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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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…

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.

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?

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?

Max’s Note: As part of our quest to post more and more often, I’m proud to present this guest post by Sammi Nuttall.

According to a new survey completed by Korn/Ferry International, nearly 73% of executive level employees believed that they could outperform their manager. Surprisingly, 42% of those surveyed also believed that their boss was doing an “excellent” or “above average” job.

That’s an interesting contradiction.

One interpretation is that employees, even at the top levels, are not leveraging all they have to offer their employers – and as a result are feeling somewhat less than challenged. This puts the onus on managers and strategic HR groups to understand who their high potentials are and to discover and cultivate their strengths. It’s only by developing employees that their full potential can be released, and if you can do that – the sky’s the limit.