind of internal mobility software. If saving on recruiting new workers was the only benefit, that would be reason enough for every company – big or small – to have an internal mobility program. The benefits of a program are far greater than that. Dozens of research studies and surveys, and the experience of companies with robust internal mobility programs like Cisco, Ingersoll Rand and Vanguard, prove beyond a doubt that career development improves engagement, increases productivity, reduces turnover and enhances the employer brand. One of the seminal studies of internal mobility vs. external hiring found internal hires outperform external hires and stay longer. Ironically, those hired from within are paid 18% less than those hired externally. Cisco and the HR advisory and research firm Future Workplace found internal mobility programs improved: Employee engagement by 49% Productivity by 39% Employee teamwork 39% LinkedIn reported in in its Global Talents Trends 2020 that on average, employees stay 41% longer at companies that regularly hire from within. The Society of Human Resource Management says the retention benefits extend to workers who made a lateral move as well as those promoted up the ladder. With these kinds of benefits why don’t all companies have an internal mobility program? Deloitte says, “Creating a strong culture of internal mobility isn’t just about posting positions on an internal job site. It involves all leaders encouraging and supporting employees to develop the skills that prepare them for their next role, and creating a matching career plan. All too often, such efforts are largely absent.” The culture at more than a few companies discourages managers from hiring internally, seeing it as poaching rather than career development. Managers, too, resist losing their best workers. “While it’s hard to believe,” says Deloitte, “There are organizations where recruiters are told they cannot reach out to the employees within the company about a different role.” Even where an internal mobility program does exist, it’s often managed by HR functional areas such as learning and development, succession or career management. When talent acquisition is not included, recruiters may not think to look inside to fill a job. Josh Bersin, a globally recognized leader and analyst in talent management, says the worker shortages of the last several years and the pandemic that forced companies to do business differently and redeploy people into new or different jobs made internal mobility more critical than ever. “It’s time for companies to provide employees with agile, personalized mobility that helps them move their careers into the right direction while meeting organizational needs with talent from within their own walls.” Contribution by John Zappe
Continue reading
Human Resources
What Is People Analytics?
BBVA, USA, a large, regional bank knew turnover was a problem. It was clear from the HR reports. But before they could address it, the HR team first had to know what jobs and where was attrition the greatest. For the answers, they turned to people analytics. Analytics identified the jobs most at risk and the branches for the biggest share of the turnover. Armed with that knowledge, BBVA developed a plan targeting those jobs and those branches, and cut turnover almost in half. Impact like that is why people analytics is becoming such a key part of human resources. But just what is people analytics? Or, as it’s also called, talent analytics, workforce analytics and HR analytics. Defining People Analytics It’s the collection and analysis of HR and organizational data to provide insights into problems or practices with the objective of improving business performance. Some answers to what is people analytics are broader, taking into account external data such as industry benchmarks. Toolbox goes even further defining it as “the deeply data-driven and goal-focused method of studying all people processes, functions, challenges, and opportunities at work to elevate these systems and achieve sustainable business success.” However it’s defined, global analytics consultant David Green says in LinkedIn’s 2020 talent trends report, “Providing insights to support better decision-making is the key purpose of people analytics.” The pharmaceutical firm Johnson & Johnson put that to the test a few years ago. Company recruiters were shifting away from recent college grads in favor of hiring more experienced workers. Acting on instinct, recruiting teams claimed experienced hires made better workers and stayed longer. HR leaders weren’t convinced. So they turned to their people analytics group, which found the recruiters were wrong. New grads not only performed almost as well as the seasoned workers, but they actually stayed longer. The analysis, explained the head of the people analytics team, “dispelled a myth in our organization.” After the analysis was reported, college hiring jumped by 20%. Results like that – and there are many, even more dramatic such as an IBM attrition project that saved the company $300 million – are making people analytics a core HR function. Now, instead of asking “What is people analytics?” HR leaders and C-suite executives are asking how to implement analytics. A study published in Journal of Organizational Effectiveness People and Performance, declared: “By 2025, HR analytics will have become an established discipline, will have a proven impact on business outcomes, and will have a strong influence in operational and strategic decision making.” LinkedIn’s survey of HR professionals found almost three-quarters believe people analytics “will be a major priority for their company over the next 5 years.” Still, a majority of these professionals admit they “need help putting basic people analytics into practice.” Perhaps for that reason, the analytics consultancy Millan Chicago, sees “the gradual mainstreaming of people analytics” as the most important trend in analytics this year. “As businesses begin to realize the critical importance of data, investing in analytics will no longer become something ‘shiny and new,’ but rather a business essential.” Instead of asking “what is people analytics,” HR leaders are recognizing what people analytics has done to improve business performance wherever it’s been adopted and are hastening to do the same for their organization. John Zappe, contributed to this article.
Continue reading
Human Resources
Offboarding Process Tips
Think for a moment about how much time and effort go into recruiting and onboarding the talented people you hire. How does that compare to what you invest in their eventual offboarding? With very few exceptions, the offboarding process is almost an afterthought. According to research by Aberdeen, only 29% of companies have a formal offboarding program. Even then, many of those are little more than checklists of the paperwork that needs to be completed by the departing employee. Other research by the business strategy consulting company SBI found HR professionals invest 8x more time developing and managing onboarding programs than they do on offboarding. Why does this matter? Because a good offboarding process tips the scales in favor of the employer when it comes to – surprise! – retention and recruiting. Employees who leave an employer feeling good about the way their exit was handled are much more likely to refer others to the company, leave positive reviews, mentor their replacements and return as boomerangs. “A well-managed offboarding process can turn employees into loyal alumni who become customers, suppliers, boomerang employees, mentors to current workers and ambassadors for the firm,” said Erin Makarius, associate professor of management at the University of Akron in Ohio, an author of a report this spring in the Harvard Business Review. An array of studies and research don’t just detail the importance of offboarding, they analyze the value, offering specific offboarding process tips to help HR teams develop the kind of programs that create brand ambassadors of former employees. Most employers already have procedures for handling the legal requirements and other basics. A successful offboarding program goes beyond that, says Makarius and his co-author, Alison M. Dachner, associate professor at John Carroll University. Here are some of the more valuable of the offboarding process tips compiled from their report and others. Treat exiting employees with respect. This is as true for those involuntarily terminated as for those leaving on their own. Resist the temptation to make a show of hustling fired employees out of the building. Affording everyone a measure of respect will help avoid the bad feelings that can lead to negative reviews, dissension in the ranks and possible lawsuits. Create an alumni group. Think of your departing workers not as ex-employees, but as a valuable resource. Just as a university engages its grads, stay in touch with your alumni. Keep them up-to-date with news about the company and about each other. In addition to using social media – many alumni groups exist on Facebook — a periodic newsletter serves as an extra way to communicate. Alumni are also a valuable resource to take on contract work or special projects. Exit interviews. In high-performing companies, these interviews are analyzed and the results reported up the chain. They are an invaluable tool for uncovering problem managers and cultural shortcomings, if they are acted upon. Recognizing the reluctance of departing employees to burn bridges, many companies will conduct an exit interview at the time of departure, then follow-up with the employee 30 or 60 days later. Mentorship. Positioning the training of an employee’s replacement as a mentorship is a more positive and enduring way of ensuring a knowledge transfer. Asking the departing worker to help with the transition and giving them the support to do that, will often make for a smoother handoff with the mentorship extending into the alumni phase of the relationship. The internet has no shortage of offboarding process tips. A search for “offboarding process” brings up thousands of results including multiple checklists of the legal and practice steps. Meeting those requirements is important and has to be a part of any offboarding process. The offboarding process tips here, though, go the heart of a company’s culture. A strong culture, the kind that has talent wanting to join you, doesn’t end with the last paycheck. Your alumni may be tomorrow’s boomerang employees and certainly you want them to be today’s brand ambassadors. ### Contribution by John Zappe ###
Continue readingAbout Emissary
Emissary is a candidate engagement platform built to empower recruiters with efficient, modern communication tools that work in harmony with other recruiting solutions.
Stay in the loop!
Subscribe to our bi-weekly newsletter and keep up to date with the latest Recruiting and HR tips and trends.
By clicking send you’ll receive occasional emails from us.