My December round-up covering articles I’ve enjoyed that month (admittedly I saved the articles…but didn’t write about them until mid January). This month is focused on Performance Improvement, Strategy, and running virtual meetings (more common than ever in the economic climate). I’ve summarized the articles for all the other busy HR professionals out there. This month’s articles are:
- HBR: Stop Competing to be the Best
- Bain & Co: Using Employee Segmentation to Bring Out the Best in your Workforce
- Fortune Magazine: Think Virtual Meetings Are Hard?
Bain & Co – Using employee segmentation to bring out the best in your workforce
Intro: Most companies recognize that not all customers are alike and offer different value propositions based on the preferences of various groups. Recently, leading companies have started to apply the same approach to their own employees. (A perfect tie in for the Employment Value Propisition if I’ve ever seen one)
Summary:
- Segmenting employees and addressing them this way improved performance by 70% in one organization while reducing costs by 30%.
- The key is not all employees are alike, they are all motivated by different factors based on their own circumstances.
- One Utility broke their workforce into three segments:
- Hidden Stars – who were performing poorly but able to be motivated by performance pay.
- Service-focused – high performing and willing to work different shifts for greater reward.
- Experienced Craftsmen – most skilled, generally older and financially secure these employees would trade flexibility for protection their pensions.
- My Note: A modern HR shops needs to build around this concept of employees as segments for all their programs, as they all tie into this. Who gets training, total rewards by segment etc. Build your HR operating model and programs around this principle to improve your organization.
Full Article: http://www.bain.com/publications/articles/using-employee-segmentation-to-bring-out-the-best-in-your-workforce.aspx
HBR – Stop Competing to be the Best
Full disclosure here, I am a huge Michael Porter fan (particularly his work on economic / industry clusters).
Intro: For
most people, “being the best” is what competition is all about. So
General Motors CEO Dan Akerson was simply echoing popular sentiment
when, on the day the new GM went public, he threw down the gauntlet:
“May the best car win!” he told reporters. The phrase reflects an
underlying belief about the nature of competition that feels so
intuitively correct that it is almost never examined or questioned. But if you want to win, says Michael Porter, this is absolutely the wrong way to think about competition.
Summary
- The first issue with competing to be the best is in most instances there is no simple “best” item. No key set of characteristics that meet all needs.
- Competing to be the best is a zero-sum game; this isn’t necessarily so in business where companies like WalMart and Target can thrive and co-exist by offering different value propositions to their customers.
- Instead be unique – differentiate yourself from your competitors.
- Competing on single or single set of features ultimately leads to a price war – and there are no winners in a race to the bottom.
- My Note: As an HR professional, particularly in Alberta far too often I hear “we can’t compete with Oil & Gas on salary, how can we attract the people we need.” Well, this ties back into EVP again, find out what different employees want and target them. Try being a lifestyle firm, or compete on other factors (development, opportunity for travel etc.).
Full Article: http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/11/stop_competing_to_be_the_best.html
Fortune Magazine – Think Virtual Meetings are hard?
Intro: With teleconferencing, Skype, and global conference calls, technology has wrought a sea change in the way people hold meetings. That can be great, not least because it saves some big companies millions annually in travel costs. (This is a basic article, better for videoconferencing than the more common teleconference).
Summary
- Minimize distractions. Most humans don’t multi-task effectively. So don’t, or you end up being the person who asks the same question for the third time during the call after the other two people who were also working on something else and not listening.
- Keep your eyes on the camera. This helps with eye contact.
- Speak slowly. Pause between ideas.
- Keep it collaborative. Too often meetings are one person pushing out their information, so focus on brainstorming as well and openly as we do in-person.
Full Article: http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2011/12/08/think-virtual-meetings-are-hard-youre-right/?iid=SF_F_LN