A post over at Vendorprisey (with a very clever title) got me thinking about Software as a Service (SaaS) again. So often, conversations about SaaS involve an argument about what is and what is not considered SaaS. 

To a certain extent these discussions can be helpful -helping to classify different solutions into categories that imply certain attributes and benefits. But to regular folks, the nomenclature is irrelevant – it’s the benefits that matter.

It made me consider how to uncover the benefits amidst all the technology talk. So here’s a first attempt at some simple questions any layperson can ask to make sure they get the most our of a technology solution. If you have any suggestions – shout ‘em out. 

1. Who manages the technology infrastructure?
If it’s your company, then you’ll be responsible for ensuring the system is available and speedy, functioning correctly, secure, up-to-date, scalable and integrated. If its your vendor, all that becomes their concern – and you can focus purely on results.

2. How do updates and enhancements get made and how often?
Good software is like a living thing. It should grow and get stronger and more capable over time. When your vendor updates the system or enhances it with new capabilities – every customer should get the benefits and have the option to take advantage. The second part is the frequency of updates – in general, more is better. You want your vendor to be constantly improving what they deliver to you and you want to be able to take advantage of it way more often than 1 time per year.

3. Who is making the system work the way it needs to?
This gets at the “customization vs. configurability” issue.  If the answer is a software engineer or programmer it means you are going the customization route. Software code has to be written or edited to get the system to work the right way. This is a big red flag. I’ll explain in a minute. If the answer is a domain expert (in our case, an HR practitioner) – you’re in better shape. It means your solution is being configured to suit your needs from a huge menu of available options.

Why is configured better than customized? The result may be the same – a system that supports your processes the way you want it to – but the devil, as always, is in the details. With a customized solution – you’re on your own. You’ve got a unique bit of software that’ll have its own quirks – so when it comes to supporting, updating and maintaining it – there are unique challenges every time. With a configured solution, everyone is working from the same core – even though every customer’s solution is completely different..

4. Is this about technology or business results? 
If it’s clear that the planning for your roll out is all about the technology – what servers, what installation, what integration, etc – then you’re going to end up solving a technology problem, not a business problem. Finding a partner that can help you focus on the business results of your efforts is the only way to achieve your business goals.

Dubs makes the very good point that satisfaction and engagement are not the same thing in his post on the “top 10 employee satisfaction indicators.” He has a point. After all, who cares if employees are happy, so long as they’re engaged with their work. But satisfaction does play a role in engagement. Even if the traditional markers of engagement (right tools, personal growth, common purpose, etc) are in place, it’s hard to see the benefits (more productive, profitable, customer-focused) if employees are caught up in nagging Dis-satisfiers.

This study on 2.2 million respondents at over 2,100 companies revealed some obvious and not so obvious elements of employee satisfaction:

1. Higher salaries – pay is the number one area in which employees seek change.
2. Internal pay equity, particularly having concerns with “pay compression” (the differential in pay between new and more tenured employees).
3. Benefits programs, particularly health/dental, retirement, and Paid Time Off/vacation days. Specifically, many employees feel that their health insurance costs too much, especially prescription drug programs.
4.“Over-management” (A common phrase seen in employee comments is “Too many chiefs, not enough Indians”).
5. Pay increase guidelines should place greater emphasis on merit.
6. The Human Resource department needs to be more responsive to their questions and/or concerns.
7. Favoritism.
8. Improved communication and availability (both from their supervisors and upper management).
9. Workloads are too heavy and/or departments are under-staffed.
10. Facility cleanliness.

If I asked you to guess what would be on this list, I’d wager you could get most of these right. Just about everyone wants to be paid more (1), to be paid fairly (unless they’re paid more) (2), to have more and better benefits (3), to work less (9) and to know more (8).

With that said, a couple of these answers jump out at me. First, #5 – Pay increase guidelines should place greater emphasis on merit. It’s almost as if employees are asking to have pay linked to performance. Second, #7 – Favoritism. How to eliminate favoritism? Have an objective mechanism for measuring and rewarding performance.

So even in a rather obvious setting, some insight can reveal itself. While it’s unlikely that you can easily do anything about the majority of these complaints, #5 and #7 give you a toe hold on the way to improving satisfaction and engagement.

A colleague sent me this article which encourages us all to get hip to the dangers of jargon. According to a survey by YouGov, 40+% of people think phrases like “blue sky thinking,” and “getting our ducks in a row,” makes bosses look “untrustworthy and weak.”

But, perhaps even more interestingly,  people apparently have this stuff on the brain, because someone else sent me this clip from the Wall Street Journal talking about the next set of annoying words we all will be using shortly. Here’s the scoop:

Jargon OUT:

rightsizing, digitization, war for talent

Jargon IN:

delayering, web 2.0, knowledge acquisition, unsiloing

I guess it all sort of depends what world you’re living in – I don’t sense that “war for talent” is on the wane. Not even a little bit.

A good little tidbit from McKinsey on creating talent marketplaces that allow employees to find the best opportunities for them within their existing companies.

I’ve seen huge reductions in recruiting costs and higher employee engagement come from better succession planning -which lets companies have more visibility into their own talent pools. Imagine if we let employees help us out with that by searching out their own opportunities.

According to McKinsey, what prevents such a thing from taking place is the traditional hierarchical mind sets that “treat talent as corporate property and HR departments that chart career paths solely within organizational silos.”

There’s an interesting chart if you click the link. 

DDI and Badbossology.com (that’s actually a real site) did a survey of 900+ employees to determine the worst (and best) qualities of a manager. And, the survey says:

A bad manager:

• Tries too hard to be everyone’s friend
• Micromanages
• Ignores conflict
• Arrogant
• Wishy-washy
• Impulsive
• Unable to delegate
• Impatient
• Stubborn
• Unprofessional

You’ll have to read the article as written up on CNN.com to find out the best qualities and to take the quick “how good a boss are you?” survey.

It’s easy to dismiss this stuff as just for fun – but when you consider that employees often leave jobs due in whole or in part to their relationship with their managers, this kind of thing takes on real meaning. And it’s also fun.

You don’t often find HR related stories on page six of the New York Post, but alas – this is why life is interesting. Last week, employees at Capitol Records shot off a letter to the company’s parent, EMI, blasting their CEO and President, Andy Slater. The letter accuses the CEO of ignoring the label’s core acts like Bonnie Raitt, and wasting money on worthless up and comers. The letter complains: “This man is a control freak . . . How much longer do we need to make sure he is happy – only to then see those choices fail?”

How fascinating it is to see such employee complaints become so public. In the past, employees would talk to HR or to their peers, or just quit. But today, with publicity just a click away, perhaps we are witnessing the start of a new trend in employee complaints. No longer content to suffer in silence – are employees now elevating their causes to the court of public opinion?

Kaizen is a topic near and dear to us here at SuccessFactors. You can even see it in our founding principles statement. What is it, you ask? Kaizen is most easily understood as a process of continuous improvement in everything one does. You can get the history of it at Wikipedia.What it means practically is that we’re always striving to do better. At a high level it means things like: to serve our customers better, to innovate better and to perform better – but it works its way down to even the most tactical of things (i.e. to write better). I personally like to use the phrase “Kaizen the heck out of it.”

It comes to mind because over at Lifehacker, they’ve got a great post up on how to use the concept of Kaizen in your personal life. A good Friday afternoon read.

Recently, I published a post called Die Necktie, die - about why it’s time to discard the necktie as a component of the business wardrobe. It was one of the most discussed posts in a while – with people taking both sides of the issue. So I wondered what would come back if we asked all of you for your thoughts. Hence, the newest poll: “Does the necktie still have a place in today’s business environment?”

Check out the left column to answer and see the results so far.

See the results of our last poll on open salaries here.

The poll we’ve been running here for the last few weeks has been asking “Would you be in favor of an “open salary” policy at your company in which everyone’s salary was published for all to see?”

As you can see from the responses (nearly 200 of them) 60% of respondents said fuhggedaboudit (AKA no). Originally based on this post from the Chief Happiness Officer, the poll was an attempt to see if people agreed with Alex who argues that there are a number of very compelling reasons to do away with the secret salary system.

While I, too, balk at the idea of publishing my salary, in many ways doing so would represent the natural evolution of something we already do at SuccessFactors: make our goals public. The idea behind pay for performance is that those who perform best get paid the most – thereby incentivizing increased performance. But if people don’t know what others are getting paid, there is a disconnect. I know what Joe did or did not accomplish from his public goal plan, but I don’t know if he got paid more or less (and how much more or less) as a result. There is a perception of pay for performance, but no proof-laden pudding to support it.

I guess my question then becomes – can you realize the ultimate promise of pay for performance without open salaries?

Unlike last year, I didn’t have the privilege of attending the annual HR Technology Conference (AKA “HR Tech”) that took place this week in Chicago. In case you didn’t have the chance to go either, here is a roundup of posts from around the blogosphere:

• Here’s the link to the official site for the show
• Jim Holincheck reviews the opening keynote of the show
• Vendorprisey sums up the coverage for Workday’s coming out party
• Jason Corsello shares stories of day 1 from “dark and gloomy Chicago.”
• We announced a couple of interesting things  (one / two)

Surprisingly, not a whole lot of coverage (unless I’m a horribly bad Internet researcher) for the one of the industry’s highest profile conferences. Too bad. Perhaps when people get back from the show over the next day or two, more will appear. When I was there last year, I tried to put a bunch of stuff out there.