Does Generational Difference Matter?

I like this article on generational differences in the work place. Yes, this topic has been done to death, but it summarises many of my thoughts on the topic (which in a nutshell is that generational differences don't really exist but people at different life-stages naturally have different outlooks)

To summarise some of these points:
Similarities

• Everyone wants respect
• Trust matters
• People want leaders who are credible
• Organisational politics is a problem - no matter how old / young you are
• No one really likes change
• Loyalty depends on the context, not on the generation
• It's as easy to retain a young person as it is to retain an older one - if you do the right things(don't necessarily agree with this one - but perhaps that my personal experience)
• Almost everyone wants a coach (again, not 100% sure about this one. I don't disagree though)
  

Differences

• Longevity - young people are more mobile (which, to me, contradicts the second to last point above)
  
• How knowledge gets transferred (I've come across this a lot)
  
• Expectations of work

Reporting on HR function performance

Here is a small whitepaper on PWC's offerings in the HR benchmarking area as based on the Saratoga Institute's HR metric list. Of course, you could get PWC to come & benchmark your HR performance for you. Or you could just do what I would do & develop my own bases for automated reporting on the metrics listed.

For further ideas I came across this summary of Kaplan and Norton's balanced scorecard approach to business reporting, which I thought could be adapted nicely to this situation.

Guide to Leadership Assessments

Here's a nice list of leadership assessments. It includes the MBTI inventory and DISC profiles, which I've done in team environments (both relatively successfully).

New Zealand scores well on Mercer's QoL index

Hot of the press are Mercer's new Quality of Living and Cost of Living indicies for 2008.

Auckland comes in really well at number 5 in the Quality of Living stakes. Other Asia-Pacific cities did well with Sydney at 10th, Wellington at 12th and Melbourne, Perth and Adelaid at 17th place.

From the press release:

New Zealand cities have continued to lead worldwide quality of living standards, making them attractive destinations for overseas expatriates, Mercer’s 2008 Worldwide Quality of Living Index has found.

Both major New Zealand cities surveyed, Auckland and Wellington, rank among the world’s top 15 cities for overall quality of living and dominate the rankings within the Asia Pacific region.

Mercer’s head of information product solutions, Mr Rob Knox, said the results were great news for New Zealand employers trying to attract overseas workers to help ease pressure on possibly the worst skills shortage New Zealand has ever seen.

The spreadsheet love affair

This article outlines some of the issues with the wide adoption of spreadsheets.
I whole-heartedly agree - spreadsheets are dangerous. The only use I have for them is a manual cross-check of reporting that I'm doing correctly in an automated reporting environment.

10 Greatest Management Theories

This page lists the author's favourite management theories and references to some quick summaries.
I agree with Management by Objectives (Drucker), Heirarchy of Needs (Maslow) and Levels of Culture (Shein).
I'd add Expectency Theory (Vroom), Group think (Janis) and Cultural Dimensions (Hofstede) as a few extra that I like.
Check out this site for more summaries (you'll have to get over the terrible site design though).

Team building

Here's a nice article on the author's views on what works & doesn't work with team building. E.g., mandated fun time isn't necessarily the best, while MBTIs and resultant action plans can be quite useful. Learning about the 5 dysfunctions of teams (Patrick Lencioni) was also highlighted.

HR Challenges

Here is a really worthwhile read on the writer's key learnings from working in HR. In summary:

• The importance of excel, pivot tables and access
• HR clients expect the right answers – and quickly
• Work shifts from a few big projects to one never-ending series of tasks
• HR is a 24/7 job
• HR Generalists have to know a lot about everything
• The value of a strong HR admin, HR VP, and a supportive team
• An effective HR pro really needs to understand the business
• HR can be a lonely, isolated role
• What it’s like to struggle in a job
• Finally, I learned the value of HR and a competent HR pro

Most of this looks fairly sound to me. The only thing I would say is that excel isn't really the answer to HR analytics. Proper reporting tools based on sound information stores (eg pure databases or data warehouses) are the best solution of this. You can be an excel genius, but it's too volatile an environment for reliable business reporting. Access is simply not a professional database, so I wouldn't even waste the time waiting for it to install.

Linking to the article above, this post praises HR generalists for the skills they bring to bear in the organisations they work in and their ability to deal with the unique role they have to play. In particular it lists:

• Compartmentalisation (switching from one topic to the next to the next in rapid succession over the day)
• Helicopter thinking (zooming in and out from detail to the big picture - again in rapid succession over the day)
• Judgement (in acting professionally and in confidence with the many stakeholders involved in HR issues).

Again - I found this to all be fairly valid material.

Talent Management Analytics

This is a fantastic article on Talent Management Analytics (aka HR Metrics).
Written by Dr John Sullivan, it goes into great depth on the reasons that these measures are typically ineffective / weak. In summary:

• Skill deficiencies in HR practitioners to actually create / report on the metrics
  
• Lack of business knowledge (inhibiting the ability to establish relevant metrics)
• Expensive tools raising the entry price tag
  
• Lack of quality data
• Complicated nature of talent management
  

Also covered are a few promising developments in this area:

• text analytics (i.e., software that pulls out summaries and trends from massive amounts of raw text data like forums, blogs and intranet documents)
• predictive modeling (i.e., using statistics to actually prove relationships scientifically rather than just hypothesising & making guesses)
  

A few principles for adopting Talent Management analytics are presented as well. I like the concept of addressing business rather than HR problems and preparing yourself for failure on the first attempt.

The importance of fairness

Fairness is one of my favourite topics when it comes to I/O psych. Of the many factors investigated affecting employees' thoughts & behaviours, I've found that fairness comes up time and again as a potent force. This is saying a lot, as there are many factors with more ambiguous effects (e.g., job satisfaction).

This article in the Washington Post covers some recent research in this field that empirically found that employee perceptions of fairness in an organisational restructure significantly predicted engagement and burnout. Effectively, those employees who felt that they were being treated less fairly in the process were more likely to be reporting symptoms of burnout and less likely to be engaged.

This points to the important aspect of fairness in that it's more the perception that matters rather than actual / distributive fairness.

Gen-Y vs. corporate IT

Having experienced this first hand, I thought this article included a fairly accurate summary of the issues that are emerging through the clash between ultra-tech-savvy Gen-Yers and corporate IT departments.

On one hand you have a group of people who have known no boundary to their adoption of new technologies and on the other is a group tasked with the sustainable and efficient maintenance of an organisations' IT systems.

My view is that it's not only young professionals that will challenge draconian IT dept practices, but work forces in general. The reason being the discrepancy between employees' abilities to achieve outcomes in the consumer space can often out class what's possible in corporate IT environments. A few examples that come to my mind are Gmail's conversation view feature, which MS Outlook fails to match (even with search folders) and Microsoft's Live Mesh product where I see end users being able to work more effectively outside of their corporate IT domains.

I would say the resolution sits in the cautious loosening of controls on corporate IT and employees accepting the reasoning behind these. The later I expect will come with time, but might be expedited through increased communication between IT & the rest of the organisation.

Employee satisfaction → Company Financial Performance

Just came across this article exploring the relationship between employee satisfaction and long-run stock performance. Yes, this is a topic that's been done to death, but from my perspective relatively little hard evidence is available to prove the satisfaction → company performance link.

Here's the abstract for a few key points:

This paper analyzes the relationship between employee satisfaction and long-run stock performance. An annually rebalanced portfolio of Fortune magazine's "Best Companies to Work For in America" earned 14% per year from 1998-2005, over double the market return, and a four-factor alpha of 0.64%. The portfolio also outperformed industry- and characteristics-matched benchmarks. Returns continue to be significant when extending the sample back to 1984, before the list was published in Fortune. These findings have three main implications. First, employee satisfaction is positively correlated with shareholder returns and need not represent excessive non-pecuniary compensation. Second, the stock market does not fully value intangibles, even when independently verified by a publicly available survey. This suggests that intangible investment generally may not be incorporated into short-term prices, underpinning managerial myopia theories. Third, certain socially responsible investing ("SRI") screens may improve investment returns.

In addition, here's a white paper that discusses this article, which also includes some references to other studies along the same vein.

Value of HR Technology and HR Technology Trends

Cedarstone has recently published two white papers on HR Technology.
The first broadly covers the impressive business case for implementing advanced HR technologies. I particularly liked the listing of the performance metrics in the areas of cost, cycle time and quality. The best practice listings were also useful, e.g.,
People

• Update change management plans to ensure managers
• and employees use self service tools
• Managers held accountable for accuracy of personnel
• actions
• Communication to employees and managers that
• details their roles and responsibilities for demographic
• and/or personnel actions
• Assess HR activities to ensure that HR is doing the
• tasks that they are supposed to; and that the right level
• of staff is doing the right level of task

Technology

• Integrated HR, Time, Payroll, and Financial systems
• Automated workflow for personnel actions so that all
• appropriate parties are notified (security, facilities, etc.)
• Comprehensively implement self service for employees
• and manager
• Deploy self service to automate HR practices and
• thus hold managers accountable for transactional HR
• processes
• Deploy integrated systems to lower training and
• maintenance requirements
• Role-based dashboards that place appropriate
• information in front of HR itself and managers about the
• organization’s human capital
• Multi-dimensional and trending analysis integrated
• to available systems (payroll, point of sale, and
• production systems) in order to optimize human capital
• management performance

The second goes into some detail on the results of their 2007 / 2008 HR Systems Survey. Which is interesting from an industry trends perspective.

Check out the list of Cedarstone publications here.

So, what does Google pay it's people?

Glassdoor is an innovative new site that you can join to see what people are paid in various companies around the globe. It works by showing you a few sample positions first. From there you need to supply information about your own job to see more. It's kind of like a perpetual employee opinion survey in that you're also asked to rate your company in relation to Employee Satisfaction, CEO approval and pros / cons.
If this site gains in popularity I can see it causing waves in the corporate world.

Leadership competencies

Interesting article discussing the most popular leadership competencies and the typical gaps that exist. Based on a study the Center for Creative leadership, the article argues against the 'playing to your strengths' approach to leadership development & quotes a set of core competencies that study participants have selected as required for any successful leader. Namely:

• Ability to lead employees
• Resourcefulness
• Decisiveness
• Managing change
• Straightforwardness and composure
• Building and mending relationships
• Doing whatever it takes
• Employing a participative management style

Ability to lead employees, change management and building relationships were then found to be lacking in participant's ratings of current leadership strengths.

If nothing else, I just like the list of core competencies above.