Month: March 2020

THIS ISN’T WHY I WENT TO SCHOOL! CHANGE MANAGEMENT AND HOW TO DEAL WITH IT ON YOUR CLINICAL TEAM

Change is scary. And no one knows this better than a hospital’s clinical staff. Physicians have been practicing medicine the same way for years. And nurses are constantly learning new procedures, sometimes just about as fast as they mastered the last one. None of your staff went to school to be an IT professional, so on top of any changes, they are also being required to learn how to manage electronic medical records. And all of this can leave many of them saying “I didn’t go to school for this!” So how do you get your practitioners back to the basics of practicing medicine while still smoothly implementing some necessary changes?
Instead of simply working on managing the change from your perspective, try seeing all of this through the eyes of your staff. There are three key questions they might ask themselves during any change. If you shape your response around their questions and concerns, while you still might have some late adopters, you might find yourself spending more time working with nurses and physicians, and less time at odds with them.

Question #1: Do I want to stay here?

This is typically your team’s first question. If your staff harbor negative feelings toward your care center, it might be easy for them to feel like they don’t want to stay. We spend more hours at work than any other activity during our waking hours, so we should definitely want to be happy about where we will spend the majority of our time; especially given the number of hours hospital staff are with each other during their shift. You want your staff to have a positive connection to your care center. “Lack of advancement opportunities” is the top fear of healthcare professionals,[1] so by making their growth a priority, you make it less likely that they will leave. Integrate any change or new training initiatives with areas they’re excited about. By offering staff the chance to choose to grow in areas they are passionate about, it can be much easier to introduce other training that may be more difficult, which should keep the happy feelings much higher.

Question #2: Do I need to stay here?

So after we address the positive and negative feelings that come with change, we must also look at the fundamental question they must ask, even if they want to stay: do I need to stay here? Before leaving a hospital, staff members will weigh the career and financial costs, among other factors. These costs will become tougher to bear the more they’re emotionally invested in their work. One way to address this is to do some internal marketing and create an offering to the staff that shows you are really invested in their welfare. You can also address this by giving staff projects they are going to feel give them purpose and help keep them connected to their jobs. The burden of switching jobs may seem worth it if they don’t feel they hold much value in their current position. However, being invested in their job and your organization help outweigh the burden of having to manage and deal with change.

Question #3: Should I stay here?

So once your staff ask themselves if they want to stay and if they need to stay, they can answer the question if they should stay. And all of this comes down to weighing the negatives and the positives. If the negatives outweigh the positives, it will be much easier for a staff member to leave. High retention rates are the goal, but they don’t tell you if team members are staying out of obligation. Start by getting your employees communicating with each other, especially about non-work topics. This also sends the message that your organization cares about their happiness outside of the office, as well. You can do this by rounding with your team and stopping by to check on them and see how they are doing outside of the day-to-day clinical operations. You can even start this as early as the onboarding phase by scheduling social events that reflect the team culture. By helping them establish their personal network, they’ll feel a stronger emotional connection to their work and their colleagues, which drives engagement, retention, and performance.
[1] No author. “TurnoveRx: How to Cure the Retention Problems Ailing Your Health Care Organization.” CareerBuilder.com. Date published: N/A. Date accessed: Oct. 6, 2015. http://www.careerbuildercommunications.com/pdf/turnoverrx-whitepaper.pdf

IS COACHING RIGHT FOR MY HEALTHCARE TEAM?

Hospitals and care centers are always looking for well-qualified, highly-skilled practitioners. And as an RN, I was always being asked to learn something new. Typically, one of my more senior peers would orient me on the new task.  And I can easily say that the times I experienced the most growth in my career was when I received some kind of coaching. Over 70% of coaching recipients saw an increase in work performance, relationships, and communication skills, and 80% reported having more self-confidence.1  So it’s no wonder that coaching in healthcare is so important. So why don’t more hospitals do it?
Quality patient care depends on a well-trained, passionate, committed staff, which in turn is fostered by supportive, skilled leadership. Yet healthcare organizations are facing radical changes in everything from policy to technology, a loss of key leaders and clinicians due to the Baby Boomer exodus, and an increasingly dissatisfied—and overworked—labor force. Not to mention increased competition and the need to run ever-leaner while still providing the same level of care, despite an increased patient load. Nurturing engaged, curious employees and creating skilled, committed leaders are key to surviving and thriving amid all these challenges.

So what is coaching?

Coaching is an umbrella term for the process of developing people’s skills and abilities, boosting their performance, and dealing with issues and challenges before they become major problems.2 But coaching can be broken out into three different categories:
  • Executive coaching: Designed for top tier team members to improve their performance and leadership capabilities.
  • Leadership and capacity building coaching: Aimed at helping managers—from those involved in patient care to administration to operations—become better leaders to prepare them for more high-level responsibilities.
  • Performance coaching: Implemented to help recipients improve performance in their current roles, build strengths, or correct weaknesses.

Must-Have Coaching Skill Sets

In addition to the above, coaches should be able to offer intangible skills that enable staff to achieve a higher level of success. Whether a coach is “coaching your coaches,” or if a manager is coaching a more junior colleague, they should be able to: 3
Listen actively: Employees need to know that when discussing career aspirations and challenges, their coach is as invested in their success as they are. By being an active listener, the coach will be able to fully internalize and understand team members’ goals and offer meaningful solutions for impactful growth. Part of listening actively is not checking e-mails, not looking at a cell phone, or doing anything else that distracts from the one-on-one element.
Reinforce positive behaviors: A quality coach should reward their clients when they’ve made the right move or decision, rather than punish them for the wrong one. By rewarding correct choices, the staff member will display better performance-related behaviors as an instinct, rather than as something they have to think about doing before acting.
Ask open-ended questions:  Asking “yes/no” questions, or ones that similarly offer a limited number of responses, are risky because respondents have to choose best-fit answers that may not paint the whole picture. Instead, a good coach will use open-ended question, such as “How do you feel when…” or “What do you think is…” This enables the staff member to provide detailed, candid answers, rather than be pigeon-holed into responses that may not present the most accurate information.

More on Coaching

There are many different types of coaches, strategies for teaching and best practices on timing. For a more in-depth look on coaching, you can download our Coaching Playbook for free, here.
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1 No author. “The Benefits of Coaching.” Outstand.org. Date published: March 28, 2013. Date accessed: March 30, 2015. http://www.outstand.org/index.php/2013/03/the-benefits-of-coaching/
2 No author. “What is Coaching?” MindTools. No date published. Date accessed: March 27, 2015. http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTMM_15.htm
3 No author. “Business Results Through Coaching.”Bersin by Deloitte. No date published. Date accessed: March 26, 2015. http://www.bersin.com/News/Details.aspx?id=15040.

TOXIC EMPLOYEES IN HEALTHCARE: WHO THEY ARE AND HOW TO DELIVER THE CURE

Toxic employees. We’ve all worked with them – but can one bad apple really spoil the whole bunch? Having toxic behavior at any company yields bad results. But having it on the hospital floor can have serious consequences. According to a study by Mitchell Kusy, forty-nine percent of nurses that reported toxic behavior by team members said that it has resulted in them wrongly administering medication.  And 25% of practitioners in the healthcare industry believe disruptive behavior is directly tied to patient mortality. 
So what does this look like for an RN that’s worked on the floor? A former colleague of mine was sharing about a nurse that was difficult to get along with. She constantly picked up extra shifts, worked long hours and never quite seemed happy about her job. Her peers would help her out where they could, but she never wanted to pitch in when the rest of the team needed help with a patient. Her patients seemed relieved when her shift was over and they got a new nurse. When a team that is there to care for people is divided because they are avoiding someone on staff, mistakes are made, patient satisfaction goes down and the care we promise as nurses inadvertently suffers.

1. What is a toxic staff member?

A toxic worker is one who engages in bad behavior while on the job, often to the detriment of the team. And in healthcare specifically, one result is usually poor patient care. Examples of toxic behavior include having a bad attitude, whining, sabotaging others’ work, yelling, and more.  Their conduct isn’t done maliciously, but it can still be harmful to their colleagues’ reputations.

2. Can anyone be toxic?

Yes. Everyone from the janitor to the CEO has the potential to be toxic. Whether they feel unappreciated – “I’ll show them for not giving me that promotion!” – or don’t work well with others, no one is immune. In fact, according to that same Kusy study, 80% of doctors have displayed toxic behavior towards staff, and 33% say disruptive physician behaviors occur weekly. No growth opportunities and being overworked are the two biggest ways to create toxics.

3. How do toxics affect my hospital?

So what else does the Kusy study tell us about having toxic staff members in your hospital? Well, for starters, toxic staff wreak havoc on retention, performance, and clinical care outcomes. Among the victims of toxics, 12% end up quitting, (and replacing them can cost over $57k per role!), 38% felt their work quality decreased, and 78% said their organizational commitment declined. For every 10% of unsatisfied nurses, patient recommendations drop 2%.
So what can you do about this in your care center? Cornerstone recently came out with a brief on toxic employees in healthcare that offers some suggestions on how to address this on your team. If you would like to dive further into what you can do to address this in your care center, you can download the rest of the brief here

HEALTHCARE: YOUR RX FOR STAFF BURNOUT AND RETENTION ISSUES

As an HR professional, it’s never fun to deal with the aftermath of a burned out employee who has decided to leave. You’re stuck with the unenviable task of dividing their workload among the existing staff, to say nothing of having to start the recruiting process all over again to replace them.
Burnout, and the high attrition it causes, hits care centers hard. NSI found that the nursing turnover epidemic is as high as 16% per year. This reaches all the way to the executive level, where Monster.com reports turnover costs can drain up to 5% of total operating budgets.

So what are some strategies healthcare organizations can employ to ensure their workers don’t get burned out?

1. What’s the Problem?  The first thing is determine if you have a problem! Look at recent data related to turnover to assess whether the high rate of employees leaving has become an epidemic. If you think it’s related to burnout, then you’re probably right. But before you make any determinations, or take any actions, you’ll need to look at the facts and figures behind your departing employees to figure out the solution. Currently, NSI says just 36% of care centers have a strategy in place to prevent attrition. Establishing one will help your organization gain a talent advantage over other hospitals in the area, and the lower attrition rates will make cost-conscious executives happy.
2. Why Do People Leave?  When one employee leaves, their work must be farmed out to the remaining staff until a replacement is found. But qualified replacements don’t grow on trees, so the longer that position is vacant, the more your shrinking headcount will struggle to care for increasing numbers of patients. This forces caregivers to work longer hours, and maybe even perform duties they’re not fully trained on. These dovetail into them being unhappy, burned out, and looking for better working conditions at other care centers. A HealthWyse report discovered that trying to replace even one nurse can cost upwards of $88,000, so pinpointing the reasons people leave does more than just prevent burnout – it ensures hospital resources are used efficiently.
3. What’s Next?  So now that your attrition problem has been confirmed, what’s next? Administer a treatment plan based on what’s wrong. If you’ve determined that workers are leaving due to unfairly high patient loads, then consider allocating resources towards recruiting new staff in order to reduce the burden. Or did your exit interviews uncover that hours are too long? Perhaps rearranging schedules to improve caregivers’ work/life balance might alleviate some burnout issues. No matter what avenue you take, your solution should address the issues presented by the data.
Does this sound daunting? It’s not. Dealing with problems like attrition is never a walk in the park, but it doesn’t have to be a Herculean task either. Look at your recent attrition data; it will not only tell you if you have a problem, but also why it’s a problem. From there, the steps should be easy to determine. Just remember that before you start offering solutions, you must first understand the issue.

A DAY IN THE LIFE OF A HEALTH CARE INDUSTRY COMPLIANCE MANAGER

Karen Shell watched intently when the Senate Judiciary Committee held confirmation hearings in January for the next U.S. attorney general, a decision that could dramatically impact her day-to-day work. As the director of compliance for National Seating and Mobility (NSM), her interest in these hearings might not be clear at first, but Shell says a shakeup in the Department of Justice’s philosophy and focus could seriously affect business.
Monitoring changes in legislation and regulation is just one aspect of her complex role at NSM, a Tennessee-based company that designs one-of-a-kind mobility solutions like manual and power wheelchairs for disabled individuals and their families.“It’s impossible to follow the rules if you don’t know what they are and how they change,” says Shell. “Plus, being unaware of a requirement isn’t an acceptable defense.”
With plenty of important eyes watching, including the Office of the Inspector General at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS-OIG), Shell sees herself and her counterparts in compliance as revenue protectors. At NSM, the compliance team has its own space on the company’ organizational chart, a wholly separate department from legal and human resources with direct, unfiltered access to the board of directors. According to Shell, it’s important that the compliance officer maintain independence, so decisions can be made without competing agendas and influences.
A typical workday for Shell involves creating policies, procedures and compliance training, identifying risks and auditing performance as well as serving as a confidential contact for all employees and leadership. We caught up with Shell to take a closer look at her unique experience as a compliance officer.

Health care is a particularly difficult industry from a compliance perspective. What challenges have you experienced while building your career in this field over the past two decades?

The major challenge has been keeping up with a constantly changing legislative and regulatory environment, along with changing technology and patient expectations. An additional challenge is presenting compliance as something more than just a necessary cost or a check box. My goal is to ensure that senior leadership knows we’re here to support our greater corporate mission, not to hinder it.

You mentioned changing technology. How does tech contribute to your daily efforts in compliance?

Technology is an increasingly important part of our compliance program because we maintain client records and file claims electronically and we communicate with our clients and their medical professionals electronically as well. We have to be careful to keep that information secure, while meeting HIPAA and HITECH regulations.
The benefit of electronic records is that we can use technology to put checks in place to help prevent false claims or more easily audit claims to identify non-compliance and improvement opportunities. We also use technology to train and inform employees. We can keep our compliance messaging fresh and make sure that compliance resources, like the compliance manual, are always current and easily available online. There’s not an area of our business that isn’t affected by technology, so we have to be sure we maintain compliance on that front, too.

Why should business executives focus on cultivating a strong compliance program that doesn’t feel like an afterthought for legal or HR teams?

All companies, and definitely those in health care, operate in a complicated regulatory environment. A strong, proactive compliance program is needed to mitigate risks and to make certain the company stays within the guardrails while innovating and moving the mission forward. While a compliance department doesn’t generate revenue, it’s important that management understands that we’re here to protect the business.
The cost of operating a compliance program is far less than the extensive fines and penalties that companies might incur for violating laws and regulations. It’s also important to recognize the value in having a certified professional lead the program. For example, I maintain my Health Care Compliance certification through the Health Care Compliance Association, which was established in 1996 to help navigate and translate the complex regulatory requirements.

Can you share some examples of particular compliance challenges that you frequently face? How do you overcome those hurdles?

Our Assistive Technology Professionals (ATPs) work directly with clients with disabilities. They provide mobility with very restricted reimbursement processes from insurance companies, Medicare and other payers. Because not every item we provide is a covered item, it’s sometimes difficult for ATPs to understand why we can’t just give our clients things for free when they’re clearly in need. As much as we’d love to help, the wheelchair industry has an unfortunate history of fraud and abuse, so we have to be especially careful about maintaining compliance with the False Claims Act, beneficiary inducement and anti-kickback statutes.
This can be frustrating, so it’s important that I communicate not just what we can and can’t do, but also why we have to do it a certain way. I explain that my job isn’t to help them get around something, but to do whatever I can to help them through it. The ability to communicate how and why regulations apply to how we do business is important at every level. Everyone from the field employees to the board of directors should understand it.

Is that why you created a training manual, a code of conduct and compliance manual for each layer of staff at NSM?

Yes. It’s important to provide employees at every level with an explanation of the laws and regulations that apply to what they do every day. Our training program helps them understand what they need to do to minimize the risk of non-compliance so that we can continue to provide great care for our clients for many years to come.
Our Compliance Manual is a detailed tool to use for guidance, while the Code of Conduct outlines the behaviors we expect and the consequences for not meeting those expectations. Establishing very clear guidelines with open lines of communication for employees at every level is crucial. It’s also the part of my job that I find especially rewarding. I enjoy being able to communicate with everyone, from the executives to part-time employees, and developing a level of trust so that anyone feels comfortable coming to me with questions or concerns.
For more on healthcare compliance management, visit https://hr.cornerstoneondemand.com/compliance-healthcare-li 

FORGET BEST PRACTICES. HOW TO GET EMPLOYEE TRAINING RIGHT

Teaching employees how to interact with customers is critical to any company’s success. But getting that training right can be challenging, especially as training staffs grow.
Why? The larger a training department is, the greater the disconnect between what trainers think are best practices and the customer scenarios employees are actually encountering day to day, writes Bill Cushard, a learning experience designer and frequent contributor to the Human Capitalist blog.
“Business goals and learning goals have become disjointed when the learning becomes overly centralized,” argues Cushard in a post about why best practices are overrated in customer-service training programs. “The execution of learning should occur as close to the customer interaction as possible. Centralized learning departments are too far away from the customers to understand that.”

The 3 Es for Better Learning

Cushard suggests ways centralized learning departments can improve their customer-service training:
  1. Empower: “A sales or service department should not have to seek approval from the learning department to run a training program. The learning department should empower people close to the customer interaction to decide what learning needs to occur and how.” 
  2. Enable: Centralized learning functions needs also to provide sales managers with the tools they need to succeed, including templates, learning management systems and analysis questionnaires.
  3. Educate: “[T]he learning function should teach those who need [these tools], how to use them.” 

THE UNPAID INTERNSHIP IS DEAD. WHAT NOW?

The unpaid internship — once a right of passage for aspiring professionals — is doomed. Following some high-profile lawsuits and mounting student opposition to the practice, companies are axing unpaid internships. For example, Condé Nast, the media giant whose coveted internships have launched the careers of many top writers, is ending its program next year.
At issue is the question of compensation. Courts have ruled that unpaid interns are covered by minimum wage laws when their work benefits the employer — which, arguably, is almost always the case.
But the moves by Condé Nast and possibly other companies, raise an interesting point: If students need internships to graduate or to get their foot in the door in a highly competitive industry, then what are they going to do now? It’s a question a lot of experts are asking these days and they don’t yet have answers.
“From a student’s perspective, an internship for credit, even if unpaid, is a step toward both graduation and a job in her chosen field at the same time,” Malcolm Harris writes on Al Jazeera. “But as many commentators have pointed out, employers commonly use internships as a way to skirt minimum-wage laws. College administrators and employers have colluded to invent a loophole where none existed.”
The media business isn’t the only one facing this problem. Roughly half of all unpaid interns work in the public sector, including the Supreme Court and the United Nations, reports NBC.

The Fix: Create Meaningful Work 

One possible solution is for school credit to replace compensation. But even that practice doesn’t seem likely to hold up in court. In June, a New York federal judge ruled that Fox Searchlight Pictures’ unpaid internship program violated federal labor law. The fact that interns received college credit for their time didn’t matter. The students, the court held, were entitled to both minimum wage and overtime.
One the face of it, the obvious fix is for employers to start paying newbies — and to look at internships not as an opportunity for young workers to gain valuable experience but as an opportunity to cultivate them as future stars within the company. “Critics of the unpaid internship seem to assume that tighter regulation would simply mean today’s interns would magically become paid employees,” says Matthew Yglesias in Slate Magazine. “In some cases, that might happen. But many positions would simply be eliminated.”
David Carr of The New York Times doesn’t write off compensation as a solution so easily. He points out that unpaid internships have typically benefited those who can afford to work for no pay, which means employers have missed an opportunity to diversify. “Only a certain kind of young person can afford to spend a summer working for no pay,” Carr writes. “Unpaid internships typically provide people who already have a leg up a way to get the other leg up.”
Companies will have to come up with the money, concludes Carr, but that’s how they’ll attract meaningful contributors. “Paid internships, properly conceived and administered, could bring a diversity of region, class and race to an industry where the elevators are full of people who look alike, talk alike and think alike,” he says, referring to the media business. He cites Atlantic Media as an example. The company ended it’s unpaid internship program and now offers yearlong fellowships that, for some graduates, have morphed into permanent roles.
Slate’s Yglesias agrees that internships serve a valuable function in society. “If there’s a policy solution fix here, it’s not going to be about banning internships, but about building better bridges between education and the workplace.”

Unpaid Gigs May Be Overrated

For all the ongoing debate, here’s an interesting statistic: The National Association of Colleges and Employers reports that 63 percent of paid interns wind up working full time afterward (with median starting salary of about $52,000), while unpaid internships led to employment 37 percent of the time (with median starting salary of just under $36,000), according to The Journal Times.
Is it possible that unpaid internships aren’t, in the end, all that they’re cracked up to be?

TROUBLE WITH THE CURVE: 4 ALTERNATIVES TO FORCED RANKINGS

Marissa Mayer has caused another stir with her latest HR stunt. Last month the Yahoo! CEO implemented a forced rankings performance review process at the company, meaning managers rank their employees on a bell curve and fire those at the low end.
Forced—or “stacked”—rankings have fallen out of favor with some companies. Microsoft recently dumped its controversial forced ranking system in favor of more frequent and qualitative reviews, according to Business Week.
But performance review processes that work for one company won’t always fit another. “If this topic were simple there would not be over 25,000 books listed on Amazon’s U.S. book site for the query ‘performance review,’” Steven Stinofsky writes on Business Insider. 
Here are some alternatives—or additions—to forced rankings that companies are using to bolster their performance review schemes.

Calibration

Calibration is a face-to-face process, in which managers who oversee similar groups review one another’s employee-performance ratings. In these “rater reliability” sessions, supervisors discuss each of their employee’s performance rankings and their reasons behind the evaluation. “A calibration session catches the ‘easy graders’ and ‘tough graders’ and helps them rate their employees more realistically,” Joanne Lloyd writes on JobDig.com.

360-Degree Feedback

Instead of relying on one supervisor to evaluate an individual’s performance, some companies ask everyone with whom the employee interacts to weigh in. That’s the idea behind 360-degree feedback, a technique that collects performance data from a number of stakeholders like team members, customers and direct reports. “When it’s done well, 360 programs allow all your team members to improve in key areas that might be limiting their upward career path or actually causing major conflict within a team,” Eric Jackson writes on Forbes.

Management by Objective

First outlined by management whiz Peter Drucker, management by objective occurs when supervisors work with employees to outline goals and desired outcomes. Managers evaluate staff members based on their ability to achieve results. The advantage of the MBO process is that it allows employees to actively participate in goal setting, according to the Society for Human Resource Management.

Peer Review 

As the term implies, peer reviews require co-workers to comment about each others’ performance. “Coworkers often know more about their peers’ strengths and weaknesses than supervisors do, and letting employees review one another is a great way for management to share in that knowledge,” Stephanie Gruner writes on Inc.
Companies have used these evaluation methods for ages, but they’re continually experimenting with new feedback iterations that combine input from employees and their peers. 
There has been some heated discussion on LinkedIn recently around forced rankings. One contributor reminds us, “It really doesn’t matter what form is used; what matters is how it is used and what the results really mean.” It’s hard to judge one company’s forced rankings system without understanding other programs that might support or counter balance it.

Q&A WITH JOSH BERSIN: THE NO. 1 PROBLEM FACING HR DEPARTMENTS TODAY — AND HOW TO FIX IT

The way many human resources departments are structured and operate needs to change, says Josh Bersin, principal and founder of Bersin by Deloitte, Deloitte Consulting LLP a human resources research and advisory firm. As the need for talent grows, the traditional approach to “centers of expertise” with HR generalists has to change, argues Bersin, driving more embedded talent expertise within the business. Bersin suggests that companies have to redefine talent management from “integrated” to a configurable “talent system.”

Why are companies rethinking their approaches to talent management?

We are entering a crisis in retention and engagement. Coming out of the recession skills are in short supply and organizations need to reinvigorate the value proposition and work experience for their employees.  We like to call it “building passion in the workplace” – it goes far beyond the traditional definition of engagement. 
Over the last ten years companies have been focused on “integrated talent management” – bringing the various talent teams together to implement coaching, performance management, development planning and other practices. 
Now, in 2014, we need to take the next step, and build what we call the “corporate talent system” — not software. Rather than think about how to “tweak” or “change” the performance appraisal and compensation process to improve engagement or retention, for example, we now need to shift our thinking to all elements of talent management at the same time.  The whole talent “system” works together, so you really can’t change one process without looking at all the others.
Suppose you want to improve employee engagement and performance in a given business area. First, of course, you have to look at management skills and behaviors. But beyond this, the likely solution may involve a change in performance management, an increase in diversity and inclusion, changing the work environment and work rules, modifying compensation, tweaking the employee development environment, and just about everything else. Rather than look at one talent practice as a solution to a problem, now we need to look at the “system” as a whole.
This takes a consultative approach. In 2014 we have to design HR to think about these problems in a systemic way and then take a systemic approach to solutions. Companies are not only going to need integrated software, but they’re going to need to have teams that work on problems in a consultative way.

Describe a company that solved a problem by taking a jigsaw puzzle approach to HR?

A Midwest electric utilities company is having a hard time recruiting engineers to work in its two nuclear power plants. The head of the nuclear division told HR that he wanted to raise the compensation by 35 percent to attract engineers. 
The HR leader said “not so fast” and created a small consulting team of HR experts that’s basically a SWAT team. After several months of study, the team concluded, “Yes, we’re not getting enough candidates, despite there being people in the market for these jobs. The reason we’re not getting them has nothing to do with compensation — it’s our employment brand. We have no brand value proposition, we’re unknown, and no one thinks we’re a cool company. You can raise the comp all you want, but we’re still not going to get them.” They implemented these recommendations, and sure enough, within six to nine months they developed a strong pipeline of engineers. 

How can a company begin to change its approach to HR?

We have to redesign HR to think about the entire “talent system” as a whole — and put in place senior specialists in the field who can implement and tweak these processes as needed. 
Generally there are three things in the way of this. First, many people in HR lack domain expertise. In one of our most recent surveys, nearly 45 percent of respondents ranked “reskilling HR” as a top priority. Second, HR structure is designed well for integrated consulting. Companies have spent a long time setting up HR generalists that serve the needs of line managers — these people have to become embedded specialists, connected to the center of expertise. Third, we have defined the HR roles based on service delivery, and HR people get paid based on the “customer satisfaction” of their line managers. While this is a good thing, it draws them away from becoming consultants and encourages them to spend time on administration.  We need to shift HR teams into consulting roles and need to train managers how to implement HR practices through self-service wherever possible.
2014 will be a challenging year to hire and retain people. It’s time to rethink about HR and redesign our teams to build a highly engaging workplace, drive development and performance, and attract the most highly skilled candidates.

Q&A WITH GARY WOODILL: WHY NOBODY WILL BE TALKING ABOUT MOBILE LEARNING IN 5 YEARS

There’s a lot of talk about the future of mobile learning in the workplace. But is it just that — talk? For now, the answer is mostly yes, says Gary Woodill, the CEO of i5 Research, a technology research firm, and author of Mobile Learning Edge. Here, Woodill explains why mobile learning hasn’t taken off, and why Big Data promises to fundamentally reshape employee education.

How are companies using mobile learning?

Mobile learning is at a very early stage. We’re not seeing a lot of companies using it in any systematic way. The types of companies that are most likely to jump in are sales-oriented companies where salespeople are on the road, field services where technicians go out to fix things, and transportation services — such as road, air or train services — where it’s tough to bring people together for training in one location.

Why hasn’t mobile learning taken hold in the workplace yet?

We haven’t really defined the problems that mobile learning can solve. That needs to happen. The most obvious problem mobile learning solves is performance support in the sense that you can get instant information at the moment of need using your mobile device. It’s a shift away from the standardized course-based model where people learned in a classroom and had to pass a test. 
The reason that doesn’t work anymore is because of rapid technological change. We can teach people about a new product, but six months later that product could have disappeared and a new one may have come along, and then you have to retrain again. If you’re able to do this on a continuous basis, that changes the parameter of everything.

How does mobile education change our approach to learning?

At the enterprise level, it’s becoming much more learner-driven where the person who has the mobile device starts to learn when they want to and when they need to. It’s being driven by immediate needs instead of a specific curriculum that’s coming out of the training department.
Another shift that’s important has to do with context. E-learning and classroom learning doesn’t take you into the environment you’re learning about. With mobile, you’re moving around and now you’re in a situation where you have a question, and you can immediately get an answer — and it’s relevant and motivating to do that because it’s something you have to deal with right now.  

Where is technology-based learning headed?

My own view is that mobile learning is a transitional technology. Mobile is only one of many ways that learning is changing. Learning is also becoming social, collaborative, networked, learner-driven, visual. In five years I don’t think we’re going to be talking about mobile learning. There’s a bigger change happening.
The term “ubiquitous computing” refers to the fact that computing facilities will one day be in every object you touch. We’re starting to talk about the “Internet of things,” where objects have an IP address and you can get information from them. Even though most people think mobile is the latest thing, in fact it isn’t — it’s been around since the 1980s.
The technology that’s most recent is Big Data and predictive analytics. Big Data and predictive analytics will take things like millions and millions of records and predict something or tell you a connection between two or more variables. That’s going to be used in the educational realm for what’s called “adaptive teaching,” where a teacher will get information as a student works to know what he needs to do to improve his learning. We can now monitor students individually to tell their moods and responses in order to figure out what the teacher should do next. Adaptive teaching is coming, not only to the classrooms but to enterprises as well.

Q&A WITH TIM SACKETT: IN THE FUTURE, MARKETING WILL DO THE RECRUITING

Marketers as chief company recruiters? Yes, predicts Tim Sackett, president of staffing firm HRU Technical Resources and blogger at The Tim Sackett Project. With new technologies, the way today’s job candidate looks for a potential employer is ever-changing. Same holds true for the way recruiters find appropriate talent. While networking events and personal connections still drive talent acquisition, social tools are becoming more important for recruiters in the early stages. Sackett predicts that as this trend continues, recruiters will eventually become part of a company’s marketing department — branding employment as it does its products.

What is the biggest change in the future of company hiring?

Eventually recruiting and talent acquisition will be taken out of HR departments and it’ll be put with the marketing department. Most companies have really good consumer branding, while employment branding is generally run by one person in HR who is working with the marketing department and the IT department. Instead of HR messing with the career site and job descriptions, marketing should deal with it. HR people see job descriptions as a legal thing, but marketing and sales would make the descriptions fun and attractive—like a story.

How have recruiting tools and technology changed over the past five years?

What you’ve seen is this evolution of the job board 2.0. For years Monster, CareerBuilder and Dice were the go-to for recruiting. Companies turned to a resume database site—whether it’s internal or external—plowed through the data and contacted as many people as possible. Then LinkedIn came into the picture, which started out as a cool networking tool for professionals, and then two years ago became a job board site. LinkedIn is different than Monster and CareerBuilder because it has found a way to get companies to think that it’s okay to have employees on LinkedIn. If my profile is on LinkedIn, I don’t have an HR manager coming down to my office asking if everything’s okay, whereas if my resume was on Monster or CareerBuilder, I was going to have that talk because they were afraid I was going to leave.
A number of job board companies are learning how to aggregate all of the data online. Let’s say you belong to Pinterest and Facebook, but you’re not necessarily looking for a job, you’re still leaving a social exhaust, a path of crumbs and pieces of you all over the web. These new technologies have found ways to take these crumbs and create a profile of who a person is—what they do, where they live. Recruiters might only have a Twitter account, but they can now connect with someone who they may have never found before. That’s the future of recruiting.

Because of all of this data on the Internet, do you think more recruiters are searching for people that aren’t actively looking for jobs?

There are two kinds of recruiters. The majority of people in the corporate recruiting industry follow post-and-pray—they’re the gatherers. Then you have a smaller minority that are the hunters—they go out and find people. Hiring managers want that passive candidate that’s already working and not looking for a job because they think that candidate’s better because they aren’t in the job market. It’s a warped sense of reality.

Looking down the road, how will recruiters change their strategies to seek out those passive candidates?

Recruiters need to leverage their networks—such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter—and their giant network of employees. Most talent acquisition professionals do a terrible job of leveraging their own employees. They put a poster up about employee referral and then they forget about it—and employees forget about it, too.
You can expand your network as a recruiter by making it super simple to leverage your employees’ networks. In an email to all of your employees, you can say, “We need a new accountant,” and in one button, employees can say, “Yes, I want to send this to my network,” and it goes to their LinkedIn or Twitter friends. Then their friends within one button can send it to their friends. This is how viral marketing and recruiting takes place. Those companies that figure out how to leverage networks are going to be the ones that find the better talent faster

Q&A WITH JOHN SUMSER: HOW DNA SEQUENCING, BIG DATA WILL CHANGE WHO WE HIRE — AND HOW WE THINK ABOUT HR

Technology can be overwhelming. It can also be enlightening. Take the fact that women earn less than men. That’s true, but the glass ceiling isn’t to blame, says John Sumser, editor-in-chief of HRExaminer Online Magazine and a principal of Two Color Hat, an HR advisory firm. Here, Sumser describes how technology is challenging HR to think differently about common assumptions — and how it will inevitably impact who gets hired and why.

Why do we feel so overwhelmed by technology?

Eric Schmidt [Google’s executive chairman] once said, “Every two days we create as much data as we did from the dawn of civilization to 2003.” People want to make the most of the technology, but can’t make sense of it all. For example, most people download 40 apps for their smartphones, but only use five of them. Plus most people have smartphones that are more powerful than the technology that put the man on the moon.

Technology is becoming more powerful than the human brain. What does this mean for recruiting?

HR has to be able to tell the difference between a person and a machine. If I come to work for you with my iPhone and all the latest business analysis tools, I can use that data at my fingertips. But what about the guy from Harvard with a 4.0 who doesn’t have all those tools? How can you tell in a world where the real advantage is access to information, not educational credentials, who is the more valuable hire? You can’t tell the difference between me and my phone or me and the data that my computer provides me.

What skills will HR employees need to learn to be able to adapt to the data overload?

People in HR should take four or five advanced statistics classes at MIT, which are online for free. With all of the data comes the requirement that you’re able to understand what it means from a statistical perspective. 
I’m sure you’ve heard of the idea that the amount of time people spend at the same job is declining, and we’re moving toward a freelance economy. If you don’t have a college education, statistics show that you’re going to hold your job for about 18 months. That’s 73 percent of the population. The other 25 percent, the college educated, have been staying at their jobs longer and longer for the last 25 years. That’s not a freelance economy — that’s an economy where the middle class has been gutted, where the people who don’t have the ability to process information are being penalized, and where the economy is moving from hard goods production to service production.
Here’s one that hits closer to home. The average woman’s salary is 87 cents for every dollar a man makes. What that doesn’t tell you is that the vast majority of that difference is composed of the jobs that are almost exclusively female professions like teaching and social work, where the wage is lower than the median wage for a man in all jobs that men hold. If you go into any workplace in America, there’s not a statistical difference between what men make and women make. The difference is in in the distribution of jobs that women take and men take. You can’t solve that as a workplace issue, even though it sounds like you can if you say, “Women make 87 cents on a man’s dollar.”

What’s the most radical change you think HR will experience in the near future?

DNA is going to find its way into the workplace. There’s a genetic snippet of how well you process oxygen, and if you don’t have it, it’s impossible to be a sprinter. Then there’s a gene that the military looks at to select front-line soldiers, called the warrior gene, which controls how long you stay mad about something. The army tries to get people who stay mad for about 12 hours, but if you have someone who stays mad for 12 hours running a candy store, that’s a bad decision. It’s probably against the law to make that decision right now. There’s not a talent management system that I know of that can import and understand genetic data. It’s going to be very interesting, and nothing like people think it’s going to be.

THE GOOD & BAD NEWS ABOUT WOMEN’S RISE IN THE WORKPLACE

Women who work have come a long way since the macho, cigar-puffing, strip club-filled ways of “Mad Men.” But they still have a lot farther to go.
Women are equally represented in the workforce in terms of their numbers — and, yes, are paid more than they ever have been when compared to men — but young workers still think gender inequality is a major issue in the workplace, according to a Pew Research Social & Demographic Trends survey. Seventy-five percent of Millennial women think more changes are necessary to achieve gender equality in the office, compared to 50 percent of young males.
What changes do Millennial females want to see? More career advancement and more money.

Cracking the Glass Ceiling

Females still struggle to climb the corporate ladder. Just look at Fortune 500 companies: only 4.2 percent of CEOs are female, a figure that hasn’t really changed in recent memory. The culprit, according to the study’s authors: women are still opting out of their careers in droves to raise children. According to the survey, 51 percent of women said being a working mother made it harder to advance in their careers, whereas only 16 percent of men said the same. What’s more, more fathers found that parenthood made career advancement easier (10 percent) compared to mothers (2 percent). 
As for compensation, female workers, not surprisingly, want to earn the same wage as their male peers (50 years ago women earned 57 cents for every dollar men pocketed; today it’s 77 cents). But one reason for the narrowing disparity: male wages have dropped 4 percent on average for men over the last 30 years while female wages have risen 25 percent.
Why can’t women get equal pay for equal work? Education isn’t the answer; more Millennial women are enrolled in college and graduating with Bachelor’s degrees today than men are. Other unquantifiable factors, according to the survey, include gender stereotypes, discrimination, lack of professional networks and women’s resistance to negotiate for promotions. Experts agree these factors likely account for 20 to 40 percent of the earnings gap, according to the survey. 

Perception vs. Reality

The study highlights some interesting disconnects. While many women say that men have an unfair advantage when it comes to wages and treatment at the office, only 15 percent say they have been discriminated against based on gender. Also, most men and women say the genders are paid equally for performing the same job — and only one in 10 women say they are paid less than their male peers.
What gives? Why do you think there’s such a difference between perception and reality? And what do you think needs to happen before women are truly equal — both in pay and status — in the workplace?

JASON CORSELLO: WHAT’S MISSING IN THE PILE OF HR PREDICTIONS FOR 2014

Jason Corsello, our special good buddy, credits his HR colleagues with some sound predictions for the year ahead. But what’s missing, he cautions, is some much-needed perspective.
“[M]ore often than not, the grandiose thoughts we all wrap with a pretty bow for the new year never really pan out the way we hope they will,” writes Corsello on Human Capitalist.
Here, Corsello sheds some “realistic light” on what many HR experts predict will happen in 2014:

Technology Isn’t a Job Killer

  • Prediction: Technology is rendering many HR jobs obsolete.
  • Reality: “[T]echnologies will transform HR jobs, not remove them. This isn’t to say HR folks weren’t doing their jobs before, but with the help of new technologies, the growth of skills and the depth of reach for HR professionals previously swamped with paperwork and a difficulty connecting with talent will increase.”

There’s a New Way to Narrow the ‘Skills Gap’ 

  • Prediction: The gap between what educators are delivering and what today’s modern workforce needs will close.
  • Reality: No it won’t. “Instead of hiring for experience in 2014, let’s hire for learnability,” writes Corsello. “Why not teach them rather than dismiss them as unqualified?”

Wearable Tech Is a Personal — not HR —Trend

  • Prediction: Wearable computers are coming to HR departments.
  • Reality: “As HR tech is still being adopted on more traditional devices like PCs and mobile, jumping right to wearable because people are talking about it right now is a mistake. The groundwork needs to be solid before companies invest in the extra bells and whistles.”

Face-Time with Remote Workers Still Matters

  • Prediction: New technologies will help remote workers retain a sense of culture and community.
  • Reality: “While I don’t doubt these technologies will help, I do think that HR teams will have to work much harder to maintain a sense of culture and community for remote workers…discounting in-person company interaction could be a mistake.”

SPOTLIGHT ON WEARABLE TECHNOLOGY: HOW A BADGE CAN IMPROVE EMPLOYEE COLLABORATION

In the age of mobile technology, wearable devices like Google Glass and FitBit are redefining the way people move and, ultimately, interact. While some HR experts argue that mobile technology — specifically wearable — is redefining the way employees work, others believe it’s only a transitional technology. Nevertheless, companies are investing in different types of mobile technologies to improve employee collaboration in 2014.
One wearable that is on some company’s radars comes from engineering and electronics company Hitachi. In 2007, it introduced the Business Microscope: a device that uses sensors to monitor and analyze how employees interact with one another — from how many interactions specific employees have with one another to the hand gestures they use and energy in their voices. Companies are now leveraging the technology to boost workplace productivity and reduce inter-team conflicts.
It may seem far off, but as Josh Bersin, principal and founder of Bersin by Deloitte, recently wrote on Forbes, it’s not as far off as it may seem. “While products in this space have not emerged yet, we anticipate that [in 2014] we will be discussing ‘wearables’ and ‘location based devices’ as the next big trend in workplace and workforce technology. Disruptive? You bet. These applications will challenge HR in many ways (privacy for one) but also give us brand new ways to improve how we work.” 

Big Data in the Workplace

Business Microscope is just one of many examples of how companies are leveraging big data to better understand how to enable their employees to be more productive and efficient. And it seems to work…when used correctly.
According to H. James Wilson at The Wall Street Journal, one company used Business Microscope to merge two product-design groups that failed to communicate. The manager of one group was able to analyze communications and conclude that he was the problem since he didn’t interact with the groups much. As a result, the manager connected the groups and encouraged them to interact with one another and leverage the others’ expertise.

Tackling Privacy

Tracking when and how employees interact can push the limits of employee privacy if not communicated from the get-go. That’s the whole goal of the technology anyway — improved communication and collaboration. Talent management experts from Sociometric Solutions suggest three tips to be transparent about this type of technology moving forward:
  1. Tell employees what’s being tracked and analyzed
  2. Clarify that individual data isn’t seen, only aggregate data 
  3. Give them the option of participating, don’t make it mandatory