Here at SuccessFactors we’re obsessed about driving real impact on companies top and bottom line from smart usage of SuccessFactors. SF Research is all about researching, quantifying and sharing leading practice for this. In this guest post from Chris Thorman at SoftwareAdvice you can read about how companies can save some green for themselves all while going greener in their IT spend.

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In case you haven’t heard (or aren’t obsessively following IT trends like we are), the great trend in software is the evolution from traditional “on-premises” software (e.g. client/server software installed at the office) to Software as a Service (SaaS) (i.e. web-based applications that are managed in the vendors’ data center and accessed “on-demand” through a web browser).

Given what’s at stake for software companies in either camp, debating the merits of each model has led to some fiery discourse. We thought we’d fan the flames by introducing another angle: which model is “greener;” that is, better for the environment. We used electronic medical record software as the comparison example.

We crunched the numbers for each type of software. Here are the quick stats on power consumption of each software delivery method:

On-premises

Total energy consumption by four physicians: 9,408 KW/yr

Individual energy consumption by each physician: 2,352 KW/yr

SaaS

Total energy consumption by four physicians: 611.4 KW/yr

Individual energy consumption by each physician:  152.85 KW/yr

For an even quicker summary, the SaaS software used 93% less energy than on-premise. That is a massive energy savings that if scaled to a large number, has world wide effects on energy consumption.

Today it’s been stated that testing your DNA to assess your potential and how you should train to excel in sports is where sports nutrition used to be a couple of decades ago. On the plane the other night I read this article from Bicycling magazine and it’s really becoming mainstream practice to see where your athletic potential lies. Not so much for absolute levels but to find it relatively if you have fast or slow twitch muscles so you’d know better in what disciplines you could get really good and where you just genetically are already capped.

In business as a manager you do whatever you can to hire and develop your folks to grow into roles that you see a great fit for and have a real business need in. I think it’s safe to say that it would be a while before we figure out how to and allow ourselves to DNA test our colleagues and contractors to help assess their potential (pretty scary and far fetching thought right?!) to drive people performance.

But what is really at your hands as a manager though is to drive as much performance from your people as you possibly can no matter their genetic capability. No one wants to leave work feeling completely underwhelmed or go celebrate some work done if you don’t feel that you did your best. You are a coach and a manager that can and should set up for ultimate performance for your team members. Get your people to feel that they left all they had on the field that day. People want to perform and you as a manager no matter at what level – even when you manage and coach yourself – should set up for this.

A while ago I learned about some of the best research into how you actually drive real people performance. Learnings from high pressure organizations, sports, art and other high performance environments. Elkiem who has studied thousands of high performers and SF Research then recently partnered up to help accelerate their research findings into the hands of people that are accountable for driving people performance in their organizations – and who isn’t?

Look at this paper – Leaders Drive Productivity -  and get some insight on how you could drive better people performance from creating high performance environments  in your organization.

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.

Out here in California, school starts next week. Being new at selecting schools for my kids, I learned that there are at least two things parents seem to be studying when they make a decision on where to place their kids:

- The proportion of kids at the school with free lunch allowance and
- The standardized test scores of the kids at that school

Those are certainly interesting data points, but are those the real and only predictors we’ve got for academic success?

What if human capital management techniques could contribute to our children’s academic success? It turns out that they do, by using them to help manage teachers. Who woulda thunk it? Our SF Research thought leader and partner Dr. Laurie Bassi (President of McBassi & Co, an HCM auditing firm), that’s who.

The results of her work are even more interesting than the topic itself. Dr. Bassi found that although children’s academic success is partially dependent on the level of their parent’s affluence, and the proportion of free-lunches – the school’s HCM practices are more than twice as important.

Listen to my conversation with Laurie about this study on this short podcast.

My question is really how much of this finding can be applied to other non-profit organizations to spur performance and ultimately drive some real productivity? One example: how influential is smarter HCM on putting our tax dollars to better use? I bet we’d all be interested in the answer to that one.

More details on Dr. Bassi’s study and the findings can be found here.

According to a recent study commissioned by Cisco, mobile workers are expected to account for a quarter of the world’s working population by 2009.  With this in mind, how:
•    Can your organization afford not to drive real performance from your remote workers?
•    Can you even attract and retain the people you need if you fight this trend? – Who wants to work for a company that would take personal sacrifices for granted? Hours commuting could be used for personal and company productivity.

Here is my take on answering these questions; I think that it comes down to how you manage and measure the impact that your people are delivering. Simply put; manage potential, measure on output. Face time doesn’t explain real output from peoples’ efforts so you might as well just forget about it. You can’t manage what you can’t see, but do you see peoples’ work just because you see their faces in the office? I doubt it.

Of course there are tasks and times that completely merit people being physically together but not all tasks all the time. Would software that helps you align the goals and monitor performance be helpful for managers to focus on the goals and the execution of these? I think so. Individual contributors, irrespective of where they work and how they are technically being compensated, can get a clear line of sight and produce while being accountable for the output.

Our friends and research partners from the Future of Work are doing research into this area and Jim Ware  and Charlie Grantham will unveil their knowledge on this topic in a SuccessFactors Research webinar on September 12.

Max’s note: We’re proud to present this guest post by SuccessFactors’ Director of Research, Erik Berggren.  

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What’s the best way to be productive? I wager 99% of you just thought to yourself – “waste less time.” After all, if we used every minute efficiently we could build skyscrapers in days, right? Maybe.

According to a new salary.com survey, young people are wasting more time than ever before (2.1 hours/day) at work and the insinuation is that this is major cause for concern. But, it’s not quite as simple as all that. Productivity has a numerator and a denominator. The denominator is time. There’s only so much in a day. The numerator? Output - how much stuff is getting done. To improve your productivity you could work on either or both sides. But it’s a balance, a single minded focus on the denominator is at best somewhat limited.

SuccessFactors’ stated goal is to increase worldwide productivity by 50% and I can tell you that we’re not going to get there by identifying slack time and eliminating it. Peter Capelli ( a SuccessFactors Research thought leader pictured left) shared his thoughts on this survey this morning on Morning Edition on NPR. Click here to listen.

Peter and I had a great conversation around productivity and HCM last week in preparation for his upcoming webinar highlighting some interesting findings from his coming book “Talent on Demand.” There is much more to driving productivity than cutting slack out of the workday and I invite you to join our webinar next week to find out why and what to do about it from one of the greatest thinkers in this area.

With all this talk of the war for talent, it often goes overlooked that an organization’s best place to look for employees is among the employees it already has. In other words, if you can make sure to hang on to the ones you’re already got, you’re a step ahead.

How to do that is of course the age old question. Is it pay? Is it meaning? What is it employees need to have in order to stick around? According to a WSJ article today, it’s coaching.

From the article:

A key differential between a staffer who feels like a valuable part of a company and one who is disengaged is the quality of leadership in their workplace. Most engaged employees work for managers who spend a big chunk of their time helping their subordinates succeed. Managers who focus on talent assign their employees to jobs that play to their strengths, make sure they have the resources they need to perform well, respect their opinions and push them to advance.

To source, screen and hire a new employee is an expensive proposition. Getting managers to spend more time managing and thinking about the people they already have may not cost a dime, but can make all the impact in the world.

A humble post at Execupundit entitled “Note from boss to employees.” 

An excerpt:

1. I am sometimes under enormous pressure from upper management; pressure that you seldom see. Anything that you can do to make my job easier will be greatly appreciated.
2. Your interests are important, but please remember that I also have to juggle the concerns and feelings of a bunch of other people, including individuals outside of the department.
3. I may not have been given a huge amount of training before being named to a supervisory position. As a result, I’ve had to learn through trial and error. That’s not always bad. Many of my responsibilities can only be learned through practice.

It’s often difficult for front line employees to put themselves in the boss’s shoes. Perhaps a bit of humility along these lines could go a long way.

A ways back, I had some thoughts on the wearing of ties in the workplace. Apparently so did you.  After more than 250 votes in our sidebar poll, it has become clear that a fair percentage of readers (~61%) feel the tie still “definitely” or “probably” has a place in today’s work environment. This is very much to my dismay, but I’m willing to accept being in the minority (so long as I don’t have to wear one.)

A new poll coming soon….

Need a good argument for why thinking about employee retention is worthwhile? Via Auren Hoffman’s blog comes a slightly different take on it than you’re probably used to. The story goes something like this:

1. Man wants to work for company X
2. Man ACTIVELY CAMPAIGNS to work for company  X (including setting up a website/blog specifically for the purpose)
3. Blog becomes big hit at company X
4. Man gets hired at company X on “its most important project”
5. Project is killed off
6. Man is fired
7. Man goes on 3 month vacation with severance package
8. Man comes back from vacation
9. Man is hired back at company X on a different project

My view on the lessons to be learned from this:

1. It’s worth knowing who your best and most talented employees are (performance evaluations)
2. It’s worth doing what you can to retain these highly motivated people (pay for performance / feedback, etc)
3. It’s worth knowing what competencies are needed at your company and which employees have them (competency evaluations) – so you don’t get rid of people who are needed and
4. It generally (there are exceptions) makes no sense time-wise, cost-wise or productivity-wise to fire someone you think enough of to hire back at a later date.

Any other thoughts?