May 06, 2005

Best you might've missed (and a note to new readers)

If you've just joined us, welcome! We've gotten hits from recent links on various blogs, and the T+D and Learning Circuits blogs are now linked to on the ASTD homepage (under Publications). To all who are new here, glad you stopped by! I hope you find the content useful.

Not long after I started the original T+D Blog, I began a weekly section listing links to the most interesting or useful articles and resources I came across on the web that week. In my job as news editor for T+D, I read a ton of online articles, blogs, newsletters, and so forth. I use a handy tool called Furl to save the links I think readers might be interested in and post the list each Friday. 

Here is this week's list. Hope you find something (or things) worthwhile to read on it.

Organizations

  • "Change or Die." This article from Fast Company is making a big splash. The author uses scientific research on heart disease patients to explain why change is so hard for people and organizations.
  • "Flexibility Key to Retaining Women." An excerpt from Harvard Business Review says that "employers need to take into account women who take a temporary 'off ramp' from their careers."
  • "Wicked Problems: Naming the Pain in Organizations." Wicked problems are a new problem variety, the author says, and we're trying to solve them using old tools.
  • New Evidence of the Power of Informal Groups. The Future of Work Weblog reports on a study saying that "informal groups that developed around informal experts and communicated openly about a problem generally outperformed formal experts who were attacking the same issue."

E-Learning

Brain research

May 6, 2005 5:31:37 PM | Best you might've missed

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85 percent?! Today I'm working on my July Intelligence column for T+D. (We work 2-3 months in advance of publication.) For the monthly Infograph, an illustrated statistic, I'm using a number that comes from The Herman Group's weekly trend alert. They say, "Recent surveys suggest that as many as 85 percent of today's workers are dissatisfied enough to move to different jobs in the next 12 months." Wow. That number seems awfully high, but for months and years people (including myself) have been warning about the coming labor crisis. (See my Intelligence column in the April issue for my most recent coverage.) As the economy is recovering and people are realizing they have options, they're going to be changing jobs in droves. The Herman Group says in the weak economy, companies have been pressuring employees to work harder and longer. But workers are getting burned out and stressed out. If they see a better option, they'll jump. Is your company ready? See my April column for some suggestions of new labor sources. I add one more source in the July column I'm writing: members of the military transitioning to civilian jobs. The Herman Group suggests that when employers get stuck, they'll rely on temporary workers to fill the gaps. What do you think? Is 85 percent too high, or does that sound about right?
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Five steps to smart human capital growth The U.S. employment report released on Friday shows a growth of 274,000 jobs in April. According to WisdomNet Inc., a consulting and technology company, that was 100,000 more than analysts had predicted. The company says these numbers show that companies are growing, but that they need to be careful about how they do so. Brian Wilkerson, WisdomNet's president and CEO, asserts that knee-jerk hiring can result in a bloated organization. He offers these steps to smart human capital growth: "Step One: Align people with your business objectives. Many smaller organizations have a similar set of talents throughout the organization--for example, techies, marketers, salespeople, or engineers. Other organizations do not systematically add to their base of expertise, hiring salespeople without examining the growth objectives, or adding management that often are not suited to the role. Successful companies avoid this problem by aligning human resources with the business goals. Expansion only begins once recruitment, training, and deployment of individuals is planned with growth in mind. Step Two: Take an inventory of current skills, talents, and behaviors. There are a number of ways to assess a company’s current skillset including internal evaluations, talent management software, or outside consulting. Internal Evaluations Most companies conduct formal appraisals of their employees, and the more sophisticated will have a number of different criteria for evaluation. The more in-depth the evaluation, the more useful it will be in assessing the alignment of skills and talents with job requirements. Technology Talent management software is becoming increasingly popular, allowing human resources and company executives to track all details pertaining to employees and their skillsets and traits. Professional Consultants Another methodology for assessing a workforce is to bring in a consulting firm that specializes in this arena. Consultants provide an objective, professional opinion with regard to staffing. They also provide a consultative document from which senior management may glean information before making decisions that may affect the bottom line of an organization. Step Three: Undertake a gap assessment. Gap assessment is the basic evaluation of where an organization is now vs. where they want to be. The evaluation of ‘now’ includes an honest audit of employees, their true talents, and their benefit to the organization. Additionally, it should include an audit of the skills required for each job description. Once complete, management must ask, honestly: “Can the current talent complete the requirements of the job duties?” Without an honest gap assessment company executives make assumptions. Some assume (or blindly hope) that they have the in-house talent to achieve planned growth. Others assume the opposite: they’ll need to hire new and expensive staff that have the necessary experience and savvy to take the company to the next level. Both or neither may be the right answer, but without an honest talent assessment management may pursue the wrong direction. Step 4: Outsourcing Like buying a car, management must ask the question – to buy or lease? Much has been made of outsourcing, but contract labor has its advantages: it can cost less, is far more flexible and can be easier to obtain from a skills perspective. On the other hand, hiring employees gives the company the final say over performance and costs. Step Five: Close the loop. So you have new employees or newly trained existing employees. Now what? In the human resources space, the hot term is 'succession planning'. But the bottom line for management is how to keep employees productive and engaged. To do this, organizations must have the processes and the infrastructure to ensure the work of their staff aligns to the goals of the business, and that the right evaluations, structure, rewards, and training are in place. In conclusion, the overriding strategic imperative is to consider talent as a key ingredient in business success – just as important as other capital investments. And just as additions of hard costs are examined carefully during times of growth, so should the additions of personnel."

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