- Focus on Top Talent
- Improve your Employment Value Proposition (EVP)
- Employee Engagement (discretionary effort)
Focus on your top talent. There are a lot of ways
to do this, but you need a systematic approach. Identify your
high performers. Then verify they are high performers.
Studies in retail environments have often shown that a significant
amount of revenue is generated by relatively few sales staff – for the
sake of simplicity, lets call it 80/20. 80% of sales were driven
by 20% of the staff (actuality, this was closer to 10% of the
staff). If you were to focus on retaining, developing and using
these staff as mentors for new staff imagine the improvement to the
bottom line. Using metrics, track and determine the best (say net
sales/product turnover, as product turnover = performance), then
learning what separates these staff from the others. Not to get
into too much detail, but in any organization you need to track the data
surrounding your best employees, and then use comparisons (top 10% to
average, top 10% to bottom 10%) to demonstrate the value of your
programs.
Recently I compared the performance levels of managers with a specific training program we offered, versus managers without the training and there was (at the 99% confidence level), a significant improvement in performance. Having this information makes it a lot easier to get buy in for future programs.
Improve your Employment Value Proposition, or why work for company A over company B. This is one I love, because it is very strategic. When executed properly, you improve the quality of your hires, they command less of a premium to join your organization (according to the CLC a 10% lower premium for candidates choosing high EVP organizations over low EVP), and best of all – you can take the top talent away from your competitors, thus robbing them of talent. If you’re doing that consistently it would be an impact you would love to bring to the C-Suite’s attention. This has a couple steps:
- Assess your EVP against benchmarks in: Rewards, Organization, Opportunity, Work, People
- Determining the preferences of your work force (what does the ideal candidate want in your organization)
- Develop and improve your EVP (align what you offer, to what your ideal candidate wants – then market this)
- Market it! (steps 3/4 are a good time to partner with your marketing/communications department for their expertise)
- Evaluate the program, and it’s successes
An easy way to evaluate it is to track the percentage of “top talent / # 1 candidates” that you identified in interviews that joined your organization, and in particular ask them who else they interviewed with. Or following up on your number 1 candidates who declined positions with your firm to join others.
Lastly, Employee Engagement. I don’t think there is a manager or an HR professional not well versed in employee engagement. Employee Engagement is a way to measure the discretionary efforts of your workforce. I personally like both Hertzberg’s model (as an isolated investigation tool) and the Gallup 12 question survey for organization benchmarking because of it’s significant history and ease of access to industry engagement information. So, I’m not going to talk about how to improve employee engagement. No, my 2011 hope is that HR professionals start (if they haven’t already) demonstrating quantitatively the impact of employee engagement. I suggest a very simple metric for this: profit/employee and individual work unit employee performance ratings.
By comparing organizational employee engagement levels to organizational profits (profit/employee demonstrates employee productivity in an easy way) we have hard numbers to bring back to executives when we want support for our new programs. These comparisons are also useful in areas generating sales, but for cost-centres within organizations you may need to find a new comparator (internal client satisfaction with HR vs. HR engagement levels etc.). The key is comparing engagement to the key performance indicators for individual areas.
Anyway, I hope you find these interesting and if you have any other ways you HR can be more relevant this coming year feel free to contact me here or on LinkedIN, or leave a comment.
Tyler Totman
Twitter: @FAPhoenix