I was forwarded this soon-to-be infamous email exchange between a spurned hiring lawyer and an uppity law school graduate today. It’s remarkable how little emotional intelligence is displayed on both sides. Sometimes it takes a little effort and common sense to be polite, but it’s usually worth it – and especially so when you’re a want-to-be member of a small professional community.

It reminds me of all the times I’ve encountered such things in my own professional career. I once had a boss who was so generally offensive for lack of emotional intelligence that her staff was a constantly shifting grouping of people who rotated into her department hesitantly and out of her group as quickly as possible. Vendors would refuse the company’s business once they understood who they’d be required to work with. But this company had no formal performance management or 360 process that would have enabled the feedback that may have had a chance to fix things. The result was a largely ineffective group.

Changing people’s behavior is one of the most difficult challenges there is, but without an infrastructure for providing feedback, it’s virtually impossible. Hank Paulson, the CEO of investment bank Goldman Sachs delivered a memorable quote that I picked up somewhere:

“One of the things we have done for years is 360-degree reviews.  It’s amazing when you go to a leader and say, “There are 30 people who reviewed you, and 30 of them trust you.  But all 30 say you don’t listen well.”  It has an impact.”

 

Another article over at WPS mag to which I was pointed. Bausch & Lomb (a customer) via Vice President of Human Resources and Chief Privacy Officer Clay Osborne is talking about what performance management means to them as a growth focused company. Just a few years back, Bausch and Lomb was in a turnaround situation. Today, the turnaround is over and the company is again focused on growth – from a $2 billion enterprise to $5 billion.  Clay talks about how performance management is an important component of reaching that goal:

A growth culture requires entrepreneurial behavior—more innovative, more creative types of behaviors and attitudes that are reinforced. To get from a $2 billion company to a $5 billion dollar company in five years requires not only mergers and acquisitions, it requires tremendous growth in sales. From a performance management standpoint, we target every individual’s objectives to those broad goals, and to ensure that it’s done in an ethical way we embed in ‘the right way’ objectives, ethical integrity expectations and behavior.

Blogs are supposed to be informational resources, right? Not just a bunch of idiots mouthing off at each other. Well, in that vein, I give you a roundup of all the web events I can find that have to do with HR. I’m always trying to see what’s going on out there, and I figure other people must be, too.

Mostly I’m focusing on the obvious sources, so feel free to submit your events and I will update this post as they come in. I hope to do this monthly if it gets a good response. Feel free to chime in and let us know which ones you’re planning to attend

Onward – Listing after the jump.

January 11th
Creating A Corporate University That Succeeds @ HR.com
The Elements of Employer Brand Building @ Human Capital Institute
Getting Started with Performance Management @ WPSmag.com

January 12th
Effective Use of Tools to help you with your PR and Marketing @ HR.com

January 17th
HCM Technology State of the Union: What we learned in 2005 that will affect your decisions in 2006 @ HR.com

January 18th

Sometimes all the high-level talk about performance management can leave you – how should I put this? – wanting more. Today I sat through a 45 minute webinar that left me thinking – "alright, I know you CAN do it, and it SHOULD work – but can you show me HOW TO do it, and that it DOES work?" I mean, where’s the beef? Show me the money! Is any of this actually real?

Well, in that vein I came across some data today showing that one of our customers with about 4,000 employees is saving half a million dollars per year on recruiting costs (because they are able to identify and promote more people from within), and has identified 40% more successors than before implementing the technology. I’m not bringing this up to toot our SuccessFactors horn (alright, maybe just a little) but instead, to show you some beef.

It’s easy to get caught up in the jargon and sales pitches when you’re talking about enterprise software. Don’t forget to ask about the beef.

Interesting report from AMI Research showing that On-demand HR applications are taking off among small and medium sized businesses. There’s a very strong case to be made for software as a service (SaaS) use among SMBs – low upfront costs, easy implementations, high configurability, super-quick time to real value and so forth. We released a couple of completely new products recently to serve these markets – Professional Edition and Manager’s Edition. I’ll spare you the commercial (you can click on the links if you’re interested).

From the report’s press release:

According to Sau Lam, Research Analyst at AMI-Partners, “Several factors are fueling this trend. Traditional on-premise HR applications are often too costly, time-consuming and resource-intensive for most SMBs to deploy and manage. Full-service HR outsourcing can also be too expensive. Plus, it requires that customers sacrifice visibility and control. Web-based solutions can potentially provide SMBs with a more viable option for servicing their HR needs,” Ms Lam continued. “At the same time, SMB HR needs are growing. They need to automate operations to meet increasing regulatory requirements, and compete more effectively to maintain a dwindling supply of skilled personnel in a shrinking labor force.”

Much has been made about the Internet as a force of democratization, and that’s true even in the world of enterprise software. As a former small business owner, I loved SaaS applications becuase they gave me functionality that similar sized competitors could only dream of. In that way, they lent a real competitive advantage. That advantage is especially true with HR software.

Workforce performance management is, in some ways, more impactful in smaller companies in which there is less margin for error. Good HR applications can reduce administrative burdens that can bog you down. They can also provide the benefits of goal alignment and performance management processes that make sure everyone is pulling together and that the company is getting the most out of its employees and vice versa.

Frank "The Proposalnator" Lynn (author of this recent post) points me to an article in Fortune called "For Happier Customers, Call HR." It echoes something I heard recently at a talk given by the legendary Jac Fitz-Enz – namely that unless marketing backs up its taglines with some customer service people who drink the kool-aid, what you get is a load of customer experiences that don’t match with customer expectations.

The article tells the tale of customers of T-Mobile who were told they would "Get More," but instead got long hold times and clueless reps. So guess how you solve the problem? Put HR and Marketing together to make sure the people being hired match the values being promoted.

From the article:

Sounds like common sense, doesn’t it? But surprisingly few companies do it. "We call the gap between HR and marketing the ‘white space’ in organizations," says Don Schultz, founder of a think tank at Northwestern University called the Forum for People and Performance Management. "The customer-contact people don’t report to anyone in marketing or have any contact with them." Neither does anyone in HR, so HR isn’t able to put customer-service people in place who can deliver on the marketers’ message. Northwestern’s latest research (see ROI of Integrated Marketing at www.performanceforum.org) shows that both HR and marketing managers are well aware of the white space: "We started studying this because people from 40-odd big companies like Honeywell, GE, and AT&T asked us how to fix it." 

Read more for how T-Mobile addressed the problem. 

One of my favorite 80’s TV shows was Sledge Hammer.  Hammer was an offbeat cop in the Get Smart/Monk tradition who had a great tagline: “Trust me.  I know what I’m doing.”  This was the ultimate ironic statement because his wacky, unconventional methods didn’t exactly reinforce to the viewer that he knew what he was doing, nor that he should be trusted.  To organizations looking for Workforce Performance Management software, vendors sound like Sledge Hammer.  They all claim to be trustworthy, but the proof is in the pudding.

As SuccessFactors’ Proposal Manager, I deal with trust issues on a daily basis.  Many RFPs and Technical Questionnaires have questions that center around data security.  In today’s post-HIPAA, post-Sarbanes-Oxley environment, safeguarding data and implementing comprehensive controls has become a top priority.  Risk Managers and IT Directors are under a lot of stress.          

In addition to developing a comprehensive suite of Workforce Performance Management software solutions, SuccessFactors has taken steps to ensure that your organization’s Risk Management professionals can sleep better at night, including:

·        A fully redundant, secure network infrastructure with backup and failover capabilities
·        Intrusion Detection and Vulnerability scanning
·        24×7x365 Live operator monitoring
·        Configurable user group and data access permissions that allow you to comply with data privacy laws

Additionally, we are Safe Harbor Certified by the US Department of Commerce.

As a Software as a Service provider with an industry-leading 98% renewal rate, we recognize the importance of earning and keeping the trust of our customers.  That’s why we allow them to perform infrastructure and application vulnerability testing – to have every assurance that their data is safe in our system.

SuccessFactors’ is the industry leading Trusted Advisor that supports organizations in achieving their objectives of rapidly aligning, developing, motivating, and maintaining their high-performance workforces.

Trust us.  We know what we’re doing.

As a followup to a previous post on forced ranking, I thought you’d like to see this article at workforce.com. It reprints an appendix from Dick Grote’s new book called Forced Ranking: Making Performance Management Work.

It’s a memo from a CEO to his company explaining the benefits of an upcoming forced ranking process and how it will work. It’s easy to see how communicating this well can remove some of the fear from the process and highlight the win-win aspects of the initiative.

DubDubs from systematicHR (Previously Known As The HR Technology Discussion board – so update your links) has some new thoughts on the performance management shootout from the HR Tech show in Chicago.  Although he wasn’t there, his (very educated and experienced) feeling is that Authoria won becuase of a spiffy user interface and solid integration between the modules they’ve acquired (as opposed to built). For a play by play of the shootout, you can see my post from that day.

I agree in part. I was there, and I felt that in the short time each company had to present, just about the only takeaway one could have was a general impression having to do with the UI. That’s not a fault of the shootout itself. The shootout is a great idea, and the execution was flawless. It’s just that each company is only given a few minutes to demonstrate its application and therefore the demos move so quickly they can be hard to follow.

What gets lost in all this is the functionality and overall usability of the application (versus the usablity of any one module). Dubs asks "So what happened to WorkStream and SuccessFactors? Clearly we can’t say that they didn’t have the functionality, integration, or UI." And he’s right, there’s just no time for the audience to fully digest those aspects of the presentations.

The point I think may get lost in all this relates to other aspects of comparison between vendors like customer retention, customer service, customer satisfaction, customer recommendations and so on. To be clear, we think our UI and overall user experience are the best in the business, but we believe that it’s our relentless focus on our customers that sets us apart.

By way of further reading, Dubs says he considers "Authoria, SuccessFactors, WorkStream, and Recruitmax to be the leaders in the field," and he’s reviewed all four vendors here and here.

Watson Wyatt released a study today which shows that while employers are leveraging best practices when designing their performance management programs, they are falling short in the implementation of those programs.

From the study’s summary:

In designing their performance management programs, most employers have adopted best practices — including providing a formal yearly review (98 percent), helping poor performers improve (96 percent) and offering coaching and feedback (91 percent) — but they have been less successful in implementing them. For example, while 92 percent of programs are designed to link pay to performance, only 79 percent of employers say that managers at their organization are moderately or greatly effective at it. Employees see even more room for improvement with only 52 percent indicating that their managers tie pay to performance.

The best program in the world can’t reach it’s potential if it’s not intelligently put into place. It’s software’s achilles heel and another reason why you’ve got to be really careful when choosing a performance management partner. The best package will not mean anything if people don’t understand it, have a hard time using it, or it simply doesn’t work right. At SuccessFactors, we have an entire professional services team dedicated only to implementing our applications and ensuring our customer’s success.

One suggested remedy from Watson Wyatt: training.

Only 36 percent of organizations have a formal training program to enhance managers’ ability to manage rewards. However, managers at companies that offer such a program are more effective at providing coaching and feedback, providing formal periodic performance discussions and helping poor performers improve.