Fear and Loathing in HR

From Monday's Lean Blog:

"Many workplaces are effectively crippled by fear, including hospitals (or some might say “especially hospitals”). Hospitals are notorious for having “name, blame, and shame” cultures. Dr. Deming wouldn’t have liked that."

I've been a big fan of Dr. Demming since I first read about him.  He and Peter Drucker shaped my management philosophy more than anyone else I never met.  One of his core beliefs around managing people is that performance reviews are waste, and we should allow those in our organization the freedom to experiment, fail, learn, and experiment some more.  Simple but brilliant.  I think that's how I define genius.

Anyway, this post, centered around the work environment at Facebook, talks about the importance of environment on success.  Taking it back to our world, what is the perception of HR in your organization?  Are you the person to whom others go for help, or are you the bouncer that escorts people out of the building?  Do you help build the business plans and talk about talent development, or do you force managers to fill out performance reviews once a year, just because they should?

HR is in position to impact not just who works in your organization, but how they work, what their support system looks like, and how their career is shaped.  This can't be done if you are wallowing in waste and bloated processes.  You have to lean out your work, eliminate bottlenecks and paperwork, and give people what they need to perform.  Then you can work on changing the environment, the culture, and the future.

Lean is Inclusive, not Intrusive.

Recently read an article talking about how HR and Lean can "join forces" to change the world.  The article is good, but I think it propagates a fundamental flaw in our thinking about Lean and anything.  Lean isn't something you do on top of your "day job," it's how you do that job.  The problem with sustaining improvement programs is when comments like "I can't run a project, I'm too busy with my regular work" are encountered without immediately coaching that person on using those Lean tools to accomplish their work in a more efficient way. 

We don't have to "join" Lean and anything.  Lean is a toolbox to help us accomplish our goals.  If it's seen as anything else, it's a failure.

5 Ways to Reduce Waste in Your Recruiting Processes

Talent acquisition is rewarding, but can be a painful process for both the recruiter and the applicant(s).  Here are some suggested methods for cutting waste and improving the overall recruiting process...

1)  Online applications.  Most companies are either in this game or going there, but many that use an application tracking system also have paper applications.  In some cases, they require both.  Not to mention the redundancies of having a CV or resume, then the online application, then the paper application.  Don't waste you applicant's time with rework, and don't waste your own in dealing with reams of unnecessary paper.

2)  Incentives your externals the right way.  The best system I've seen offers their external recruiters a bonus payment if the first candidate they present is hired.  This gives them incentive to really learn the culture and position to give you a great candidate the first time.  If you think of the wasted time and money in looking at multiple candidates, it's a small price to pay.

3) Cut your interview to offer time.  Sometimes the bottlenecks are simple ones to reduce, once you realize that time is not a free resource.  One team I worked with waited until the end of the process (meaning post-acceptance) to perform the background check and drug screening.  It added 5-10 days to the end of the process.  The cost for each round of checks was about $50.  Once I asked them if the position added more than $10 per day of value, it became an easy decision to move it.  Now they perform those checks on the final three candidates just before the last round of interviews.  Results don't come back until after the interviews and (generally) the decision is made, but the delay in getting the offer and acceptance in greatly reduced.

4) Create a pull process in staffing.  Recruiters will tell you there is a limit to how many searches that can do at once before you start to lose quality.  Ten seems to be the average.  If you are using an online talent system, hold the requisitions back until one of the ten they are currently working is closed out.  This also allows you to track your staffing levels and know if you have the right number on the team, too many, or not enough.  Speaking of which...

5)  Centralize your staffing team.  Just like a call center, shared staffing resources allow you to handle the peaks and valleys of demand across your business without over- or under-worked people (as well as often needed fewer recruiters overall).  Rather than have a staffing person for each location/department/business leader, build a central team that can take requests from across the business and triage them for best responses.  Within that team you can still have specialists as needed, but you reduce your risk of losing an expert recruiter because their knowledge can be more easily shared. 

And the unnumbered bonus tip is, of course, get really good at talent retention and development.  It will help keep the recruiting needs to a minimum, which is the best way to reduce the waste in the first place.

LSS Deployment Benchmarks - How do you stack up?

Karen Welch from Abbott Nutrition presented in October at the 4th Annual Global Lean, Six Sigma and Business Improvement Summit. She quoted a few interesting (or depressing, depending on how you see it) statistics from Leap Technologies. I thought I'd share the ones that really caught my eye.

• Close to 50% of organizations making a significant investment in LSS complete fewer than 10 projects in the first two years despite significant training investment.
• Less than 15% Green Belts trained in LS methods (80 hrs classroom time) actually complete a project.
• Close to 40% BB training is devoted to teaching DOE, yet the majority report never using the tool in an actual project.
• Despite a goal of changing the culture, employee participation in LS projects average less than 10% of the workforce

How does this compare to your organization? We’ve spent a great deal of time on these very issues, and I’d like to think we’ve made progress in our organization, but I’m curious as to the state of the practice in other companies.
So how many of these four items would you dispute on your team?

Obama appoints "Chief Performance Officer"

In the interest of keeping politics at a minimum, I won't ask people's opinions of the incoming administration (or outgoing, for that matter, though civil discussion is always welcome), I thought this new post was interesting enough to mention.  From Yahoo! News...

President-elect Barack Obama...named on Wednesday a former Treasury official as the first U.S. "chief performance officer" to oversee budget and spending reform.

"We can no longer afford to sustain the old ways when we know there are new and more efficient ways of getting the job done...Even in good times, Washington can't afford to continue these bad practices. In bad times, it's absolutely imperative that Washington stop them," Obama said.

Obama has repeatedly promised that his administration will go "line by line" over its budgets -- a task that will now fall to Killefer and Obama's nominee to as White House budget chief Peter Orszag.


I thought it interesting to see a high level position specifically designed to make the entire system work better, though it sounds more like a finance watchdog than a Lean practitioner position.  With all the waste that the new administration expects to find, let's hope they engage a few people who know how to clear it out and streamline the system.  That would get us past removing deadwood and start the country down it's own Lean transformation.

Let's Shake the Tree

With the new year approaching, what better time to start challenging the status quo, questioning our collective assumptions and looking for a better way to do, well, everything?
So I'm looking to this small (but growing!) cadre of like-minded HR visionaries to start shaking the HR tree and see what comes flying out.  Let's change the world together.
Here's one of mine from last week.  In working with a team of recruiters and HR pros, we ended up debating recruiting methods, specifically the offer process.  (Who makes the offer?  Do you allow negotiations?  Who is authorized to do so, and how much?)  At one point, we came around to incentive pay for sales professionals.
I challenged the team as to why we pay commission.  Isn't it our desire to hold onto our best, and attract the best that we don't already have?  How do we differentiate ourselves?  I submit that a compensation plan based on a strong base pay with a smaller incentive peice at the top end (and maybe structure more around MBOs than sales dollars) would provide a more stable income and security than a "traditional" approach of most (or all) commission based pay.  Your best people will be driven to succeed regardless of the pay plan (though it is, of course, a factor).  If you can give someone some financial security in these times and they respond by being less invested in their (and your) success, that's probably the wrong person to have on the team.
This was met, of course, with some eye rolling, some chuckles, and several "But everyone pays on commission!" statements.  And maybe it's not the right approach, now or ever.  But that's ok.  I'm more interested in asking the question than knowing the answer.
So, who else is shaking the tree out there, and what's falling out?

The Fallacy of Lean and Economic Downturns

I've seen a lot of people who are concerned for their jobs, who have lost their jobs or who know their jobs are going away.

Recently I had a discussion regarding my team's function in the organization, and that we are secure because of the climate. When things go south, that's when you really need your Lean leaders to help right the ship and bring savings home to maintain profitability.

I call shenanigans on that line of thought.

We need our Lean leaders to be the most engaged when times are at their best! We need to be out front, leading the discussions when people are least interested in listening.

No business I have encountered has ever said, "Nah, we don't need that $50,000. Go ahead and throw it in the trash." At least, not ones that stay around long.

While we can use this opportunity to "reset" our perspective and drive Lean thinking, we need to do so just as hard in the good times. When we don't, we end up in times, well, like these.

What would your companies position be today if you increased OI 5% a year over the last 10 years? Or just reduced waste by 25% Think you would be better positioned in the market?