Ultimate Team Rankings - HR Style

Every year ESPN ranks the franchises in the four major United States professional sports leagues, (NFL, MLB, NBA, and NHL) according to how much the franchises Gives back to the fans in exchange for all the time, money and emotion the fans invest in them.'

You can see the results  here - ESPN Ultimate Team Rankings, (the Los Angeles Angels of MLB led the rankings).

To me what is most interesting about these rankings is the criteria that are used: 

Bang For The Buck : Wins during the past three years (regular season plus postseason) per revenues directly from fans, adjusted for league schedules.

Fan Relations :  Openness and consideration toward fans by players, coaches and management.

Ownership : Honesty and loyalty to core players and local community.

Affordability : Price of tickets, parking and concessions.

Stadium Experience : Quality of arena and game-day promotions as well as friendliness of environment.

Players : Effort on the field and likability off it.

Coaching : Strength of on-field leadership.

Title Track : Championships already won or expected in the lifetime of current fans

What if you, as a Human Resources professional, applied those same criteria to your organization? Instead 'fans' think about the categories as they relate to your employees and candidates.

Bang For The Buck : Pretty simple, revenues per employee. A standard HR metric, but are you consistently measuring it?  And not just in total, but also in the context of initiatives like downsizing, merging, or expanding. In your recruiting efforts are you carefully evaluating the cost and return of your ATS, job board advertsing, specialty advertising, etc.  If have dived in to the world of 'social recruiting' do you have any idea how it is paying off?

Fan Relations : Openness and consideration toward fans employees by executives and management.

Are you truly an 'open' organization?  Your executives may claim they have an open door to employees but do the employees truly believe that is the case? What steps have you taken to demonstrate open communication and consideration towards employees, particularly if your organization has gone through reductions in force, or will be doing so soon?

Ownership : Honesty and loyalty to core players employees and local community.

Do the company owners make it a priority to give back to the community?  Do you have some kind of company sponsored volunteer day, giving employees time off in exchange for volunteer activities?  Does ownership do more than just claim to be community minded?

Affordability : Price of tickets, parking and concessions total compensation awarded to employees.

Let's spin this one to your overall compensation package.  I know these last two years have been brutal for comp budgets, but even still your organization's compensation package needs to be competitive to continue to engage and retain the best of your employees.  Even in a recession, these employees could jump.  If as in the case of many organizations, and the cash element of your total compensation is still under downward pressure, are you enhancing or emphasizing other elements of the total package that are of benefit to the staff?

Stadium Experience : Quality of arena facilities and game work day promotions conditions as well as friendliness of environment.

Take a honest look around your offices and facilities. Are they the best you can make them? When employees drive up to the facility what is the first thing they see?  Make sure the grounds are kept up, the parking lots well-lighted and please don't allow the clan of smokers to huddle around the main entrance.

Inside, start with the simple, low-cost elements.  Are the bathrooms and kitchen or break areas super-clean? Make sure folks have easy access to a refrigerator and freezer, and keep the coffee high quality and as low cost to the staff as possible.

Players : Effort on the field and likability off it.

I will spin this one a bit, more toward the employment brand and the image that the company has in the local, national, or global community.  What are your employees saying about the company both in internal communications and forums, and externally on blogs and social networks. How about candidates and their experience and view of your organization?  All these elements play into the idea of 'likability', which is not usually thought about as an organizational feature.

Coaching : Strength of on-field leadership.

This certainly is a awkward one for HR, the frank assessment of the organization's leadership, but certainly a necessary component for a high functioning organization.  HR can take the lead in identifying gaps in leadership capabilities and implement strategies to address these issues. Doing right by employees often means ensuring company leadership is truly able to carry out the company's strategic objectives. Succession planning programs also play strongly into HR's ability to support and improve the ongoing leadership capabilities of the organization.

Title Track : Championships already won or expected in the lifetime of current fans employees

Are you a market leader in your industry/region/niche?  Have you been recognized as a 'great place to work' or a 'Top Employer' by any national or local organizations?  What do the employees think about the short and long term prospects for success?  Are the companies best days behind you, (like the Cleveland Browns, or New York Knicks).  This is critical in sports, as we often see many excellent and experienced players that have their pick of teams to play for choosing the ones that are perceived to be championship contenders.  Simply stated, the best want to play with the best, and position themselves for success. Do you have the kind of environment that attracts the best talent available? And if not, what can you do in HR to try and reverse the tide and get back on top?

FYI - The team that came out on the bottom of the ESPN Ultimate Team Rankings was the Los Angeles  Clippers of the NBA.  Sort of amusing that the best and worst team in the ratings play in the same city.  Perhaps the HR department of the Clippers can try and initiate some executive exchange or cross-organizational meetings to try and learn a few things from the Angels.

So what do you think? Is your organization is more like the top teams in the survey like the Angels, Pittsburgh Steelers or Detroit Red Wings?  Or sometimes do you feel more like the Clippers, Detroit Lions, or Cincinnati Bengals? The kind of teams the general public associates with losing, scandal, and inept management.

If you liked this article (and you must have if you have hung this long), be sure to check out the August 28, 2009 HR Happy Hour Show - 'Sports and HR'. We will be taking sports, HR, and where the two worlds collide.

Let the users help themselves

If you are in a mid to large size organization that has implemented either Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions, targeted Human Capital Management (HCM) applications, or really any enterprise-wide IT solution it will not have taken long to realize shortly after implementation you were faced with a rash of questions, issues, and problems that were discovered by the end users of your applications.Flickr - Jaydot

I know, you prepared detailed end-user instruction manuals, or even video tutorials.  You held numerous forums, demonstrations, and hands-on training sessions.  Maybe you even anticipated and posted a 'Frequently asked Questions' section on the company intranet.

You thought you had all the possible scenarios covered in your rigorous system and user acceptance testing.

But of course, once the system was subject to more widespread use, beyond the project team, conference room pilot, and the pilot department or division, you started running into issues, questions, bugs, and use cases that you had not anticipated, nor tested for prior to go-live.

And so, like in almost every major enterprise implementation before yours, you feverishly spent the first few days/weeks/months getting patches, updating user procedures, adding more and more items the the FAQ list, and generally fighting fires to keep the system running, and close the books/pay the employees/send the files to the bank, etc.  Honestly, even the very best implementations that I have worked on have to go through this insane stage, where the hours are long, the list of issues is enormous, and the light at the end of the tunnel seems very distant.

But eventually, the issues die down, the urgent problems are resolved, and soon, you as the implementor arrive at that place where you are sort of in limbo, kind of on standby. Not implementing anything new, because the organization is still trying to digest all the changes from the go-live, and still dealing with issues and questions from the user community as they arise.

After a while the questions and end user feedback starts to morph from 'This does not work' type questions, to 'Can the system do this' or 'I wish we had the ability to do that' type inquiries.  And typically as the system gets rolled out to more and more users and locations, and members of the project 'core team' either leave (in the case of consultants), or move on to other projects, the connection between HR or IT and the end user community tends to weaken, and at some point the questions, problems and issues start to increase.  Attrition, job rotation, and normal turnover all conspire against you, the 'super' users you could rely on may no longer be there, and soon you find your user guides, FAQs, and tutorials are not enough to keep up with the increased number of questions and issues.

And if you are like most organizations that I have been around, you respond by updating the manuals, FAQs, and tutorials. Maybe you hold more training sessions for the new users. You address the help desk calls one at a time, until you feel like you have stabilized the system once more. 

But what if instead of repeating the same pattern over and over again, of users finding issues, and asking questions of the project team or IT, you give them the platform and opportunity to help each other?

Instead of each individual question or problem  flowing from the user  to the central help desk, or support analyst, and back again to the user, usually via e-mail, what if you had the users enter all the questions in a shared question and answer forum, or even a wiki?

Larger organizations have hundreds, if not thousands of users, the chances are pretty good that most specific issues have been previously encountered by someone else in the user community.  Creating user forums with different sections for the various components of the application (Payroll, HRIS, Self-Service, etc.), that are accessible to all users, searchable, and monitored by the support team can be a great way to reduce time to resolution, lower support costs, and build a stronger, shareable body of organizational knowledge that potentially will also ease the transition of new users of the system. Additionally, you can include specific sections for enhancement requests, or for desired changes to the system or the underlying business processes.

This 'users supporting users' model has had quite a bit of success and publicity in the consumer spaces, most typically with tech goods and services like computers, home electronics, and popular consumer software.  Why not leverage the concepts with your internal enterprise users?

Have you deployed end user support forums for your community of users yet?  I would love to hear some case studies.

What is the meaning of Hard Core HR Professional?

That was the question posed by an anonymous reader who found his or her way to this blog after hitting 'search'.

It is a pretty good question, and I don't think they found the answer here, at least not a complete answer.Flickr - valentin.d

From my perspective as an HR Tech guy, 'Hard Core' HR would certainly involve staying current on the latest tech trends and developments, strongly advocating for and implementing new tools and technologies to streamline processes, improve talent management, and enhance organizational communication and collaboration.

But most of all it would mean challenging the status quo, pushing the technology envelope in HR, and trying new things even if they make your 'traditional' HR colleagues uncomfortable. 

Start an internal blog, claim your company's Yammer domain and get the HR staff signed up, post a 'Why its great to work here' video on YouTube, create a free Wiki for posting frequently asked HR questions, use Rypple to get feedback from staff on HR policies and programs.

Maybe those are not really 'Hard Core' steps, but if your HR department is still relying on blast e-mails, a boring intranet, and the hidebound annual employee survey, then 'Hard Core' really is not needed yet.

'Medium Core' will probably do for a start.

What do you think?

What is the meaning of Hard Core HR Professional?

Measurement and ROI

I read an excellent article earlier in the week on the Chief Learning Officer site on the inability of the traditional definition of ROI to adequately assess the importance and value to the organization of its employee's networks and the value that is derived from these internal and external network interactions, and by extension the technologies and processes that support these interactions.

The essential point of the article was that these network benefits are intangible in nature, do not 'fit' the classic ROI model (that was developed to understand how tangible activities like buying a new factory, or upgrading an assembly line) of measurement.  It really is a riff on the 'what is the ROI of e-mail' argument that is often used when folks are attempting to justify time and expenditure on new tools and processes designed to increase workforce collaboration.Flickr - Darren Hester

Can the organization really accurately estimate the ROI of 'increased network activity'? Does it even make sense to try?

Unlike the new industrial machine, that is built to precise specifications for productivity, output, and operating costs, it is just about impossible to predict how new technologies and processes for collaboration will be embraced inside the organization.  You may be able to apply typical benchmarks on participation rates and utilization statistics, but I have to believe its just about impossible to intelligently make an argument to senior management that a specific 'return' is likely to be generated, at least prior to the introduction of these tools.

In many ways organizations that embrace these projects, and the new ways of communicating, collaborating, and working that they introduce have to take somewhat of a leap of faith that there will be sufficient 'return' on the investment (which for all but the largest organizations is chiefly employee's time, the technologies that are most frequently utilized tend to be low cost, sometimes even free). It is very easy for management to constantly drive the focus back to the traditional 'ROI' measure, and it gives many leaders a convenient 'out' from having to address and show true skill and even courage. 

But just like communication and collaboration advances like voice mail, fax, e-mail, and personal and network computing all moved from experiments to critical business infrastructure mostly without any idea of traditional ROI, so it will be for social networking and collaboration technologies. The smart and leading organizations have already embraced this concept, and I do not think it long before these technologies also become essential components of the modern organization.

Be innovative (but only with the tools we give you)

I am sort of but not really an IT person, so I understand why most corporate IT departments like to enforce consistent standards for the workforce's computers.  Security, compliance with vendor licensing, reduced maintenance cost etc. are the typical reasons why an organization will issue a company computer with an 'official' configuration and a set of applications pre-installed.  The exact mix of applications could vary depending on the user's role, but essentially, the employee is expected to perform their job duties using the 'delivered' configuration.

And in many organizations this standard pc configuration is coupled with an aggressive internet filtering system that blocks access to unauthorized sites from the company's network.  Originally these filters were put in place to block pornography and gambling sites.  Then as now it does seem like employees whiling away the hours surfing porn and playing online poker would be a drain on productivity. But don't employees already know that?  Do you really need to actively marshal IT resources (that theoretically have more strategic, value add activities to work on) to make sure your staff isn't abusing the internet?

Do we really need to put up a sign in the breakroom that says 'Committing a felony is against company policy?'

I digress. 

The main issue is how these risks and issues get quantified.  It is pretty easy for the IT folks to calculate how PC support costs are kept 'in-line' by enforcing a strict set of standards.  It is also fairly simple to determine the costs to the company if a malicious computer virus infected the network and rendered all the computers inoperable for a period of time.

What is much harder, if not impossible to quantify is the 'cost' of employees not being able to download a free application or program to experiment with that may help them become more productive.  If a key piece of information or training course is available via YouTube, but the company blocks the site, who knows how long it will take the employee to find the needed information from an 'allowed' source. These costs are real, even if they can't be precisely measured.  And what else is real is the frustration level for employees who know that there is a better, and more efficient way to do things but have their hands tied by company IT policies.

And don't even get me started on companies blocking access to social networking sites.

In today's downsized, pressure-packed, do more with less world, we are asking our employees to be more productive and innovative, but in many cases not equipping them with the freedom to use all the tools in the workbench. Rolling out 'company-issue' PC after PC and clamping down on worker's online resources might have made sense 10 years ago, but that time is long gone.

Note - This post is dedicated to Lisa Rosendahl of HR Thoughts, who was not able to watch a live stream of a SHRM 2009 panel during which the panelists specifically mentioned her blog as a great example for HR blogging in the public sector.