Blog: HR Periscope

In July I learnt that Buckinghamshire County Council was outsourcing its recruitment services in order to improve its efficiency. Following on from this, I went on to read an article which mentioned the promotion of outsourcing as a good thing. Finally, I was called by an agency setup which was setting up an event to promote Lean Government, requesting that I participate The agency explained to me that Central Government is currently pushing for Local Government outsourcing in order to safe costs. This led me to reflect on some of my experiences of outsourcing and its impact.

The key thing that comes to mind is that when services are outsourced, savings does not simply derive from the fact that an external provider is used. Savings tend to come from a combination of organisation restructuring, improved processes as well as the possible use of an external provider. To understand whether outsourcing is truly beneficially to an organisation it is therefore important to find out from the outsourced provider which areas the quoted savings will actually come from.

Specifically I believe it is important to be clear on:

· Both what you want and what you need from your outsourced service

· The minimum requirements for the area you are planning to outsource (this would normally be the level of service you currently have in place). Outsourcing should lead to improvements in the service you have in place and not take you backwards

· What the essential processes are in the area you are planning to outsource and how the processes work

· The fact that the systems to be used are compatible with other systems in place in your organisation. I would also be concerned that any technology to be used is not a step backwards

· The fact that the outsourced service provider understands your business and is not simply selling you a standardised model without modifications to suit your organisation

· Be clear on what data/processes you are willing and comfortable to hand over and what you would like to keep in-house

· Ensure that relevant employees will have the right level of access to your organisation information/systems if you outsource.

· Finally – be clear on where the savings are actually coming from

Simultaneously it’s important to ensure that the outsourcing service provider:

· Understands your organisation’s culture and the way in which it works

· Is flexible in their approach

· Have previous, relevant experience with a demonstrable track record – ideally, you would want to be able to contact a few current and possibly even past customers

· Is update with industry trends and legislation

· Has systems and processes that work effectively and are up to date

· Is able to demonstrate the areas that savings and efficiencies will come from

Susan Popoola
Conning Towers
HR Transformation & Talent Management
Leveraging the Power of People

Copyright 2009 This document is the specific intellectual property of the Conning Towers Consultancy. Content may not be reused or reproduced without the specific permission of the owner or a reference to the source. Opinions may be generated from content obtained from other sources and such content is referenced as appropriate.

Labels: HR Strategy, HR Systems, HR Transformation, HRIS, Human Resources, Outsourcing

As we are now unfortunately in a recession, the current focus for most businesses is unlikely to be on recruiting staff, but now more than ever there is a need for organisations of whatever size to ensure that they are are as efficient and effective as possible.

A critical key to this is having staff with the right skills, in the right roles within your organisation. You may have noticed politicians talking about upskilling staff affected by redunancies to find the new jobs. This leads me to two inter-related questions. 1. Do prospective employees know what skills they require in order to work within your organisation? and 2)Beyond the knowledge that you need skilled staff do you know what specific skills you require, such that anyone could readily be able to identify individuals that would be suited to work within your organisation?

If the answer to either of these questions is no, then I believe you as an employer are missing something, asemployers are known to complain that young people coming into the workplace do not have the required skills. Now is the time for you to stand up and clearly articulate your requirements so that individuals going out for retraining and the people supporting them can make sure that they will be able to fulfil your business needs.

This is also important for your current workforce as through schemes such as Train to Gain there is currently a considerable amount of financial support is available to help you to develop your Staff.

I would recommend that you seize the opportunity and take a few steps as follows:

1. Review your business objectives/ plan for the next few years

2. Identify the skills and competencies you are going to need to meet your business objectives. If necessary get help in doing.

3. Develop this into a framework of roles which identifies not just the skills and qualifications, but also the wider abilities and attitudes that enable effectiveness such as communicatin skills and confidence to undertake different activities.

4. Assess the abilities of your current staff against both your immediate and future requirements in order to identify where you can develop current staff to fulfil roles and where you are likely to have gaps going forward that need to be filled external.

5. Make sure that the processes that you use to identify staff for development and promotion are open and fair taking into account the views and interests of your staff. This is important in order to prevent any legal claims of unfairness, but it’s of equal importance to ensure your staff remain engaged and positive about working with your organisation.

6. Begin to think about how you are going to fill the gaps (when the need arises) by recruiting employees, contractors or possibly outsourcing.

If you miss this opportunity and don’t begin to prepare now, when we come out of this recession in a year or two or whenever it may be, you may be caught of guard in a reenergised battle for skilled employees.

Susan Popoola

Conning Towers
HR Transformation & Talent Management
Leveraging the Power of People

Copyright 2008 This document is the specific intellectual property of the Conning Towers Consultancy. Content may not be reused or reproduced without the specific permission of the owner or a reference to the source. Opinions may be generated from content obtained from other sources and such content is referenced as appropriate.

Labels: Human Resources, redundancies, Skills, Train to Gain

A reality that cannot be denied is that 2009 will at the very least start of with a number of economic uncertainties and there is no doubt that the British economy has definitely slowed down. As a consequence, many businesses will go into survival moment and automatically be planning to cut jobs in order survive. This may help in the short term, but in the longer term when things pick up again organisations that do so may find themselves struggling to find the people with the right skills to support their businesses picking up.

On the other hand in spite of the economic climate, there will be people who start of new businesses this year that will actually thrive. This suggests that there are still a lot of opportunities out there for businesses that are able to identify them. I would therefore suggest that you start of the New Year by doing the following:

· Review your business objectives and activities, considering what areas of your business have been the most profitable and are likely to be the most profitable going forward. Consider if there are new areas that you can expand into that would be specifically beneficial at this point in time. If you have difficulty in working this out for yourself, speak to a few of you current customers and try and get an indication of what their requirements are likely be going forward.

· Develop a skills (or competency) framework to match your business requirements. You’ll find this useful to your organisation in the future as well.

· Do a skill’s audit for your staff you may be surprised at the latent or hidden skills that some of your staff members may have that may be crucial for both this period and the future of your organisation even if their current roles become redundant.

· Make changes to your staffing structure accordingly. At this point you may find that there are employees for whom there is no longer a role within the organisation or too many employees for a specific role. If this is the case you may have to bring in redundancy procedures, but you can do so knowing that you can clearly justify your actions.

· Even at this stage it is possible to consider other options to redundancy with employees such a reduced hours or a (temporary) salary decrease as long as this does not take employees below the minimum wage.

· If there are other organisations that you have a good relationship with there is a possibility that you can also share the time/services of staff or even second them for a period to the ‘sister’ organisation.

· There may also be employees who would like to take time of work to go on a training course. This may be a good time to support them in doing so.

Ultimately, be creative! However, If you are going to have to go for redundancies or consider any other option such as those mentioned above, communicate regularly with your employees and keep them abreast with the options, be aware that it will be essential that you first seek legal advice and that employee terms and conditions will need to be updated to reflect the changes made.

Susan Popoola
Conning Towers
HR Transformation & Talent Management
Leveraging the Power of People

Copyright 2008 This document is the specific intellectual property of the Conning Towers Consultancy. Content may not be reused or reproduced without the specific permission of the owner or a reference to the source. Opinions may be generated from content obtained from other sources and such content is referenced as appropriate.

Labels: Human Resources, redundancies, Talent Management, Workforce Planning

I believe most organisations have come to accept the fact that Social Networks such as Facebook, Bebo and MySpace are here to stay. Facebook specifically is fast becoming increasingly popular not just amongst young people, but also with older people as well. This has become increasingly evident to me in the last few months when I have noticed a number of friends from school that I haven’t spoken to for around 20 years, signing up to Facebook. Although, personally I have been a user of online networks for a number of years, I previously only found people of my age on business online networks.

There is no doubt that as individuals use social networks, they need to be cognisant of the fact that a lot of the information and I emphasis images placed on social networks are public and therefore accessible by both current and potential employers. If I ever doubted the extent to which employers used information from the internet to vet potential employees and suppliers, it became clear to me when I attended a meeting with a potential client, who had in front of him a printed copy of my online profile from Ecademy (a Social Business network).

A number of organisations have banned employees from access Social Networks at work for fear of the security of their IT systems or out of concern that employees will spend all their time on the networks when they are supposed to be working.

On the other hand, recognising the power of social networks to breakdown silos, build relationships, allow for collaboration and the sharing of ideas and solutions to problems an increasing number of organisations are creating internal social networks. Although I think this is something great that should be encouraged, the truth is that it doesn't replace the external social networks that enable employees to interact on a social and professional basis with friends and associates outside of the organisation. Until you log on to a social network you may be unaware of the diversity of activities on the sites which often include a number of professional/business focused groups, in addition to the more general social chit chat and activities.

Furthermore, as the 21^st Century employee increasingly seeks flexibility and freedom in how they work, I’m not sure that a simple no access policy is a good way of retaining the support and employment of good employees.

Rather, I believe there is a need for a middle ground which protects the organisation, whilst allowing employees reasonable access to social networks. So organisations concerned about the security of their IT network can have a few computer terminals that are not linked to the company’s network, placed in communal areas which employees can access during lunch or coffee breaks. Enabling employees to only access Social Networks in communal areas should also deal with employer concerns that employees may be sitting at their desks accessing social networks throughout the day.

Most important of all, an organisation should have a clear policy on employees use of social networks incorporated into its Policy on the Use of IT. This is important not only to clarify what is acceptable access to Social Networks within the workplace, but equally to ensure that employees specifying their employer’s name on profiles, blogs etc maintain a public image which is consistent with that of their employer.

Susan Popoola
Conning Towers
HR Transformation & Talent Management
Leveraging the Power of People

Copyright 2008 This document is the specific intellectual property of the Conning Towers Consultancy. Content may not be reused or reproduced without the specific permission of the owner or a reference to the source. Opinions may be generated from content obtained from other sources and such content is referenced as appropriate.

Labels: Facebook, Generation X, Generation Y, Human Resources, Social Networking, Talent Management

I’ve noted that there are an increasing number of organisations that offer Talent Management services, include it in job titles or simply speak of the need for it. To an extent this is good or at least the Management of Talent sounds positive. The only thing is I believe there is a lack of clarity as to what it really means. In deed people using the terminology often mean different things.

By Talent Management, I’ve found that typically a number of organisations use Talent Management as another name for Leadership Development, while a number of others use it to describe recruitment and development (of the top tiers) of staff within organisations.

I take a more holistic approach to Talent Management as I believe that although Leadership Development and Recruitment & Development may be important elements of Talent Management, they cannot by themselves be truly effective.

Talent Management needs to start with an understanding of a business’ objectives – both immediate and for future years in line with an organisation’s business plan. (This is the reason why whenever I work with an organisation one of the first things that I do is come to grips with the organisations business plan and objectives.) These objectives need to be translated into resourcing requirements, ideally in the form of a Competency Framework. This may be developed at either an organisation-wide or departmental level.

This Framework forms the baseline for Talent Management as it enables for the Resource Planning or Workforce Planning that provides an understanding of the human resources required by the organisation both immediately and into the future. It further enables an organisation to measure the required resources against those currently in place, to identify where the gaps exist and plan for the future.

It is against this backdrop, that we can talk of the recruitment and development aspects of talent management. The starting point of this is the development of staff to work effectively in their current roles. From here there is a need to move on to consider the identification and development of staff for succession planning. This often focuses on the development of Leadership staff. Good leaders should in turn look to the development of their teams.

As this is going on there is a simultaneous need to creatively work on the recruitment of staff. Although recruitment is nothing new, the challenges of getting the right staff within an organisation is increasing becoming a challenge and the challenge does not stop with recruitment. If an organisation goes through great troubles to obtain staff, then it is only logical that the organisation will want to retain them.

This takes us on to the final aspect of Talent Management that I wish to talk about. This is the management and engagement of staff. The point at which performance management becomes important, not just as a means of measuring performance, but also a means of employee engagement to ensure that an employee’s role within the organisation is something that he or she feels valued in and that it helps to develop/enhance his or her career. Simultaneously it entails offering the flexible working options that provide employees with a work life balance of choice. All of the aspects of staff management and engagement mentioned feed back into Workforce Planning.

While the various aspects of Talent Management have always been important, there is a heightened need for a number of them due to the requirements of employment legislation. Most pertinent, however is that fact that we do have an ageing population and the younger generations of workers that we do have; popularly referred to as Generation X and Generation Y are increasingly demanding these options of their employers.

In effective while the various elements of Talent Management are nothing new what is, if not new, now pertinent is need to pull together the various strategies, processes and systems required for the development of an effective workforce.

Susan Popoola
Conning Towers
HR Transformation & Talent Management

Leveraging the Power of People

Copyright 2008 This document is the specific intellectual property of the Conning Towers Consultancy. Content may not be reused or reproduced without the specific permission of the owner or a reference to the source. Opinions may be generated from content obtained from other sources and such content is referenced as appropriate.

Labels: Ageing Workforce, Competency Framework, Generation X, Generation Y, Performance Management, Talent Management, Workforce Performance

According to the Peter Principal, People are promoted to their level of Incompetency and sadly I can’t count the number of times that I have seen the Peter Principal take place and work to the detriment of both of the individual concerned and the department or an organisation as a whole.

This is particularly true, when an employee who is very good at working on an operational level is moved into a managerial role without being prepared for what it entails.

To avoid the Peter Principal and its implications there are certain questions that need to be answered before a decision is made to move them into a managerial role. Specifically are they prepared to:

• Act more like a coach than a player?
• Step out of the limelight and let their employees take the glory instead?
• Both organise and motivate both themselves and their employees
• Handle paperwork and details?
• Spend a lot of their time planning and analysing rather than being with people?
• Listen to complaints and resolve their employees’ problem?
• Handle personnel issues, inclusive of disciplinary issues which could amount to firing them?

If the answers to any of these questions is “no”, it is not to say that an employee should never be moved, but that time should be taken to prepare employees so that the answers become “yes”.

This indicates the need for talent management, whereby there is an extended time to prepare employees for the moves and at times to develop more creative ways of promoting and fully utilising employee skills, without giving them responsibilities that they will never be comfortable with or readily able to cope with.

Susan Popoola
Conning Towers
Human Resources Consultancy
Leveraging the Power of People

Copyright 2007 This document is the specific intellectual property of the Conning Towers Consultancy. Content may not be reused or reproduced without the specific permission of the owner or a reference to the source. Opinions may be generated from content obtained from other sources and such content is referenced as appropriate.

Labels: Human Resources, Peter Principle, Succession Planning, Talent Management, Workforce Planning

I recently read an article in the CIPD magazine that stated that according to a report by MPs, “Workforce planning in the NHS has been a disastrous failure that has led the service from boom to bust”, due to a lack of strategic planning by the Department of Health which led trusts to recruit more staff than they could afford.

The report goes further to explain that between 1999 and 2004 nurses in the health service increase by more than 67,000 – 48,000 of which were unplanned.

I don’t know much about the workforce planning that has taken place in the NHS, but I am aware of the positive impact of the planning or in some cases lack of planning in organisations that I have worked with.

Workforce planning is a strategic part of Human Resources as it involves planning for the future. Unfortunately, Human Resources departments are often too caught up with the day to day operational aspects of business to have time for future planning.

This unfortunately means that staffing plans are made based on the basis of short term and present requirements. Subsequently as medium/long term plans are not taken account there is a need to change plans on short notice leading to the need to suddenly increase or reduce staffing levels.

This could, however, be avoided or at least minimised by both medium/long term planning and more flexible working structures.

Ref: Personnel Management 5^th April 2007

Susan Popoola

Conning Towers

Human Resources Consultancy
Leveraging the Power of People

Copyright 2007 This document is the specific intellectual property of the Conning Towers Consultancy. Content may not be reused or reproduced without the specific permission of the owner or a reference to the source. Opinions may be generated from content obtained from other sources and such content is referenced as appropriate.

Labels: HR Strategy, Human Resources, NHS, Succession Planning, Workforce Planning