Archive for the ‘employee’ Category

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Bad Money After Good: Preserving Your Employee Investment

Sunday, August 24th, 2008

How can you preserve the investment in your IT employees?

The great thing about talent portability in today’s IT market is that whenever you have a need to fill a position that requires a specialized set of skills or experiences, you can generally go shopping and find exactly what you need. The downside to this is the simple fact that your competition can do the same thing and they might be selecting from your employees!

Gone are the days in which firms developed their talent from within. Carefully nurturing those-who-would-be managers, giving them the training that they needed and rotating them among job assignments so that they would be ready when the trumpet sounded for them to take center stage in the Colosseum of business. Perhaps somewhat sadly, that model no longer exists.

Instead, today’s IT professionals are free to move on whenever a better opportunity presents itself. Applicant-tracking company Taleo has done a survey in which it was revealed that 80% of firms that participated in the survey have moved away from this “we know whats best for you” model to now starting to use internal job boards that are designed to make it easy for employees to apply for open positions and move around within the firm instead of leaving it. The poster child for this approach is Dow Chemical who was able to cut its turnover rate in half when it moved to using the internal job board approach to fill positions.

A small note of experience is probably due at this point. I’ve worked at a number of large firms in which it was mandatory that all openings were posted on the job board. However, the position was often already effectively filled by the posting manager long before the posting. Once the rest of the firm starts to understand that the job board is basically just window dressing, its value and its ability to retain staff goes down significantly.

What’s interesting about the shift to using a job board approach is that it moves the burden of managing an employee’s career from the company over to the employee. This has, of course, caused a great deal of chaos. The disconnect comes when an IT team member wants to move on to another job opportunity and his/her manager doesn’t want to let them go. Now we’ve got conflict! Welcome to the world of negotiations – somebody needs to be able to step in and find a way to preserve the investment that the company has made in this employee.

Different firms are finding different ways to deal with this issue. McKinsey tries to resolve this type of issue by (of course, it’s McKinsey after all) using rankings: how did the employee rank the job posing opportunity and how has the employee’s team ranked them on the current project that they are working on? If all of this analytical work does not resolve the issue, then the Senior Partner gets brought in to play the role of King Solomon. Before they imploded, Bears Sterns had created an office of mediation which took on the job of working out such differences between employees and their managers when an employee wanted to move on to another internal job.

In the end, the world of employee training and retention has been turned upside down. Where once firms were responsible for training and managing the careers of their employees, now that is no longer the case. Instead, the responsibility for managing one’s career is now the responsibility of each employee and training, which used to be a given, is now viewed in terms of its short term payback to the company. The old system of talent management had been set up along the lines of an engineering system: given a set of inputs, a predictable set of outputs would be produced. Today’s talent management is much more fluid. It is driven more by external market conditions and viewed through operations tools that are better able to adapt to increasing levels of uncertainty. It is possible to manage your pool of talent, you just need to update the tools that you are using to do it with.

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Posted in employee, IT jobs, IT manager, recruiting, retention | 1 Comment »

Staffing Flexibility Is Soooo Underrated!

Monday, August 18th, 2008

Flexibility is needed in order to ensure that you will be able to staff your IT department

If you thought that just barely getting by using skills to manage your IT staffing needs using both home grown talent as well as warm bodies that you purchased off the street was tough, just imagine how challenging it is when you try to move things up one level and adapt your IT organization to the uncertainty in demand for IT talent. Just think about that for a moment: how would your life be different if instead of running around trying to fill holes in your organization as they occur, you could actually be ahead of the 8-ball and be ready for changes as they came?

Here’s a fundamental thought that will help you to solve this staffing problem once and for all. It’s based on lessons that our supply chain friends learned the hard way a long time ago. Instead of trying to stock your IT department with every body that you think that you might need both today and for the next x number of years, instead do what the supply chain guys do. Bring in small batches of what you need more often. This will allow you to not have to attempt to predict your staffing needs so very far out.

For a good example of how the current IT hiring/staffing process is broken, take a look at how recent college graduates are brought into the organization. Most firms do almost all of their new graduate hiring right after the students get out of college. This means there is a wave of new recruits that enter the firm in June. Even if you allow for some new-hire orientation and perhaps some training, the firm still has a need to carve out a substantial number of new-hire spots all at once. If the company is struggling in the current quarter, then this can be especially difficult.

A different way to handle this issue would be to take this single large problem and divide it into two smaller parts. Not all college graduates really want to go to work immediately after finishing 4, 5, or 6 years of intense schooling. Some would more than willing to delay their start date by 3-6 months. If this was done, then the firm would only have to process half as many new recruits at a time. More personal attention could be paid to each incoming employee and better fits for talents and interests could be made. Having fewer number of new hires to place but having them more often makes the staffing challenge much easier – you never have too many or too few. Retaining non-working students for 3-6 months can be as simple as agreeing to pay them 1/2 salary until they start working full time.

Long and expensive training programs present the same challenge. A two year management training program could be broken up into four 6 month programs. Each smaller program could have its own goals and forecasts. The benefit of doing training this way is that should an employee in training decide to leave the firm, then the entire training program expense may not have been spent on them.

Finally, within IT organizations different programs are often allowed to maintain and run their own talent management programs. The end result of this is that all too often, one program will have too many potential managers and another will have too few. Since there is no centralized way to communicate these supply issues, the firm generally just deals badly with the imbalance. If talent management within the IT department was centralized, then this issue would not occur.

So now we have an understanding of where to find IT talent and we now know how to deal with fluctuation in the need for IT talent, I guess the next thing that we should talk about would be how to improve the Return on Investment spent on developing employees…

How does IT staffing work at your firm? Do you seem to have waves of new employees sweep in every so often? Is your department set up to handle this flood of talent? Have you ever tried to manage the process by adding fewer new employees more often? What was the result? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

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Posted in employee, employee motivation, it, personnel, staffing, training | No Comments »

A New Way To Think About IT Talent Management

Monday, August 11th, 2008

Talent Management problems are very similar to supply chain problems

So hopefully we can agree that most firm’s approach to talent management is at best broken, and often missing-in-action. What’s an IT manager to do? Well, let’s first look for a process that actually works in the modern corporation and then let’s see what we can do to model it for talent management. That can’t be that hard to do can it?

If you very coldly view staff as “products” for just one fleeting moment, then you might be able to agree with me that one might be able to view talent management as some sort of soylent green supply chain problem. There has been a lot of work done on how to improve and optimize supply chains over the last 60 or so years and we can use this work to improve how we manage talent today. If you’ll allow me to extend the product analogy just a little bit further, then you’ll find that the nirvana of talent management would be if we could create a “just-in-time” delivery system that would provide the right employee at the right time to get the job done correctly.

Since inventing a brand new way to do talent management would be too risky, let’s take a closer look at what supply chain processes can do for us here:

  • The bane of talent management is forecasting how many people will be needed over time. Supply chain processes have exactly the same challenge; however, they’ve come up with a way to do it.

  • Reducing the costs of manufacturing a product is very similar to a company’s efforts to minimize the amount that they spend to develop talent.
  • The common practice of outsourcing parts of a manufacturing process is equivalant to hiring outsiders to do jobs.
  • The challenge of making sure that products get delivered on time can be thought of as being similar to planning for company events where succession is necessary.
  • Finally, supply chain management deals with how products move through a supply chain and eliminating bottlenecks that occur in that chain. Managing a pipeline of internal talent is very similar as you attempt to have employees advance through development jobs with different responsibilities.

In the end, there are four principles that can be drawn from supply chain management and applied to talent management. What’s interesting is that two of them deal with uncertainty that appears on the demand side (make vs. buy and forecasting) while the other two deal with uncertainty on the supply side (improve development ROI and how to protect that investment). We’ll discuss these four principles in detail next time.

What do you think? Is it too chillingly cold to try to apply supply chain principles to HR tasks? Should we not try to fix something that you don’t think is broken? Do you have another example of an existing process that would be a better model to use? Leave a comment and let me know.

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Posted in employee, it careers, retention strategies, supply chain | 2 Comments »

The Myth Of Talent Management: Why It Doesn’t Work

Thursday, August 7th, 2008

Just like the Chicago Bulls, IT managers have to find a way to manage their talent

Everyone who has lead a team, managed a department, or run a company knows that in addition to all of the other “keeping the doors open” jobs that they have, the task that can sneak up on them at any time is staffing. This coin has two sides: you don’t want to have too many warm bodies on your team if you don’t have the paying work to support them. At the same time, you don’t want to have to few or you’ll not be able to secure new work and that will eventually lead to your firm’s demise.

Two weeks ago I found myself in the wrong position on this issue. The project that a team that I was responsible for had run into some delays. This meant that the schedule had been stretched out and yet the funding for the staffing had not been changed. What this meant is that I had to start to shed project members. This ended up requiring me to to make several trips down to the cafeteria with team members to let then know that their time on the project was up. Needless to say this was not fun for me and it was clearly not fun for them. As I did this, I was wondering what’s a manager to do to avoid this type of poor talent management?

After the bloodletting was done, I started to do some research in order to find a better way to manage talent. A smart guy by the name of Peter Cappelli over at the University of Penn’s Wharton School has spent some time looking at this situation and he reports that things are pretty grim.

What is talent management? In a nutshell, it’s an attempt to anticipate the level of need for staff and then creating a plan for how you are going to achieve it. Dr. Cappelli says that he’s found that most firms fall into one of two groups for managing their talent: either they do nothing and run around when they have to fill a position or they have a staffing forecasting system that’s left over from the 1950′s which is now inaccurate because the world is moving so much faster.

Anybody remember internal development programs? When I worked at Boeing certain workers were identified as “Hi-Pots” (High Potentials) and they were placed on a career path that rotated them through multiple departments. This approach has pretty much gone the way of the Dodo. The few shining exceptions are at GE and PepsiCo that have their famous management academies that mangers attend as part of their job. While these are great programs, who cares since only a few managers in the world have access to them.

In the 1990′s hiring folks from outside became all the rage. It was possible because there were so many people who had been shed from other companies that the pool of available talent was quite large. Bad news – that pool’s all but dried up now. Additionally, as the pool got smaller, firms who had spent money training their employees started to see them leave and go to work for their competitors. This, of course, made them even less interested in investing in training their staff.

Ok, so where do we stand right now? Most companies / departments / managers don’t have any sort of talent management plan in place right now. However, the upper management is starting to realize that this is one of their key challenges. The ultimate question is how can your firm’s talent be managed in such a way that it will allow the firm to ultimately make more money (and spend less)?

I’ve got some thoughts on things that you can do, but first do you agree that things are as dire as I’ve laid them out to be? Does your firm have a talent management program? Are YOU being managed as part of a talent management program? Post a comment & let me know.

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Posted in employee, it careers, IT staff retention, recruiting, retention | 4 Comments »

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