WSR January-March 2018 by IHRIM Publication

January–March 2018

The Official Journal of the International Association for Human Resource Information Management

IHRIM.ORG

Strategic HR and Talent Management: How to attract new talent, maximize existing talent, and redeploy or re-skill employees to meet new business opportunities…

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Contents

Volume 9, Number 1 • January-March 2018

From the Editors 3

Roy Altman and Michael Martin

Where Are You From?

By George Walker, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center Diversity and Inclusion are now widely considered an important program for any company’s HR function. In this article, the author shows us, through the telling of his own story, how asking a few extra and more explicit questions beyond “where are you from?” can lead to a fuller understanding of the person. We all have unconscious biases in hiring and evaluating talent in the workplace. We’d like to think that our awareness will lead to first impressions not being our last impressions.

Ageism – Ensuring High Quality Talent Now and For the Future What You and Your Organization Needs to Know and Do 8 By Lexy Martin, Visier Are you involved in diversity and inclusion efforts in your organization? While, to date, these efforts have mostly revolved around gender and ethnic equality, expect the topic of ageism to increasingly be part of the discussion and in need of solutions. Situational ageism – prejudice or discrimination on the basis of a person’s age – is an important issue that organizations across industries should be aware of, and take steps to monitor and improve.

Moving Beyond Transactions – Moving to Strategic HRIS 11 By Mike DiClaudio, Chip Jackson, and Todd McAllister, KPMG As HR adapts to the demands of the evolving employment market, the shift from a transactional focus to strategic focus is essential. Technology is an important enabler in providing the access and insight to guide leadership at all levels to the broader impact of transactions in accomplishing the strategic goals and objectives balanced with protecting the organization’s core values, vision, and trust.

How to Manage the Modern, Multi-Dimensional Organization 16 By Nicole Treviño, Matrix Management Institute Before implementing new initiatives, you should also consider what your team needs to learn to adopt the proposed strategies. Learning and skill-building will be required for people to operate differently. There are no shortcuts. By putting in the time, however, you’ll see your organization build internal capacity for achieving big-picture goals and your teams are working collaboratively toward those goals.

Strategically Create the Employee Experience: Redefining the HR Operating Model

as a business-critical partner to strategically define the employee experience has never been more urgent. The HR operating model – how HR delivers value – must be changed. It’s time to design HR to be the business partner with the skills, organization, and partnerships to deliver innovative employee experience solutions.

The Evolving Role of HR Business Partners

By Tom Friedrich and Trisha Rajshekhar, Aon Hewitt For most HR organizations, the true value of the HRBP is not recognized due to an inability to successfully change its scope of work. In order for HRBPs to change the focus of their work, HR must alleviate the capacity and capability constraints that are outlined in this article. Only then will we realize the full potential of the HRBP and have them take on the mantle of business performance consultant.

HR and Marketing: Shaping the New World of Work

By Dr. Anna A. Tavis, New York University Ironically, HR might have been last to grasp the realization that it is good business to make work more purposeful, engaging employees at a personal level, and ensuring the workplace experience is positive, something Marketing has understood for a long time…but HR is catching up fast, closing the gap between what Marketing knows and what HR does.

“ThePeopleProject” at Roche

By Margaret Greenleaf, Roche Roche has embarked in a significant redefinition of its talent management processes due to the pressure of the business. This transformation is piloted with and by the business to provide to the organization the agility and flexibility required to be successful. Roche will go-live with its new environment in April 2018.

The Back Story

HR: The Silos within Silos (And What it Means for Analytics) It behooves HR professionals to move beyond basic reporting of readily-derived data points, and make full use of the analytic technologies available to them today to address the requests from their leadership, especially in the face of new technologies in the workplace. The challenge: moving beyond siloed data to enterprise-wide amalgamation of strategic analytics.

By William E. McClane, McClane Consulting Group Human Resources has reached the point of diminishing returns in its focus on administrative efficiency. By contrast, the need for HR

Buyer’s Guide

Page 14-15

Workforce Solutions Review (ISSN 2154-6975) is published quarterly for the International Association for Human Resource Information Management by Futura Publishing LLC, 12809 Shady Mountain Road, Leander, TX 78641. Subscription rates can be found at www.ihrimpublications.com. Please send address corrections to Workforce Solutions Review at the address above. www.ihrim.org • Workforce Solutions Review • January-March 2018

Volume 9, Number 1 • January-March 2018

Workforce Solutions Review is a publication of the International Association for Human Resource Information Management, whose mission is to be the leading professional association for knowledge, education and solutions supporting human capital management. Opinions expressed herein are not necessarily those of the editors, the IHRIM board of directors or the membership.

SCOTT BOLMAN, HR Transformation & HR Excellence Practice, Deloitte, bolmanscott@yahoo.com YVETTE CAMERON, Global Vice President Strategy, SuccessFactors, Littleton, CO Yvette.cameron@successfactors.com

LEW CONNER, Executive Director, Higher Education User Group, Gilbert, AZ USA lconner@heug.org

EDITORIAL COMMITTEE

ELENA M. ORDÓÑEZ DEL CAMPO, Senior VP Global Delivery Unit, SAP AG, Frankfurt, Germany elena. ordonez@sap.com

Managing Editor BRUNO QUERENET, Head of HR, Think Surgical Bruno.querenet@gmail.com

Co-Managing Editor MICHAEL RUDNICK, Managing Partner, Prescient Digital Media, Michael.rudnick@gmail.com

Associate Editors ROY ALTMAN, HRIS Manager - HR Analytics & Application Architecture at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, NY roy@peopleserv.com SCOTT BOLMAN, HR Transformation Consulting Leader, Deloitte, bolmanscott@yahoo.com SHAWN FITZGERALD, AMS Portfolio Manager, Alight Solutions, Shawn.fitzgerald@alight.com DAVID GABRIEL, ED.D., Global Reach Leadership, Berkeley, CA USA, davidgabriel@gmail.com BOB GREENE. Account Executive, Ascentis, San Mateo, CA, Bob.Greene@ascentis.com JEFF HIGGINS, CEO, Human Capital Management Institute, Marina Del Rey, CA USA jeff.higgins@hcminst.com ERIC LESSER, KPMG, Eric.l.lesser@gmail.com MICHAEL H. MARTIN, Partner, Aon Hewitt Consulting, Organization & HR Effectiveness, New York, NY michael.martin.6@aonhewitt.com DARSHANA NARAYANAN, PH.D. Research Lead at Composites Collective, New York, NY, Darshana.Narayanan@gmail.com

EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD CECILE ALPER-LEROUX, VP Product Strategy and Development, Ultimate Software, Weston, FL cecile_leroux@ultimatesoftware.com MARK BENNETT, Work Life and Collaborative Products Strategy Director, Oracle Corp., Redwood Shores, CA USA mark.bennett@oracle.com ERIK BERGGREN, VP of Research, IDC, San Mateo, CA USA

GARY DURBIN, Chief Technology Officer, SynchSource, Oakland, CA USA hacker@synchsource.com Dr. CHARLES H. FAY, Professor, School of Management & Labor Relations, Rutgers University, Highland Park, NJ USA cfay@smlr.rutgers.edu DR. URSULA CHRISTINA FELLBERG, Owner & Managing Director, UCF-StrategieBeraterin, Munich, Germany ucfell@mac.com ALSEN HSEIN, President,Take5 People Limited, Shanghai, PRC Alsen@take5people.com CARL C. HOFFMANN, Director, Human Capital Management & Performance LLC, Chapel Hill, NC USA cc_hoffmann@yahoo.com JIM HOLINCHECK, VP Customer Deployment Applications, Workday, Chicago, IL USA james.holincheck@workday.com

DR. DANIEL SULLIVAN, Professor of International Business, University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware USA sullivad@lerner.udel.edu MARK SMITH, CEO, Chief Research Officer, and Founder of Ventana Research, San Ramon, CA USA mark.smith@ventanaresearch.com DAVE ULRICH, Professor, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI USA dou@umich.edu JULIE YOO, Founder and Chief Data Scientist, Pymetrics, julie@pymetrics.com DR. MARY YOUNG, Principal Researcher, Human Capital, The Conference Board, New York, NY USA mary.young@conference-board.org

IHRIM BOARD OF DIRECTORS Officers and Executive Committee JIM PETTIT, HRIP, SHRM-SCP, Chair MICK COLLINS, Vice Chair GARY MORLOCK, HRIP, CFO, Finance Committee Chair JOYCE BROWN, Secretary SHAFIQ LOKHANDWALA, Executive Director

CATHERINE ANN HONEY, VP Strategic Partner Relations, Safeguard World International, Boston, MA USA catherinehoney@safeguard.com

Board Members

KATHERINE JONES, Ph.D., Intellectual Capital Solutions, Global Head of Talent Research Katherine_ics@msn.com

STUART RUDNER, Director of Meeting & Events

SYNCO JONKEREN, VP, HCM Applications Product Development & Management, EMEA, The Netherlands synco.jonkeren@oracle.com MICHAEL J. KAVANAGH, Professor Emeritus of Management, State University of Albany (SUNY), Albany, NY USA mickey.kavanagh@gmail.com BOB KAUNERT, Principal, Deloitte, Philadelphia, PA USA bkaunert@yahoo.com DAVID LUDLOW, Global VP, HCM Solutions, SAP, Palo Alto, CA David.ludlow@sap.com RHONDA P. MARCUCCI, CPA, Consultant for GruppoMarcucci, Chicago, IL USA rhonda@gruppomarcucci-usa.com LEXY MARTIN, Independent Consultant/Researcher, Meadow Vista, CA Lexy.martin1@gmail.com BRIAN RETZLAFF, VP of Information Technology, Voya Financial, Atlanta, GA USA LISA ROWAN, Program Director, HR, Learning & Talent Strategies, IDC, Framingham, MA USA lrowan@idc.com

JOSH BERSIN, Principal and Founder, Bersin by Deloitte, Oakland, CA USA jbersin@bersin.com

LISA STERLING, Executive Vice President, Chief People Officer, Ceridian, Lincoln, NE USA, lisa.sterling@ceridian.com

January-March 2018 • Workforce Solutions Review • www.ihrim.org

CATHERINE HONEY, Director of Member Services & HRIM Foundation Director MARYANN MCILRAITH, Director of Communities DOUG SAMPSON, Director of Marketing & Communications SHARON THOMPSON, HRIM Foundation Director

PUBLISHING INFORMATION TOM FAULKNER, Publisher, Futura Publishing LLC, Austin, TX USA, tomf@futurapublishing.com PATTY HUBER, Advertising Manager, Austin, TX USA phuber2@austin.rr.com

Roy Altman, Lead Editor

Roy Altman is manager of HRIS Analytics and Architecture at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. He is responsible for putting actionable data in the hands of workers to assist in decision-making, manages a work stream of their Workday implementation, and determines short and long-term application architecture strategy. Previously, he was founder/CEO of Peopleserv, a software/services company. He has published extensively and serves on IHRIM Workforce Solutions Review editorial committee and can be reached at altmanr@mskcc.org. Michael Martin, Contributing Editor

Michael Martin is a senior leader in the Organization & HR Effectiveness consulting service line and is a partner in Aon Hewitt’ Talent Practice. He has more than 17 years of industry experience with a broad range of HR transformation initiatives including strategy and design of the HR function, shared services design, implementation and optimization, business process re-engineering, change management, and implementations of HR technology solutions in many industries. He has held internal HR roles, including leading a global HR Center of Expertise and running a large, outsourced HR shared services function. Martin earned a B.A. from The George Washington University with major in Psychology, and an M.A. in Industrial/Organizational Psychology from New York University. He is regularly featured in HR trade journals, and has been a speaker at the annual IHRIM conference. He can be reached at michael.martin.6@aonhewitt.com.

from the editors

The theme of this issue is Strategic HR and Talent Management, which is a pretty broad pairing of topics. As a result, this issue explores a wide diversity of subjects. In a bit of a departure from the typical themes, the first leitmotif of this issue is (appropriately) diversity. George Walker, director of Diversity and Inclusion for Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, explores the hidden meanings, and potential micro-aggressions of the seemingly simple question: “Where are you from?” illustrated by his own journey. Lexy Martin addresses an all too common “-ism” in the workforce in “Ageism – Ensuring High Quality Talent Now and for the Future” where she debunks common myths using data in her own inimitable way. Another theme is the elusive goal of HR being strategic to the organization. What does strategic mean, and what does it take to get there? Many companies confuse tactics with strategy, or are unable to articulate a clear strategy. KPMG’s Mike DiClaudio, Chip Jackson and Todd McAllister tackle that subject in “Moving Beyond Transactions – Moving to Strategic HRIS.” In “How to Manage the Modern, Multi-Dimensional Organization,” Nicole Treviño from Matrix Management Institute addresses one of the biggest strategic problems your company probably isn’t aware of – transitioning your organization to an agile, matrix environment from the bureaucratic, command-and-control hierarchy. Bill McClane, from McClane Consulting, in “Strategically Create the Employee Experience: Redefining the HR Operating Model,” is looking at the necessary evolution of the HR organization in order to strengthen the employee experience. Required organizational change is a subject that has been written about by industry thought leaders from Josh Bersin to Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of the U.S. forces in Iraq. This is a topic clearly entering the zeitgeist, which you will be reading more about in months to come. The role of the HR business partner has transformed in recent years, from compliance police to becoming a valuable contributor to the company’s talent strategy. Aon’s Tom Friedrich and Trisha Rajshekhar share their research on that transition in “The Evolving Role of HR Business Partners.” Director of Human Capital Management Program at NYU, Anna Tavis, Ph.D., observes that “People do not join companies; they seek to become better versions of themselves.” She argues that HR should take a cue from Marketing and leverage their expertise in telling a persuasive story that gives employees a place “to hang their hats.” Roche Pharmaceuticals’ Margaret Greenleaf recounts a case study in “ThePeopleProject.” What started out as a Performance Management initiative quickly morphed into a holistic approach to gain the agility to allow the workforce to deal with the challenges and opportunities they face. The end result was a three-tiered approach that encompassed policies, practices, and technology. As usual, the issue concludes with our recurring Back Story article from Katherine Jones, PhD. In her article “HR: The Silos within Silos (And What it Means for Analytics),” she points out the overuse of the word silos (“Mid-western farms possibly don’t even have silos anymore.” Ed. Note: I’m pretty sure missile silos are still in use, though.) and drills down to the “Silos within” to reveal how analytics can unearth hidden challenges. Well there you have it. On behalf of the editorial committee and publisher, we hope you enjoy this issue as much as we enjoyed putting it together. www.ihrim.org • Workforce Solutions Review • January-March 2018

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George Walker, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center

Where Are You From? Editor’s note: George Walker is the director of Diversity and Inclusion for Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. The following article was adapted from a presentation that he recently gave at The Conference Board’s West Coast Diversity & Inclusion event in San Francisco. Diversity and Inclusion is now widely considered an important program for any company’s HR function. A recent study at Harvard University summed it up thusly: “People with different lifestyles and different backgrounds challenge each other more. Diversity creates dissent, and you need that. Without it, you’re not going to get any deep inquiry or breakthroughs.” 1 Also, a 2017 study conducted by Cloverpop,2 a decisionmaking database company, concluded the following: • Inclusive teams make better business decisions up to 87 percent of the time. • Teams that follow an inclusive process make decisions two times faster with one-half of the meetings. • Decisions made and executed by diverse teams delivered 60 percent better results. In our conversations, George challenges me to address the unconscious biases we all have, by being aware of them. In this article, he shows us, through the telling of his own story, how asking a few extra and more explicit questions beyond “where are you from?” can lead to a fuller understanding of the person. We all have unconscious biases in hiring and evaluating talent in the workplace. We’d like to think that our awareness will lead to first impressions not being our last impressions. Whether you have done much work with unconscious bias or not, you’ve undoubtedly

January-March 2018 • Workforce Solutions Review • www.ihrim.org

heard the term, and because you are super smart you know what biases are and understand that we all have them, whether they are in the front of mind or not. Okay, let’s lock this in for a moment as we dig into the question of “where am I from?” Let me start with the quick version of my story: I was born in the Republic of Panama and immediately put up for adoption. The circumstances here get really murky and I haven’t really done much to learn more. As an infant, The Walker’s chose me as their only child. From Panama, where my father had been in the military, we came back to the U.S. and lived in Grand Forks, North Dakota where I only recall having a teacher named Mrs. Stewart. Our family returned to Memphis, TN where each of my parents had grown up and met. My fast answer, when I am asked, is always that I am from Memphis. And, when I want to emphasize the fact that I am not to be trifled with, I might say, “don’t get it twisted, I am from Memphis!” Or, if we are talking about BBQ, I definitely say,“Who’s in the kitchen? What’s that you’re calling BBQ? I am from Memphis.” That’s a point of authority you see, and I take it seriously. But if that were all we were discussing today, we might just leave the conversation there and it wouldn’t have probed much on why this is a question with such mixed outcomes. However, as professionals, what we understand is that there “could be” a perceived subtext to the question. Our histories are full of stories and some of them are not so pleasant. In the U.S., especially, and not because other countries don’t have challenges with respect to diversity, immigration, and acculturation, the very notion that this question of “where” may seem loaded is because

there is a disconnect between who we say we want to be and the actions and inactions that demonstrate who we are. Let me unpack that. In the U.S., historically, we express that this is a country meant to be open to all who would come and they’re welcomed on her shores. I don’t have to remind you about the Statue of Liberty or any number of icons that clearly express the welcome of the U.S. And yet…yet…the suspicious reaction that many of America’s most prominent sons and daughters receive is ubiquitous. “Where are you from?” Often it suggests that you are NOT from here. In doing a little research, I found several comments on this question of “where are you from?” We know that often the question of the immigrant of several generations isn’t about accent, or even cultural context, but solely about race and ethnicity. It seems okay in many quarters to question someone who isn’t white about their validity in the U.S. There are many who care about issues of inclusion and are great practitioners of how to make others feel welcome. The most obvious micro-aggressive comments aren’t uttered … ever. Ever? And for those not as familiar, micro-aggressions are the indirect, subtle, or unintentional discriminatory acts against members of a group that is marginalized. A quick example is when we applaud girls for being pretty and boys for being strong. Got it? Girls can be both pretty and strong. Our notion of gender stereotypes is changing rapidly. I was thinking about what I do, where I can make a difference. I had to make a real hard ask of myself in terms of how I ask questions of people and what I do with that information. Here, my friends, I’ll invite you to think about your explanation, privately, as we explore together some of this “stuff” that isn’t just black and white. Hopefully, we can unearth some of our deepest prejudices that continue to create walls. When does “where are you from” mean “who are your people?” What assessments do we write about a person’s worth based on what we think we know about the person’s heritage and ancestry? When we are the questioner, what do our eyes tell and

how much of it is correct? I started by sharing that I am adopted. While I don’t specifically identify as Afro-Latino, as I age, my life without my parents, the ones who raised and loved me, becomes more sobering. I think a little more about genetics and health. I am noticing that I look like a lot of my Latino and Caribbean brothers and sisters. It also helps that I live in New York City (the Washington Heights/Harlem border in Manhattan) so I see a lot of people who have hair like mine, skin that’s my color, and I hear many who speak Spanish. When I was Peace Corps volunteer in Ecuador, South America, I can’t tell you how many times I was asked about my background, even after I said I am an American and my passport had been shared, metaphorically or literally. Now I don’t mean to suggest that I was always irritated by the question, I wasn’t. I was in another country and to some extent I took it as a part of being there. Sometimes you’re more ready to challenge and some days, you just aren’t. Even as I share this story, I can imagine that some of you are reading and thinking; I get that all the time and I live here in the U.S. I certainly know that there are people who have had to roll their eyes when it was clear that more was being asked in this simple question. But, as I began, what about the times when we’ve done the same thing? What about “where are you from?” sets up a dynamic of hierarchy, unintended, in positioning one nation over another, or perhaps a city or state, or town and village? In this way, in America, native peoples are often assumed to be the outsiders, or perhaps the way people of Mexican descent are treated as immigrants, when in fact, many of them descend from families that have roots that were crossed by what is the United States. The historical narrative of what American openness is supposed to have meant in the U.S., and particularly what other populations like Italians, Jews, or Irish have also struggled with respect to identity and the question “where are you from” is still being written. Some of it is basic as this question lands differently if your skin is dark, but that’s not the whole story. Dealing with the racial undertones of the questions brings up all sorts of stuff, and

What about “where are you from?” sets up a dynamic of hierarchy, unintended, in positioning one nation over another, or perhaps a city or state, or town and village?

www.ihrim.org • Workforce Solutions Review • January-March 2018

Endnotes

Paul Block, from an HBR article by Boris Groysberg and Katherine Connolly: “Great Leaders Who Make the Mix Work.” https://hbr. org/2013/09/great-leaderswho-make-the-mix-work 1

² https://www.cloverpop. com/hacking-diversity-withinclusive-decision-makingwhite-paper ³ W. E. B. DuBois, ‘The Souls of Black Folk’, 1903

just like every micro-aggression, it festers. For those of us who have been asked this question, it is that relentless beat that says, “you’re not really an American or really from here.” And, when you ask it of someone, what meaning do you assign? So this feels heavy and perhaps you adamantly disagree with this notion of the question even being up for debate. Perhaps you say you carry nothing to the question. “Where are you from” is genuine curiosity, you might say, and a yearning to learn more about someone who might share an experience that is unlike yours. Isn’t there room in the question to be harmless, George? Can we not be dealing in micro-aggressions and bad behavior solely because we might be curious? When I first met the man who is now my husband, I recall being enchanted by a speech pattern that was not of native U.S. – speakers. We met in a Cuban restaurant and I saw him come in with someone I identified as Latino and another man who, while his skin was white, was wearing a poncho. We made eyes at each other and finally decided to get up and chat. We debate who spoke first, but since it’s my story, you’ll read it my way. I heard the soft lilt that came from his voice and I immediately said, “Do you speak Spanish?” Probably with the desire to impress, we exchanged pleasantries in Spanish enough to get beyond the basic, “Como estas?” Well, I think I asked, secure in our Spanish conversation, “where are you from?” and he said, Haiti. It was as if a car was screeching to a halt, I was confused and said, but don’t they speak French there? And he replied, yes, and it is my first language but you started by asking me if I spoke Spanish and I do. And of course, he speaks English, and Haitian Kreyol and reads Portuguese. So fine, in this example, I was the one who had been embarrassed and then impressed. And, as I mentioned, we went on to have several dates after that meeting and on the 1st of December, 2017, we celebrated 17 years since our first date. I learned a lesson that day, and since spending time with him, I have noticed that we have very different reactions to the question. His is usually to respond by first stating where he considers his home, his place, Washington,

January-March 2018 • Workforce Solutions Review • www.ihrim.org

D.C. or New York City. Of course, I immediately look incredulously and say, you know that’s not where that question comes from. His response, “if there is another question to ask, they should ask it.” He simply doesn’t react the same way nor does he hear the question or ask through the same lens I do. The subtext doesn’t mean the same thing and I know a big part of it is that he accepts some of this curiosity as a part of his immigrant story and understands that his accent might be “interesting” to some. I was raised by black Southerners who had a healthy skepticism about integration because they had lived through the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed in our town. So, I ask myself, does “where are you from” change depending on context? I think it does. We, each of us, have a role to play in this examination of our own stereotypes and images. We push these assumptions forward in ways subtle and quite egregious. We must lean into an examination of what we ask and how it might be interpreted. I mentioned that I claim Memphis, and I do claim her fiercely, until I recognize that some of the southern mannerisms and ways are no longer my ways or didn’t serve me as well. I know that when I speak with my “folks” we drop into a southern drawl and twang that works so easily for us in “black speak.” And yet, on a dime when we think it is not as effective, we’ve also learned to code-switch. I can still hear my mother when she spoke formally on the phone about business. Her voice went higher, her drawl less pronounced, and her diction was as crisp as a Macintosh apple. I have heard Northerners, mostly white, with misplaced “R’s” talk about diction classes that allowed them to smooth their final consonants and hesitate with just the right emphasis as to not be labelled “from” a lower class. The notion of being from is complex. It begs of us to think more concretely about what story we’re writing of each other, but also what we want to be said of us. There are a few simple lessons I want to impart: • Nuance and subtlety are everything: Each of us has a task to root out our own

bias. When we learn where we are triggered or could be making the space for others uncomfortable, we have to make choices in the types of ways we show up. Before we blurt out, “where are you from,” contextualize how it might come across and what might be the thing to which you want to know could be stated more concretely. I have used a combination of “how do you identify racially?” or “from where does your family trace its history?” These are much more direct and surprisingly much better received. • Name the issues: When thinking about this question of origin, recognize that for many people it is a racially loaded question. Race and origin play a vital role in the U.S. context. In speaking of the black experience, W. E. B. DuBois coined the term, “double consciousness,” in his 1903 book, The Souls of Black Folk.3 In it, he expresses the idea in this way: “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” • Finally, meet new people! It is not as an anthropological exercise but as an invitation to deeper human connection. We need each other to know each other. Our stories often have meaning because of things we have ascribed. In order to adequately engage in real questions and get a glimpse at authentic exchanges, we have to listen to what is being said, pause, think, and hear. And when we are asked the question with curiosity and openness, we have to share in meaningful ways, not with the assumption that the question is meant to goad or chide. “Where are you from” comes with a few questions buried inside – “Who are your

folks?” How much money do you have or can you afford it? Should you be here? Are you like me? Do we speak the same languages? Are we the same people? And these are just a few of the interpretations. In fact, when I was talking through this writing with a colleague, she said one of the difficulties about a topic like this is that it can be summed up in a few sentences, or maybe a paragraph or two. She wondered aloud with me if it really took a whole article. I loved that she said that because I knew it was a struggle I was wrestling with. I don’t want to hammer a topic beyond its usefulness and I know that real questions don’t get asked. They get buried in simplistic “go-arounds” and we don’t deal with what is hard about learning about someone without being offensive. I read an article by a Canadian woman who is of Chinese descent. She lists her responses to the question of why she finds “where are you from” offensive. This line really spoke to me: “So what’s a more appropriate way to pose this question? Ask me what my background is. This question is far more specific and does not contain the unintentional negative connotations that come with asking, where are you from… Or better yet, don’t ask me at all. My culture is part of my identity, and from having a simple conversation with me, you’ll soon find that out. Ask me about my parents or where I grew up. Ask me where I consider home to be. Ask me where my heritage lies or what languages I speak.” I am from Memphis. I am so very proud of that. I am from the suburbs of a city and have seen white flight devastate the economic base of many of my childhood neighbors, probably more white than black. I also was able to get a great education in suburban and private schools. I am from a country where the language is Spanish and it sings sweetly to me when I least expect it. My memories remind me that mis sueños son lindas – my dreams are beautiful. Thank you for allowing me to share a part of where I am from.

About the Author

George Walker has worked extensively in social justice and philanthropic causes, as an employee and volunteer. In February 2012, President Barack Obama appointed him to be a member of the President’s Board of Advisors on Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), where he served until the end of the administration in 2016. George is a member of the American Leadership Council for Diversity in Healthcare (ALCDH). He was selected to serve as a German Marshall Memorial Fellow, representing the U.S. and learning about transnational partnerships on a variety of issues while traveling to five European Countries. Professionally, he leads Diversity & Inclusion at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, the world’s oldest cancer care facility. This position serves as an institutional leader on diversity goals and programs for staff. A proud former volunteer of the U.S. Peace Corps, he served in Guayaquil, Ecuador. George is a graduate of Morehouse College (BA History) and The Divinity School, Duke University (MDiv). He is also a graduate of the Georgetown University, with a Certificate in Executive Coaching. He is an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ (UCC). A native of Memphis, Tennessee, George lives with his family in New York City. He can be reached at gbwjr91@gmail.com.

www.ihrim.org • Workforce Solutions Review • January-March 2018

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Lexy Martin, Visier

Ageism – Ensuring High Quality Talent Now and For the Future What You and Your Organization Needs to Know and Do Are you over 50? Are you concerned you may lose your job? Or, if you are currently looking for a job, are you concerned that you may not be hirable because of your age? Do you work in the tech industry?1 If so, then your concerns are valid. Many tech professionals over age 50 (and even a number over age 40) believe ageism exists because of their own personal difficulties finding work later in their careers. Certainly, there have been numerous class-action lawsuits about ageism against Silicon Valley giants, even more than about racial or gender bias.2 Are you involved in diversity and inclusion efforts in your organization? While, to date, these efforts have mostly revolved around gender and ethnic equality, expect the topic of ageism to increasingly be part of the discussion and in need of solutions. Situational ageism – prejudice or discrimination on the basis of a person’s age – is an important issue that organizations across industries should be aware of, and take steps to monitor and improve. This is not just because of fairness or to reduce the risk of age discrimination litigation, but also because of upcoming retirements and the resulting skills shortages. In the past 50 years, the size of the U.S. workforce has grown an average of 1.7 percent annually. In the next 50 years, the U.S. workforce size will grow by only 0.3 percent annually.3

Does Ageism Exist in Tech?

In short, yes. A Visier Insights Report on ageism in the tech industry4 found that tech does hire a larger proportion of younger workers and a smaller proportion of older workers than in other industries. Is this disparity in hiring due to systemic ageism in tech? To investigate this, we first strove to determine if the disparity is related to the availability of talent versus an intentional bias

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towards hiring younger workers. We found that hiring decisions in tech do indeed favor younger candidates. Millennials were hired over Gen X candidates at a higher rate than in non-tech industries. This answer has traditionally been difficult to get; while leading tech companies publicize their organizational ethnic and gender composition data, little data has been shared about the age makeup of the tech workforce.5 We began our research into ageism by looking at the breakdown of the workforce by age, comparing the tech industry to non-tech industries. Using the Visier Insights database – an aggregation of anonymized and standardized workforce databases that for this report included 330,000 employees from 43 large U.S. enterprises (those with at least two years of verified and validated high-quality data) – we were able to examine the role of age in the workforce like never before.

Debunking Myths about Ageism

Our research showed that the average tech worker is 38 years old, compared to 43 years old for non-tech6 workers. The average manager in the tech industry is 42 years old, compared to 47 for non-tech industries. It comes as no surprise that tech workers are younger on average, but our research clarified some key misconceptions related to the salary life cycle, resignation rates, and perceived value of older workers. Here are four common ageism myths we debunked with the data: Myth #1: Older tech workers are less valued. While the average tech worker is five years younger than the average worker, it is a misconception that older workers are less valued in tech. From age 40 onwards, non-manager workers in tech enter the “Tech Sage Age” and are increasingly likely to receive a top-performer

rating as they age, mature, and gain experience. Conversely, the proportion of top performers decreases with age in non-tech industries. This finding suggests that maturity and experience are more important drivers of high performance in tech than in non-tech industries.

About the Author

Myth #2: Older tech workers experience a drop in salary. Older tech workers, as a group, do not experience a reduction in average salary that is any different from non-tech industries. Rather, workers in tech experience the same salary life cycle as their counterparts in non-tech.

Myth #4: Older workers in tech resign at higher rates. The average resignation rates by age for tech and non-tech workforces show that older tech workers — from age 40 onwards — have the same first-year resignation rate as their non-tech age counterparts: approximately 10 percent.

Lexy Martin is a respected thought leader and researcher on HR technology adoption and their value to organizations and workers alike. Known as the originator of the Sierra-Cedar HR Systems Survey, she now works at Visier continuing her research efforts on workforce intelligence, and works closely with customers to support them in their HR transformation to become data-driven organizations. Lexy is principal of Research and Customer Value at Visier. She enjoys hearing from IHRIM members at lexy.martin@visier.com.

The Value of Including Older Tech Workers

Myth #3: Newly hired older tech workers are not paid equitably. Older tech workers that are newly hired do not — on average — experience a lower wage. Rather, newly hired workers are paid the same average salary as more tenured workers, across all age groups.

As our Tech Sage Age finding shows, companies are missing out if they don’t consider the age composition of specific teams, departments, and business units, and how managers can build diversity and take advantage of the maturity and experience of older workers. Legal issues aside, designing a recruitment strategy around younger generations can be shortsighted from a business perspective. Older workers tend to be more loyal, and an overrepresentation of Millennials in the workforce can impact retention. A 2016 Gallup report reveals that “21 percent of Millennials say they’ve changed jobs within the past year, which is more than three times the number of non-Millennials www.ihrim.org • Workforce Solutions Review • January-March 2018

Endnotes

The tech companies included in our research represent the diverse fields within the tech industry from software development, hosting, data processing, telecommunications, computer systems design and scientific services. Carol Hymowitz and Robert Burnson, “It’s Tough Being Over 40 in Silicon Valley,” Bloomberg Businessweek September 8, 2016. https://www.bloomberg. com/news/articles/2016-09-08/ silicon-valley-s-job-hungry-saywe-re-not-to-old-for-this 2

Global Growth: Can Productivity Save the Day in an Aging World?, McKinsey Global Institute, January 2015. https://www.mckinsey. com/~/media/McKinsey/Global%20Themes/Employment%20 and%20Growth/Can%20long%20 term%20global%20growth%20 be%20saved/MGI%20Global%20 growth_Executive%20summary_ January%202015.ashx 3

The Tech Industry, September, 2017. https://www.visier.com/ wp-content/uploads/2017/09/ Visier-Insights-AgeismInTechSept2017.pdf 4

How Millennials Want to Work and Live, Gallup, May, 2016. http://news.gallup. com/reports/189830/e. aspx?utm_source=gbj&utm_ medium=copy&utm_ campaign=20160512-gbj 5

Josh Bersin, “Employee Retention Now a Big Issue: Why the Tide has Turned,” LinkedIn, August, 2013. https://www.linkedin. com/pulse/20130816200159131079-employee-retentionnow-a-big-issue-why-the-tidehas-turned/ 6

David Rock and Heidi Grant, “Why Diverse Teams Are Smarter,” Harvard Business Review, November, 2016. https:// hbr.org/2016/11/why-diverseteams-are-smarter 7

Lexy Martin, Ageism in Tech: A Septuagenarian 8

Speaks Out, Visier. http://www. visier.com/clarity/ageismtech-septuagenarian/?utm_ campaign=b9717rr&utm_ medium=b&utm_source=rr Rooney Rule, Wikipedia. https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rooney_ Rule 9

who report the same.” A workforce of job-hoppers can have a big impact on the bottom line. As HR expert Josh Bersin writes in this post, “The total cost of losing an employee can range from tens of thousands of dollars to 1.5 to 2 times an annual salary.” Studies have also found that diverse teams are more innovative, which is critical in an era when competitive threats loom large. Hiring people “who do not look, talk, or think like you, can allow you to dodge the costly pitfalls of conformity, which discourages innovative thinking,” according to a Harvard Business Review7 post.

What can you as an individual do?

In 2014, I retired from over 40 years of active thought leadership roles related to introducing workplace initiatives and emerging technologies. In June 2016, I joined Visier, a workforce intelligence solution provider that hired me at the age of 71. After 16 years of managing the Sierra-Cedar HR Systems Survey and managing data on over 20,000 organizations covering millions of workers each year, I now work closely with Visier customers to support them in their HR transformation to a data-driven culture. I continue to do research, although now more anthropological in nature than survey work. As a 73-year-old tech sector employee, I am a rare breed. And, even though I am past the average age of retirement, I love my work and am particularly sensitive to the idea that someone could lose the opportunity to work simply because of her or his age. I have a lot of boomer and even older friends who continue to work and want to. After all, we are living longer, we’re healthier, we’re fully engaged, and we’re maintaining our passion in our work lives. I think that passion is critical for older workers to maintain. So, a bit of advice to those over 40: It is sometimes awkward working with younger workers. Listen with empathy and contribute in whatever way you know possible, even when it’s not easy. Do not lose confidence in yourselves. Serve and learn, intern and mentor, and even put yourself in the role of student while also acting as a sage. That is what the Tech Sage Age is about.8

What Businesses Can Do?

There are some important activities you can do to root out the risk of ageism in your workforce and ensure that you acquire, develop, and retain the best and brightest talent available, regardless of age:

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• Review your workforce data to understand the current state of age equity within your organization to find any signs of potential bias in hiring, promotions, salary levels, turnover and performance ratings. If you work in people analytics, you can play a role in warning of incipient ageism in your organization and support your own organization to outperform your competition. You can uncover and root out intentional and unintentional bias in your hiring practices that might be limiting the Gen X and older workers or potential hires. • Set objectives and develop a plan with manageable steps (and a way to monitor your progress) that helps your organization achieve an inclusive work environment. • Keep in mind that, as with ethnic and gender equity, age equity is a cultural issue – if pockets of ageism exist within your organization, you will need to devise plans to address them not only via better HR practice and policy rollouts, but through culture change. • Consider implementing a version of the Rooney Rule9 for age, specifically for teams or roles where the workforce is less diverse in age: for every position you have open to fill, consider one or more older candidates (or candidates that will help create a more diverse team, in general). • Develop hiring practices that reduce the potential for intentional or unintentional bias in the screening out of older applicants. • Develop hiring practices that specifically do not screen out candidates based on the length of their unemployment – while this report focused on systemic ageism, many individual stories suggest older unemployed workers struggle to get hired, and studies indicate recruiters screen out candidates that have been unemployed for longer periods of time.

The Bottom Line – Passion and People Analytics Successfully Combat Ageism.

For individuals, it’s about maintaining passion in your activities. If you don’t love your job, perhaps you should consider another. But if you do, show it, and, if I’m any indication, you can continue to work for as long as you want. For organizations, if you have not already deployed people analytics, the capabilities will help you identify if ageism exists today, or will in the future. And, you can assess where in your hiring, developing, and retention of your talent you need to improve to maintain your competitive advantages into the future.

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Mike DiClaudio, Chip Jackson, and Todd McAllister, KPMG

Moving Beyond Transactions – Moving to Strategic HRIS “Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory; tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” —Sun Tzu The last decade has shown evolving workforce demographics, increased competition for top candidates, and employees’ changing expectations of work/life balance. There remains tremendous opportunity for organizations to transform their current human capital management processes and technologies beyond increasing operational efficiency. With a clear strategy and path to enhancing the role and value of HR, the result can be a more efficient and agile organization where skills are maximized and employees are more engaged. A recent HR Transformation Survey by KPMG International shows that most HR functions are providing only moderate value when it comes to enhancing HR operations and providing analytics for talent or enabling evidence-based HR, both trademarks of business needs beyond baseline operational efficiency.

The transformational trends are creating a new appreciation for technology as organizations embrace a mobile workforce. Employees are more engaged with social media and find fewer barriers between work and personal life. However, if mired in an HR model where career development is based on roles and responsibilities, organizations will find it challenging to attract and retain the talent they need to thrive in the face of disruption. While keeping pace with the changing expectations of a mobile workforce, organizations must bring IT into the conversation to understand how new technologies can enable even greater capabilities for HR. Technology application providers have been enhancing the capabilities for HR by embracing mobile-cloud-based-reporting/analyticsbased applications. With software, infrastructure, and platform-as-a-service, they offer new levels of accessibility, flexibility, and consistency with the tangible benefit of better cost containment and improved utilization of resources.

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Charting the Course

But the road to HR transformation is not always smooth. Failed, sub-optimized, or canceled engagements litter the path of those that lacked the strategy for effective implementation. Our research has uncovered the challenges that organizations face that could hinder their chances of success.

Conversely, there are several commonalities among those that have completed successful HR transformations.

Source: KPMG 2017 HR Transformation Survey

While there may be an element of truth to each comment, most troubled projects are in jeopardy before the product selection is completed and the teams are engaged to deploy the solution. When an organization seeks a transformative solution, there is often the backwards approach that adoption of a new technology will drive the strategy of HR transformation.

Everything Starts with Strategy

A successful strategy creates a self-sustaining decision engine that aligns a set of guiding principles with a defined set of objectives. When organizations start down the path of HR

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transformation, it is imperative that the process begins with a strategy that can be directly tied to those objectives. Defining a strategy is composed of five vital steps. If not completed, much like a chain with a missing link, the strategy is incomplete and falls back to only a tactical or transactional delivery. Each strategic step feeds directly into the project charter, objective metrics for project success and, ultimately, the project and staffing plan. The first step is to identify the opportunities for the initiative. When looking at broader goals of cost containment, automation, integration, and process improvement, there may be many opportunities for setting the strategic framework for the project. Engagement across the organization through surveys, interviews, and workshops can result in a richer set of opportunities and a more complete set of requirements. As these requirements are tied to the business, they can be prioritized by business value, organizational impact, and sustainability. The next step defines the scope based on the opportunities and priorities. When the opportunities are assessed in detail, the benefits become clear and can be documented as scope. It is critical that these detailed assessments of the opportunities include a clear description of the challenge, its root cause and effect, and a desired outcome from resolution. The role of a project sponsor should not be overlooked and is critical to this process. Project sponsors provide a communication channel to the organization but also can validate that the objective is achievable. Working as a change agent, the project sponsor can demonstrate, educate, and encourage the organization on why this should be a critical objective. The final and most difficult step is to translate this set of prioritized objectives into a mission statement and a commitment from the organization. Sponsors and key leaders must be aligned and committed to the effort and inspire the commitment from other key stakeholders. This commitment includes recognition that sufficient resources must be allocated and ongoing engagement for the inevitable tough decisions that will arise. With agreement on a clear strategy, the goals, and the objectives, the organization can then take the steps to develop a project

charter, project plan, and staffing plan. With the necessary plans in place, the project management office (PMO) can provide a framework for governance and metrics for progress established. The final element is accountability. Once the governance model is operationalized, milestones can be assigned to leaders. These leaders must own the milestone and use metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) to track to success.

Validating the Strategy

As organizations build their project charter and associated deployment plans, there is usually a significant effort in building the traditional balanced scorecard that incorporates financial and operational measures that highlight the conflict between decisions and outcomes. This approach generally does not drive the HR transformation to strategic value. Most balanced scorecards focus on financial and administrative efficiency measures, which do not have linkage to the strategic HR objectives. As a result, there is a critical need to re-examine the role of analytics in the strategic realignment of HR. While the use of common metrics such as turnover rates, utilization, and number of days that job requisitions are open is still a valuable tool for line management, they do not position HR as a strategic resource to the business. With the alignment of HR to the organization’s strategic objectives comes a new set of metrics. These metrics must extend from financial/cost containment and compliance to include unique measures of employee rewards, development, and participation in reaching the wider organizational goals. These metrics often define how an intangible metric has financial impact, such as employee or customer satisfaction on revenue. When the goals of the company are aligned with employee behaviors, there is a significant increase in the potential for successful HR transformation. The transformation to an HR organization with a strategic vision is driven by a collaborative process that requires input and engagement at every level from the line level of the organization all the way to executive leadership. Finally, it must have a sense of common purpose in

reaching the strategic goals of the organization but also acceptance of accountability in reaching the goals.

Building a Foundation for Future Success

For many organizations that are tied to doing things the way they have always been done, radical changes in process and technology without a supporting strategy can create uncertainty. Change management plays a key role in this process. The success of the initiative will depend on the organization’s understanding, engagement, and adoption of this transformation. While it is easy to measure a financial initiative’s results, the less tangible outcomes of some HR initiatives will require leaders from all levels of the organization to understand the goals and their role in accomplishing a strategic mission. There is truth in the statement that “you manage what is measured.” In any organizational transformation process, trusted data and the analysis to act upon it is essential to the validation of the strategy and investment into the transformation. The net result is empowering the organization with key information to attract new talent, maximize existing talent, and redeploy or re-skill employees to meet new business opportunities. As HR adapts to the demands of the evolving employment market, the shift from a transactional focus to strategic focus is essential. Technology is an important enabler in providing the access and insight to guide leadership at all levels to the broader impact of transactions in accomplishing the strategic goals and objectives balanced with protecting the organization’s core values, vision, and trust.

About the Authors

Mike DiClaudio is a principal in KPMG’s Advisory Services practice with more than 15 years of business consulting experience. He has a specific background across the full HR value chain, including HR strategy development, organizational design, technology selection, and implementation, and overall HR transformation. He can be reached at

mdiclaudio@kpmg.com

Chip Jackson is a managing director in KPMG’s Healthcare Advisory practice. His background is focused on helping clients develop organizational strategies and supporting the deployment, integration and optimization of essential back office systems including revenue cycle, decision support, budgeting and planning, enterprise resource planning solutions (ERP), and data and analytics solutions. He can be reached at

lawrencejackson@kpmg.com Todd McAllister is a KPMG principal and leader of Human Capital Management technology in KPMG’s Enterprise Solutions practice. With more than 25 years in business consulting, he helps clients drive business transformation across their HCM operations through the implementation of technology solutions. With a focus on HCM strategy, roadmap development, and implementation, Todd has led clients through successful implementations and transformational upgrades spanning core HCM, talent management, and analytics solutions. He can be reached at tamcallister@kpmg.com

www.ihrim.org • Workforce Solutions Review • January-March 2018

January-March 2018 Buyers Guide The 2018 Annual Buyers Guide will serve as a valuable reference tool. For your convenience, the guide has two sections: a Categorical Listing and an Alphabetical listing. In the Categorical Listing, companies are listed under the product and service categories of their choice. For information on a specific company and its products and/or service, please refer to the Alphabetical Company Listing. While a listing in this guide does not constitute an endorsement by IHRIM, it does indicate that these companies are interested in serving the needs of HRIS professionals. We hope this Buyer’s Guide will assist you in your 2018 purchasing decisions.

Product Categories

Core HRMS

Optimum Solutions StarGarden Corporation

Business Intelligence

Analytics Enterprise Information Resources Inc.

Compensation Management

Deferred Compensation Decusoft Executive Compensation Decusoft Incentive Compensation Decusoft Enterprise Information Resources Inc.

Paid Advertising

Employment Systems & Services

e-Recruiting/Application Tracking Optimum Solutions

HR Service Delivery

Cloud Computing Enterprise Information Resources Inc. Optimum Solutions Learning Management Optimum Solutions Onboarding Optimum Solutions On-Premise CRG emPerform Saas CRG emPerform Self Service Optimum Solutions

January-March 2018 • Workforce Solutions Review • www.ihrim.org

Payroll Software

Optimum Solutions

Performance Management

Enterprise Information Resources Inc. CRG emPerform

Rewards/Recognition

CrystalPlus.com

Self Service

Employee Self-Service (ESS)/Manager SelfService (MSS) Optimum Solutions

Time & Attendance Systems

Optimum Solutions

January-March 2018 Buyers Guide

Alphabetical Company Listing* *Systems and applications referred to in this section are trademarked, registered, or in progress. These names should not be used generically.

CrystalPlus.com

18475 E. Valley Blvd. City of Industry, CA 91744 Michelle Smith 888-779-8803 888-669-0838 service@crystalplus.com www.crystalplus.com CrystalPlus.com is a leading supplier / manufacturer of crystal awards and corporate gifts. We offer free engraving and no setup charges on all of our crystal awards and gift products. We have in house professional graphic designers, engravers and customer service specialists to serve our customers making ordering crystal awards and gifts easier than ever. At Factory direct prices and with huge inventory selection at our California warehouse, you can’t find any better prices and faster turnaround for the same premium quality of custom engraved corporate awards, sports trophy and personalized gifts.

Decusoft

70 Hilltop Rd. Suite 1003 Ramsey, NJ 07446 Michele Weiss 201-258-3395 201-785-0774 Michele.weiss@decusoft.com www.decusoft.com COMPOSE is a specialized compensation management software solution designed to make compensation processes more efficient. Decusoft’s award winning implementation methodology reduces risk, increases security, and provides “what if” modeling scenarios that help you make informed decisions and gain a competitive advantage in your marketplace. See our ad on the Inside Front Cover.

Enterprise Information Resources Inc. CRG emPerform

6 Antares Dr. Phase 1 Suite 200 Ottawa, ON K2E 8A9 877.711.0367 613.232.4295 info@employee-performance.com www.employee-performance.com Easy, affordable & all-inclusive employee performance management. With 100% configurability and easy integration with existing HR systems, emPerform offers award-winning online appraisals, 360° reviews, surveys, succession planning, compensation management, and reporting. Engage employees and managers in ongoing goal tracking, performance development, and feedback & coaching, all from one place for one low price. Contact us to get started. See our ad on the Back Cover.

Optimum Solutions

210 25th Avenue North, Suite 700 Nashville, TN 37203 Scott Henderson 615-329-2313 615-329-4448 sales@optimumhris.com www.optimumhris.com Optimum Solutions provides Payroll, HR, and Time & Attendance software delivered on-premise or in the cloud (OptiCloud®). All applications are developed and supported internally, giving your company the individual attention it deserves while providing you with a complete, one database HRIS solution. Optimum Payroll clients currently process over 12 million paychecks annually.

StarGarden Corporation

271 Waverley Oaks Rd. Suite 207 Waltham, MA 02452 Gin O’Leary 855-589-9451 781-790-8068 info@eir-inc.com www.eir-inc.com EIR Compensation Analytics automates the delivery of compensation reports by integrating and summarizing data from multiple sources while ensuring accuracy and role-based data security. The resulting reports provide users with access to timely, accurate, actionable data to support budget decisions while reducing the time spent generating compensation analytics. See our ad on the Inside Back Cover.

300-3665 Kingsway Vancouver, BC V5R5W2 Marnie Larson 800-809-2880 info@stargarden.com www.stargarden.com Let StarGarden’s 30+ years of experience help manage your most important resource. Get the right resource on task at the right time with StarGarden’s advanced HCM, Payroll, and Workflow functionality. Visit us at www.stargarden.com to learn more.

www.ihrim.org • Workforce Solutions Review • January-March 2018

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Nicole Treviño, Matrix Management Institute

How to Manage the Modern, Multi-Dimensional Organization The demands on organizations to operate more efficiently and effectively are constantly increasing. Leaders in every industry face challenges on multiple fronts. Many organizations are examining how to support and adapt to an increasingly multi-generational workforce while staying competitive in attracting top talent. Organizations are identifying ways to manage both human and tangible resources as effectively as possible. Many are also operating in an increasingly complex, global market and trying to stay ahead of their competitors. Often, functional areas within an organization – such as Human Resources, Marketing, Operations and Product Development – tackle these issues separately, improving conditions in their own departments. However, this approach creates frustration with colleagues and processes in other departments that inhibit their streamlined operations. Independent optimization also reinforces competition over resources rather than promoting collaboration across the whole organization. Few leaders have begun looking at their organizations cross-functionally to optimize the organization as a whole, rather than optimizing functional areas. By not analyzing operations cross-functionally, organizations are missing critical opportunities to make changes that can address many of their challenges at once. While it seems simple enough to think about an organization holistically, why aren’t more leaders and businesses doing it? The answer dates back to the Industrial Age.

Where the Problem Started

Many of the organizational designs currently in place were developed to optimize manufacturing and machinery operations at a time when doing business was much simpler,

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before the globalized economy and technology paved the way for virtual teams working across the world, expanded product and service portfolios, and created more complex projects with numerous interdependencies. Organizations of the past were concerned with how to execute repeatable processes as efficiently as possible, often using authority and control of staff to do so. During the industrial era, the roles that employees played in the success of an organization were much less about relationships and collaboration across the entire system. In those days, optimizing a single functional area of an organization likely made sense and contributed to greater profits and effectiveness. Over the last few decades, we shifted away from manufacturing products to selling innovation, thought leadership, software, and other products and services that required employees to critically analyze, make decisions based on their own expertise, identify challenges, and adapt their approaches as they worked. Yet, even in the midst of massive shifts in the products and services we produce and the way we work, we didn’t update our management and organizational processes to support these new needs. We are still applying command and control principles to a workforce that needs to operate in multiple dimensions and functional areas of our organizations, with extensive latitude for judgement and self-direction. We also have not updated the way our organizations are structured to allow for more cross-functional collaboration, to align projects with strategic initiatives and to improve processes that will impact efficiency across the organization. Although these conditions have created organizations that are doing great work, many of these companies are still unable to meet many of their strategic goals.

Where We Are Today

In many organizations today, even nonmanagement employees can play critical roles across functions, and work heavily with internal partners throughout the organization. Often, employees are tasked with gaining buy-in, input, and commitment from others they don’t have authority over, which requires a more robust set of collaborative leadership and relationship management skills. Organizations need departments to be proficient at running day-to-day operations, while also managing projects that help them complete their strategic initiatives. However, most organizations are still aligning resources by departments and utilizing vertical management systems that depend on authority and control to get work done. This creates competition between departments and individuals for resources, power, and control. Ultimately, this serves to undermine the strategic goals of organizations, which are most often crossfunctional and require commitment and support from workers at every level of the organization. When departments are the priority, each department may be reaching its goals even as the organization as a whole does not. Instead of looking to outdated operating systems for guidance, companies need to consider their current processes, systems, and needs as well as the critical roles staff at all levels play. Setting priorities at the organizational level, mapping relationships, and optimizing the entire organization are critical processes for increased effectiveness and, ultimately, survival.

Why Restructuring Doesn’t Work

When leaders think about systemic solutions to solving their challenges, they often default to restructuring the organization. After all, how much more systemic can you get? However, shuffling boxes around on their organizational charts typically results in the same problems, in new configurations. Rearranging the vertical dimensions of an organization – namely, its reporting structures – does not address the underlying issues. In fact, this default solution frequently creates new, unanticipated issues, usually by creating new silos. My colleague, Cathy Cassidy, here at the Matrix Management Institute, has worked with organizations around the world that con-

tinue to battle the same issues after multiple restructuring initiatives. According to Cathy, organizations usually restructure to achieve one or more of the following goals: • Create alignment around a new strategy. • Get people to work across silos. • Achieve greater efficiencies. • Downsize and reduce resources. • Get more done with fewer resources. In working with these organizations, Cathy aims to understand their challenges while helping them see their operations in two dimensions, both vertically and horizontally. “When you restructure using a one-dimensional approach,” she says, “everyone realigns and then creates a new silo.” Our work helps organizations move beyond vertical structure and harness the power of their horizontal dimension, the dimension that transforms inputs into outputs that serve customers. “One of the first things we do when we work with a company is to shine light on their horizontal dimension,” she said. “If leaders can look to other structures, like horizontal steering teams and work teams, they’ll have a much more agile operating system for their business than moving boxes around on the org chart.”

A Tale of Two Dimensions

To illustrate the difference between vertical and horizontal operations, consider this example from my work at another organization. I led a group of technical experts that produced extensive thought leadership – including manuals, curricula, presentations, and articles – to share their knowledge across the U.S. and to create revenue-generating products. These publications and presentations required support from several other departments, including an additional technical team that served as reviewers, our communications and marketing teams, and the knowledge management team. Successful completion of deliverables required my staff to negotiate timelines, monitor progress, and collaborate with multiple departments. Since other teams in the organization needed the same type of support from these departments, we ended up competing for their time and resources. We had no authority over these other teams and little understanding of their overall portfolios and project timelines. You can see the chal-

Setting priorities at the organizational level, mapping relationships, and optimizing the entire organization are critical processes for increased effectiveness and, ultimately, survival.

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Recognizing some of the challenges and identifying how to fix them was a great first step and opened the door for more honest and straightforward communication with the other departments.

lenges of managing this process, can’t you? Like our counterparts at many well-meaning organizations, we tried to overcome our publication challenges by improving our area’s operations. First, we refined our department’s project management plans and timelines. Then, we assigned key roles and responsibilities within our team to better manage our portfolio of publications and projects, and we shifted duties from one person to another. While we did improve our internal efficiency, our progress was short-lived. When our deliverables were ready to hand off, we found that our partners in other departments could not deliver according to our timeline because of competing priorities and deadlines, which delayed our process, despite our best efforts. Next, in an effort to make the other teams more accountable to our project timelines, we shared our concerns with their leaders. Surely, if their managers were involved, we would get the authority we needed to get the job done, right? Nope! After spending nearly a year optimizing our functional area and attempting to increase our authority over other teams, we not only encountered the same issues, but we also experienced more delays after inserting more lines of approval and authority into the process. Because of our narrow focus, we hadn’t considered the process for moving these projects across the organization. We needed to think about the full process of completing these projects across all teams, not simply those parts of the process for which we were accountable. It was critical that we discussed the challenges we were facing to identify where to make improvements to the overall process and how to plan more collaboratively. We also needed to align our priorities and timelines to those of the organization to better communicate how our work served critical organizational goals.

The “Aha” of Horizontal Planning

After taking a few steps back and working with these other teams to plan more effectively, we realized our team needed to become more aligned with other organizational processes and plans to make our work with the other departments easier. We adopted the other department’s processes and tools which illuminated very quickly the full scope

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of work we were handing off to other departments. It was easy to see how we were creating our own bottlenecks by sending too many publications at once. We looked for ways to space several publications out and incorporate the full editing process requirements of the other departments into our own timelines. This allowed us to better develop and negotiate timelines for each publication, set a more reasonable publication deliverable schedule overall by reducing our portfolio, and factor in additional project deliverables to ensure we made handoffs to other departments at times when they were actually available. As a result of better planning, we created a new position to oversee processes for publications and projects. Because this person was also trained in some of the processes and systems used by our partners in other departments, we started to see our publication process in new ways and develop new skills within our own team. We realigned available funding to support the actual time and resources needed by the other teams to work on our projects by reducing our overall publication portfolio and providing more funding for the intensive work required for each publication. Recognizing some of the challenges and identifying how to fix them was a great first step and opened the door for more honest and straightforward communication with the other departments. My team and I had to come to terms with some hard truths – our portfolio was too ambitious, we were treating our projects as if they were the only priority for other teams, and we were engaging in more finger pointing and blame than self-reflection about our own contributions to the challenges we were experiencing. This reflection process and our communication with the other teams helped us identify some easy shifts that would make things run more smoothly. First, we adopted the tools and templates of other teams to make our full portfolio and proposed timelines clearer. Then, we mapped the full process from the first draft of a publication to the final publishing, including handoffs and rounds of edits to better understand our full project cycle from beginning to end. Finally, we didn’t simply send our publication timeline and portfolio to the other teams; we negotiated the dates together, taking into account the timelines of other projects and needs of the

other departments. We also recognized that each member of the cross-functional team had to be accountable for both their individual tasks and the larger team and organizational goals. As a result, we had to have honest conversations about each person’s capacity and timelines, and then allow each person on the team to negotiate what they were being accountable for and when they could complete their part of the project. This openness also supported our processes when timelines or deliverables needed to be adjusted or adapted due to unforeseen delays. This process didn’t require an executive or other authority figure forcing us to work together better; each of us simply committed to the process we developed together and to working toward the same goals, while being honest about what we could do. My team found that creating accountability, even within our own level of the organization, helped us achieve our goals, maintain our timelines, and plan more effectively. We also learned how cross-functional collaboration made our projects more successful. Once we made these commitments and learned how to collaborate, we were able to get several other processes and projects to operate more effectively. After revising our publication process, we repeated the same process with our monitoring and evaluation team to create an evaluation plan that allowed both of our teams to meet the deadlines and deliverables we negotiated collaboratively. It transformed the way we worked with teams throughout the organization and across several of our projects. It was still a work in progress, nevertheless a vast improvement on our old way of doing business.

Where to Start

Making system-wide changes can feel daunting when you are just getting started, especially while in the throes of dysfunction. What solutions should you consider? How will you get people on board? While organizations within the same industry often face common challenges, no two organizations are the same. The best processes and solutions are the ones that best apply to your unique organization. The following steps will help organizations uncover the root causes behind their challenges, as well as effective solutions:

1. Review both horizontal and vertical structures. Start with looking at how your organization works cross-functionally and determine how to improve processes within the horizontal functions. This will help you improve collaboration between departments, break down silos and make the best use of your resources to execute strategy and deliver results. Don’t spend too much time focusing on the vertical dimension of your organization – functional areas and departments. This is not where you want to make changes. Remember, moving boxes around your organizational chart does not make people work together more effectively; better systems, processes, and accountability do. 2. Learn how cross-functional teams work together. Do teams have a model for true collaboration? Map relationships and handoffs of deliverables between teams to improve project outcomes. This exercise will help you identify key points in the process, determine how to support teams in making collaborative decisions and commitments, and allocate resources. Remember, it’s not about who has authority over whom; it’s about building shared understanding, leadership, and commitment for project outcomes. 3. Strengthen accountability systems. The right accountability systems create a culture of success and enable team leaders to lead, whether or not they have authority over others. Because team members have to be accountable for individual commitments, team commitments and organizational priorities, they also have to be able to say “no” when they cannot commit to something due to competing priorities or other demands. Look at the “no’s” you receive as people being serious about accountability and commitments, rather than as unnecessary pushback. If your system doesn’t support both individual and shared accountability, your vertical structure won’t matter; the work won’t get done as effectively or as efficiently as it should.

The Role of Leadership

Ultimately, leaders can do a lot to steer and

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influence their organization’s cross-functional operations without restructuring – doing so starts by taking a broader perspective. “You want to think about the different levels of leadership and what you expect from them,” says Cathy. “Ultimately, you need a senior leadership team that is committed to working together differently. It’s easier for them because they are already cross-functional by nature.” How can you demonstrate your commitment to working differently across departments and functional areas? If you’re not a senior leader, don’t despair. You can still influence and improve the way your crossfunctional teams work. Look for opportunities to engage teams in collaborative decisionmaking. Build accountability into decisions, and be accountable for the commitments you make. Anyone in an organization can work toward building more collaborative systems and processes that help improve the way the organization functions.

About the Author

What Does Success Look Like?

With all that I’ve shared so far, you might be wondering, “What does success look like for my organization, and how can I get started right now?” One of the biggest challenges of organizational transformation is staying patient with the process. It takes time to examine how your organization is working now, to consider how it should operate in the future, and to identify strategies that strengthen your horizontal processes and systems. Before implementing new initiatives, you should also consider what your team needs to learn to adopt the proposed strategies. Learning and skill-building will be required for people to operate differently. There are no shortcuts. By putting in the time, however, you’ll see your organization build internal capacity for achieving big-picture goals and that your teams are working collaboratively toward those goals.

Nicole Treviño is the director of Customer Engagement at the Matrix Management Institute. She joined MMI from the nonprofit sector where she spent her career developing collaborative initiatives, training emerging leaders, and providing capacity building services to government, nonprofit, and education organizations. Previously, she worked at EngenderHealth, an international nonprofit organization, providing capacity building, training, and technical assistance to U.S. based organizations. She founded the Healthy Youth Partnership (HYP) – a multi-organization collaborative effort to equip youth serving professionals with the skills, resources, and network to do their best work. She has also led capacity-building centers for the U.S. federal government. She has a M.A. in Organization Development, a B.S. in Health Promotion, and is a Project Management Development Professional (PMD Pro – an internationally recognized project management certification for nonprofit professionals) and a Certified Health Education Specialist (CHES). She uses her multidisciplinary education to work with a variety of organizations across cultures and countries. She can be reached at ntrevino@matrixmanagementinstitute.com.

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William E. McClane, McClane Consulting Group

Strategically Create the Employee Experience: Redefining the HR Operating Model Introduction

Human Resources has reached the point of diminishing returns in its focus on administrative efficiency. By contrast, the need for HR as a business-critical partner to strategically define the employee experience has never been more urgent. The same actions that reduced HR costs will not address these business needs. Instead, the HR operating model – how HR delivers value – must be changed. It’s time to design HR to be the business partner with the skills, organization, and partnerships to deliver innovative employee experience solutions. The business challenge: strategically create the employee experience. Many HR organizations incorporate centers of excellence (COEs), shared service centers (SSCs), and HR business partners (HRBPs) to organize and deliver HR services. In these operating models, COEs consolidate HR expertise, SSCs emphasize transactional performance, and HRBPs act as HR consultants to the business. Significant gains have been achieved following this model, making HR leaner, less administrative, and more strategic than ever before. Human Resources back office functions are transitioning to cloud technology, employees are practicing self-service, service centers support non-routine employee requests, and robust online and mobile applications provide information once provided by HR generalists. While there are many remaining opportunities, the biggest gains in these areas have already been harvested by leading companies. By contrast, the need for HR as a businesscritical partner to strategically define the employee experience has never been more urgent. The employee experience is the constellation of interactions that enterprise members have with

leadership, colleagues, customers, systems/ processes, and the physical work environment. The way that employees experience their work communicates value, motivation and expectations. This experience becomes “strategic” when it enables high performance. Some examples of issues facing business leaders illustrate the challenges that HR is being called to support. For example, automation and artificial intelligence (AI) are eliminating or substantially changing jobs, dramatically changing workplace dynamics. Employee decisions at all levels are increasingly visible to customers and other stakeholders, challenging traditional approaches to accountability and supervision. Employee engagement and networking have become more multifaceted and dynamic, requiring support of a rapidly changing social media landscape. Essential technical and interpersonal competencies are changing rapidly, demanding changes in recruitment and development. Finally, acquisitions, outsourcing, and divestitures are recreating enterprises, requiring new structures and ways of working. The same actions that reduced HR costs will not address these business needs. Instead, the HR operating model – how HR delivers value – must be changed. It’s time for a new HR.

Redefining the HR Operating Model

An operating model describes how stakeholders are engaged, where decisions are made, the work that is done, and the capabilities needed to perform the work. Focusing the HR operating model to deliver value around the employee experience is not simply adding words to the traditional HR model – it requires redefining the way HR works in collaboration with the business in five areas. www.ihrim.org • Workforce Solutions Review • January-March 2018

Human Resources must be prepared to get itself out of the middle of data provision, partnering with IT and other technology partners to enable data access and use by managers and employees.

The first, and key step, is to recognize HR as the chief strategist of the employee experience. The employee experience at most companies is highly fragmented, with many organizations owning parts and none focused on the whole. Human Resources must be prepared to lead this space. To do this, HR competencies must include traditional areas – for example, compensation, talent management, and performance management, as well as new ones, such as organization development, change management, employee engagement, and workspace design. In addition, HR must have the capabilities to lead projects, including scope, resources, activities and risk management, which recast the employee experience. Second, prepare HR to be the conduit for resources and innovation by organizing HR as the center of a capability ecosystem. Traditionally, HR competencies have been defined within COEs. To lead the definition of the employee experience, HR must be built as an ecosystem of capabilities, many of which are within HR, are provided by external partners, and still others for which resources must be discovered. Defining and deploying this dynamic ecosystem of capabilities and providers will be the work of HR rather than staffing static functions. As a result, HR must be capable of initiating market research and vendor contracting, particularly with speciality firms, e.g., analytics, employee engagement, portal design. To facilitate access to these capabilities, HR must be able to maintain forums for collaboration and propagation of innovative practices. To cement the HR-business relationship, the third area requires HR to define governance to both drive employee experience capabilities and integrate them into the enterprise strategy. Governance (e.g., advisory committees) provides a structured means to engage stakeholders, create cross-organizational alignment, and drive strategic initiatives. In the HR operating model, active governance is critical. It must define the scope of employee experience capabilities, support engagement of external organizations, and develop/communicate strategy. The HR function governance must include HR leadership, business leaders, as well as key technology and external partners. In a parallel fashion, business unit governance must include HRBPs to incorporate employee experience as an integral part of operational strategy and execution.

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Next, as part of driving HR content, HR must develop the roles, processes, and skills to deliver workforce insights. Historically, the difficulty of measuring and systematically impacting the employee experience has hindered action. No more. At base, HR is expected to bring data to guide management decisions, and to be able to utilize “what if” scenarios to assess the implications of both HR and non-HR policy and practice decisions. Beyond simply consuming data, however, HR must lead the development of an integrated HR data platform to solve business problems, identifying needed data and helping to execute data governance. This includes traditional HR data (employee sentiment, talent retention, and planning) data to manage implications of change (automation, AI, revised business partnerships), as well as non-HR data that provide workforce insights, e.g., marketing. Human Resources must be prepared to get itself out of the middle of data provision, partnering with IT and other technology partners to enable data access and use by managers and employees. Finally, bring the model together by refocusing the mission of centers of excellence, shared service centers, and HR business partners. Whereas HR has traditionally consolidated expertise in separate functional COEs, the “top” of the HR operating model must now focus competencies and roles to guide the capability ecosystem, support HR and business governance, define the integrated HR data platform, and collaborate with IT and external vendors to define social and mobile solutions. Working laterally, COEs engage across enterprise leadership to define and execute enterprise-wide strategy. Working vertically, COEs support communities of practice for expertise sharing and solution building. Similarly, whereas SSCs have traditionally emphasized transactional performance, these organizations must be focused on data and solution delivery in the new operating model. Shared service centers must be positioned to collect and analyze traditional HR transaction data, support analysis to understand implications of change (AI), and incorporate non-HR data as part of analysis. Further, this group must be prepared to support social and mobile solutions to improve data and analytics access for both employees and managers. Whereas the current model stresses HRBPs as consultants to the business for HR ser-

vices, these critical roles must be refocused on envisioning and enacting the employee experience of the future. Human Resources business partners must lead business-enabling change that leverages the competencies and solutions developed by COEs, as well as the solution delivery and analysis executed by SSCs.

Implementing the Operating Model Changes

The five areas outlined above represent significant change to HR organizations focused on driving efficiency and lowering the cost of traditional services. Requisite skills may not be present, structures may not support new services, and the business may not interpret its issues as employee engagement problems. For HR to deliver this new value, several enabling actions are necessary. First, build the operating model with the people who will execute it. The new HR operating model will be best constructed by a joint team of HR and business professionals. Establish design criteria to state the value and operations of the HR organization and use those criteria to resolve disagreements early. Practice excellent stakeholder engagement in selecting team members, soliciting their input, and applying the results. Finally, use interactive, agile practices to maintain high contribution and momentum. Next, ensure that change includes both HR and the business. Many parts of the organization impact the employee experience. For HR to lead the strategic definition and enactment of employee experience, it must demonstrate competence not possessed by any other part of the business. Often, this is a two-step process of negotiating the leadership role, while simultaneously developing the requisite competencies.

Role alignment between HR and the business are essential to build understanding of capacities, focus on the most impactful opportunities, and to manage expectations. Finally, change HR leadership first and then lead the change in the rest of the organization. Many “traditional” HR jobs will go away when transitioning to the new organization; and the new jobs that are introduced will require different skills. In place of the high-touch generalist, HR will now include more functional experts, more networkers and collaborators, more technology-enabled contact points, and more strategic thinkers. Human Resources must simultaneously manage the onboarding of new talent from multiple business roles, as well as the effective transition of current people.

About the Author

Dr. McClane is the president of McClane Consulting Group. He is a leader in the design and implementation of new operating models and organization structures, bringing both intellectual capital and practical Call to Action experience from over 30 major In summary, the need for HR as a business engagements, including HR partner to strategically guide the employee mergers and top-to-bottom experience has never been greater. The HR global HR restructuring. Bill is operating model must change if HR is to meet an industrial/organizational psythis need. Define HR COEs around a new set of chologist, Six Sigma Black Belt capabilities that includes an ecosystem of pro- (American Society for Quality), and certified Project Manageviders well-beyond its functional boundaries. ment Professional. He can be Execute governance so COEs can drive needed reached at capabilities and HRBPs can integrate them william.e.mcclane@gmail.com.

into strategy execution. Ensure that SSCs can leverage an integrated data platform to solve business problems and support social and mobile solutions. Finally, position HRBPs to lead business-enabling change, leverage COE-led capabilities and SSC solution delivery. Human Resources leadership must change first, but this is not an HR change – it is an HR and business change, one of co-defining the operating model to deliver innovative employee experience solutions.

Recommendations for Further Reading

Arthur Mazor, Erika Volini, Michael Stephan, Aaron Alburey, Mark Bowden. The High-impact HR Operating Model, Deloitte, July 2014. Available at: https:// www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/global/Documents/HumanCapital/gx-hc-high-impact-hr-pov.pdf Francisco Puertas, Himanshu Tambe. A New Blueprint for HR, Accenture Strategy, 2016. Available at: https://www.accenture.com/t20160804T021527Z__w__/ us-en/_acnmedia/Accenture/Conversion-Assets/DotCom/Documents/Global/PDF/Dualpub_14/Accenture-New-Blueprint-HR.pdf#zoom=50 file:///C:/Users/willi/ Downloads/changing-operating-models_tcm18-10976.pdf Frank Bafaro, Diana Ellsworth, and Neel Gandhi, “The CEO’s Guide to Competing through HR,” McKinsey Quarterly, July 2017. Available at: https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/the-ceos-guide-to-competing-through-hr Jacob Morgan, “3 things to Know about Employee Experience,” HR magazine, March 8 2017. Available at: https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/news/hr-magazine/0317/pages/3-things-to-know-about-employee-experience-.aspx Michael L. Zeoli, Kim Billeter, Stuart Steele, Danny Ferron, Joe Fucello, Billy Soto Garayzar, “The EY Business-led People Operating Model,” EY, September 2017. Available at: http://www.ey.com/Publication/vwLUAssets/ey-business-led-model/$FILE/ey-business-led-model.pdf www.ihrim.org • Workforce Solutions Review • January-March 2018

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Tom Friedrich and Trisha Rajshekhar, Aon Hewitt

The Evolving Role of HR Business Partners Human Resources has come a long way from its role as a depository for administrative and legal requirements and a functional cost center, thanks to the redesign of the HR function into three pillars: centers of expertise (COEs), shared services (to manage HR operations), and HR business partners (HRBPs). In the 1990s, the “war for talent” began and the rise of international mobility and technology created an opportunity for the function to grab a seat at the C-suite table, help steer the business, and become a genuine value-added partner. Human resources business partners, with their ability to effectively engage with the business, are absolutely essential for the successful transformation of HR. As shared in Aon Hewitt’s Reimagining HR for 2025 white paper, the HR operating model requires various components of the HR infrastructure to work together to support the needs of the business. The new model relies on COEs that can lead strategic program design, HR operations that efficiently execute processes, and HRBPs who address workforce managementrelated business needs. While many organizations have made strides in implementing the HRBP role, most have struggled to deliver on the promise this role brings. In order for HRBPs to be successful, they must be provided with capacity and the right capabilities to converse with the business, understand their specific needs, and develop proactive solutions that drive business outcomes.

Creating Capacity

Organizations have largely focused on HR shared services for capacity creation within the HRBP role. While this has proved successful in reducing the transactional and customer service workload for many HRBPs, there remains additional opportunity to shift more work to the service centers. As outlined in Aon Hewitt’s Driving a Customer-Centric Employee Experience Through HR Shared Services

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white paper, the scope of services for service centers is gradually increasing to include more complex processes such as onboarding, performance management administration, and employee relations. Significant components of these processes have often remained with the HRBP. Shifting this work to a centralized team will further free up capacity for HRBPs to focus on more strategic tasks. The next frontier in creating HRBP capacity involves rethinking the partnership between the COEs and HRBPs. As described in Aon Hewitt’s Rethinking HR Transformation white paper, creating a more flexible staffing model for enterprise COE resources can help reduce the delivery responsibilities that still reside with the HRBP. For example, leading organizations are creating COE resources that operate as internal consultants and are available to respond to specific business unit (BU) needs on a project basis. These internal consultants are directly responsible for project delivery and providing results for the BU. Not only does this create capacity for HRBPs, but it also allows for a more flexible expertise model that is more agile, more nimble and, in many ways, more practical where resources are in “close proximity” to the business.

Capability

As part of their HR transformations, most organizations defined competency models for the HRBP role, which we believe was a critical first step to ensuring the success of this role. However, many organizations tried to “boil the ocean” and focused on developing too many HRBP competencies, or did so in a vacuum, without an understanding of what the business actually needed. Now is the time for HR organizations to take a step back and seek input from businesses on their expectations of this role. While some business leaders may find it difficult to articulate what they expect from an HRBP, especially if they are not accustomed to working with HR in a strategic manner, sharing examples of what

good business partnering looks like can help them prioritize what they need to achieve their business goals. This input needs to then be validated to ensure it is aligned with the desired HR operating model and the role of the HRBP. Examples of focus areas under the HRBP model include:

HRBPs can use with business leaders to proactively develop workforce plans; and, • I ncorporating action learning teams and knowledge sharing to allow participants to practice the skills they have learned and work with others who are going through the same experience.

What Next?

While the HRBP role is the most anticipated for both HR and the business, we also often see the full implementation of the role occurring after HR shared services and the COEs. As a result, the investment dollars are often limited, which, in turn, impacts the ability to develop and deploy training required to enable this role to be successful. While many have defined a competency model, many organizations have struggled to ensure that their HRBPs have the skills and capabilities required to be successful in the role. Establishing a training curriculum that addresses these needs is critical to successful execution. A successful HRBP training curriculum includes:

Organizations that have successfully created capacity and built strategic capabilities are now beginning to evolve the role of HRBPs to better align with business demands. We see HRBPs serving as internal business performance consultants by providing innovative and relevant people interventions to address challenging business problems and drive business performance. This differs from yesterday’s HRBPs, who often focused on adapting enterprise programs to BU requirements. Business Performance Consulting focuses on understanding critical business issues and the corresponding people implications, ultimately bringing relevant and integrated solutions that drive the desired business outcomes. Below are some key attributes essential to successful Business Performance Consulting:

About the Authors

Tom Friedrich, associate partner, partners with clients to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of their HR functions. His core expertise is in HR transformation, human capital advisory, organization design, process re-engineering, vendor selection, and project governance and management. He can be reached at tom.friedrich@aonhewitt.com. Consultant Trisha Rajshekar consults with clients on all aspects of HR transformation and delivery including, HR assessments, organizational design, talent management, process mapping, HR technology, and workforce analytics solutions. She can be reached at trisha. rajshekar@aonhewitt.com.

• A variety of different developmental opportunities including classroom training, knowledge sharing, mentoring, and action learning; • Real data, real business examples, and lots of practice to ensure participants are learning and practicing situations that will resonate within the organization, e.g., using actual turnover, engagement, exit interview, and compensation data as input to proactively develop a retention strategy; • Equipping participants with the tools they need to be successful in their new role, e.g., if one of the focus areas is workforce planning, build the training module around a workforce planning model that

For most HR organizations, the true value of the HRBP is not recognized due to an inability to successfully change the work. In order for HRBPs to change the focus of their work, HR must alleviate the capacity and capability constraints we have outlined in this article. Only then will we realize the full potential of the HRBP and have them take on the mantle of business performance consultant.

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Dr. Anna A. Tavis, New York University

HR and Marketing: Shaping the New World of Work Work is not just a paycheck; it’s part of who we intrinsically are. According to Gallup polls collected in the past 20 years, more than half of working Americans (55 percent) and the majority of those with college degrees (70 percent) reported deriving a strong sense of personal identity from their jobs. Added to our search for identity at work is the critical need to discover the personal purpose.

New purpose of work

In his book, Purpose Economy: How Your Desire for Impact, Personal Growth and Community Is Changing the World,1 Aaron Hurst, a “purpose economist” and the co-founder of the purpose building consultancy, Imperative, has announced the coming of the new economic era when the role of purpose at work becomes central to any successful long-term performance. Purpose is critical to our overall sense of well-being.2

As marketing experience is becoming What Did HR Miss? Ironically, HR might have been last to grasp the generally realization that it is good business to make work more purposeful, engaging employees at a personal level, better and ensuring the workplace experience is positive. understood Historically, compliance was HR’s focus and most recently, for a couple of decades, HR was preoccuand broadly pied with “getting a seat at the table,” speaking the shared, it is business language and appearing “business like” by pursuing the ever elusive return on investment (ROI). gradually To make the “business case,” HR was borrowing the making its language of finance and investment, brushing aside about “soft issues” such as values and way into day- conversations trust. Overlooked were the assets that the HR function owned – its connection to the human side of the to-day HR. organization. Neglected was the unique expertise HR had evolved through the years by working on the human side of the organization. An explosive Harvard Business Review cover story from June/July 2015 announced that: “It is time to blow up HR and start again.” The time for that change is now and HR is catching up fast, closing the gap between what marketing knows and what HR does.

What did Marketing get right?

Marketing understood years before HR that figuring out a customer’s/consumer’s “human” motivations is good business. Why is it, then, that we are January-March 2018 • Workforce Solutions Review • www.ihrim.org

used to holding customers and employees to a different standard? With the gap in understanding external and internal customers now closing, it is time for HR to catch up with their agile marketing colleagues. If all HR professionals reimagined their roles with that profound insight of purpose at work in mind and learned how to build it into everything HR does, we would be guiding senior managers to become better custodians of people’s working lives. We would also help redesign company cultures to be purposeful and highly inclusive. Thriving at work is what we would all be wishing for ourselves and for all of our employees. It turns out that it is really good business. Steve Job’s leadership taught Product Marketing a few important lessons. One of those “aha” discoveries was that detailing out product features when trying to gain new customers had serious limitations. Making someone feel smarter and more successful as a result of buying your product/service turned consumer experience into something much more personally elevating. “People don’t buy products. They buy better versions of themselves.” This adage, penned by UserOnboard.com creator and user experience guru Samuel Hulick, has become the new product marketing mantra. Applied to the workplace, this insight becomes prophetic and changes everything HR does. What if HR listened to the new rules of behavioral economics and embraced the fact that: “People do not join companies, they seek to become better versions of themselves.” Would we then re-write HR manuals with employees as learners and purpose seekers in mind? Would we transform our organizations to become places where people thrive? How will talent management change if its ultimate goal will not be the select pool of high potentials but every single employee seeking their purpose and their better selves? If the people function borrowed a page from the marketing playbook, what would change? As marketing experience is becoming generally better understood and broadly shared, it is gradually making its way into day-to-day HR. Human Resources is uniquely positioned to connect the organizational dots and tell a persuasive story that gives employees

figuratively a place “to hang their hats.” Human Resources can show every working person their potential for contribution, career opportunities, and help them focus on critical performance areas where they could make a difference. The people would feel connected to the company’s larger purpose, would be less unhinged when things need to change around them, and most importantly, understand “what’s in it for them.” Only then would they give the organization their true 100 percent effort. The new employment formula calls for the following new equation: Regular Employees + Feedback and Development = Empowered, Motivated, and Better-Skilled Employees (high performing employees and teams with new powers). This new employment formula is rooted in the shift in focus to the new employee experience. Needless to say, marketing has gone there first. Engagement marketing, sometimes called experiential marketing, aims at engaging consumers directly with the brands, and invites and encourages them to participate directly in the evolution of a brand or a brand experience. Rather than treating consumers as passive targets of messages, engagement marketing believes that consumers should be actively involved in the production and co-creation of marketing stories, developing a close relationship with the brand. Shouldn’t the next generation of companies be similarly focused on their employment experience and invite employees to contribute and connect with the company’s story and internalize employee’s unique contribution to the collective experience of company culture above all else? At Horizon Media, “Business is Personal.” One of the exemplar companies that successfully blends HR and Marketing to deliver superior company culture is Horizon Media, New York City’s largest private media services firm. At Horizon Media, “business is personal” and they mean it. Eileen Benwitt, EVP of Talent at Horizon Media, tells the company’s HR story in the special fall issue of People+Strategy Journal (v. 4, 2017). Even though tapping into employees’ personal brands seemed obvious to the media agency professionals, it remained initially an underutilized resource for HR. Most recently, a strong collaboration between Horizon’s world-class marketing and innovative HR teams was forged to lead the creation of the company’s singular employment identity. This is how Horizon HR and marketing

partnered to create the role of director of Talent Branding. The director of Talent Branding role included responsibilities for curating HR-related content, including developing digital job profiles, as well as producing videos that promoted personal brands of both employees and company leadership. As employees engaged in helping shape employment branding, they became more ardent company brand loyalists. Horizon Media’s journey in bringing HR and the company’s expert marketers together illustrates that the gap between internal and external approaches is narrowing fast. Human Resources is picking up on the skills and techniques traditionally reserved for marketers.

New Rules of Engagement for HR

Today, we may still be in uncharted territory when it comes to the blurring of boundaries between HR and marketing. To me, “the future is already here, it is just not evenly distributed,” and companies like Horizon Media are showing us what that future might look like. I am convinced that the future of the HR function will be decided at the critical intersections between data, technology, brand, and marketing. The new rules of engagement are emerging and we can summarize them as a set of four: • We need to compete for talent (internal and external) as if we are competing for customers. • We must seek to personalize the employee experience as if it were the customer experience. • We must provide transparency to employees similar to what consumers are demanding. • Above all, we must create company cultures that help employees find their unique purpose at work.

Endnotes

Aaron Hurst, Purpose Economy: How Your Desire for Impact, Personal Growth and Community Is Changing the World, Amazon Digital Services LLC, April 4, 2014. 1

² Patrick L. Hill and Nicholas A. Turiano, “Purpose in Life as a Predictor of Mortality Across Adulthood,” May 8, 2014, http:// journals.sagepub.com/doi/ abs/10.1177/0956797614531799.

About the Author

Dr. Anna Tavis is clinical associate professor and academic director of Human Capital Management program at NYU. Her article with Peter Cappelli of Wharton, “The Performance Management Revolution” is in Harvard Business Review’s “Top 10 Must Reads for 2018.” The second article on Agile HR will appear in HBR in March of 2018.

The ball is now in HR’s court. The future of HR rests on our ability to make work personal, and as the title of the new generation HR conference suggests, “Work Human.” A quote by Dr.Tomas Chemorro Premuzik, the CEO of Hogan Assessments, captures HR’s new role at the intersection of HR and marketing: “As we look at the world around us, we see a closing gap between employees and consumers, an evolution of how brand is shaped, fueled partly by technology, but just as much by those who see the possibilities of a new future.” The main lesson learned from marketing is that it takes more than the tools alone to make this important shift. Experience HR calls for the next generation of professionals to do their work with the mindset of the new purpose. www.ihrim.org • Workforce Solutions Review • January-March 2018

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Margaret Greenleaf, Roche

“ThePeopleProject” at Roche Roche, a global pioneer in pharmaceuticals and diagnostics, is focused on advancing science to improve people’s lives. The combined strengths of pharmaceuticals and diagnostics under one roof have made Roche the leader in personalized healthcare. Roche is the world’s largest biotech company, with differentiated medicines in oncology, immunology, infectious diseases, ophthalmology, and diseases of the central nervous system. Roche is also the world leader in vitro diagnostics and tissuebased cancer diagnostics, and a frontrunner in diabetes management. Founded in 1896, with over 94,000 employees in over 100 countries, Roche continues to search for better ways to prevent, diagnose, and treat diseases, and make a sustainable contribution to society. Our success highly depends on innovation created by highly engaged and talented people working at Roche. And, at Roche we experience the same challenges that most other companies are experiencing. Success in the future requires that we become even more globally connected, digitally accessible, and technologically current, and that we manage to do this with increased resource challenges. It requires agility to adjust rapidly to changing market conditions. In 2016, we began work on evolving our performance management process. But, we quickly realized that this would not be enough. In addition to our need to ensure that we have highly engaged employees, we face challenges in the healthcare industry. “Biosimilars” are entering the market and companies face patent exposure when they do. There are changes and unknowns related to the future of healthcare systems and drug pricing. Research and development productivity is critical and costs and expectations for medical value are rising. Complexity in markets around the world also adds to the challenges including access and the healthcare infrastructures. In highly developed

January-March 2018 • Workforce Solutions Review • www.ihrim.org

healthcare systems, such as Europe and North America, companies need endorsement from governments and payers to gain reimbursement for patients. In the developing world, access challenges can vary greatly – from infrastructure barriers (access to diagnostics, distribution of medicines, treatment pathways, etc.) to economic realities that may require a different approach to pricing negotiations. This list touches on the challenges only at a very high level. What is consistent across all of these areas is the pace at which change is happening – fast. When we talked to our leaders internally, they identified those same challenges for us at Roche. And, they also expressed their need for agility to be able to manage their business and people in a flexible and agile way that will allow them to deal with the challenges and opportunities they face. “We are dealing with a much more competitive, complex external environment.” “Speed is becoming increasingly important.” “We are living in a global world and exchange of people has increased.” “We will need to be more diverse and a lot faster in pretty much everything we do.” We recognized that we must equip our people with the mindset, knowledge, and capabilities needed to thrive in this fast-evolving environment. This requires more than just evolving our performance management processes. We challenged ourselves to do things differently and to change the way employees and managers interact with each other. To shift our collective mindset so that we can be flexible and agile in the way that we think about ourselves as employees and the way we manage our people. That is precisely what ThePeopleProject is all about – adapting our HR practices to

support the continuously changing business needs of an agile organization. It is about our people. And, one of the first steps in this journey has been to change our language. Human Resources processes are about us – People. With this in mind, we changed HR processes to People Practices. And, as we thought about how we could effectively make the shift, we realized that we would not only have to change the way we think about these processes, but we also had to change the way we approached their design and implementation. Roche HR is leading the implementation of ThePeopleProject, but the changes in the way we work are owned by everyone. ThePeopleProject centers on three main pillars: designing and implementing People Practices, our new approach for attracting, developing, and engaging people who work at Roche; implementing Workday, a cloud-based platform for simplified HR processes (our People Practices); and, focusing on the skills, capabilities, and mindset needed in HR. What we have done differently is to fully engage with the organization. Human Resources, in partnership with our leaders, managers, and employees, developed our new People Practices. We collected feedback from over 1,000 Roche employees and 400 business leaders, incorporated the results of our Global Employee Opinion Survey (GEOS), and conducted external benchmarking with more than 30 leading global companies. Throughout the process we remained engaged with the organization. This is how we defined the People Practices and ultimately gained approval of our senior leaders to implement the changes, and how we have achieved the unique position where the organization takes ownership and accountability for the changes. The first element of People Practices that the organization experience is called “CheckIns.” These are simple, frequent, informal conversations between managers and employees focused on what the employee needs. They are one of the key vehicles that bring our People Practices to life. There is no prescribed frequency or format for these discussions. It is up to employees and managers to decide what works best for them. We provide some ideas to help focus the conversations

around Career, Capabilities, Connections, and Contributions. But, they decide how to have these conversations. This flexibility allows both employees and managers to benefit. And, ultimately, they help build trust between employees and managers, contributing to performance and engagement overall. Of course, there are challenges on this journey: preparing 94,000 people to work differently, empowering managers to think differently and to embrace the People Practices in a way that accelerates their organizations, and unlocking agility in our own HR organization to ensure that we can be successful in our new ways of working. But, at each step we are continuing to challenge ourselves to do things differently and to remain engaged with the organization. All of our training and change management is designed around not only the need to be flexible and agile, but also the goal of “teaching people to fish” rather than giving them the fish. We want to shift mindsets in both HR and managers so that they are in a position to figure out what is right for them, rather than HR giving them all of the answers. Human Resources colleagues and managers are empowered to decide what processes make the most sense to implement in their organizations. Employees are empowered to drive their own career development and ongoing dialogue with their managers in new ways – increased transparency to opportunities and job profiles, new career paths and ability for self-nomination, and employee-centered conversations through Check-Ins. Only they are in a position to know what is really best for them as individuals or for their organizations. The evolution of People Practices gives them the tools they need. This flexibility and agility of our People Practices, in combination with the continuous engagement with the organization, has allowed us to define how we will change the way we work. And, these changes are fully owned by the business, which is anxious for us to begin the next chapter in the way we manage our people. It’s a great place to be – embarking on a significant change that can positively impact our people and our company, and managers and employees are looking forward to the go-live in April, 2018.

About the Author

Margaret Greenleaf is the head of Group HR Strategic Initiatives at Roche where her focus is on organizational transformation. She has over 20 years of experience across industries and functions, both inside and outside of HR, giving her a unique breadth of perspective. She currently has a priority focus on leading ThePeopleProject, a program designing simple and engaging people practices to enable employees to focus on what matters – time that leads to enhanced performance, realization of potential, and pursuit of passions. She can be reached at Margaret.greenleaf@roche.com.

www.ihrim.org • Workforce Solutions Review • January-March 2018

The Back Story

Katherine Jones, Ph.D., Mercer

HR: The Silos within Silos (And What it Means for Analytics) The “silo” metaphor has been used to death— and mid-western farms possibly don’t even have silos anymore—but bear with me as I use the metaphor one more time. Long has the HR department been described as a silo—different from the rest of the corporation in that it does not have revenue targets, is not responsible for a money-making product, and rarely is directly involved with businesses’ end-users or buyers. Rather the focus is on compliance and the workforce: its acquisition, development, and well-being. As a cost center rather that a revenue producer, HR is singular in its primary focus on the internal organization rather than its relationship to the outer business and industrial world. More important may be the silos within. In most organizations, HR itself is comprised as a series of silos: talent acquisition, training and development, labor relations, compensation management and payroll, and specialists in performance management and succession. In a recent study by Human Resource Executive and Mercer that looked specifically at how organizations gleaned analytics, one issue emerged: siloed functions produce siloed analytics – and siloed analytics often provide little value to the organization as a whole.

Silos Within

While there are many possible organizational models for providing analytical data, most often HR relies on a function-by-function approach. Almost one half of the study’s respondents report that talent analytics responsibilities reside with individual HR and talent team members as part of their specific HR functions, not in a separate unit within HR. Sometimes the issue is technology: as functionally-specific talent management software

January-March 2018 • Workforce Solutions Review • www.ihrim.org

applications have augmented core HR systems, incompatible data models have emerged. Vendors increasingly provide integrated human capital management (HCM) solutions that are cross-function, but today, disparate applications in HR and talent remain. Fully 60 percent of HR leaders report that their organizations employ a variety of HR and talent applications that have different and incompatible data models, preventing easy consolidation and information analysis. Functional-centric analytics may present a chicken-or-egg situation for HR. Applications, even those that deliver sophisticated analytics about a specific function, for example, recruiting and hiring, may deliver data that is difficult to cross-tab with data delivered from other talent products in a way that provides meaningful insights. Integrated talent or integrated talent plus core HR solutions for the most part can solve this problem. However, as this research shows, analytics delivery is concentrated within the talent areas and the products deployed often support only that area; what seems ideal is only so if the corporate intent is to consider data function by function rather than cross-function.

Tools of the Trade

Given that the majority of HR and talent analytics collection and analysis resides in the functional areas, it is not surprising that the primary sources for their data are the core HR applications that provide analytics or reporting functionality, and the talent management applications that deliver analytics or contain built-in analytic dashboards. Even though these products provide both the data itself and often support the analytic tools to create meaning from that data, 42 percent report using home-grown customized analytic tools and dashboards.

Figure 1. Analytic Tools in Use Today, Source: Mercer and HRE, 2017.

Still challenged with providing the analytics that executives seek today, how is HR preparing to glean and address analytics in the face of rapidly changing software in the workplace—which will provide new and different levels of analytical information? For the most part, however, today’s HR members see themselves as fairly close to providing the statistics that its executives seek, albeit occasionally rather than consistently. This holds true even in the newer technologies such as machine learning, augmented intelligence, and RPA. (On the other hand, of executives participating in Mercer’s 2017 Global Talent Trends research, only 27 percent thought that HR provided them with actionable analytics to enhance their decisionmaking abilities.) That more than 20 percent of executives seek to use data from their AI and machine learning platforms is impressive, and the fact that 16 percent of HR teams are able to deliver

them likely speaks to the analytic capabilities embedded in those newer software applications.

About the Author

Dr. Katherine Jones is a partner and director of Research at Mercer in Talent The telling question remains the source of Information Solutions. With analytics: will the reliance of functionally-specific both academic and technolanalytics provide the corporate-wide talent data ogy industry experience, needed for the future? Whether derived from core she has been a high-tech HR or talent-application specific data, will it suffice market analyst for 18 years. Her doctoral degree is from to answer the strategic workforce planning quesCornell University. She can tions of the future? It behooves HR professionals be reached at

Summary

to move beyond basic reporting of readily-derived data points, and make full use of the analytic technologies available to them today to address the requests from their leadership, especially in the face of new technologies in the workplace. The challenge: moving beyond siloed data to enterprise-wide amalgamation of strategic analytics.

Katherine.Jones@mercer.com or @katherine_jones.

www.ihrim.org • Workforce Solutions Review • January-March 2018

July 9 & 10, 2018 Are you optimizing your talent management processes & systems? What trends are impacting the future of work? What’s next in talent management solutions? Aligning Talent Management with your organization’s priorities? How Are You Enhancing Your HR Technology Career?

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January-March 2018 • Workforce Solutions Review • www.ihrim.org

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