Our January 4th UPDATE summarized new research about boardroom analytics from IBM. Here is some additional new HR related board research from David Creelman at Creelman Lambert Research.

David, who has a long-standing research interest in corporate governance, recently decided to investigate these anomalies:

•  “While organizational leaders so often declare employees to be their most important asset, their boards rarely seem to include anyone with deep professional knowledge of people management practices and organizational development.
   
• Employee engagement is much spoken about, but it is striking how often organizational change has been managed in a way that undermines trust and employer reputations, and how many M&As and public sector reorganizations have destroyed value and failed to improve outputs.
   
• Financial analysts mostly display complete disinterest in HR, despite their need to discern the sources of lasting value.”

These anomalies are no secret. For years most of our own work has revolved around helping HR to make better arguments to management about the business impact of their work. David’s new contribution is to report on conversations with a group of successful companies in the US and UK where these anomalies appear to have been addressed and at least partially resolved. READ MORE >

Scenario: A client of ours is planning for substantial hiring. They already hire about 40,000 people a year worldwide and they expect to add 10,000 more in 2012. The additional headcount will work on new products, in new geographies, in two new divisions. Many of the managers and HR staff doing the additional hiring will be new to the company. The parent has a strong brand in the job marketplace and a well-established, consistent staffing culture. Their performance against industry performance benchmarks is above average.

Problem: How do they maintain that brand strength and hiring quality when so many of the staffing personnel are new, are not steeped in the company’s hiring culture, and the growth timetable precludes extensive training. In particular, how do they build accountability and performance into the interview process?

We suggested an idea borrowed from baseball: an interview scorecard.  READ MORE >

Successfully selling staffing’s services to the sales department is a political home run because more C-suite and board meetings begin with, “How are sales this…?” than any other question. When sales are good, everybody smiles. When they aren’t everyone barks and glowers. When they aren’t for long periods of time, heads roll.

Convince your sales managers that you can help them report good results and you will have successfully aligned yourself with two of your organizations main objectives, growth and profitability, and some of its most influential players.

Selling your services begins with data.  Do you know your company’s...

1. Sales figures for the last week/month/quarter?
2. What they are quarter over quarter and year over year?
3. Which geographies are sizzling and which are tepid?
4. Which product lines are carrying the company and which are fizzling?
5. Which market segments are targeted for growth?
6. Which competitors are gaining ground?

We find that staffing departments vary enormously in their access to this type information and in the depth of their knowledge. Some departments work in companies where it’s easily obtained while others work in companies with restrictive, need-to-know-based policies. READ MORE >