It’s pay back time!

It the recent Head Light survey - Justifying spend in hard times: measuring Return on Investment for 360 and Performance Reviews – we asked when users of on-line 360 and performance reviews saw a return on their investment.

Only a fifth of those who had moved, had looked at ROI – but where they had…

• 46% of those moving to an on-line 360 system saw a return on investment within 12 months and over three-quarters (77%) within two years
  
• 17 % of those stepping up to an on-line performance review process saw a return within 6 months,  42% saw a return within 12 months  – and 92% see pay back within two years. 

 Compelling figures for those looking to make the move!

Calculating ROI – are we all doing this?

With economic uncertainty comes the need for greater scrutiny of spend and examination of return of any investment.  But how does this apply to areas of talent management spend?  Are we all justifying our spend, building a business case and looking at the payback on the investment once made?

Our recent survey - Justifying spend in hard times: measuring Return on Investment for 360 and Performance Reviews – looked at just this and took a snapshot of the current practice of ROI measurement and business case creation.

Towards the end of 2012, following questions from customers about how to best demonstrate the value effective talent can bring, we decided to survey the HR and Learning & Development decision makers with whom we regularly communicate.  We chose to focus our research on two of the most widely-used talent activities: 360 feedback and performance review, asking these HR and L&D decision makers and practitioners to complete our on-line survey anonymously during December 2012 and January 2013.

The results are in.

Less than one fifth of those moving to an on-line system have calculated an ROI figure – although a third of respondents to our survey intend to. 18% of respondents to the survey stated that they had already looked at ROI for their on-line 360 system – and a further 39% plan to.  It is a similar picture for those who have introduced on-line performance review systems, with 13% already having looked at ROI and 31% intending to.

But a quarter of both of these talent activity respondents commented that they have no intention to look at the return on investment.

It seems the most common reason cited for not looking at ROI to date is because it is thought to be too soon in the implementation – although 35% of those with on-line performance review systems report that they are not clear how they would go through this exercise. 

To this end, we’re developing a step-by-step guide to help calculate a return on investment figure.  To learn more and to keep in touch, contact us at http://head-light.co.uk/contact/informationrequest.asp

Speedy problem resolution and round the clock ‘up-time’

When you’ve chosen to implement an on-line talent management system, you want a service that is available to your people when they need it  - and any problems or questions you have, resolved and answered as speedily as possible.

And that’s what we commit to.

Year after year we invest in our own people and systems to better support our customers and we are delighted with the service level statistics we have achieved for 2012.

During the last 12 months we:

·         Achieved 99.999% service availability on a 24 x 7 basis.

·         ‘Closed’ support calls made to us on average in 43 minutes.

·         99.2% of support calls were closed within one working day.

·         90.4% of support calls were closed on the same working day.

And we’re looking to improve on this for this year.  Watch this space!

Introducing a more formalised performance review process at MeetingZone

MeetingZone is one of the world’s largest independent conferencing and collaboration services providers and offers customers high performance, personalised audio and web conferencing services. It’s a growing business and we are delighted that Jenny Barnes, MeetingZone’s HR Director has appointed Head Light to work with her and her team as they introduce a more formalised performance review process.

Jenny Barnes comments “Our business has expanded rapidly over the last few years – and, indeed, we have strong growth forecasts for the coming years.  We have recruited many new and talented people and I believe that as an organisation, we have reached an important stage where we need to invest in professionalising our HR activities so that each one of us at MeetingZone understands the role we play in delivering the business plan.”

“As a starting point, I wanted to make sure that our performance review processes were robust to manage the complexities of the business and our structure, as well as highlighting areas where prompt action or intervention is required. I and some of the other senior managers have used other systems in the past in other organisations but what really appealed to us as we looked at Head Light’s Talent® platform is the intuitive ease of use and modular approach that can be taken. We have begun to use the performance review module as it suits our needs today, and as we look to develop our talent management activities in the future, we will be able to expand our customised system.”

Ian Lee-Emery, Managing Director at Head Light comments, “MeetingZone set about implementing the Talent® platform by carrying out a pilot before they started in earnest. We know from experience that this is the best way to successfully implement a new talent process so that issues can be raised and problems resolved. We look forward to hearing how Talent Performance® beds down in the new financial year and what impact it has on the business.”

Jenny concludes “Initial feedback from users and line managers has been very positive and our people see this as a commitment to invest in them, and to make a real difference to the performance of the business.”

Why Talent Management is important

Talent Management has broadly existed in various forms for many years with organisations using such processes as succession planning and competency frameworks to identify and develop their high potential performers.

The term itself wascoined in the late 1990s, gaining particular momentum as firms tuned into the fact that having a consistent and focused approach to managing intellectual capital within the organisation would have a positive impact on the business.

Since then White Papers, surveys, reports and articles on the subject abound, each with perhaps a slightly different definition of talent management and each taking their own angle, but all with the same consistent message: there are clear bottom-line benefits to having an effective, integrated talent management strategy which is underpinned by the broader business imperatives and this enables current and future success.

Impact on business performance

Various studies have focused on these business benefits and the role of talent management practices and, with the EU backing a legislative initiative to improve the gender balance in the boards of companies listed on stock exchanges, there is a further argument for having a more inclusive and targeted approach to talent management.

• Huselid and Becker (1995) researched the HR practices of 740 companies and found that those using High Performance Work Systems (HPWS) or integrated talent management practices had significantly higher levels of organisational performance, measured by an increase in market value per employee.
• Watson Wyatt’s European Human Capital Index study in 2002 suggested that there were 36 HR practices and policies which were associated with an almost 90% increase in shareholder value.
• The Institute of Work at Sheffield University conducted a study on manufacturing companies in 2001.  Its research demonstrated that people management practices were a better predictor of company performance (productivity and profitability) than strategy, technology or research and development, accounting for 20% of the variation in the financial performance indicators.
• Ernst & Young in its report titled ‘Managing Today's Global Workforce: Elevating Talent Management to Improve Business’ found that those companies which effectively manage talent consistently, deliver higher shareholder value. They analysed results from a survey of 340 senior executives conducted in 2009 to assess global talent management practices and evaluate their impact on business.  It was found that companies which align talent management with business strategy deliver, on average, 20% higher return on equity than those without alignment; those that integrated their talent management programmes delivered 38% greater returns.

 

Impact on employee engagement

Another strong argument for investing in a coherent talent management strategy is engagement.
There is a growing wealth of data which suggests that an engaged workforce leads to a range of organisational performance benefits.  For instance, the 2009 MacLeod report to Government cited a number of correlates of high engagement levels, many which have been reported by the poll experts Gallup in its studies of engagement.
Among its findings:

• In organisations with strong talent and engagement practices, more employees were likely to recommend the company to others, with 67% of employees in organisations who had strong Talent Management practices advocating their company versus only 33% of employees in the organisations which did not.
• When comparing business units, those with engagement scores in the bottom quartile averaged 31 – 51% more employee turnover, 51% more inventory shrinkage and 62% more accidents than those in the top quartile.  Looking at the same business units, those with engagement scores in the top quartile averaged 18% higher productivity and 12% higher profitability.
• In a study on the earnings per share (EPS) growth of 89 organisations, they found that the EPS growth rate of organisations with engagement scores in the top quartile was 2.6 times that of organisations with below-average engagement scores.

Engagement is now understood to be a major driver of individual and organisational performance, and has therefore become a management imperative and an important aspect of talent management.
An effective talent management strategy will ensure that critical roles are understood and that key people and your stars of tomorrow are identified, managed appropriately through the organisation, engaged, motivated, empowered and retained.  Effective talent management practices and engagement are strongly linked.

If you would like to read more about developing the talent management strategy for your business - or updating the plans you already have, contact us and we'll send you the first in our series of three White Papers.

Making Talent Reviews more effective

As an HR Business Partner, you need to know where the pipeline of future talent is going to come from within your area of the company. Do you have sufficient internal talent to drive the future growth of the business, as set out in your strategy? What are the gaps between the resources you have and what the company will need in the next 2-5 years? What are managers doing to grow and develop the people in their teams? Are there any critical roles or posts which do not have suitable successors and where your organisation is at risk? What do you need to do or put in place to mitigate against these risks, and ensure the sustained growth and success of your part of the business?

The forthcoming round of talent reviews should help you to answer these questions.

Talent Review Scenario 1

You are an ambitious, motivated person and you want to advance your career as far as you possibly can. You work hard and are keen to show that you’re a valuable asset to the company. Your skills and experience befit a role which is far beyond the requirements of the post you currently hold; you took an entry level job with the company because of the wider opportunities the business can offer. Whilst you consistently exceed your objectives, you get the feeling that your line manager doesn’t always recognise your worth, and you don’t always see eye to eye. But you know that the organisation has a talent review process through which high potential can be spotted and promoted to positions where they can really add value so you’re willing to stick with your current job for now...

Talent Review Scenario 2

You manage a large team in a growing area of the business. You know your team pretty well and they’re all good people; some have clearly reached their ceiling but are happy to remain the solid bedrock of the Division, but others show potential far beyond their current role and you recognise that you can’t keep all of them in the long-term. It is likely that the company will get the most value from them - and that they are more likely to resist the amorous advances of your competitors - if they are given opportunities to grow, develop and ascend the ranks: this is likely to mean that they will not remain in your part of the business, but that’s what good management is all about. It can be as difficult to manage these ‘stars’ as it is to deal with the underperformers, but the organisation has the talent review process in place so this will give you the opportunity to ensure that there are growth opportunities either within your own area , or across the organisation for them. You are looking forward to seeing their careers accelerate...

Talent reviews are an essential element of talent management, since they are the organisation's opportunity to identify and make best use of rising stars, but they are also often poorly managed or misused. In theory, talent reviews should form an integral part of the people strategy and should enable the company to make best use of its assets. In reality, the process is fraught with difficulties and rarely fulfils the needs and expectations of the key stakeholders, as described above.

In this article we will consider why this might be, and share some practical steps that organisations can take to improve the utility of their talent reviews.

Read the full article here

Leadership and Learning Agility

Increasingly we are hearing from organisations that are moving away from highly bespoke, tailored models of leadership effectiveness within their organisations to using generic, cross-sector criteria for assessing their top people, finding talent and developing their pool of leaders.

One recurring theme among these generic models is learning agility. This is not a new concept; in their 1985 paper “Leaders: The Strategies for Taking Charge”, Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus identified ‘the development of self’ as a key dimension associated with success, finding that the majority of successful leaders “are highly proficient in learning from experience’. Sternberg, Wagner, Williams and Horvath (1995) set learning agility out as being distinct from basic intelligence and linked it to concepts such as ‘street smart’, ‘savvy’ and ‘common sense’. However, we may now be seeing the emergence of learning agility as a key, underpinning leadership competency which has the potential to influence the way we select and develop leaders in much the same way as the EQ revolution did. Lominger, the developers of research-based assessment and development tools that can be customised to fit any organisation’s culture or operating style, have Learning Agility as a core concept within their frameworks and have defined it as being “able and willing to derive meaning from all kinds of experience” (Eichinger & Lombardo, 2004).

What does learning agility look like? What behaviours might the ‘learning agile’ leader demonstrate? We think it encompasses the following things:

• The ability to reflect on experience; to learn from one’s own and others’ successes and failures and to use this learning in the future
• The willingness to seek out challenging experiences, opportunities to develop and try out new behaviours and strategies
• Showing an openness to feedback; actively seeking feedback from multiple sources, assimilating and using it to improve future performance
• The ability to perform well in first-time, challenging conditions
• The ability to derive learning from a range of different situations, opportunities and sources
• The ability to apply new strategies, concepts, behaviours and knowledge to novel problems; not sticking to just one ‘success recipe’ that may be inappropriate for the context.

So, if we are saying that these qualities are essential for leadership effectiveness, how can we 1) select leaders who have this quality, 2) can we develop it and 3) if the answer to 2 is “yes”, how do we do that?

There are a number of ways in which we have seen learning agility measured as a competency:

• Use the behavioural markers of learning agility to conduct a 360 degree review
• Give an individual an exercise (e.g., a problem solving activity). Let them do it, give them feedback and then administer a parallel exercise and look at how their approach differs - through observation and by interviewing them afterwards on their rationale behind doing particular things
• Conduct a critical incident-based interview which focuses on how the individual has learned key concepts, skills, abilities, knowledge and behaviour, and how they adapt their approach to different situations
• Use a psychometric test such as the Cognitive Process Profile, which consists of simulated problem-solving exercises and monitors candidates on their ability to explore, link, structure, transform, remember, learn and clarify information. This test also provides an indication of the cognitive level at which the individual is currently performing, and the level to which they might be able to develop to, given appropriate opportunities. It gives feedback on an individual’s ability to explore and use new information, analyse, structure, solve problems and their capacity to learn from the process and incorporate that learning into subsequent problems.

Can learning agility be developed? The underlying principles on which the CPP was developed would suggest so. Some practitioners take the view that it cannot be taught, but can be developed in those who have the innate trait. But aren’t all human beings capable of learning? If we accept that we engage in a huge amount of learning throughout our entire lives, then why can’t we learn to be more agile in our learning? Whilst we are not saying that some individuals are naturally more agile than others, we think there are some ways in which we think that learning agility could be encouraged and developed:

• Leaders could be helped, through coaching, to adopt the practices employed by effective learners (e.g., taking time after key events to reflect on one’s own performance and to note lessons for the future, to become more aware of one’s own learning preferences and to actively engage in all four stages within Kolb’s learning cycle, etc)
• Supporting individuals in deliberately seeking out experiences which would stretch them out of their comfort zone
• Ensuring personal development or career plans include a range of different learning opportunities, which tap into different learning styles or modes
• Engaging in team or peer reviews to analyse the efficacy of decisions made, gathering a range of views on how different people would approach the same situation and to collectively explore alternative strategies.

It could be also argued that being an agile learner must be a pre-requisite for developing other key leadership skills and that it is also important that senior managers role model learning agility in order to create a culture of continuous learning and personal growth. It’s also something that an individual can demonstrate in any role, regardless of the stage the individual is at in their career. So if learning agility is closely linked to leadership success, then it’s probably something we could focus on as a marker of potential for the highest-level leadership positions, which makes it a highly useful concept.....