Strategic Human Capital Insights

HUMAN ASSET MANAGEMENT STRATEGY AND THE CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT LOOP

Why do organizations invest time and effort into continuous process improvement and stop there? When people drive the responsibility for continuous process improvement, shouldn’t there also be an aligned Human Asset Continuous Improvement Loop for those who drive the process?

How often do the following questions come up?

• Why aren’t my people coming up with solutions to problems they encounter?
• Why can’t employees see beyond the next step?
• Why isn’t the quality control/assurance function as proactive as it should be?
• What has happened to the disappearing skills of:
  • Trend Spotting?
  • Problem Identification?
  • Problem Solving?
  • Critical Thinking?
• Why aren’t people planning, recommending, and thinking about business impact analysis?

We are thrilled to announce the launch of Joanne Flynn's co-authored career development book, Brand YOU, Brand NEW, a Step-by-Step Guide to Take Your Career to the Next Level.📚
 

Joanne Toth Flynn and Elyse Flynn Meyer, a mother-daughter team, co-authored, Brand YOU, Brand NEW  from a multigenerational perspective. Through their collaborative approach, they provide a range of universal perspectives to help you optimize your personal Brand YOU. This book takes you through the critical steps needed to proactively manage your brand and your personal development. The goal is to put you in the ultimate career control seat.

Take an Organizational Quality Assurance Diagnostic.

As organizations move through continual change, staying up-to-date and relevant is now a strategic imperative.  Nowhere in the organization is this more relevant than to a Quality Assurance Department whose function is to always maintain quality despite the change swirling around it. The challenge of managing quality assurance in a changing workplace is analogous to changing the tires on a car while the car is traveling at 60 miles per hour.  As difficult as it may seem, the goal is to always maintain Quality Assurance.

Have you been feeling “stuck” lately? Perhaps you’re the ambitious type, and you’ve been working in a dead-end job. Maybe you love what you do, but you want to improve your financial situation by going after a big promotion. Or perhaps you have an entrepreneurial spirit and dream of working for yourself while traveling the world or spending time with your kids. Whatever the case may be, there are many ways for women to improve their careers and change their lives all at the same time.

1. Update Your Resume
Whether you want to change careers or apply for a big promotion at work, you’ll definitely want to make sure your resume is in top shape. When updating your resume, try to condense your skills and work experience to one page. That way, recruiters and hiring managers can skim to find your most important skills and experiences at a glance. You might also look online for resume templates that can enhance the professional look of your resume while guiding you through the resume creation process. Resume templates can help you choose the perfect eye-catching color scheme and layout for your resume. They’ll even guide you through the process of entering your work experience, skills, and other information to help your resume stand out from the crowd.

The employee handbook may be underestimated, but it is certainly strategic!

Do you really need an employee handbook? This question predictably comes up when I speak with company management, often because the Employee Handbook is considered moderately useful but not on the top of management’s priority list. Why is that? Because often the Employee Handbook:

• Isn’t current
• Doesn’t cover the full range of issues
• Isn’t specific enough to be meaningful
• Isn’t given to new employees
• Isn’t used by management

However, one thing is for certain, when something goes wrong in an organization, the following happens:

• From the manager’s perspective: Managers look to the Employee Handbook for guidance and protection from liability.
  
  
• From the employee's perspective: Employees look to the Employee Handbook for guidance and protection from liability or loopholes created by omission or ambiguity.

Take the Job Description, Performance Review and Development Plan Challenge

It’s Performance Review time for many organizations. However, with the rate of change accelerating and the rate of skills / knowledge obsolescence increasing faster than ever, can you really only review performance once or twice per year? As managers, how can you even justify that ancient practice? Today, continuous performance improvement has replaced the time-honored, annual Performance Review process, so employees continue to be the appreciating human assets that are always aligned with corporate strategy and goals.  It may seem like an onerous, time-consuming process, but is it really? When viewed through the lens of great management best practices, let’s shift the performance review paradigm to a continuous improvement paradigm where we treat our employees, our human assets, the same way we look at continuous improvement for processes. Why would we continuously improve processes and not continuously improve people? 

Where to Start?

Let’s take the performance management processes out of the HR department and place them squarely under the responsibility of managers since employee performance management is one of the prime job responsibilities of managers. Where do you start with this strategic and holistic approach?

Both employee and manager loyalty has always been considered a good thing. So what’s changed? When does being loyal long-term, at all costs, go from a virtue to a liability?

The concept of "change" has changed everything. When companies grew at standard rates, and change was incremental and predictable, manager and employee loyalty could keep pace with each other and the organization's direction. Now, however, when organizations are growing fast and adapting to new technology, new processes and methods, increased customer demands, and additional new employees, the predictable, static environment that many employees are comfortable with has morphed into chaotic, change-driven, unpredictable frontiers where the old rules and controls have evaporated. Increasingly, the latter describes today’s work reality. 

Here are some essential questions to consider when thinking about loyalty:

• What does it mean for the employee to be attached to the old rules and controls and have real issues adapting to the new work reality? 

• What does it mean for new employees who don’t know the old rules and controls and don’t need to work under those constraints since that work environment has shifted?

• What does it mean for the manager who must manage these two conflicting and competing employee needs?

Members of the C-suite are becoming more and more aware of how critical information technology is to an organization.

In the tech industry, C-level leaders have different levels of education and work experience. Over half of the tech leaders in the hardware, software development and other online businesses have a bachelor's degree, while less than 40 percent in each of these disciplines have a master’s degree and less than 12 percent have a PhD. A recent JWC partners’ survey, as it relates to information technology, found that C-suite leaders are the most concerned with the following: cyber security, digital disruption, and innovative technology advances.

Technology leaders are now making more appearances before the C-suite to discuss the company's IT strategy and technology direction. For any technology leader, delivering insight and intelligence to help C-suite leaders better understand the value for their IT investment and IT team is imperative, but this is unfortunately easier said than done. If you are looking to deliver value to the C-Suite at your organization, here are 4 tips to help you get started:

Take Up the Job Description Challenge
Can a simple and often overlooked job description really safeguard your organization? They should if job descriptions are used to strategically align organizational goals and results with the employees' individual efforts. To achieve this alignment, you need to review the following Job Description Checklist to assess:

Job Description Checklist

• Are your current job descriptions as robust and strategically focused as they should be?
  
  
• Do you and your employees clearly understand their jobs and accountability at a detailed level?
  
  
• Does your organization have a robust and honest employee assessment process driven by the detailed job description? The assessment process should align with the job description and be used accordingly. If not, what are you assessing employees against?
  
  
• Is your organization committed to managing and monitoring the job description, assessment, and employee development process to ensure all efforts are aligned, optimal, and focused on strategic initiatives?
  

Have you ever thought, heard or said the following?

• Organization charts aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on?
• Here is the organization chart, but, let me tell you how it really works!
• Why do we need organization charts anyway – they only reinforce bureaucracy which is counterproductive?
• We can’t figure out how to put together an organization chart that makes any sense

Why Should We Even Bother?
Why do organizations spend so much time putting organization charts together, and why do they rarely display how the organization really works?  Because we desperately need to rationalize how the organization works, recognize how work gets done and define how accountability is managed.  Without a visual depiction or starting point, we are disorganized around chaos where people are busy (but busy doing what and for whom?) and where accountability is elusive because no one really knows who is responsible.  This describes a state of disorganized chaos which is hardly an efficient and effective way to run a business and is frustrating for everyone involved, both managers and employees.