Organization

“Employee Engagement” is one of those ‘buzzwords’ that you hear thrown about quite a bit…but this is a buzzword that should be carefully thought about by every organization.

A recent survey, reported on by Management Issues, has some very interesting results pertaining to Employee Engagement. The article, titled “Getting to the Heart of the Disengagement Gap“, reports the following results:

A poll of 14,000 employees across 10 European countries by consultants Watson Wyatt has confirmed what a number of similar large-scale surveys have been suggesting over the past few years - namely that there is a vast reserve of untapped potential in the workplace in the form uncommitted or actively disgruntled staff.

It also revealed that more than four out of 10 are actively considering leaving their current employer.

But whereas a 2007 poll of almost 90,000 workers by workplace consultancy Towers Perrin found that just a fifth felt engaged with their work, Watson Wyatt found that only 13 per cent (fewer than one in seven) displayed both strong commitment as well as having a good understanding of the part they could play in making their organizations successful - an understanding Watson Wyatt term “line of sight”.

Only 13 percent of the workforce is fully engaged and trying to create value of organziations. What are the other 87% of the workforce up to? Are they lazy? Incompetent? I highly doubt it…its more likely that the organization has done a poor job of describing how each person’s contributions can affect the organization.

The lack of Employee engagement isn’t just the fault of an organization. There are people who are OK with doing ‘just enough’ to get by but an organization should do everything in its power to ensure that employees are happy and that they understand how valuable they are to the organization.

Whether you agree with the Towers Perrin study that found 20% engagement or Watson Wyatt’s 13% engagement, I think you’d have to agree that there is a problem. How many coworkers/employees do you know that are actively seeking employment elsewhere? How many are really doing the best job that they can do?

How can an organization engage employees? There’s no simple answer…it takes long-term effort by both the organization and the employee(s). I’m not an expert in this field (or any field!) but I will provide a few basic thoughts on how to get started engaging more employees.

• Hire right
• Don’t ask for (or expect) an employee to ‘live to work’ for you…respect their life outside of the office.
• Hold all employees accountable. If an employee notices that there are ’sacred cows’ that aren’t accountable for their actions, their level of effort and engagement will drop.
• Offer flexibility for work hours
• Offer job rotation opportunities - this would hold especially true to young/new employees….keep people interested and don’t let them get bored with their job.

Those are just a few thoughts…i’m sure there are many more. For a great follow-up article on the subject, read Wayne Turmel’s latest article titled “Employee Enagement has a ring to it” that discusses this topic…great article and worth reading.

Technorati Tags: Employee Engagement, Human Resources, Organizational Behavior

This is an excerpt of a paper I’ve just completed titled “Information Technology Human Capital as Competitive Advantage”. I’ve provided a brief intro plus the conclusion here. This white paper was the inspiration for the the topics discussed in my previous posts titled “Resource Diversity & Immobility Simplified“, “Competitive Advantage and the Resource Based View of the Firm“, and “Competitive Advantage - The Human Capital approach”

To read the entire article, download the PDF titled “Information Technology Human Capital as Competitive Advantage“.

This paper provides a brief review of the literature within the space of information technology and business alignment, and more specifically, the areas of creating competitive advantage by managing human capital to create a sustainable advantage in the marketplace.

In today’s ever-changing world, organizations must learn to evolve, adapt and continuously rethink their strategic objectives and operational abilities. As part of this strategic planning process, organizations have historically looked at two aspects; strategy (how they will go to market, what they will sell, etc) and execution (how to implement the strategy, how to do business, etc). The seminal research on strategy and competitive advantage (Andrews, 1986; Porter, 1998a, 1998b) historically overlooked two of the most important aspects of any strategy; technology and people.

In the 1990’s, researchers and practitioners began looking at merging technology into the strategic planning process and how the alignment of business strategy with information technology can help to create a competitive advantage (Henderson & Venkatraman, 1993). These researchers had brought technology into the strategic planning process, and in some respects they considered the human resources of the organization, but they still overlooked the people as being a valuable piece of capital that could be used to create competitive advantage.

This oversight is most visible within the information technology (IT) groups. Even though many organizations and researches stressed the need for IT and business alignment, they still seemed to overlook the human capital aspect while aligning IT and business strategy.

These oversights have led to the current environment of overworked, disengaged and misaligned IT personnel and IT groups. The “turnover culture” that has arisen within the IT industry provides some evidence of the unhappiness and/or discontent that most IT personnel have (Moore & Burke, 2002).

Recent research has provided a path to the solution of the problem of creating sustainable alignment between IT and business strategy. These solutions involve not only aligning IT and strategy but also implementing human capital management practices to ensure that people are considered as much of a resource for creating competitive advantage as any other asset within the organization (Hu & Huang, 2006; Robert, Agarwal, & Ferratt, 2000).

This paper provides a review of existing literature related to the strategic alignment of business and information technology and human capital management practices. The first section, titled “Alignment of IT with Business Strategy” provides a review of existing business and IT alignment research. The second section, titled “Human Capital Management, IT & Business Alignment” provides an overview of existing research into human capital management practices within the IT space.

The third section, titled “Human Capital as Competitive Advantage” outlines the use human capital as a means to gain competitive advantage in the marketplace. Lastly, the fourth and final section titled “Future Research and Conclusions,” outlines areas that may provide avenues of further research and concludes the paper.

To read the entire paper, download the PDF titled “Information Technology Human Capital as Competitive Advantage“.

Further Research and Conclusion

Further research into this area can follow Ferratt et al.’s (2005) study of the effects of human resource management on information technology (IT) employee turnover (Ferratt et al., 2005) and Joseph et al.’s (2007) suggestion that adopting a human capital management approach to managing IS employees may increase employee engagement and reduce turnover and job dissatisfaction (Joseph et al., 2007).

Another area of further research that could be considered is Huang and Hu’s (2007) approach of combining human capital management along with a business-IT alignment model by using a balanced scorecard system to implement and measure alignment. This balanced scorecard approach seems reasonable but very little quantitative data exists to measure the success or failure of this approach (Huang & Hu, 2007). Further research into the use of balanced scorecards to align IT, business and human capital management practices could be accomplished by collecting quantitative data in multiple organizations to provide more insight into the success and/or failure of this approach.

Yet another avenue for further research is within the area of validation of alignment of IT system requirements with business strategy (Bleistein, Cox, & Verner, 2005). Bleisten et al.’s research provides a framework for measuring and ensuring that all IT system requirements are in alignment with business goals. This research is interesting but as yet unproven.

Lastly, research into furthering the application of the resource based view of firms and the creation of resource diversity and resource immobility within organizations seems to be a fairly wide open area. In many organizations today, outsourcing work has become the norm as has hiring contractors instead of full-time employees. Many research questions arise from this. A few examples are:

• How can an organization create resource diversity and/or resource immobility when they are drawing from the same talent pool of outsourcers and independent contractors as their competitors? This is an idea that is very interesting and something worth pursuing.
• How can an organization segregate IT projects so that non-strategic projects (is there such as thing?) are managed with non-strategic assets and resources while strategic IT projects are managed with strategic assets and resources.

There is still considerable research to be done to better understand how to create sustainable advantage using technology and people. The areas of information systems, strategic human resource management and organizational behavior can provide models to help create sustainable advantage and value for organizations.

In order to truly create sustainable competitive advantage, an organization must have the right strategy, technology and people in place. In today’s world, it isn’t enough to have only one or two of these; an organization must obtain and maintain the mix of the right strategy, the right technology and the right people.

I wanted to take some time to simplify my discussion of Resource Diversity and Resource Immobility from my post titled “Competitive Advantage and the Resource Based View of the Firm.”

If you’ll recall, Resource Diversity:

pertains to whether a firm owns a resource or capability that is also owned by numerous other competing firms, then that resource cannot provide a competitive advantage.

and Resource Immobility is:

The concept that if a resource is easy to obtain by competitors because the cost of developing, acquiring or using that resource is relatively low, then that resource cannot provide a competitive advantage.

Now…why do we need diversity and immobility? According to the Resource Based View (RBV) of the firm, achieving diversity and/or immobility allows an organization to create competitive advantage. The theory put forth by RBV is that if you can create an organization full of people, technologies and processes that can’t be reproduced elsewhere by assuring that your resources are diverse and immobile, you can create an advantage in the marketplace.

If you’ll remember from my posted titled “Competitive Advantage - The Human Capital approach” I talked about a football team owner trying to create a real competitive advantage. How would you, as the football team owner, create resource diversity and/or resource immobility?

As I’ve already mentioned here, you hire the best coaching staff and players that you can and then allow the coaches and players to build their game strategy to ensure that the strengths are accentuated and the weaknesses are hidden. You then create an environment that makes your players want to stay as part of your team for the long-run, which means that you have to find creative ways to keep your players and coaches engaged and interested in remaining a part of your team.

Let’s look at another example:

You are the owner of an IT consulting firm and you want to differentiate your firm from the hundreds of others out there. What do you do?

If you are like most people, you probably spend a considerable amount of time thinking about your ‘go-to-market’ strategy, building a marketing plan, building a business plan, etc etc. These are all good things and things that are relevant.

But…what about the delivery of services? How will you staff your projects? Which of the following will you do:

(a) hire the best people with the most experience and expertise.
(b) hire junior level staff with a few years experience and train them to do the job.
(c) call the local IT staffing company and bring in contractors

None of the answers are ‘wrong’ but there are better options from a competitive advantage standpoint. Let’s look at the three options:

• If you do option “a” and hire the best people and provide them with what they need to do their job and keep them engaged and interested in remaining a part of your organization, you are attempting to create resource diversity and resource immobility.
• If you do option “b” and hire junior level staff with some experience and then provide them with the training and tools to do their job, then you are also attempting to create resource diversity and resource immobility…but you have to be careful here. These junior level folks have to be good at what they do and training and tools don’t make people want to stay with you…there has to be something that makes these employees want to stay. You must find a way to keep them engaged.
• If you do option “c” and call the local staffing company and hire some contractors, I’d have to say you aren’t creating any advantage with your human capital. You can’t create advantage this way because you are drawing from the same talent pool as the rest of your competition. A contractor in your office today can easily walk away tomorrow and work for your competitor. You don’t create resource diversity or resource immobility using this option.

You’ll notice that of the three options given above, option “a” and option “b” will provide you with similar results if you approach them with the right strategy. Hiring the best and most experience will more than likely cost a lot of money while hiring more junior level folks will be a bit cheaper. Perhaps you pick from both options and hire people of both types and let the junior level folks learn from the senior level folks. Either way, you have to hire the best people you can and keep them engaged in the organization.

I’m sure there are some of you that are saying “wait a minute…what about…” and you might be right. There might be some options where you would want to use contractors for project-based work but you should expect anything more from them than what any of your competitors do.

If you are truly trying to differentiate your firm from your competitors you won’t do it by using contractors. You do it by having a distinct delivery strategy while finding and keeping the best people you can.

In order to truly create sustainable competitive advantage, an organization must have the right strategy, technology and people in place. In today’s world, it isn’t enough to have only one or two of these; an organization must obtain and maintain the mix of the right strategy, the right technology and the right people.

Using Resource Immobility and Resource Diversity concepts can help with attracting and keeping the right people…which will in turn help with crafting the right strategy and developing and deploying the right technology.

Technorati Tags: competitive advantage, organization, resource based view of the firm, technology, strategy, people

As a follow up to my previous post titled Competitive Advantage - The Human Capital Approach, I wanted to take a second to talk a little bit about the Resource Based View of the firm that I mentioned in the previous post

Most organizations don’t place a high enough focus on human capital management as a component of competitive advantage. In order for an organization to be successful in any market, they must create value for their clients. This value can be created using a new strategy, new technology or some other ‘gimmick’ but in order to sustain this value (and the competitive advantage it brings), organizations must develop and maintain an engaged, knowledgeable and creative workforce (Afiouni, 2007).

To create a workforce that provides sustainable competitive advantage and value creation, an organization must create an environment that allows their human capital to grow, much like money sitting in an interest bearing account does. This growth, expressed within people as increased knowledge, increased motivation, increased engagement, etc can be used to create competitive advantage that would be very difficult for competitors to imitate (Afiouni, 2007; Agarwal & Ferratt, 2001; Luftman & Kempaiah, 2007).

Out of the many theories of organizational behavior, one aligns itself well with the human capital view of people within an organization. This theory, called the Resource Based View (RBV), suggests that the method in which resources are applied within a firm can create a competitive advantage (Barney, 1991; Mata, Fuerst, & Barney, 1995; Peteraf, 1993; Wernerfert, 1984). The resource based view of firms is based on two main assumptions: resource diversity and resource immobility (Barney, 1991; Mata et al., 1995). According to Mata et al. (1995), these assumptions are defined as:

• Resource diversity (also called resource heterogeneity) pertains to whether a firm owns a resource or capability that is also owned by numerous other competing firms, then that resource cannot provide a competitive advantage.
  • As an example of resource diversity, consider the following: a firm is trying to decide whether to implement a new IT product. This new product might provide a competitive advantage to the firm if no other competitors have the same functionality. If competing firms have similar functionality, then this new IT product doesn’t pass the ‘resource diversity’ test and therefore doesn’t provide a competitive advantage.
• Resource immobility refers to a resource that is difficult to obtain by competitors because the cost of developing, acquiring or using that resource is too high.
  • As an example of resource immobility, consider the following: a firm is trying to decide whether they should buy an ‘off-the-shelf’ inventory control system or have one built specifically for their needs. If they buy an off-the-shelf system, they will have no competitive advantage over others in the market because their competition can implement the same system. If they pay for a customized solution that provides specific functionality that only they implement, then they will have a competitive advantage, assuming the same functionality isn’t available in other products.

These two assumptions can be used to determine whether an organization is able to create a sustainable competitive advantage by providing a framework for determining whether a process or technology provides a real advantage over the marketplace.

The resource based view of the firm suggests that an organization’s human capital management practices can contribute significantly to sustaining competitive advantage by creating specific knowledge, skills and culture within the firm that are difficult to imitate (Afiouni, 2007; Mata et al., 1995). In other words, by creating resource diversity (increasing knowledge and skills) and/or resource immobility (a culture that people want to work in), sustainable competitive advantage can be created and maintained.

In order to create human capital resource diversity and immobility, an organization must have adequate human capital management practices, organizational processes, knowledge management practices and systems, educational opportunity (both formal and informal) and social interaction (i.e., community building) practices in place (Afiouni, 2007; Barney, 1991; Mata et al., 1995; Schafer, 2004).

NOTE: I am finishing up a White paper on the topic of Competitive Advantage & Human Capital and hope to have it available within the next week or so…check back soon.

References

• Afiouni, F. (2007). Human Resource Management and Knowledge Management: A Road Map Toward Improving Organizational Performance. Journal of American Academy of Business, Cambridge, 11(2), 124.
• Agarwal, R., & Ferratt, T. W. (2001). Crafting an HR strategy to meet the need for IT workers. Association for Computing Machinery. Communications of the ACM, 44(7), 58.
• Barney, J. B. (1991). Firm resources and sustained competitive advantage. Journal of Management, 17(1), 99-120.
• Luftman, J., & Kempaiah, R. M. (2007). The IS Organization of the Future: The IT Talent Challenge. Information Systems Management, 24(2), 129.
• Mata, F. J., Fuerst, W. L., & Barney, J. B. (1995). Information technology and sustained competitive advantage: A resource-based analysis. MIS Quarterly, 19(4), 487.
• Peteraf, M. (1993). The cornerstones of competitive advantage: A resource-based view. Strategic Management Journal, 14, 179-191.
• Schafer, M. (2004). Why Workforce Management Is Back In Style. Optimize, 67.
• Wernerfert, B. (1984). A resource based view of the firm. Strategic Management Journal, 5, 171-180.

Technorati Tags: competitive advantage, technology, resource based view of the firm, human capital, organization

I was asked recently to describe how an organization can use its human capital to create competitive advantage.

I fell into the trap of using Porter’s descriptions and other schemes of describing what it is and how to achieve it and while I was talking I saw eyes glazing over and people losing interest very quickly. I had to find another way to describe competitive advantage and quickly.

The ‘usual’ definition of competitive advantage goes something like this (from QuickMBA):

When a firm sustains profits that exceed the average for its industry, the firm is said to possess a competitive advantage over its rivals. The goal of much of business strategy is to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage.

Michael Porter identified two basic types of competitive advantage:

• cost advantage
• differentiation advantage

A competitive advantage exists when the firm is able to deliver the same benefits as competitors but at a lower cost (cost advantage), or deliver benefits that exceed those of competing products (differentiation advantage). Thus, a competitive advantage enables the firm to create superior value for its customers and superior profits for itself.

That’s an awful lot of big words that really don’t provide a lot of actionable information, especially if you are trying to understand how to use people to create sustainable competitive advantage.

I hit upon the following definition and example and these seemed to stick fairly well…these aren’t mind-blowing but they were effective. My definition:

In order to gain competitive advantage, you must do something different than your competitors in such a way as to make it difficult (hopefully impossible) to imitate.

The above definition was easier for the audience to understand but they still wanted an example to help clarify and solidify what it really means to gain competitive advantage.

After thinking for a few minutes, I came up with the following example….maybe its not the best but it definitely helped the audience get a good grasp of how to use their human capital to create sustainable competitive advantage.

Suppose you’re the owner of an American football team and you’re trying to find a way to ensure that your team wins. What do you do?

Do you…

• Spend millions on the best technology?
• Spend millions on a new stadium?
• Move your team to a new city and hope it works out?

These things might help attract a larger fan base and perhaps bring you more revenue but will they help you win? In football, the superfluous things such as technology,stadiums, etc mean nothing if the team is a losing every game. People won’t pay to see your team play if they lose. So what do you do?

You hire the best coaching staff and players that you can. Your coaching staff spends months (years?) ‘training’ and coaching these players to create a cohesive team that works well together. The coaching staff understands the strengths and weaknesses of the individual players and develops offensive and defensive schemes to take advantage of the strengths and hide the weaknesses.

Now…any other team can imitate the plays that your coaches develop. They can try to imitate the coaching style and the players…but they will fail. Unless they take your players/coaches from you, they will never be able to fully imitate your team.

Your competitors can always try to hire better people and develop better schemes but if you are doing your job as the owner of the football team you should be constantly evaluating your team to ensure that you have the right people with the right training in the right places to ensure success.

The ability to create a unique team is one of the most cost-effective ways to create real sustainable advantage in the marketplace (and in my opinion, the only way).

You can try to use technology, marketing or other approaches but unless you develop those approaches internally they will not provide sustainable advantage because your competitors can use the same approaches to match your every move.

Using the people within your organization to create advantage is one of the most overlooked methods in business today. In most organizations I’ve been a part of, the organization try to mold people to fit the organization rather than create an organizational model that fits the strengths and weaknesses of its people.

I’m planning on expanding on this topic a bit more in later posts by discussing a theory called the Resource Based View of the Firm. This theory states that by creating resource immobility and resource diversity, a firm can create sustainable competitive advantage. Check back for more.

Technorati Tags: Resource Based View of the firm, Competitive Advantage, Human Capital, organization, HR, people, strategy

Its amazing to see what passion can do to a person….and an organization.

My wife Tracie and a business partner (Marcy) officially launched their photography business recently (and I couldn’t be prouder of them). The business, named Jordan Brown Photography (you can view their website @ http://jordanbrownphotography.com), and the pictures that they’ve taken have already started to bring in some business. Not a lot of money mind you…but a little bit.

Both partners still have their ‘day jobs’ and run the photography business in the evenings and on the weekends. Naturally, this has kept them both very busy….but it seems that even though extremely busy, Tracie is extremely happy (and I think Marcy is too). When we talk about the business and photography, I can tell Tracie has a passion for it and really loves taking pictures and learning more about all aspects of photography.

This past weekend, they had a photo shoot for a client on Saturday afternoon and she spent a good portion of the day on Sunday working with the photos in photoshop and working on their website. Not once did she complain that her day was being ‘wasted’ or that she wished she was doing something else. She was truly happy to be doing what she was doing.

I started thinking about the last time I saw passion like that in an organization and I had to think pretty hard to come up with an example.

I sometimes wonder what happens to those bright eyed young people who are passionate about life and their ’causes’ while in high school or college and then somehow, things change. The passion is lost…or at least fades…and those bright eyes dull a bit. I wonder if this dulling happens after leaving college and entering ‘the real world’? I’ve seen a lot of once passionate people enter an organization and very quickly turn into an automaton that ‘goes through the motions’ of corporate life where they do ‘just enough’ to get by.

Could it be that organizations don’t provide an outlet for a person’s passions?  Or…could it be that organizations do so much to require uniformity that they snuff out any passion a person might have had for their job?

I have to wonder how many people in this world are lucky enough to be able to hold on to that passion and do what they truly love doing. Those folks that wake up every day and love to ‘go to work’ have really beat the odds.

How about you? Do you love your job? Do you love commuting ‘x’ hours a day to go to work? Do you work long hours because you love what you do or because you know that your boss expects you to?

If you aren’t passionate about your job, what would you do differently? Change jobs? Change organizations? Would your feelings toward your job change if you were allowed to make your own schedule, spend some of your ‘work life’ engaged in activities that you’re passionate about, work from home or just have a little fun at the office?

There are passionate people within many organizations and there are many organizations that embrace and try to maintain passionate employees but I don’t think this is the majority of people and organizations. There seems to be a movement these days within organizations to find ways to create ‘happiness at work’, but I fear that this is either a fad or that the majority of organizations will try to implement a ‘happiness process’ that will try to force happiness on their employees much like they try to force ‘teamwork’ on them through ‘team building exercise’.

Anyone know of any organizations who are going out of their way to help people remain passionate about their jobs/careers? I’d love to hear of some examples.

As a follow up to my previous post titled “Dress Codes at Work“, I wanted to present the following hypothetical question to my readers.

You work for a company that has a formal dress code that requires a tie to be worn everyday to work. You have the chance to hire the world’s foremost expert in “________” (fill in the blank). This person tells you that they aren’t going to wear a tie and want to be able to wear jeans and a polo shirt every day to work when not interacting with clients.

What would you do?

Assume that the financial decision isn’t of concern (in the real world, we know it would be…this person would probably be very expensive).

Do you hire this person and allow them to follow their own dress code or do you pass and allow them to go to work elsewhere (perhaps your competition)? Would your company even allow you to hire this person because of their request to not follow the dress code?

My answer: I’d like to hire this person….but I have a few caveats to that.Would I want to hire someone that immediately starts asking that they be treated ’special’? Maybe…maybe not…it depends on how the person approached the subject of not following the dress code.

Could I hire this person? Maybe…maybe not…I know a few organizations that would flat out refuse to hire this person because they wouldn’t ‘play the game’ and dress like everyone else.

Would you want to be a part of an organization that would so easily toss aside a potential superstar just because they won’t wear a tie? What does it say about an organization who holds a dress code in higher regard than a person.

In my opinion, dress codes exist to create uniformity. Do you really want uniformity in your organization? Can innovation and creativity grow out of uniformity? I don’t think it can but perhaps someone can prove me wrong.

I do believe in wearing a tie…and even a suit now and then. I just don’t want to be told that I have to wear them every day in order to ‘fit in’. If I’m visiting a new client I ’suit up’ if its appropriate.

PS - make sure you look at my picture on my blog. You’ll see Mr Uniformity That picture will be changing soon…I had already decided to change it prior to this post but now I know I have to change it.

Technorati Tags: organization, Innovation, Leadership, Human Resources, people

Have you ever walked into an interview with a preconceived notion of the job you were interviewing for and after during/after the interview you felt that the job you were told about wasn’t the job you interviewed for?

In a previous article titled “Interviewing Tips for Interviewers,” I gave interviewers five tips for interviewing. These tips are:

1. When interviewing candidates, be personable and professional.
2. Be prepared. You expect the candidate to do their homework, do yours.
3. Don’t read from a list of ‘canned’ questions during an interview….probe into the background of the candidate.
4. Have a conversation with the candidate…don’t talk ‘at’ them.
5. Understand the role that the candidate is interviewing for.

I think I need to add one more item to this list due to a recent experience.

I’ve recently had an experience where I flew across the country to interview for a position that I thought to be a senior level position within the company. What I thought the job was was much different than what it actually was….and to make matters worse, the people interviewing me (all eight of them) had different ideas of what the position was that they were interviewing for.

Let me reiterate…each person had a different idea about what the job was…eight different people interviewing me for basically what felt like eight different positions. One person asked me about my leadership abilities and how I went about business development. The next asked about my knowledge of J2EE and the next about my project management skills. The following person asked me about my .NET development skills. Another asked about my network architecture background. At the end of the day I felt like I’d interviewed for eight different positions.

Now…I really hope they didn’t expect me (or anyone else) to have all the skills they asked about. If they were trying to hire a Managing Director who also developed software in both J2EE and .NET and who also was a network architect…more power to them.

So…time to add another tip to add to the list:

6. Be crystal clear about the role you are trying to fill. A high-level description should clearly state the what/why/how/when for the role. After describing the role, make sure your interview team understands the role too.

Most positions today require employees to wear many different hats and to be very flexible in their assignments. This flexibility and multiple responsibilities can make it difficult for interviewers to communicate the essence of the position they are trying to fill but some basic understanding of the roles/responsibilities is necessary before interviewing.

Before posting a job opening, be very sure you know how to describe the job and be especially sure that the team members doing the interviewing understand the job and the role that person will play in the organization.

Technorati Tags: Human Resources, organization, Management, Leadership, Interviewing Tips

This post is a follow up to my post titled “Employee Onboarding“.

Research reported on a recent Management Issues article titled “How to lose half your hires within a year” provides a bit more insight into the Employee Onboarding problem in the US. They report (bolded text is my emphasis):

A study by consultancy Novations has found a third of employers report that a quarter of their new hires leave within the first year, while more than a fifth carelessly lose nearly half of their recruits within the same timeframe.

The research, reported by SHRM Online, the website for the Society for Human Resource Management, found fewer than half of employers have a structured programme to help new recruits settle in, or “onboarding” as it is called.

Under a third of employers train their hiring managers in onboarding techniqures, with 15 per cent even leaving it up to their hiring managers to sort out all the paperwork.

Similarly, fewer than half give candidates a realistic job preview or provide interviewers with tools to help them evaluate a candidate’s skills.

While six out of 10 do follow a structured selection process, just 46 per cent establish objective hiring criteria for all open positions.

Can you imagine?

How much money is wasted every year by organizations by selecting employees and then just ‘throwing them to the sharks’.

You can read the SHRM article on this research at “Many Employers Admit They ‘Wing’ Support of New Hires“. Some other interesting stats from the research report are:

• 57 percent of all those surveyed have never had a performance review, or, if they did have a review, they found it neutral or not useful.
• 79 percent don’t receive career mentoring.
• Only 12 percent said their employer offers them a career path plan.

Other articles you may find interesting:

• The Hiring Challenges
• Blaine Collins on New Team Members
• Organizational Culture
• Follow-up to Organizational Culture

Technorati Tags: Organizaitons, Hiring Challenges, Employee Onboarding, Onboarding, Culture

Organization Alignment seems like one of those ‘touchy feely’ things that most technical folks would rather not discuss but it’s actually quite relevant to success in todays technology and project driven organizations.

Organizational alignment is the practice of aligning an organization’s strategy and culture. In other words, organizational alignment helps to ensure that ‘what gets done’ is in line with ‘how things get done’ and vice versa. For a more detailed description of organizational alignment, take a look at the article on Organizational Alignment on Vanguard Consulting’s website.

As mentioned, Organizational Alignment is the act (or art?) of aligning strategy and culture. The field of strategic planning and organizational strategy is a very well researched and fairly well covered in academia (and blogosphere) so I won’t go into the ’strategy’ aspect but I will cover the ‘culture’ side here.What does organizational alignment have to do with project success? In my opinion, everything.

For a project to be successful, an organization must have its strategic goals aligned with its cultural values…and projects must also be aligned with the organizations’ culture and strategy. Consider the following brief example (paraphrased from Vanguard Consulting’s website):

Assume that the goal of your organization is to create a flexible service delivery model to allow you to be flexible for your clients. You’d want to make sure that the organization is aligned to meet these goals by having flexibility as a core value. You wouldn’t want to implement a ‘command and control’ structure that requires everyone to get approval before acting. The command and control structure would completely counteract the stated goal of flexibility for your clients.

The cultural aspect of organizational alignment covers ‘how things get done’ (while the strategic aspect covers ‘what gets done’). The ‘how’ covers the values, behaviors and processes for getting things done, which are things that can be addressed across the organization using various methods, such as the implementation of a Project Management Office (PMO).

Many organizations have implemented PMO’s to standardize project management methodologies, align projects with corporate strategy and act as a central point of management for all things projects. The majority of these PMO’s usually don’t address the values and behaviors across the organization. In fact, most definitions of a PMO only describe the use of a PMO to standardize project processes and align projects with strategy but values are usually overlooked.

A PMO is a good thing for most organizations but its doesn’t go far enough to ensure alignment. Standardizing project methodologies can be a good thing but standardization doesn’t go far enough to address the issues of values and behaviors. The PMO, by definition, isn’t setup to address values and behaviors but could easily be converted into an office to help align values, behaviors and process and perhaps it could be renamed the ‘Project & Alignment Office’ (PAO).

So….after all of that (and my creating the PAO!), how do we ensure project success by organizational alignment? We don’t…you can never ‘ensure success’…but we can help set projects on the path towards success by working to align the ‘how’ with the ‘what’ and the ‘why’.

Look for more to come on organizational alignment and projects…and maybe even more on the newly created PAO

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