Through the miracle of Tivo, I just caught "The Office" on NBC.  If you don’t watch it, you should – it’s a brilliant commentary on the nature of working for a company. Anyway, this episode found the good folks at Dunder Mifflin talking about performance reviews and I thought you might get a giggle out of this quote:

It’s Performance Review day, company wide. Last year, my performance review started with Michael asking me what my hopes and dreams were, and it ended with him telling me he could bench press 190 pounds. So, I don’t really know what to expect.

It’s that special time of year again, and everyone’s thinking about them. Or dreading them, as the case may be. Well, if you need a place to vent, you should take a look at worstreview.com, a contest we’re sponsoring to find the worst performance review story ever. Have a gander, tell a story, maybe even win a prize. It’ll be a hoot.

Got a tip on this interview with a Deloitte HR consultant named Andy Peck on Talent Management / Succession Planning.

His Take:

The biggest long-term issue is the lack of talent-management strategies and the relationship with changing demographics. By 2008 many baby boomers will be retiring, which will put enormous pressure on the workforce. One day companies will wake up and ask, “Where are the people?” It could be cataclysmic. Besides the lack of personnel, we are not planning how to fund pensions or how to transfer the knowledge of older workers onto younger ones.

You can make an analogy with Y2K, which also had a known deadline. People waited until the eleventh hour before making a plan to keep the lights on. The level of awareness about this problem is modest at best.

Here’s the whole interview.
Thanks to Dana Flanders for the pointer.

Anita at the Small Business Trends blog is talking about the impact Software as as Service (SaaS or SaS) is having on small business. She does a great roundup of some of the discussion going on right now and talk about the benefit to be reaped by small businesses.

Money Quote:

If you are a small business that is a user of technology, your choices of affordable, easy-to-implement services are going to become much bigger. You will have access to ever more powerful software, without the need for involving your already-stretched — or non-existent — information technology staff.

From individuals using Google, to the Enterprises and Small Businesses using services like SuccessFactors and salesforce.com – SaaS is a powerful movement. When Microsoft comes around like it has in the past few days – you know it is truly the future of software.

Via Be Excellent

 

Gautam’s talking about performance reviews today. He asks "If it serves so many functions why is it often such a de-energising and negative process?" It’s a fair question.

Here are two guesses:

1. – The medium is the message. If you’ve got to slog through reams of paper to do your reviews, it almost doesn’t matter what the results are. The process alone is painful enough to make the whole excercise negative.

2. -  True, reflective evaluation is hard.  Who said being fair, honest and helpful was supposed to be cake? It’s part of what makes the whole thing worthwhile. We actually take a short break from our daily efforts to think about our performance and that of others. It should be a smidge challenging.

No? 

Safe Harbor Certification is a program set up by the US Department of Commerce in partnership with the European Union. The deal is that the EU passed some regulations dealing with the privacy of its citizens’ data back in 1998 and the certification program was set up to help verify that US companies comply with those regulations. 

I just found out that we’re certified – is your vendor?

There have been some annoucements recently about the HR-XML standard so I thought I’d inquire about what was happening on that front within SuccessFactors. So, I had a conversation with Doug Ito who has been doing some work on it from our side.

First – what is this thing? Well, it’s an attempt to make it easier for HR systems to communicate and share information with one another by using a common standard for identifying information. That basically means you can do stuff like have your Recruiting system feed data on new hires directly into your  HRIS system, or your Performance Management system automatically grab data out of your HRIS to do performance reviews and then put the compensation decisions back in.

Are we compliant? Yes and No. Not compliant directly with the standard, but because our system already supports XML interfaces – we can effectively interact with any HR-XML standards compliant system without a problem. Our approach can be effectively categorized as "wait and see." While we believe the standard has a future, our ability to interoperate with it using current technology means we don’t have to adopt it wholesale -at least not just yet.

I recorded my conversation with Doug on the topic and you’re welcome to listen in. We talked about the history of simiar standards, why we haven’t yet fully embraced this one and what we’re hearing from the market. Doug does a great job of explaining the technology, and the idea behind HR-XML – so if you’re looking to catch up on the concept, here’s a good place to start.

Is such a thing even possible? Well, I wasn’t able to attend our most recent user group meeting in Chicago, but Randy Reynolds tells me about an interesting comment from some of our customers. We unveiled some new interface enhancements at the meeting that reduce the number of steps managers have to go through to evaluate an employee. It’s called SpeedRater, and it sounds good right?

Well there was apparently some pushback becuase people felt it would enable managers to do their reviews too quickly – thereby removing some of the time for thought from the process. In other words, people were worried that you’d get quick but thoughtless reviews.

But then Randy asked the HR folks to put themselves in the positon of a manager who has a bunch of reviews to do. Would they appreciate the feature then? A room full of hands went up.

So what do you think? Which is more important, speed or thoughtfulness? What’s the happy medium?

Our own Rob Bernshteyn published an article with the above title in the most recent edition of IHRIM.link.  It discusses the complex issue of how workforce performance management systems actually treat the employees and managers that are expected to use them. While terms like "human capital supply" are bandied about pretty freely, can we really treat people like supplies? Obivously, the answer is no – and Rob discusses the implications of this and alternative approaches in the article.

The complete version can be found after the jump.

(more…)

According to this, Fast Company isn’t finished yet. The author of the "Why We Hate HR" article is set to appear on CNBC tonight.

Let me know if anybody catches this.

A comment was made on the blog recently by a well known industry journalist who is also one of programmers of HR Tech. He was unhappy with some of my posts on the conference, specifically   my post on the Pay for Performance breakout session. I want to respond to the criticism publicly, because I think it is both valuable and important.

This journalist felt I was remiss in not mentioning that Authoria, the vendor involved in the presentation, is a direct competitor of SuccessFactors and that they beat us in the Performance Management Shootout. He felt this lack of context was misleading.  Let me say very clearly that if anyone was misled by this post, I apologize. I did, in fact, mention that we were beat in the shootout in this post about the shootout, but not directly in my post about the pay for performance session. I have now updated the post to reflect this.

I do not want my opinion on this one session to represent my opinions on the conference as a whole. I thought the conference was very worthwhile in general – well executed and, as tradeshows go, quite excellent. You can see my actual conference review form here.

Now switching gears – let me also be clear about this: I am not a journalist, and I do not intend to be. Journalists have a responsibility to be fair and factual and to provide context and background. And, while I personally strive toward that, Bloggers as a group do not have this responsibility. That is the strength and the weakness of this or any blog.  This blog is a single perspective, just one opinion, one view, one side of the story on what is happening in the HR Technology space. There are other perspectives (here are one and two), and I encourage everyone to see what they have to say as well.

The beauty of this format, however, as opposed to a magazine or newspaper, is that people can talk back in real time.  If you don’t like what I said about this conference or if I got something wrong, please feel free to share your opinion by posting a comment. Correct me in public. It’s okay! I have never filtered a comment (except for language). You can occupy the same space as I do and I want to encourage that as much as possible. The value for this blog is in the sharing of opinions and information – SuccessFactors the company and Max Goldman the guy want to know what you have to say – so get to it!