Strategic Human Capital Insights

As managers, facing the vacation season always proves challenging. When the first person approaches you with the request to take off a day or two for a long weekend, or another employee is planning a one or two-week family vacation, the stress of ‘how is the work going to get done’ begins. 

Have you ever asked yourself one or more of the following questions:

• How did the plan you had to provide backup for everyone on your team not get executed?  Where did the time go?
• How are you going to train the right people with the right skills and competencies to get the job done right? 
• How can you tell some employees that they must reschedule their vacations due to a lack of backup? 
• What is going to happen to employee morale? 
• What is your boss going to think of your planning skills? 
• How did this happen again? 

A critical question for today’s leadership: Are your employees appreciating in value, maintaining their value, or declining in value?

Businesses consistently refer to employees as “their most valuable assets.” However, when we look at how organizations view employees, many fail to deliver on that mantra. Employee management continues to be based on models developed in the late 20th century. Along with outdated employee management models, we see Human Resources struggle to transition from organizational operations, support, and compliance to a true strategic partner role.

In that role, Human Resources must drive Human Asset Management Strategy (HAMS) to encourage leaders to shift their approach to the critical element of success - employees.

Are We Appreciating All Our Assets?

Today, any organization will say that its employees are the most valuable asset to the organization. As new process applications, automation, and artificial intelligence continue to make their presence felt in the workplace, employees keep things running, provide the critical customer interface, and discover the opportunities to leverage technology. When we step back and look at organizations, we tend to find that leadership does not put the same emphasis on their human assets as they would on a physical asset they are acquiring or optimizing. I'm not implying we should treat people like equipment; however, as our most valuable asset, we need to put the same effort into ensuring employees can be most productive while providing an environment where they increase in value to themselves and the organization. Our employees, our human assets, have one key advantage that physical assets do not - they can increase in value over time.

Job descriptions are the unsung hero driving the Performance Management process. If the performance management process is fundamental to your Human Asset Management Strategy (HAMS), job descriptions are the mighty little, obscure engine driving the whole process.

How important are job descriptions in HAMS, and how can those often-forgotten job descriptions be so important? Because if they are only used as HR tools for job banding and compensation, then they are misnamed. If that's the case, they should be called job categories. Here's what job descriptions should be doing for your organization.

You must first determine the function in your organization responsible for utilizing job descriptions. What is the job description's real, dynamic driving force behind them? To analyze this, we start with where job descriptions are parked. Job descriptions can live in HR, but that should only be their part-time home. Job descriptions should be relevant to every functional group in every organization and be used by the functional group full-time! Job descriptions are the foundation to determine what a job does, how an organization works, how it grows, if it can grow/compete and if it will stagnate. Most importantly, job descriptions must not only live in the operating functions, job descriptions need to be relevant and referenced continuously. As a consultant, I have frequently heard these answers to the question, "Can I see your job descriptions?":

The Statement: “That’s Just Bob Being Bob."

Have you ever heard this statement before, or worse yet, have you ever said those words yourself? I know I have certainly heard those words in every scenario, from work to athletics to family, and my emotional response to those words has ranged from frustration, consternation, disgust to despair. 

What does this have to do with Performance Review? Since many of you are in performance review season, consider if you have an employee that you can associate with this statement, “That’s just Bob being Bob”. The situation that causes this statement doesn’t live in organizational isolation. Let’s take a serious look at the negative organizational impacts in the workplace of this statement and the underlying situation.

Here’s a recent and very real situation I witnessed in a store that provides a customer-related service.  I’m sure we have all experienced a situation like this in the workplace. As you read through this situation, think about all possible resulting organizational impacts. As a manager, if you have one of these employees/situations, the performance review process is the perfect time to identify this person and set up a development plan to correct the situation, one way or another!

Guest Blog: What It Takes to Find the RIGHT Candidate. 

How many times have you hired a candidate and then found out that the candidate was missing the right skill set? Hiring the right person for the right role at the right time is a strategic organizational responsibility. It starts with developing a detailed role benchmark that includes role responsibilities and competencies/capabilities for the role. This benchmark becomes the springboard to take a deep dive into a candidate’s background, looking for evidence and examples that align with the role benchmark. 

Since inbound marketing has become so important to many organizations, I felt the below guest blog by Elyse Flynn Meyer would have a direct application to many organizations. 

So, You Want to Hire an Inbound Marketing Expert (excerpt)

4 Questions to Ask to Make Sure You’re Hiring the Right Inbound Marketer to Join Your Team by Elyse Flynn Meyer 

“Finding candidates to fit the niche marketing roles that require expertise in inbound marketing can be very challenging. Traditional marketing and advertising techniques are taught around the globe in colleges and universities, but unfortunately, inbound marketing is still not a discipline that graduates know when they enter the professional workforce. After graduation, individuals are typically not ready and able to directly jump into inbound marketing roles that require extra training to get fully on board and learn how it integrates into an overall marketing strategy. The scarcity of digital marketing training, and more specifically, inbound marketing training, can make it all the more difficult to find that perfect inbound marketer for your team. We see this issue over and over again while working with organizations that want to practice inbound marketing but either don’t have the talent on their team to support the initiative and/or don’t have the budget or desire to work with an external inbound marketing agency.

For as long as we have had the modern organization, employees and managers have said, “We are too busy – we need more help’!  In my 30+ years of working in and advising organizations, that statement is a common thread.

As we enter that ‘special’ time of year on the corporate calendar known as ‘performance review time,’ I ask you to incorporate the ‘Busyness Challenge’ into your review process.

What is the ‘Busyness Challenge’?  It’s all about human capital (employees), human capital resource capacity, human capital resource planning, and human capital resource forecasting.  Otherwise known as Human Asset Management Strategy© (HAMS).

As organizations look to evaluate performance management processes and shift to a continuous performance review process/system, the questions often asked are, "What is a continuous performance review, and what has changed to require a fresh approach?"

Are we getting what we need from our current review process? If not, is it time to finally reconcile performance reviews with today's business and work reality? If a company is forward-looking, why are our performance review processes backward-focused? Continuous performance review is a forward-focused management process and not an HR process. We must shift our paradigm. Yes, HR is involved, but managers are responsible and accountable for the procedure. Gone are the days of saying, "HR is making us do these performance reviews." You are doing reviews because it suits your business and your employees. 

Yesterday's Performance Management Process: Assessment

Performance management was done by HR as a year-end review process focused on pay and promotion. It was a way to rate /assess people and their past performance.

Human Asset Management Strategy (HAMS)© demands a robust and continuous performance review process focused on employee development. You can't have one without the other.

According to the Harvard Business Review, one-third of U.S. companies are revising traditional appraisal processes. Since change is revolutionizing our work, we must focus on a continuous performance review process, where robust, two-way feedback is frequent.

Forces Disrupting Traditional Performance Review Processes

I’m often asked, “What’s the difference between the concept of human capital and human asset management strategy?"  When we discuss human capital, it is usually described as:

• Individuals' collective skills, knowledge, or other intangible assets can be used to create economic value for the individuals, their employers, or their community.

• A measure of the economic value of an employee's skill set. This measure builds on the basic production input of labor, where all labor is considered equal.

Most definitions of human capital still focus on skills/people as they exist in an organization today.  Human asset management strategy (HAMS) focuses on the following:

• Conducts a current assessment of people and their skills today
• Attaches a trending component to the assessment for today and tomorrow to determine appreciation or depreciation
• Develops a human capital gap analysis between today and future human capital needs
• Evaluates productivity and associated costs
• Creates an organizational impact analysis for near-term, mid-term, and long-term effects and risks