Author Archives: Jim Matheson

SuccessConnect 2010 Frankfurt

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Willkommen in Frankfurt (Welcome to Frankfurt)!

SuccessConnect 2010 kicked off today in the beautiful city of Frankfurt, our final SuccessConnect destination for 2010.

The event started with a bang with the ever energetic, Lars Dalgaard taking the stage.  Announcing the acquisition of YouCalc, a Danish company, to a jam packed house, Lars explained how SuccessFactors latest purchase will let business create and share custom reports and analytics from the cloud.

Jay Larson, SuccessFactors Head of Sales, was next up to the podium. Jay discussed HR’s new economic reality – do more with less: more ROI; greater business impact; connect HR with the business; and close the gap between strategy and execution.  He then went on to share success stories from those who have implemented more for less and have “BizX’ed” their organizations.  

Dmitri Krakovsky drilled further into SuccessFactors recent YouCalc acquisition explaining the new Calculator in the Cloud feature that will allow users to perform analytic mash-ups and what-if scenarios from any cloud based application. Dmitri also expressed his excitement over SuccessFactors new partnership with Jobvite, pointing out that the time to hire is not as important as hiring the best.

The final SuccessConnect of the year showcased the best of the best with Norbert Kleinjohann, CIO Siemens AG and Marion Horstmann, Corporate Vice President of HR, Siemens AG sharing their secrets for success.  

Marion Horstmann shared Siemens transformation of the HR function using a global people strategy of which transparency was a key element. Marion expressed her delight that her three requirements for a strong HR strategy were inherently delivered via SuccessFactors solutions: integrated applications for all people processes; a uniform product completely that speaks in a single global language; and recurring efficiency and higher quality.

Norbert Kleinjohann then went on to discuss how Siemens positioned their standard HR system, labeled 4Success, for success. “During the evaluation process, Siemens IT team worked with their HR colleagues to assess 50 possible suppliers, both on premise and in the Cloud. We awarded the contract to SuccessFactors in March 2009, based on functionality and usability and the provisioning of an integrated solution with consistent data models,” says Kleinjohann.  (See article SuccessConnect: The Biggest Cloud in the World) Kleinjohann cites: “We have seven modules in place – target setting, performance management, compensation management, roundtables, career development planning, recruitment management, and employee profiles. We went live within 6 months with the target setting module which we rolled out to 170,000 employees. We now have 400,000 employees information loaded into 4Success and have 40,000 log ins per day.” SuccessFactors had the fastest implementation, best functionality, usability, and integrated capabilities.  Kleinjohann says: “I believe that Cloud Computing will be adopted by IT sooner than we expect.”

The audience enthused over the Siemens presentation stating that it was a pretty impressive story for an impressive first day in Frankfurt!

SuccessConnect San Francisco

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Lars Dalgaard- CEO, SuccessFactors

Lars Dalgaard- CEO, SuccessFactors

SuccessConnect 2010 kicked off today in San Francisco and has been nothing but non-stop action. Leading the action, was Lars’ by jumping for joy onstage to open up his keynote. Lars recapped SuccessConnect in New York, discussing business execution, and spinning the infamous big “Wheel of Success.” The “Wheel of Success” has an array of topics ranging from a “Innovation Machine” to “Audience Picks”, and proved to be very entertaining and informing for all.
Carlin Wiegner- CEO, Cubetree

Carlin Wiegner- CEO, Cubetree


Lars introduced Carlin and he did an amazing demo of Cubetree. By using Cubetree, Carlin demonstrated how to see group comments on a resume and how one could ultimately be in two meetings at once. After Carlin, Lars introduced Calibration, and the new launch of a new Goal Execution function, as part of the Goal Management Module. Calibration, the industry’s first solution for streamlining and simplifying the calibration process at enterprises for improved business results through more impactful talent initiatives. The Goal Execution helps companies make sure that people are working on the right things at all times by bringing awareness, visibility and tracking of progress against company goals into the daily work of employees. Lars and Dmitri did a quick demo of the new Goal Execution function by showing the execution map and status update function. The recruiting demo has some great new features, which Lars’ showed off by scoring a potential candidate off stage on his Blackberry, and the improvement on turnaround time for candidate feedback. Peter Howes and Brian Kelly from Inform took the stage next. Peter talked about the history of Inform, GBMC, and BizX Insights. The keynote ended with Lars discussing Employee Central.
Peter Howes- CEO, Inform and Brian Kelly- President, North America

Peter Howes- CEO, Inform & Brian Kelly- President, North America

SuccessConnect 2010 in San Francisco had a huge surprise in store for everyone. An extra keynote speaker was added! Dr. Chip Heath, a Professor at Stanford University School of Business and author of best seller “Made to Stick” and “Switch” gave a great lunch keynote. Nothing but excitement here in the city by the bay.

SuccessConnect NYC

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Lars Dalgaard - CEO, SuccessFactors

Lars Dalgaard - CEO, SuccessFactors

SuccessConnect 2010 had an amazing kickoff today in New York. Lars opened up his keynote using a big spinning “Wheel of Success” to determine what to talk about, all while holding his son, Lars Jr. right by his side. The “Wheel of Success” had topics ranging from a “Funny Lars Story” to “Insight for Impact”, and proved to be very entertaining and informing.

Lars introduced Calibration and the new launch of a new Goal Execution function, as part of the Goal Management Module. Calibration, the industry’s first solution for streamlining and simplifying the calibration process at enterprises for improved business results through more impactful talent initiatives. The Goal Execution helps companies make sure that people are working on the right things at all times by bringing awareness, visibility and tracking of progress against company goals into the daily work of employees.

Dmitri Krakovsky - VP, Product Management

Dmitri Krakovsky - VP, Product Management

Dmitri demoed the new products with a cool touch screen for everyone to see. The recruiting demo has some great new features, which Lars’ showed off by scoring a potential candidate off stage on his Blackberry. The keynote ended with Carlin Wiegner surprising everyone with a demo of Cubetree.

We are also thrilled to have had full houses in both bootcamp training sessions today, prior to our SuccessConnect kickoff and keynote!  Over 30 companies participated in these paid training sessions, both on our “Introduction to SuccessFactory” class and on “Performance Fundamentals- Effective Goal Setting”. Let’s keep it coming New York!

Additional updates  over on twitter.com/SuccessFactors

More photos available over on the SuccessFactors Facebook page

Money Chases Talent

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Erik’s note: We’re happy to present another guest post by Chris Lozaga a Research Analyst in SuccessFactors Global Research team

We talk a lot about the future of work, borderless collaboration, as the war for talent drives businesses to look globally for the best people to get the job done. It is already happening. SuccessFactors Research has a unique window from which to draw insight – the data from our over 3 million active users. We recently studied 41 U.S. based companies that use our compensation module, and looked at how they pay their international talent (people on the payroll in a foreign currency). In an aggregate and anonymous way, we crunched the numbers on pay increases given to 239,000 individuals across these organizations and made some interesting observations.

First, companies are much more aggressive in pay for performance with their U.S. based workers. We found this out by comparing the standard deviation (spread) in pay raises, by percent of salary. This was not particularly surprising, given that the U.S. has very liberal attitudes regarding free markets and compensation. The insight that might surprise many came when we looked at the actual average raise given – the percentage was much higher in India and China than in the U.S. (see below). While there is less variability in these regions, they average pay increase is much bigger. Companies are paying to acquire, motivate and retain this talent.

The war for talent is real. Retention is a major problem in rapidly growing countries like China and India, and companies appear to be paying to keep their international people. Money chases talent.

Winning the war for talent is critical to success. Talent is now the ultimate differentiator for companies – people are responsible for executing the company strategy, generating the new ideas and IP that drives growth. This snapshot of companies and their 239,000 employees shows that U.S. based companies are aggressively implementing pay for performance inside the U.S., but less aggressively for their overseas people. Companies put their money where their talent is.

More details on our findings in International Pay can be found in this downloadable data brief: SuccessFactors Research Data Brief: International Pay for Performance.

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The No Asshole Rule

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A note: if the title offends you, please excuse me. I think the content and concepts make it worthwhile. Also, it’s the title of a real book – and so that makes it okay (right?).

I’m now kicking myself for being just completely remiss in not mentioning Bob Sutton on the blog. For one, he’s talked a lot about us recently, but mostly, I’ve been remiss because he’s an incredibly interesting guy.

He’s got a new book coming out next month called “The No Asshole Rule – Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t.” Today, at our all-hands company meeting, we got a chance to hear Bob speak on the topic.

The No Asshole Rule is something we actually have, use and abide by at SuccessFactors. We have a “rules of engagement” document which is posted all around our offices and on our website (#5) that reminds us of some of the basic tenets of working at the company. This particular rule, now softened a bit to “No Jerks,” understandably gets the most attention.

Why are assholes such a big deal? According to Bob, a professor of management and engineering at Stanford, they can easily take the wind from the sails of an otherwise successful company. Assholes can lower engagement, raise turnover and cost companies a lot of money. One guy Bob spoke about cost his company an estimated $160,000 over the course of a year – factoring in the costs of time spent by management, hr and executives in dealing with him – as well as anger management and training classes, overtime spent by other employees responding to his last minute requests and so on.

But its likely you don’t need any data points beyond ones from your own experience to make you aware of the preponderance and impact of assholes in the workplace. We’ve all dealt with them at some point and been the victim of behavior that makes us feel awful. According to Bob, there are two tests that identify the presence of an A-hole:

1. – “After talking to the alleged asshole, do their “targets” feel oppressed, humiliated, deenergized or belittled by the person?” and

2. – “Does the alleged asshole aim his or her venom at people who are less powerful or people who are more powerful.”

There are a few things to be careful of with your newfound A-hole identification powers. An important one is to be mindful of rushing to a-hole judgement – once you accuse someone of being one, you may quickly find you’ve created a monster.

So what do we do about the a-hole problem? Bob counsels us to simply avoid working at places where the a-hole factor is high (if you’re an employee), and to avoid hiring them (if you’re a company). He notes that “asshole poisoning is a contagious disease. Get out and stay out of asshole infested places – they will change you, you wont change them.” And the opposite effect is true as well – hire too many and it wont be long before your whole company is acting like an ass.

Another answer is to me mindful of “moment to moment conversations.” Be aware of asshole behavior – both yours and that of others. Noting and making small adjustments in response can make all the difference in whether a colleague perpetuates the -Ass-holishness.

We were lucky enough to get a copy of Bob’s new book today and I’ll be reading it soon. I hope to be back with further reflection once I work through it, but in the meantime, you should take a look at his blog for more thinking on the topic.

Findings from our Research on the Impact of Competencies in Financial Performance

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A guest post by Josh Bersin – CEO, Bersin & Associates

Competencies are one of the most difficult and under-utilized part of performance management.  Bersin & Associates research shows that only 36% of organizations with performance management process rate their use of competencies “excellent” or “good.”

But we also found that effective use of competencies can have a huge impact:  organizations that rate themselves world-class in the use of competencies for performance management are 4-times as likely to have a strong performance-driven culture.

Why?  Because the process of identifying and implementing critical competencies in itself drives a clear understanding of what performance means, how to obtain it, and how to communicate it.

As you can read in our recently published research, thoughtful and strategic use of competencies can have a significant impact on financial performance.  A few of the highlights from our research with SuccessFactors on how the use of competencies affects financial performance:

* Competencies should be customized for your business and should focus on management and leadership-level skills, not just job requirements

* There are two types of job-level competencies:  “hygiene” competencies which establish the basic requirements for a job (ie. customer service), and “performance” driven competencies, which, if executed, will not only help an individual perform their job but will help them grow and excel.

These “performance” or “critical” competencies vary from company to company and industry to industry.  

Read more from our research with SuccessFactors.

Want to succeed in High-Tech? Focus on your customers

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A guest post by Erik Berggren – Director of Customer Results, SuccessFactors.

You probably don’t need me to tell you that successful companies are ones who provide products people want. But what sometimes gets lost is that this is true not just for B2C firms, but for B2B firms as well. To get a sense of what I mean, just consider the story of my current office printer. Made by a well known PC manufacturer – it is so universally despised by my colleagues for being constantly broken (as it is right now) that it will soon be replaced by a machine from another company. The moral of the story? If the end users, your ultimate customers, don’t like your product, its ultimately not going to do very well.

Recently, SuccessFactors conducted a study on how high-tech companies manage their talent. Specifically, we took a look at the core competencies such firms use to evaluate people in their organizations. Perhaps not surprisingly, we found that one very key competency stood out amongst companies that both grew faster and provided a greater return to their owners than their competition. That competency? Customer focus.

“So what?,” you might be thinking. Isn’t it fairly obvious that customer driven product development and engineering makes sense? Sure it is, but the research shows the importance of making this an explicit area for managing people. It?s not something that can be merely talked about, it has to be acted upon ? and it?s that action that makes all the difference. By way of comparison, our research also showed that customer focus is NOT something that poor-performing high tech companies stress. That is what makes this so intriguing - we’ve proven both sides of the coin.

Want to know more? Based on the results from our broad-ranging research on competencies and how they drive financial performance, we decided to partner with Bersin and Associates to get a perspective of deep expertise from the broader HCM field. Josh Bersin has analyzed our research in depth and written a great report that puts the importance of managing competencies in perspective.

For questions about the research, feel free to leave a comment, or send an email to Erik at eberggren AT successfactors.com.

Google: HR Innovator?

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Not to keep flogging the Google horse or anything, but it appears the company is doing some innovative stuff beyond its products. The company has gained some HR-related attention before for using billboards featuring complex mathematical problems to recruit engineers. Now, they’ve turned their attention to candidate screening.

According to this NYT article, the company is exploring new methods for hiring “more well-rounded candidates, like those who have published books or started their own clubs.”  They will now be asking the 100,000 job applicants each month to fill out an “elaborate online survey that explores their attitudes, behavior, personality and biographical details going back to high school.”

The company then takes the surveys and compares them against some 25 different measures of employee performance. By doing so, they hope to expose the traits that make for successful employees so they can more readily find the gems amongst the thousands of applications they get each day.

I just think they are just right on with this. As I recently posted on Dave Lefkow’s blog:  ”When performance is the heart of the effort, you can come to a recruiting system from a new perspective. Instead of focusing only on traditional recruiting metrics like time to hire – you can start to think about and track the actual performance of each new hire over time. Then, you can identify what makes for higher performing candidates and build that knowledge into a system that helps you source and hire more like them.”

Interestingly, Dave wondered “…if the market is ready for this – right now, recruiters are measured on efficiency, not effectiveness. It’s all about getting bodies in seats, and introducing a measure of quality that recruiters are tied to would require a big mindset shift. I can hear the groans now – but I don’t make the decisions about who to hire. That’s the hiring manager. Buck passed.”

Google is no representation of the market at large. But as a pioneer in many ways, they often pick up on trends before others. Perhaps their talent approaches are equally visionary.

Poll: Make salaries public? NO!

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PublicsalariesThe 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?

Socking It to Employees at Appraisal Time

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Did you ever know a manager who waited until performance evaluation time to “sock it to” an employee? This is a pretty horrible tactic for a number of reasons – most obviously becuase the employee isn’t given the chance to adjust his or her behavior and then essentially punished for not doing so. It’s bad for the employee becuase they get broadsided and bad for the company becuase it has lost the opportunity to fix things along the way (if there was indeed anything to fix in the first place).

This topic is being discussed in depth over at Workforce Management’s online discussion boards. There are a number of resources mentioned – a very “rich” thread. Worth checking out.

A quote from MilesSW:

If you have a puppy who piddles in the corner, do you wait eight months for its performance appraisal to whack it with a newspaper? Well, you never whack it with a newspaper, but you most certainly don’t wait eight months. To modify human behavior, there needs to be immediate positive consequence for positive behavior and immediate negative consequence for negative behavior.

It’s people like this who give management a bad name. Keep the employee, dump the “manager”.