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.

How Google Can Change Recruiting

We’ve long been trained against asking personal questions in the process if interviewing candidates, even though we’ll accept it if offered.  At the same time, we move into a more open world with Facebook, Twitter, blogging and other types of social media.  For some reason, many managers, even in HR, don’t take the simple step of examining a candidate’s online presence during the interview process.

This is potentially the richest source of information on a candidate.  Are they insightful, presenting new ideas in their chosen discipline, investigating potential avenues of learning more about their work?  Or are they disruptive, combative, or even just rude?  People are more themselves when they think they are anonymous, even if put their name at the end of their post.  It’s a different world than just a few years ago, and indicators of a candidate’s personality are now available in the public space for your perusal.  So why aren’t we using it more?

Regardless of readership levels, I know that if I search on myself, I’ll find this blog, my LinkedIn profile and Lean For HR LinkedIn group (feel free to join!), and several online discussions I’ve held on work relevant topics.   But this rarely comes up in conversation with outside recruiters.   

To me, that work is more indicative of my thought process and outlook on key tenants of HR than anything on a CV.  Between your CV and your online presence, I can get a handle on not just what you’ve accomplished, but how you did it and how your personality is likely to fit in with someone else’s culture and team.  Why wouldn’t we use that to its full extent?

I suspect, or at least I hope, that we will dig into this at the HR Technology Conference.

Openworld Update #9: Fusion

More detail and some pics for you...

The demo on the HCM product was the highlight of the week for me.  It has all the right items included, and a nice package to boot.  Some images from the presentation...

Two views of org charts.  You can toggle between them, as well as pull more info by person and initiate transactions.

Drill down into an employee page, see their comp ratios, proficiencies, predictive performance, and other key data...

Want to move them into a new role?  You can see how their skills match the job profile and what kind of fit they would be.  Again, more predictive analysis built into the system...

 The on-boarding panel, which includes a progress bar that updates each time a piece is completed, including person info validation and emergency contacts...

Not to mention benefits enrollment, including pricing based on the pay rate and the bio data already provided...

 The design interface, which allows you to rework the process on the fly...

I spoke with one of the presenters, and he verified that the system starts the predictive work based on external data, but adapts over time to the specifics of the organization.  By far the best thing I saw over the week.

Openworld Update #8

Finally had the chance to see the Fusion HCM product yesterday. It
looks fantastic, and ther features that were shown were everything I
was hoping for. I have pictures from the demo that I will post later.
The interest part now will be the vendor discussions at the HR Tech
conference next week. Fusion looks like it cantake the place of a lot
of one-off systems. I'm interested to hear why they think they should
still be part of the total HRIS solution.

Openworld Update #7

This morning's keynote was presented by Michael Dell, with some help from Cadir Lee (Zynga) and Rob Carter (FedEx).  The takeaways:

They are all really busy, and business is great
They all really like working together
You should buy/use their product

Outside of that, not too much.  Dell did show off their tablet phone (available soon as Best Buy) and their upcoming 7" tablet.  And they like Android, apparently.

It strikes me that the keynotes have been more about how great each company is rather than offering solutions to complex issues or taking the opportunity to issue challenges to their user community.  I think this is a huge miss, not just for OpenWorld but for any conference that brings a user community together.  Maybe that's just the HR guy in me talking.

Openworld Update #6

Just one post today to wrap up the action...

Most of the good ideas are coming from the Expo areas, not from the sessions.  They are remarkably disappointing.  Today's sessions...


"20 Countries in 20 Weeks With No IT Support"
In fairness, I should have asked what they were doing in those 20 countries.  Traveling the countryside?  Cooking classes?  Book reports?  The answer is technically an HCM implementation, in that they were adding EEs from a recent acquisition.  Their time today was spent explaining how they built a template to enter the data, and a glorified macro to type it in.  That's it.  No integration, no testing, no full migration, no change management, no training.  Data entry.  And it took 20 weeks to enter 900 records.  The best thing I can say for this session is that it ended early.

"Building Your PeopleSoft Application Strategy"
You should upgrade now, because then the CEO will sign off on everything.  We have the skit to prove it.  Oh, and all HR people have to offer at the big table is an engagement survey ("Everyone is sad, but we treat them really well.  If only we knew more!"), turnover ("I wish we knew why people are leaving!") and a fear of the unknown ("What?  We have to upgrade our system again someday?").  But it's ok, as long as you upgrade, you'll be fine.

Hopeful for more tomorrow, with some promising sessions lined up.  But the feeling from the IT team is the same.  And I've heard it was similar last year.  It's unfortunate, given the cost of the conference.  I am trying not to get my hopes up for the HR Tech conference in Chicago, but I think having a host of vendors on hand will provide more insight into processes and specifics than we are seeing here.

Openworld Update #5

Final session of the day was the Oracle HCM Roadmap, promising a look into the future of the application.  And the future looks a whole lot like the present.  Or even the past.

The items they shared were very basic, including online applicant portal and manager self service.  The feature set looks very standard, and at no point did the presenters give us something along the lines of "I know this looks like what everyone else has been doing already, but here's why ours will be great!"

On a side note, if you are presenting for your company, no matter how big the crowd, be sure you know how the microphone works and what you are going to cover.  The presenters looked ill-prepared at the last session, their demo did not work correctly, and one of them insisted on holding the lapel mic (while waving her arms around, gesturing during her parts).  Hard to watch, little value gained.  We can all do better.