We poll our readers regularly to monitor C-suite access and strategy integration. Both measures are reliable proxies for overall staffing efficiency and effectiveness. Satisfactory access and integration result from an executive mindset that “people assets” are as consequential as any other form of corporate asset and need to be treated as such. Companies that have that mindset tend to have a competitive advantage in the job market.
IBM’s data from their 2008 study, “Unlocking the DNA of the Adaptable Workforce”, nicely documents the convergence over the past decade of the day-to-day business of corporate recruiters and the strategic preoccupations of top corporate executives. Every year a few more CHROs are invited into planning sessions with CEOs to provide the people components of the corporate growth equation. Of course, this is encouraging.
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Chart from the 2009 Recruiting Metrics and Performance Benchmark Report
However, scratch that sunny surface, which suggests that 90+% of HR departments are meaningfully involved in high-level corporate planning, and the picture darkens. This is one insight from our latest Recruiting Metrics & Performance Benchmark Report, which examined the attitudes of those front line staffing and HR professionals actually involved in these types of planning efforts.
(Caveat – IBM and Staffing.org did not survey the same companies, so the data needs to be viewed accordingly: as two distinct pictures of a subject from two different angles.)
As we all have learned from experience, collaboration has many guises. Where does your organization really stand with respect to full HR integration? Has it made only a modest commitment, where you are dutifully asked your opinion on various drafts of planning documents that have been prepared by others; or a full commitment, where you are part of the team that drafts the plan, argues out the details, and has to sign off on it before it goes to the executive committee? Or are you somewhere in between?
Good planning is hard work. Entrenched interests have to synchronize. Powerful, opinionated people have to compromise in order to reconcile business aspirations (growth, profit) with reality (hiring, training and developing the required talent). The process is often intense and difficult. Displays of temper are not unknown.
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Chart from the 2009 Recruiting Metrics and Performance Benchmark Report
When we look at this data, we see that only about 37% of our audience is very happy with the access required to fully participate in the planning process. Everyone else sees room for improvement. There are some interesting sidebars to this chart. When viewed through the lens of company size, employees at large companies (5000+ employees) are more likely to be dissatisfied (35%) than those at small companies (13%). People who work in government are much less likely to be very satisfied (27%) than employees in telecommunications (63%). (Full breakouts are available in the report.)
The real world issues affecting collaboration are many: structural (who reports to whom), cultural (how much are we expected to share), political (who has power and who doesn’t), intellectual (reliance on different data), and personal (“I just don’t like you”). It is far easier to find companies exhibiting token collaboration than companies where it’s deeply engrained in the culture and highly effective.
Today’s staffing frontier is located wherever top executives are asking:
- “I see a plan here, but I don’t see the people to make it happen. Where will they come from?”
- “We’re going to lose over 160 senior managers in the next five years. Who do we have ready to replace them?”
- “From a cost perspective, I know where to put the new call center, but cost isn’t everything. Is there a U.S.-based solution?”
- “Two of our last five executive hires bombed. We can’t afford that kind of turnover. How can we do better?”
HR has been in gradual transition for several decades. The thought leaders who over the years have envisioned a unified, empirical business discipline called human capital management are seeing it come into focus. Individual companies like GE (management training, leadership development), IBM (workforce optimization), and Intuit (recruiting, workforce planning) have taken traditional HR practices and blown them out to their logical potential, thereby acknowledging their enormous potential for business advantage. Achieving integrated, strategic human capital management is where the profession is headed.
One set of data suggests that HR is fulfilling its destiny as a key contributor to corporate governance. The other suggests that it has a ways to go.
We hope that your company has begun asking the right questions about talent acquisition and management. If they are not, the beginning of the next planning cycle is the time to make your play for additional relevance in 2010. Certainly, 2009 has been a memorably tough year, probably one for the record books. As Rahm Emanuel, President Obama’s Chief of Staff has noted, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”
We have the materials to construct our respected, empirical business discipline: decades of practical experience and case studies plus piles of data from recruiters, consultants, researchers and academics. Now we must organize and assemble them, then link the results directly to the business challenges of our enterprises.
Hopefully, 2010 is your year to contribute. Best of luck.
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Back to the Future: January 2010
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