2010: The Year that Planning and Analytics Caught On

Posted on October 7, 2010 by Andrew Jacobus

Like many professionals who try to balance daily work demands with awareness of industry and practice trends and innovations, this year I’ve attended and/or presented at my fair share of conferences, workshops, and trade shows. Playing varied roles in these trade events in 2010 has led me to develop some strong feelings about where Strategic Workforce Planning and Analytics are going.

The economy is turning, and with it, investments in HR and WF Analytics and Planning. Conferences are better attended compared to the past couple of years, which my highly tuned analytics skills tell me is a good trend. But the bigger picture is that IT budget purse strings are being loosened, and in ways that free up internal resources: http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20101004-704380.html. HR and workforce investments can now help HR professionals to focus on what has admittedly been a niche-y area within HR. Workforce planning and analytics skills and practices are growing in demand, even ahead of any unanimously recognized economic recovery (almost there…where are the jobs?!?).

Workforce Planning and Analytics create business value and bolster business strategy. Given the titles of presentations, the conversations between conference delegates, and the overall language coming from HR and non-HR professionals, HR is clearly more focused on strategic, operational, and financial business outcomes. I attribute much of this to workforce analytics and planning; now, not only is HR gaining support in this space in terms of investment, it is also strengthening its credibility and strategic impact on the business it serves.

Firms’ Analytics and Planning capabilities can mature quickly. What we have historically seen as evolutions in organizations’ HR capabilities in these areas, sometimes taking years, is no longer necessarily the norm. Comcast is one example of a company presenting their story of accelerating the pace of change, “getting good at” workforce reporting/analytics and driving impactful results quickly. A common theme: the critical success factor is engagement and support from business executives, as well as strong leadership of the function.

The Foundation is set for Strategic Workforce Planning. It has commonly been a relatively linear process for HR to 1) get some data, 2) make sure it’s clean, 3) look at the history, 4) understand why things happen and 5) begin to get predictive with that knowledge. After that, it would take a while to then 6) look ahead and model workforce availability against business need. Practically speaking, HR went through a long process, taking several years, to get to workforce planning: obtaining data and cleaning it up, focusing on reporting quality, then start and grow analytics improvements, before beginning workforce planning.

However, I’m seeing more companies turn that maturity model on its head. The practice of strategic workforce planning is becoming both more foundational and more sophisticated. I have heard several stories from people who have successfully practiced workforce planning on Excel files, using a pilot approach that is less dependent on rock-solid systems and data and more reliant on strong capabilities, relationships, and organizational readiness. Some firms even have what they consider beginner-level reporting and analytics with pretty advanced workforce planning processes. This means to me that 1) while great analytics capability absolutely strengthens workforce planning, it’s not a requirement to get started, making inertia less of a risk to workforce planning than ever before.

Client/vendor services and relationships are of critical importance in Analytics and Planning. My company, SuccessFactors, provides workforce analytics and planning software as a service – “in the cloud.” In addition to our industry-leading workforce planning and analytics experience and expertise, we also deliver real empathy and familial commiseration to our clients. I frequently hear of newcomers’ admiration of that genuine care – they want us to put them on cloud nine, too. And SuccessFactors is investing significantly to emphasize these areas even more to enable us to grow while driving our clients’ success. All of these lead me to believe that, while having bulletproof, ever-more innovative products is paramount, we’re powerfully differentiating ourselves in how we take care of our “members.” We are on their team, we don’t succeed if they don’t succeed; and their knowledge of our commitment will bring long-term success for both sides of the relationship.

Business Execution

Posted on September 10, 2009 by Erik Berggren

We’ve been talking about how companies can drive better results from better execution throughout the lifetime of this blog. With this launch of a new software category Business Execution Software we decided to explicitly rename this blog. Welcome to our new born or reincarnated Business Execution blog.

Lars, our founder and CEO, and I are working on our book Return on Execution©. You will find posts from the research and findings that we’ll share in the forthcoming book right here on the Business Execution blog. After all driving execution is what explains the financial performance of your company. Execution creates sustained competitive advantage. With an average of 70% of your operating expenditure comprised of labor (for not taking contractors into account) there is no bigger expense post to optimize if you want to drive better execution. It’s not a matter of what but rather who drives the execution of your strategy. To learn more about this exciting book visit this Return on Execution(c) link to read the short version of it.

You’ll see posts from the SF Research team as well as guest posts from our select thought leaders on the topic of driving execution. Keith will share insights from working with our customers around the world in how they increase their ability to execute both here and through Twitter so sign up for that too. We welcome your active input and feedback. Let’s go drive some better execution.

Economic Downswing: Let’s not make the same mistakes again

Posted on October 9, 2008 by Erik Berggren

Making mistakes can be a good thing if you learn from them. Making the same mistakes again and again is stupid and costly.

The economy goes in cycles. I know it feels like a long time ago, but do you remember that we had a pretty quick and tough downswing that started in March 2000? 2001 and 2002 felt like a nuclear winter to a lot of people and businesses. I’m not saying that the current situation has the same underlying factors and patterns as the last time that we had this tough economic climate, but businesses and people are to a large extent equally as affected by it as before. Smart companies learned from the mistakes we made the last time the economic cycle entered a downswing and avoid repeating them.

So what did we learn from the last downswing? Some companies really lost and others came out of the economic turmoil even stronger, making real gains relative to the competition. Business, like sports, is very competitive and relative. Making a relative gain is easier when everybody is hurt rather than when all are performing well and happily taking orders serving demand. Furthermore, it was clear that those companies that avoided facing the new situation lost. Inaction is never the solution for advancing down the field. So companies that tried to take advantage of the economic downswing with clear actions won.

Here are some mistakes that losers make to learn from:

Losing companies that get caught up in internal reconfiguring and take on an inward focus also tend to forget about their customers need and the value provided to them
Losing companies fall for the pressure to cut people across the board when called on to downsize and reduce costs
Losing companies alienate talent with poor decisions made through an extreme focus on short-term results; alienation which can last years thereafter.

SuccessFactors Research has recently written the paper Winning Through Talent in Uncertain Times, addressing how companies can get ahead when times are tough. Learn from your competitors’ mistakes, smartly align your resources, and turn an economic downswing into an economic opportunity for your company.

Viva Pay for Performance! Even Cuba gets it!

Posted on June 13, 2008 by Erik Berggren

Cuba dollar It is always surprising when people resist the idea that pay and performance are related. It is so logical – reward your best, and make sure that slackers aren’t hanging around being rewarded.

Why would a rock star keep performing if he or she were only paid as much as the guy who surfs the web all day instead of contributing? Ignoring pay for performance is a sure fire recipe for low morale and low performance.

Even Communist Cuba gets it! After decades of trying to run an economy where a doctor is paid about the same as the paper boy, they are acknowledging the obvious – if you want great people to do a great a job, they have to be recognized.

Vice-Minister for Labour Carlos Mateu says it best himself, “It’s harmful to give a worker less than he deserves, it’s also harmful to give him what he doesn’t deserve.”

While SuccessFactors Research does not endorse any government or political philosophy, we do endorse people performance, and recognizing great individuals – Viva pay for performance!

Attack at the top of the hill

Posted on April 28, 2008 by Erik Berggren

Go on the offense in the war for talent when your competition is hurt. Yes you hurt too but winning in business or in bike racing is a relative game – very relative. Of course you are stronger and feel more confident in your ability to sprint and attack when you are warmed up and ready, but the problem there is that so is your competition. In tougher times when every company is hurt from a slowing economy there is no better time to go on the offense and focus on strategic talent management issues. You can recruit the best from your competition and develop your key talent – if you get some slack you should use it wisely.

Of course when the economy is putting the knife on your throat it is easier said than done, but most organizations get very inactive in a slow economy. They simply resist taking any action, hoping things will correct themselves. Well the economic climate will eventually recover – it always fluctuates – but your company will come out weaker than your competition if you don’t act. But can you marry cost cutting with going on the offense? Yes, but laying off people can’t be done by simply applying stupid rules such as last in first out (very common in Europe, sometimes forced by laws) or broad 10% cuts in everything. Doing it like that is just lame.

Make sure you surgically get rid of the people that do not perform, nor have the potential to grow into the future needs of the organization. Think not only in terms of cost savings, but also in terms of talent optimization, although this is probably something that most organizations should do all the time in any economic climate. You just don’t see nor face this problem in booming times. So attack on top of the hill when your competition is hurt and you have a great chance of coming out winning. Pain is temporary, victory is forever.

What’s the time? – It doesn’t matter it’s always now…

Posted on April 11, 2008 by Erik Berggren

I was preparing for a presentation about change management and how HCM technology drives results that I plan to deliver at an HCM conference when I saw this video. I must say that Sam Zell really nails it when addressing the staff at Chicago Tribune. This 6 minute video clip is so telling, inspiring and indeed entertaining.

Sense of urgency, attention, and understanding the reason for change are of course the ingredients required to help change something. It doesn’t hurt if you know where you’re going either to funnel the change in the wanted direction. I think Sam nailed it. Win or lose – that’s the game.

Give me what I need not just what I want!

Posted on January 18, 2008 by Erik Berggren

I was just checking my Yahoo! mail where I saw an email highlighting a really cool piece of research recently done in the UK, studying how the Google generation (people born after 1993) go about getting information. The study, information behaviour of the researcher of the future, was commissioned by the British Library. Guess what – people are not going to spend time pouring through libraries and books to get the information they need, but rather simply search from the web or better just have it intelligently pushed to them – is this really a surprise? No but it does raise the question: why have we put up with enterprise software that is so dumb in how it delivers information? Generally, enterprise software is great for handling transactions but no real guidance on how to make better decisions faster.

SuccessFactors has just released the 83d release of our product, called ULTRA, which has received enormously positive feedback from customers, prospects and analysts. But what is so special with this new release? Yes, it is completely integrated and easy to use with very intuitive navigation and delightful appearance. So what does that have to do with finding the information you need when you need it? Information alone is not terribly useful. This is why ULTRA strives to deliver contextualized content. That simply means delivering answers to questions that you might have, or ought to have to effectively execute the task at hand. Today, no one has any time for anything including time to find the information they need, which would be lost time for productive work. If you need relevant information, but fail to go out and get it you will be forced to make a less informed decision. This could have a huge impact on your overall productivity. In ULTRA this concept was widely considered during its design, which is why in ULTRA information is delivered with the relevant context and tools so that you can make informed decisions. Even if you actually don’t know that you need it.

For example, there is a Coaching advisor that gives the individual practical advice on how to address specific needs or shortcomings, as defined in a competency assessment? If you have a need for better communication skills (and who does not btw…) real, practical advice on how to improve those skills is just there. Need to get a quick look at how people in your department are performing vs. their potential, check out the nine-box summary and drill down to the individual level to troubleshoot performance problems – content in context. These tools have not only helped me, but have also benefited the members of my team for whom I complete performance reviews. That is what truly smart software provides for its users. The writing assistant is another powerful tool that I just used to assist in writing a performance review for an analyst on my team. I think that alone saved me the evening, freeing up some valuable time and getting me home in time to have dinner with my wife and kids. Thanks to the ULTRA team for making it easy for the Google generation and for the rest of us…

Insource the strategic stuff

Posted on November 19, 2007 by Erik Berggren

Cost, talent, or innovation – which of these three challenges will drive Human Capital Management decisions in the future? The answer is easy: all of them. The question of how to address these drivers is a far more strategic and important question. Charles Grantham, co-author of Corporate Agility, recently joined us to speak with our customers about coming challenges that businesses face due to dramatic shifts in how, where and by whom work is done – a major focus of his recent book and the research he and Jim Ware from the Future of Work are doing. In his presentation, he described 9 strategies for addressing the challenges.

After reading this and engaging in discussions with Charlie, it became apparent that we actually help our customers execute on several of these strategies. We do this in a unique way, enabled by our delivery model and the focus of the product suite in terms of what it actually does for people.

For example, many people think of investing in on-demand solutions as an outsourcing strategy – moving administration away from the core business. But a better way to look at our model is to think of it as an INSOURCING strategy, the customer is INSOURCING a best-in-class and ever improving process. Of course, it is very powerful to let someone else do non-strategic activities faster and cheaper for you. But when you truly INSOURCE, you get the best of two worlds: it is someone else’s core business to figure out the best way to do things, and constantly improve it for you, while also being very cost efficient. That cost efficiency is of course a mutual win for INSOURCE providers and customers.

Effective human capital management processes are critical to INSOURCE. Why? Facilitating teamwork and collaboration is critical for innovation. Finding high potentials, developing their skills, and adapting to the new workplace is critical to closing the talent gap. People are the largest variable cost for most businesses (70%), optimizing their performance is critical to reducing costs. The revolution of on-demand software delivery with the SaaS model enables this phenomenon of being able to INSOURCE strategic processes that support your business’s strategy execution.

Where is Here?

Posted on October 25, 2007 by Erik Berggren

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

I once taught a class designed to introduce senior citizens to computers. By far, the internet was the most difficult concept to explain. Teaching file systems was fairly easy – it is not much of a stretch to visualize files in folders. Start up a web browser and the analogy breaks down. All sorts of questions come up, “this file is on my screen, is it in my computer?” “Is this file on their computer?” The complex amalgam that is a webpage, some bits cached locally, others served up from different data centers around the globe, took some time and effort to explain.

Some of the questions raised by my students were eerily prescient, like “Where is here?” Data made the move into the “ether” a decade ago. In many ways, work is woefully behind – still physically tethered to offices, desks, and phone lines.

Recently, Jim Ware and Charles Grantham, principal founders of The Future of Work, and authors of the recently published book Corporate Agility, joined SuccessFactors Research as thought leader partners for a webinar discussing remote work and productivity. The revelations were profound:

Work will be spread throughout the day and week (24×7), no more 8 to 5 work schedules
Work will be divided into smaller chunks with cycle times down from months to weeks
Work will be accomplished in a wide range of locations, 35% home, 35% office, and 30% in-between

As we me make the transition to knowledge work, “here” is no longer a physical place. “Here” is the where the data is, “here” is where the project is. Virtual meetings take place alongside the data, in the ether, not tethered to the physical office.

This is just one example of several, coming, dramatic shifts in attitudes, demographics and the global economy. In the paper Talent Management 2017, Erik Berggren and Jason Corsello examine these changes and show how talent and performance management will actually drive strategy in the future. From this session, one question really sticks out – How can we better collaborate? With a distributed workforce, how can we even find each other when we need to? Software vendors are just starting to answer these questions. One successful innovation that we have brought to market is our employee profile module. It is just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak, in encouraging collaboration. An early adopter of this tool reported that 94% of their employees started using it immediately after deployment, indicating that interest in connecting people is strong. At the end of the day, how could you drive people performance if people can’t even find each other? Where is here? What are your ideas for bringing people together in a distributed world?

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