Ask HR to provide a list from the payroll and you should get the answer with reasonable accuracy, – right?

Well, with an average 20% of the working population (Manpower estimate) working for one company but technically being paid from another -so called contingent workers- the answer is not that obvious anymore. According to American Management Association 93% of U.S. corporations use some form of contingent workers.

However, far more important than getting an accurate headcount is how you get these value-contributors aligned with your company’s goals and priorities. How do you engage and motivate these people and ultimately, how do you get real performance from them?

The answer is that you need to include all value-contributors, irrespective of how they are being paid, in your strategic HCM plan and execution. Your process for

• aligning goals,
• setting expectations,
• monitoring performance,
• develop skills, etc.

should at a minimum include all your value-contributors and not only those on your payroll.

Whatever your strategy, make sure you include all of the individual value-contributors that participate in its execution.

The challenge of finding people and leveraging their strengths and interests is part of the reason why SuccessFactors today has launched a consumer-inspired Employee Profile solution. In its simplicity it’s genius. The product builds the social network framework automatically from the traditional HRIS information in the system, but then the ownership for enriching the content lies in the hands of individuals, encouraging workers to advertise their strengths and have fun creating and building their profiles. Of course, managers can build on top of the profiles in terms of performance and potential data, etc. This approach to user-managed and user-relevant applications is also inclusive of contingent workers. All value-contributors now have the opportunity to define their own value proposition to the business through self-completion of skill and competency inventories.

SuccessFactors Research and Thought Leader Dr. David Sirota hosted a webinar in which the link between engagement and camaraderie is revealed. Of course building this kind of community, or social network, is crucial to building camaraderie and driving the performance of these value-contributing contingent workers.

But at the end of the day how can you work and collaborate with people that you can’t find nor even know exist?

So the question remains: Do you know who is working for you today?

Out here in California, school starts next week. Being new at selecting schools for my kids, I learned that there are at least two things parents seem to be studying when they make a decision on where to place their kids:

- The proportion of kids at the school with free lunch allowance and
- The standardized test scores of the kids at that school

Those are certainly interesting data points, but are those the real and only predictors we’ve got for academic success?

What if human capital management techniques could contribute to our children’s academic success? It turns out that they do, by using them to help manage teachers. Who woulda thunk it? Our SF Research thought leader and partner Dr. Laurie Bassi (President of McBassi & Co, an HCM auditing firm), that’s who.

The results of her work are even more interesting than the topic itself. Dr. Bassi found that although children’s academic success is partially dependent on the level of their parent’s affluence, and the proportion of free-lunches – the school’s HCM practices are more than twice as important.

Listen to my conversation with Laurie about this study on this short podcast.

My question is really how much of this finding can be applied to other non-profit organizations to spur performance and ultimately drive some real productivity? One example: how influential is smarter HCM on putting our tax dollars to better use? I bet we’d all be interested in the answer to that one.

More details on Dr. Bassi’s study and the findings can be found here.

According to a recent study commissioned by Cisco, mobile workers are expected to account for a quarter of the world’s working population by 2009.  With this in mind, how:
•    Can your organization afford not to drive real performance from your remote workers?
•    Can you even attract and retain the people you need if you fight this trend? – Who wants to work for a company that would take personal sacrifices for granted? Hours commuting could be used for personal and company productivity.

Here is my take on answering these questions; I think that it comes down to how you manage and measure the impact that your people are delivering. Simply put; manage potential, measure on output. Face time doesn’t explain real output from peoples’ efforts so you might as well just forget about it. You can’t manage what you can’t see, but do you see peoples’ work just because you see their faces in the office? I doubt it.

Of course there are tasks and times that completely merit people being physically together but not all tasks all the time. Would software that helps you align the goals and monitor performance be helpful for managers to focus on the goals and the execution of these? I think so. Individual contributors, irrespective of where they work and how they are technically being compensated, can get a clear line of sight and produce while being accountable for the output.

Our friends and research partners from the Future of Work are doing research into this area and Jim Ware  and Charlie Grantham will unveil their knowledge on this topic in a SuccessFactors Research webinar on September 12.

Max’s note: We’re proud to present this guest post by SuccessFactors’ Director of Research, Erik Berggren.  

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What’s the best way to be productive? I wager 99% of you just thought to yourself – “waste less time.” After all, if we used every minute efficiently we could build skyscrapers in days, right? Maybe.

According to a new salary.com survey, young people are wasting more time than ever before (2.1 hours/day) at work and the insinuation is that this is major cause for concern. But, it’s not quite as simple as all that. Productivity has a numerator and a denominator. The denominator is time. There’s only so much in a day. The numerator? Output - how much stuff is getting done. To improve your productivity you could work on either or both sides. But it’s a balance, a single minded focus on the denominator is at best somewhat limited.

SuccessFactors’ stated goal is to increase worldwide productivity by 50% and I can tell you that we’re not going to get there by identifying slack time and eliminating it. Peter Capelli ( a SuccessFactors Research thought leader pictured left) shared his thoughts on this survey this morning on Morning Edition on NPR. Click here to listen.

Peter and I had a great conversation around productivity and HCM last week in preparation for his upcoming webinar highlighting some interesting findings from his coming book “Talent on Demand.” There is much more to driving productivity than cutting slack out of the workday and I invite you to join our webinar next week to find out why and what to do about it from one of the greatest thinkers in this area.