Category Archives: News & Technology

Who is working for you today?

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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?

Think you can do better than your boss?

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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.

A spoonful of sugar

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Dion Hinchcliffe, a well-known blogger and thought leader in the Enterprise 2.0 space wrote a post recently in which he talked about the next generation of business software – social, interactive tools easily delivered over the Web – and how they can make a dramatic impact on the hierarchy and culture of businesses. These new tools, Hinchcliffe said, can tear down traditional knowledge barriers and walls within an organization by making information fluid, collaborative and accessible to everyone who wants it, leaving the power of that knowledge in the hands of everyday workers and not just managers and executives. That’s pretty powerful, and the catalyst for this dramatic transfer of power and virtual flattening of an organization, he said, lies in these simple, lightweight next-generation tools:

“Because they are highly democratic and egalitarian; anyone can deploy (Enterprise 2.0) tools, anyone can quickly learn to use and benefit from them, and they can be used to communicate and collaborate openly with anyone else inside (and often outside) the organization, are inherently viral, they literally tear down the barriers that would normally impede their forward movement and adoption inside the organization. And, anecdotally at least, this seems to be happening.”

This is a great piece of insight. In the past, there was always a barrier between every day workers and the information they worked with. To use a practical, HR-related example, take first-generation performance management tools – they were useful, but in order to get real value out of them in the form of analytics, they had to be sorted out either by hand by HR managers or run through a database by IT folks. Useful, but not efficient or at all egalitarian. Enterprise 2.0 gets rid of that gatekeeper.

As a general philosophy, SuccessFactors has always advocated transparency and the free flow of information – both are core doctrines written into our software and promoted as part of our own workplace culture. With SuccessFactors NEXT Labs, we’re trying to help promote that openness on both the technology and cultural fronts. NEXT Labs is a Trojan horse of sorts, designed to introduce Web 2.0 technologies and concepts – blogging and tagging capabilities, social networking and sharing – that render the adoption and repeated usage of an enterprise application painless for people accustomed to using such tools in their personal lives.  

Rather innately, Performance & Talent Management systems are the ultimate in-house Enterprise 2.0 tools: They help employees easily see their performance by harnessing the power of collaboration, communication and visibility, giving them the knowledge they need to make what they want out of their careers. In a way, NEXT Labs is our ”spoonful of sugar.” It  helps companies and employees eaily swallow what is all too often a bitter dose of medicince – the adoption of a new enterprise-wide software system.

Close to crazy

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Max’s note: We’re proud to present this guest post by SuccessFactors’ Director of Customer Results, Erik Berggren.  It is in response to a previous entry posted here by Dr. Jac Fitz-enz.

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The idea of seeing the future is always appealing, but as Dr. Jac suggests (and as we know from our horoscopes), not all that easy. Even so, I’d argue it’s worth the effort when it comes to people. Not attempting to understand your complete talent picture – so that you can stay ahead of the curve – is, in my opinion, downright stupid. Seeing and understanding but not acting is equally bad.

In our work, we see forward looking companies starting to take the idea of predictive HCM seriously. But most organizations are waiting. Waiting for the economy to turn, or waiting to realize they are no longer attracting and retaining critical talent. Waiting to find out they can’t protect their margins or even stay competitive because they don’t have the right people in place. They haven’t yet figured out that calamity is just around the corner and are waiting to do anything meaningful about their talent situation.

Maybe it’s that they are too comfortable, or too oblivious, but a recent McKinsey Quarterly article exposes this widespread lack of strategic planning around talent:

“Executives’ concerns about executing and aligning strategy are likely exacerbated by a perceived lack of integration between the company’s strategic-planning group and its human-resources group. When asked to consider strategic planning’s integration with several major corporate functions, respondents rank HR as second-to-last in terms of degree of integration. Respondents who are dissatisfied with their company’s strategic planning see the least integration. Of these, only 14 percent say planning is completely or mostly integrated with HR, and 59 percent say the two groups are integrated slightly or not at all.”

Simple supply and demand planning with some scenario analysis is commonly made in all other areas but HCM. To me, that’s a bit silly if only for the simple reason that people are your biggest asset (or biggest expense – depending on how your look at it). It’s truly time for that to change, and I welcome Dr. Jac’s initiative and look forward to continue working with him this year.

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Erik Berggren is SuccessFactors Director of Customer Results. He has worked on strategic consulting service engagements with more than 30 different companies across Europe and the US. He has held positions with Ernst & Young in Stockholm and New York and most recently worked with Capgemini in the Nordics.

New Poll: Jerks at work?

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Clown - Credit: Bungcayao

There’s been so much conversation recently stemming from Bob Sutton’s book – The No Asshole Rule – that I thought I’d try to gain a better understanding of just how big an issue jerks are at work. Hence, our new poll on the right: Are jerks a big problem at your workplace?

Click an answer to register your vote, and see the poll results. And, if you want to find out if you’re a jerk, click on over to the ARSE test and find out.

President Bush wants pay for performance

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Not for himself, of course, but rather for America’s corporate executives. In New York City today, Bush spoke on Wall Street about his belief that “the salaries and bonuses of CEOs should be based on their success at improving their companies and bringing value to their shareholders.”

So often, pay for performance is a concept assumed to be applicable only to the rank and file. It’s a worthy cause to elevate it to the c-level as well and it’s great that Bush is pushing the idea.

It just makes you wonder what HIS salary would be if we applied pay for performance thinking to his $400k “guideline.” Given his approval ratings, it would be an interesting exercise indeed.

Six SaaS lessons

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Knots

If you’re still debating the merits of Software as a Service there’s an article from The Economist you should read. It’s not about SuccessFactors (though it could be) it’s about Google. Why is an article about Google relevant to SuccessFactors? Well, because they provide their offerings as a service, and so do we. Thus, many of the benefits of the approach are the same:

6 lessons about SaaS using quotes from the article:

1. “Most employees already know how to use web-based software, and thus do not need training. “ Any new application takes some time to get familiar with, but when users are used to the web, they have a tremendous head start with SaaS applications.

2. “They can access the services through any web browser, regardless of what kind of computer (or telephone) they use.” Ummm. Yes. No software to install on every PC. Works with any system anywhere in the world.

3. “And in-house IT staff need do absolutely nothing, since the data and software reside on Google’s server computers.” IT’s opinion will always count, but it’s not another system they have to install, update, secure and maintain.

Continue reading →

The SaaS/On-Demand Benefits Test

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Bullseye

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.

Kaizen, what?

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Kaizen

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.

HRTech Blog Coverage

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ChicagoUnlike 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:

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.