Category Archives: News & Technology

Creatively retaining talent

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BrickGigaOm highlights Yahoo’s new attempt at retaining top talent. Called Brickhouse, the project is essentially an in-house incubator meant to give it’s entrepreneurial employees another reason to stick with the company. Not altogether different from the Google 20% – wherein Googlers get to spend 20% of their time on a project of their choosing – it is both a way to satisfy the innate desire to create as well as a method for harnessing that creativity.

The blog discussion is also pretty interesting. Some people think money rules, but others see real value in letting employees explore. I wonder if such tactics are purely in the domain of the high-tech world, or if there’s applicability beyond technology. Could you see something like this at Pfizer or Ford?

The future

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LightAnother post from a few days back on SystematicHR (I just can’t keep up with the guy) in which Dubs hopes that the future of SaaS is a world in which vendors can use abstracted data from their systems to help customers learn what’s working and what’s not for others in their business / industry. After all, across millions of users and hundreds of companies one could imagine all kinds of delicious data that, in anonymous and abstract ways, could be used to identify trends, successes and failures across all kinds of situations.

In fact, this has been the holy grail of such systems for years. Today, such data comes from surveys. But if one could get data directly from what companies are doing, as opposed to what they are saying, how much more accurate and powerful would it be? We think a lot. That’s why were already doing it. We think it’s a huge value to our customers – and one of the ways we’re helping to drive customer success.

Erik took a moment to reply to Dubs’ post. Here’s part of what he said: “We are looking at aggregate data from that enormous resource of ours. To look at what works and not we use publicly available financial information and cross reference those two. The findings we make are very interesting and are being used to further push our thinking of leading practice in different areas.”

You can read more about SuccessFactors research here. And if you have questions for Erik, just email him.

 

 

Is a bonus better than a raise?

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RaiseDepends on who you ask.

Via digg.com, I came across an article from the WSJ entitled “Employers increasingly favor bonuses to raises” – which discusses the whole concept of performance-linked bonuses. According to the article, 80% of companies will offer some from of bonus program this year up from 78% last year and 67% in 1997. The article discusses the pay-for-performance initiatives of Whirlpool, which has made more employees eligible for bonuses and increased the maximum bonus that can be achieved.

According to the article “Whirlpool also awards merit raises based on performance. But it considers bonuses a more powerful motivator. “It starts breaking away at the notion of entitlement,” says David Binkley, Whirlpool’s human-resources chief. With merit pay, “if you just spread it around, it just raises your costs.” Across corporate America, he notes, “those days are coming to an end where everyone just automatically gets this 3.6%, 3.7%” merit raise.”

In case you were wondering, the average raise for 2007 is projected to be 3.7%, up from 3.6% this year  – according to data from Hewitt.

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Boo! Are you scared now?

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Sometimes I read these articles and wonder who benefits from all this fear-mongering. Clearly, someone is out to scare the heck out of us. In any event, Forbes presents “Where have all the leaders gone?,” a rather sanguine look at the looming talent shortage at the C level.

In the article, commentator Kevin Cashman (CEO of a leadership development firm) responds to reader questions. One reader asks “…what practical measures can senior leaders take to deal with potential crises?” Cashman responds:

It may sound simplistic, but the best thing a top leader can do is be a great coach, boss and mentor. After conducting 19,700 exit interviews of key employees leaving companies, the Saratoga Institute found that 85% of bosses thought their top people left for more money and opportunity. But the real reason behind the turnover: 80% said they left due to poor management and leadership or because of a dysfunctional company culture. If you’re a board member, a CEO or a leader on the front lines, paying more attention to the development of your people and teams is the crucial variable for retaining key people.

It’s a point well made. Talent shortages are far more acute for companies that don’t actually work to develop their employees. Keeping the top performers you already have is far easier and more efficient than going back to the well.

Quitting your job in public

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Though perhaps a bit risque for an HR-related blog, one of my colleagues sent me this link and I thought I would pass it along. I figured it might be good for a Friday afternoon chuckle at the very least.

I wont get into details - if you want to know, you can click the link and listen – but suffice it to say that this radio DJ is not going to take it anymore, and she wants all her listeners to know. I bet she’d vote yes on the open salaries question, too.

(Related thought: I wonder if such public outburst are cathartic. I’m sure there are plenty of people who wish that they could tell their employer off, but when it’s over, do they feel better? Would you feel better?)

Transparency means accountability

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Though it’s always true with anything on this blog, i should note here in particular that this post represents my personal opinion on this matter, and not necessarily that of SuccessFactors.  – Max

Why public disclosure of vendor selections will make analysts and vendors more accountable to customers.

Gartner’s Jim Holincheck poses an interesting question. He wonders:

The reality is that industry analyst firms are also customers. We need technology to run our business. It does not make sense for us to build it all ourselves. So, like our clients, we use packaged applications. How transparent should we be about what vendors and products we use?

It’s interesting because Gartner, like most analyst firms, has very specific rules and regulations about when and how vendors can use Gartner’s name in marketing materials. That is to say – basically, never.

It’s not that I don’t understand the dilemma. Surely, in any competitive market, most vendors will be left unhappy when a 3rd party firm (whose value resides in their presumed objectivity) chooses one over all the rest. It can be construed as an implicit endorsement. How can Gartner (and others – like Forrester, Bersin, etc.) be considered objective once they have made a purchase decision for themselves?

But I’m honestly not sure there is a real conflict here. As a professional services firm, Gartner represents a very specific type of company. And, there are other factors that differentiate them as well – like size (medium), industry (technology) and geographic distribution (global). Those factors account for some of the most important considerations in the choice of a vendor for just about anything.

Therefore, the only realistic conclusion is that analyst firms choose vendors that are right for them; for their situation, specifications and needs. Its not logical to assume that the same situation, specifications and needs are shared by every company that might be influenced by a Gartner report. To put it another way, companies that follow in Gartner’s footsteps purely on the thinking that “whatever is right for Gartner is right for me” are probably making an ill-informed decision.

In that way, it can be argued that analyst firms are doing a disservice to their clients by hiding their own choices. By allowing customers the illusion that those choices are the only correct ones, they miss an opportunity to say “here’s why we picked vendor X, but your company is different in this way and so the choice of vendor X may not be right for you.”

Funny enough, Jim makes an innocent but telling misstep at the end of his post. Having apparently posted to his blog from his mobile device, the post is appended with the line: “Sent via Cingular Xpress Mail with Blackberry.” Clearly we all now know that Gartner (or at least Jim) is a customer of both Cingular and Blackberry. They have opened the proverbial kimono. Gartner’s choice of wireless vendor and wireless email service are now public information: Gartner chooses Cingular and Blackberry.

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Jack Welch loves HR

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Really, truly an invigorating little article from a couple of days ago in the UK’s Telegraph. In it, Jack and wife Suzy embark on a spirited defense of the importance of HR. I wish I had something to add to the article beyond a straightforward “see, I told you so” but I don’t. So in place of the usual musings, I give you a few of my favorite bits:

Bit #1:
“Look, HR should be every company’s “killer app”. What could possibly be more important than who gets hired, developed, promoted or moved out the door?”

Bit #2:
“If you owned Real Madrid, for instance, would you hang around with the team accountant or the director of player personnel?  Sure, the accountant can tell you the financials. But the director of player personnel knows what it takes to win: how good each player is and where to find strong recruits to fill talent gaps.”

Bit #3:
“Leaders need to put their money where their mouths are and let HR do its real job: elevating people management to the same level of professionalism and integrity as financial management.”

Yes, indeed.

Read the whole article. You’ll be better off for it.

Guest Post: Don’t Believe the Counter-Hype: Software as a Service Is Here To Stay

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Lars-Dalsgaard-3A Note: this post was written by a guest writer, and does not necessarily represent my opinion. That said, I think it’s important to host a variety of thoughts and perspectives on the blog and thus, I give you the following article written by Lars Dalgaard, the CEO of SuccessFactors. As always, please feel free to comment.

As an outsider that moved into the software industry five years ago, I’ve been amazed to watch the wild mood swings that take place due to over-hyped and over-marketed technology trends – which every vendor seems to chase loudly in pursuit of “the next big thing.”

Of course, customers in the real world are more focused on “what’s now” rather than “what’s next.” And yet they have to wade through reams of white papers, data sheets and web site content to figure out whose software actually does what – and then hope the promised features actually migrated from the press release commentary into the real product code.

The same type of real-world sanity check can tell you whether a technology trend is here to stay or hyped to decay. A good litmus test is whether it’s vendor-driven or customer-driven.

It’s exactly this test that I believe can sort through the hot topic du jour: software-as-a-service. Admittedly the topic has been heavily hyped by Silicon Valley types looking to drive big multiples. And now that some of those high-profile players have experienced some hiccups, the naysayers are working overtime to call the whole idea into question. Scare tactics and “what if” scenarios abound to push people back into their comfort zones.

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SaaS is about results

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Shinycar1

ShinycarShinycarMy favorite SaaS blogger, Phil Wainewright, has a great post from last week about the real benefit of SaaS: It lets everyone focus on results.

He puts it better than I could:

Now, for the first time since that wrong turn the software vendors made all those years ago, on-demand applications are putting business results back into focus. The vendor has already done the implementation before even meeting the customer. The technology is already sorted, and the vendor guarantees to keep it working. What matters is whether the application meets the customer’s business need. The whole conversation revolves around what the customer is trying to achieve, and whether the application can help with that.

Well, isn’t that really what software is meant for in the first place? To get results? It seems quite obvious, but most of our experiences tell us it’s all too rare.

The point he doesn’t make is that we can get to results way faster with SaaS than any traditional software implementation. We don’t need to spend a ton of time or money or effort on the software itself, so we’re free to spend all of our resources pursuing our goals.

It’s kind of like if we had to build a car every time we wanted to go somewhere new. That would clearly be a lot of work. SaaS is like having a car delivered to your door. You still have to drive it to your destination, but don’t have to worry about whether or not (or even how) the car itself works.