The Changing Face of HR

FACT: HR is a knowledge-based profession.

The Future Focus feature (open to SHRM members only) of the December issue of HR Magazine (open to all), captures the findings of the 2007 HR Career Survey. The findings indicate that HR "is a knowledge-based profession with an increasing need for more skilled and educated professionals as baby boomers approach retirement--a profession tapping into the growing base of women, particularly young women, with college degrees."

Yeah for women in HR. Yeah for men in HR. Yeah for a college education. Yeah for the HR profession.

Mucho Metrics

 Numbers, measures, yardsticks, results. Dashboards, accomplishments, progress and . .  . . score!

I am part of a team tasked with developing a dashboard of HR metrics for our network. To start with, we will focus on recruitment metrics and expand to other key areas. There are books, web sites, white papers, sample score cards, fillable templates, you name it, to assist people like me not yet at the starting gate of measuring HR contributions and organizational impact.

Notice I said contributions and organizational impact - not performance. I don't want our scorecard to be all about HR performance and limited to the timely processing of acti0ns. This is a given and a set of measures we are required to have, but we have room for more. We have room for measures that assess how well the organization is utilizing it's human resources and these are what I am seeking. I could read the books, and believe me, I will. I will read the SHRM white papers and am planning a visit to their metrics page.  

Time to hire, quality of hire, and cost of hire aside, some ideas I am tossing around include % of students/interns we hire, average years of managerial experience in our current supervisors, and % of facility leadership development program graduates assuming greater responsibilities. Yet, even these are not quite capturing the essence of the forward looking dashboard I am trying to get my mind around.

Read, read, read aside, I am curious to know what actually works. So, I ask you, what metrics do you "score" with?  What metrics have you used to catch people's attention? What metrics made them stop and say, "aaaah" or "I hadn't thought about it like that" or better yet, "very interesting!" Which one (s) are you most proud of? Why? 

Here's to mucho metrics for all!

Ban the No. 2

I am attending a HR Manager's Face to Face most of next week. The HR Managers from our network are meeting to discuss the future of HR in our network.

My mantra for the week? My battle cry? Ban the No. 2 pencils! It is great to talk about operating at a strategic level all the time, envision how we would operate, imagine the job satisfaction we can have but talking, envisioning and imagining will only get us so far until we begin to make the tough calls.

The state of network HR is not as bad as my cross country skiing was a few years ago when I went to a workshop and the coach said, "let's just focus on the arms, there are too many things wrong here!" There are a few outliers we can start with:

• We must standardize our processes, not within the medical center only, but across the network. 
• We must be very selective with our hiring and our promotions. Promotions are not entitlements and if the skills we need are not present in our current staff, we need to hire externally.
• We have to mandate automation within our staffs, not encourage it. Yes, that means throwing out the typewriters and halting the show when we see someone addressing  mass mailing letters individually. It means Access databases. It means intranet usage. It means Sharepoint. It means collaborative learning.

The first step is no more No. 2 pencils! We can do this, I know we can!

Update on Monday, May 14, 2007 by Lisa

Here are two references I came across this morning as I am trying to get my head around "strategic HR" and what it means.  These offer a great perspective:

 What Is Strategic HR 

What Isn't Strategic HR 

Fundamental Tension: An Inquiry

I am in the midst of inquiry.

Flashback to 1988. Assistant to the S-1, Personnel Officer, for an advanced individual training battalion. Soldier sent home from advanced individual training, didn't meet physical requirements, very upset veteran parent comes to personnel because drill sergeant said it was our decision (read: fault). Guardian.

Flashback to 2001. Manager of an HR department for a small but growing company. HR manager asks for feedback on perception of HR and gets back "no-no girls." Guardian. Same company. Automated annual review process and HR information system implementation, navigated through first downsizing and participated as member of management team in strategic planning. Partner.

Flashback to last week, April 2006. HR Officer reviews all things HR and hears,  "how could you let this happen?" The words weren't there but the message received sure was. Guardian. Developing targeted recruitment plans for hard to fill positions, building collaborative relationship with union. Partner.

April 2007 Harvard Business Review article, "Avoiding Integrity Land Mines," encourages finance, legal and HR to be both partner and guardian and recognizes the "fundamental tension" that exists between these two roles. Well, as one who lives it every day, fundamental tension is not the half of it. 

Fundamental tension between the roles explains some of what I have been feeling recently but there is something more. Could it be that tension not only exists between the roles themselves but also from the perspectives from which it occurs? Is there tension between operating within an organization and operating for the organization? I am not saying this well, yet, but there is something there for me. Maybe it is time to step out a little further on the branch, be more present, to drive the train vs. guide it. Is this the natural progression of things? Am I growing perhaps? I don't know but I do know I have not felt this way before. Is it the need to lead?

Coming from this perspective, the message, "how could you let this happen?" listened to more closely can be an inquiry in and of itself.  It may more completely be, "how can you stop this from occurring in the future . . . .because I know you can." You know what? So do I.

The inquiry continues.

What Does This Mean for HR Automation

Mr. Allen Pittman, the leadership face of HR automation efforts in VA has resigned. We have not yet received a  public statement or an internal news release so I am not sure what happened but my mind goes right to the automation efforts he was providing leadership for. What does this mean for those efforts and is this the end of leadership support for them. Until I hear and see more, this is not looking good for the home team. Darn! 

Coming Soon to an HR Department Near You

Let me introduce you to our logs. We have logs to maintain the status of many of our personnel actions – gains, losses, position changes, merit promotion and open continuous announcement numbers, position description numbers, submission of background investigations, and more. Born of necessity, these logs serve a purpose but maintaining them adds to our already complex processes. Right now, gathering and providing the information the organization needs often means another spreadsheet or log. I have lamented that we cannot spreadsheet our problems away and applying process redesign principles to a system that requires automation, absent that, will not get us anywhere. We are a paper-based human resource system that has outgrown our legal pads and excel spreadsheets.

And, this is about to change. Under the leadership of Allen Pittman, VA’s assistant secretary for human resources and chief human capital officer, "VA is embarking on a multi-year effort to automate its personnel system." We are about to be uncovered. Not discovered, but literally uncovered. Uncovered from the paper, uncovered from the manual processes, uncovered from the side by side IT systems that don’t communicate with each other or present their information in the same way. Uncovered.

Yes, it is an idea whose time has come. Yes automation is absolutely necessary for us to provide the services, information and resources our organizations need. Yes, I could sit back and simply say "its about time" but I won’t and I hope others don’t either. This is more than a "gimme." To those, like me, who feel that their real contributions are buried under the paper – this is a message. This is a message from leadership that the support is there – not only to the tune of millions of dollars but also to the commitment to provide us with the tools and resources we have said that we need. Mr. Pittman, thank you.

Now, it’s up to me to use this to make a difference in my little corner of the world.

Breaking Ranks

Fast Company published an article last year, Why We Hate HR by Keith Hammond. As you can imagine, this article did not go over well with members of the HR community. I came across it again recently and at the risk of breaking ranks, I’d have to say that I agree with Keith on most of his points.

Now, I don’t agree with the generalities. Come on, not all HR professionals are drones. The HR profession, as well as any other profession, has to claim some drones but you will find that some of us are pretty darn smart. Like others, I choose to work in Human Resources because of the value I find in many of the things that we do each day. And no, for me, it is not simply because "I like people." Truth be told, I really don't like people very much at all.

The value HR has to offer is in contributing to, facilitating, or enabling an organization to meet it’s goals and objectives be it sales, new patient enrollments, employee satisfaction, manufacturing efficiency etc. The value is found sitting beside the Director of Primary Care or any other service, discussing the issues and identifying ways to address them. It is sort of a "perfect storm" of staff, services and organizational support. Our HR departments must be staffed with professionals with the critical thinking and problem solving skills who are technically and strategically proficient to identify services to meet needs. And what is the organization’s role? The organization must provide the necessary support in terms of top down leadership support and resources.

We can go round and round about what comes first, the chicken or the egg but the bottom line is organizational support is necessary for HR, or any service, to function effectively. Consequently, a non-functioning service will have a heck of a time finding much support from down the hall or anywhere else for that matter.

I work in an organization now where the culture, and subsequently the perception of HR, has been very traditional. We are drowning in administration and many days, we cannot see the forest for the tress. Fortunately, the tides of change are occurring close to home. Right now, the network HR Managers have an opportunity to take advantage of leadership's willingness to listen to us, not necessarily as individuals, but as a collaborative force. I know where the bus is heading and am clear that the keys are there for our taking.

Logic says that if we have less time devoted to administering routine, regular tasks, we will have more time to provide proactive, strategic HR leadership to the organization. But can we really? We need to take a hard look at our staff and at ourselves and ask, "do we have the right people in the right seats on the bus to get us to where we need to go?" Listening to the answer. . . .there in lies the challenge for us as HR leaders.

The Tides of Change

I organized and participated in a training yesterday for the roll-out of E-QIP across the 8 medical centers in our network. E-QIP is a system that will allow candidates to submit their background investigations to us electronically. E-QIP is one of the E-Gov initiatives to automate HR administrative processes and with over 40% of my department's time spent on administrative tasks, I welcome any piece of technology I can get my hands on.

Implementing E-QIP will require some changes to our current process and the changes themselves are not significant. This will also provide us with the opportunity to make other changes to our related processes. What struck me most during the training was some of the comments I heard from another medical center along the lines of, "management will never support this" or "they will never let me do that."  Comments like that drive me absolutely crazy.

Yes, there will be bumps in the road; yes, there will be resistance on some fronts; and no, I don't expect all people to welcome change with open arms. What I do expect is for you to identify those bumps, figure out how to transition over them and to, above all, keep the end gains in mind. Some we will be able to implement, others we will not and that should not stop us from even trying. We must be able to anticipate, listen to and address stakeholder concerns and show how making these changes will enable us to serve them better.

Times are changing and you can either be riding the wave or not and be in it as it crashes on the shore. I know where I plan to be, how about you?