Strategic Human Capital Insights

If you say people are your most important asset, it may be time to rethink what that really means to your organization.  How do your current human assets perform relative to your organization’s requirements for growth, competitive positioning, transformation, and business agility - the ability to deploy human assets on demand?  All these strategic business issues require complex, future-focused approaches that replace outdated, underperforming methods.

If the measure of success for every company is the realization of maximum business value based on value creation, then every human asset should be a value creator.

The Challenge:

Replace short-term, cost-center focused people strategies with a well-considered, long-term human asset management strategy.  If people are assets, they must be treated like any other organizational asset.

Have you asked yourself the basic question, "Does your organization value IT as a good investment?" To help answer this question and others, we have developed an eBook with one of our strategic partners, Quality Service Solutions, Future Proof your It Organization.

THE HOLISTIC IT ALIGNMENT OF STRUCTURE, PROCESS AND PEOPLE

For decades, boards, corporate executives and IT directors have sought evidence that IT investments generate business value. Unfortunately, business executives continue to find the link between investments in IT and specific business benefits something of a mystery. Yet, IT executives often assume the link is obvious.

This eBook sets out a new approach that enables enterprises to:

• Construct a trail of evidence leading from measures of business value to indicators of the contribution made by both the IT function and each professional within IT
• Gauge the readiness of their organizations’ human capital to add value in the future

“The best corporate strategy can fail at implementation without a human capital strategy supporting it.”

The Critical Importance of the Job Benchmark

I recently met with a client, and while we were discussing an employee performance issue, I asked a very simple question: “How is your employee performing against the benchmark?” Since many conversations on the topic of employee performance often center around an employee in isolation or comparing an employee relative to other employees, we are constantly using inherently biased and subjective information when assessing an employee.

With that backdrop, we discussed how the employee was being evaluated relative to:

• the amount the employee was being paid
• an objective assessment of how the employee was actually doing or not doing against the ideal competencies and tasks of the position – THE BENCHMARK.

This is the fourth blog in our ‘soft skills hiring practices’ series. If you missed any of the other blogs in our series, you can view them here.

Employees with Growth Potential and the Looming Talent Crisis

This blog focuses on interviewing questions that can help you tangibly determine the growth potential of a candidate.  Why are these questions so incredibly important? Our organizations, according to Workforce 2020, are in a talent crisis. With the rate of change increasing, employee skills are deteriorating or become obsolete every 2 – 2.5 years. In IT, this ‘skills obsolescence’ is actually accelerating given:

• all the change stressors IT is experiencing in general
• the increased demands being placed on IT’s human resources

When employees were surveyed, 60% responded that they fear becoming obsolete and irrelevant given the demands of the future workplace.

This is the third blog in our ‘soft skills hiring practices’ series.  If you missed the first two blogs, you can view them here.

I recently attended a conference focused on the future of the workforce.  The keynote speaker focused on the different work revolutions that have redefined the very nature of the workforce.  The speaker reviewed the issues of the industrial revolution and followed through to the technology and internet revolution. 

Today, the speaker talked about how we are now entering the next workforce revolution – the collaboration revolution.  The nature of organizations is changing and companies are embracing strategic partnerships and alliances, working virtually across geographies with new organizational structures that will perform and behave in vastly different ways.

The word collaboration has its root in Latin meaning to co labor – work together.  Collaboration is defined as:

Hiring managers often say, ”I can teach people skills, but hiring people to work in our culture is more important. I can’t teach that!” These words are so true. So how important is this topic to hiring within IT? It’s critical! Get this right, and employee retention, productivity, and engagement will follow. Get this wrong, and the management nightmare begins. And with that nightmare goes productivity issues, disengagement, and the spread of discontent among your staff and the client users who must interact with your people. Culture clash affects and infects your entire organization.

Did you know that 69% of hiring managers say Adaptability is the most important soft skill they screen for? To stay competitive today, your company needs to be able to adapt to a changing economy and business needs. This means you also need to hire employees who can adapt as well.

So what does this mean for IT hiring? Adaptability is one of the most difficult challenges in the IT hiring process. Why? Because when you consider how positions in IT are evolving today, the role of IT employees increasingly requires the Adaptability soft skill. Adaptability is now required for multiple facets of the evolving IT position benchmark:

A start-up to growth story – the very definition of continual change

‘What got you here, will likely not get you to where you are going!’  In the world of of start ups, these words should resonate with every founder /owner / executive team. In our recent Case Study: It's Time for GrowUp to Grow Up, we discussed the changes that a tech start up, or any start up, goes through in the early stages. Change permeates every facet of a start-up organization, as it:

• develops product
• takes product to market
• hires new people beyond the original group
• adapts to the demands of bankers and financing
  

Literally, every day can represent a change that needs to be anticipated, understood and responded to. But somehow, the start up community often thinks they are exempt from the demands of change because they believe themselves to be the disrupters or agents of change, and therefore, different from other organizations. In addition, they believe that change issues are reserved for those organization that are older, bigger or more status-quo driven. They couldn’t be farther from the truth. Why? The very nature of a startup is steeped in change.

If you could focus on the one overarching skill that would make a profound impact in the world of technology, what would it be? Leadership, of course!

Why is this one skill so important?
Without effective leadership, all the other focus areas are built on a rocky foundation of shifting sand. What good is excellent problem solving without outstanding leadership to listen, change and / or implement? The traction point for all the other skills hinges on Leadership.

Is there really a leadership issue with Technology Leadership?
According to recent research, here’s how the C-Suite rates the newly-defined VUCA leadership skills for Technology.

 
We're all used to the issues related to assets in the Information Technology arena: equipment that is heading towards obsolescence by the time we get it in the rack, the exponentially growing thirst for storage by the users, and the new version of software that is released just as we finish the project to upgrade from our previous version.  This is just reality. These are things we are used to justifying to the C-suite - they are a cost of doing business. I'd like you to expand your vision a bit and look at some of the most critical assets in your Information Technology organization: your human assets and, as a whole, the human capital that is critical to your daily operation.

Think of People as an Asset with Investment Value

I know some of you are saying "you can't look at people like they are equipment". That's not what I'm suggesting. I believe you need to treat and evaluate your team as the most valuable item in your organization. There is a substantial investment in each individual - you may not have made the investment, but overall, a substantial investment has been made in your team through education, training and experience.