Ten Ways for HR People To Gain Altitude in 2009

HR people say, "I want my seat at The Table." Others say, "I've got my seat - now what do I do with it?" They're two sides of the same coin. Which HR approaches have the greatest leverage? HR people want to be heard - so how do they do that? And once people are listening, what do they say?

Here are ten thoughts for HR types looking to gain altitude - as in the difference between the two-inches-from-the-ground, here's-the-form-you-need-to-fill-out view and the fifty-thousand-foot, let's chart a course for the company's talent management for the next five years view:

Ten Ways for HR People to Gain Altitude in 2009:

Read the right stuff.

There may be a line manager or two in your organization who's interested in the latest findings about performance management or the nifty team-building ice breaker you discovered on an HR blog. Mostly, your managers couldn't care less. To be credible as an HR person, you've got to know more about business -- your business, your industry and your competitors - than you know about HR. That means reading industry pubs and blogs, not just HR-specific media.

Learn by Interviewing.

You've got a building full of business experts at your disposal, and multiple brains stuffed full of useful information. Sharing your HR expertise isn't nearly as important as learning from the brilliant folks around you, and a great way to do that is by interviewing. If you're not interviewing at least a leader per week in your organization, you're behind the curve. How do you interview your leaders? Easy - ask each one to coffee or just schedule a meeting, notepad in hand, and start asking question. What's the biggest challenge each top leader sees on the horizon for '09? What are the acquisition-and-retention-of-talent issues on his or her mind? What organizational changes does s/he foresee for '09, and why? Don't site in your cave - get out and get into the brains of the people who run your organization.

Be a Community HR Leader.

The best HR advice I ever got came from my CEO back in 1988. He said "I want you to start an HR Council for our industry association." That group was the American Electronics Association. I said "Okay," and that was that. Soon I was organizing meetings, getting to know my peers in the industry and speaking in front of groups (horrors!). You can do it too, and you should. There will never be enough time in the day to finish all your tasks and paperwork - that's a terrible goal, anyway. Get outside your office and share ideas with your counterparts.

Ask your Clients What They Need from You.

We hate to ask our internal clients how we can do a better job, because we're afraid we may be overwhelmed with their wish-list items. That's a small problem. If we can dig into one area of common need and deliver, our credibility and our utility will soar. Create a free Zoomerang or SurveyMonkey survey for your 50 most-visited internal clients and ask them what they want from HR, and from you, in '09. Whatever action plan you put together, Item Number One is a recap of the survey results to the participants, letting them know "I heard you." That seat at the table is hiding in those data!

Build on the Business Strategy.

If you haven't read your organization's 2009 Strategic Plan yet, now is a good time to do it. If there isn't one, an HR person like you can be the catalyst for getting one written. It doesn't have to be ponderous and dense - one pithy page is perfect. Somebody in the enterprise knows the 2009 plan - you can pry it out of his or her brain and put it on paper so the rest of the squad can get on board. Your HR plan springs directly from the company strategy. An HR plan built in a vaccum is an irrelevant HR plan.

Your focus group awaits.

Imagine that it's mid-December and your shiny six-point 2009 HR plan is committed to a dazzling Powerpoint presentation. Take it to the lunchroom or the breakroom and pop a squat. Chat with the first ten people who wander in, and ask them whether HR is doing what it needs to do to keep smart people in the organization for another year. But wait, you say - my obligation is to the management team, not the rank and file! Bull dooky - who keeps the organization running, after all? If your team members aren't getting what they need from you (think of timely and correct paychecks, performance review processes that work, information on pay grades etc.) their bosses won't give you the credibility time of day.

Be Specific.

"Create a winning culture for long-term competitive success via strategic use of Talent Management approaches in a multidimensional intervention matrix" is not a strategy, a tactic, a plan or even a mission, vision or coherent English sentence. It's HR gobbledygook, and it sinks our credibility like no other. In your HR planning, be specific. You're going to reduce turnover? Great - by how much? How are you going to do it? You're going to listen more closely to the needs of middle managers? Ditto - how, and to what milestone? Sales and manufacturing departments don't get to submit airy-fairy annual goals, and credible HR people don't, either.

Know Your Stuff.

I used to say to my CEO boss, "Hey! My job is harder than yours. You just have to know a bunch of business stuff. I have to know that stuff, plus all this HR junk." I was kidding. But it's true. You'd better to be up to speed on HR trivia, including changes in employment laws, how smart employers are changing their approaches to recruiting (broken) performance management (cracked) and other often-tweaked-but-seldom-improved HR processes. If you want to gain altitude in '09, you've got to come across for your organization with smart and nimble HR systems that work - not retreads of barely passable programs that you've read about in year-old HR magazines.

Be Available.

Line executives' biggest complaints re: HR people are their lack of business knowledge, their fanatical devotion to policy-making and their unavailability when they're needed. Make yourself available to people who have questions for you - the daytime hours are for people, after all. I hate to work overtime as much as anyone, but if I'm not available to business leaders during the day, I'm sunk. No one values you for your diligence in completing EEO reports; that stuff doesn't move your business forward. Get it done another way, and keep your door open for those business-slash-people problems that high-altitude HR people are experts at.

Spin It Up.

As you build your HR plan and your high-altitude 2009 persona, start a conversation about what you're up to with other HR folks. Join a discussion group like Ask Liz Ryan HR (just for HR people) or Ask Liz Ryan (25,000 businesspeople from all functions) and/or a Ning group like this one to keep your learning going throughout '09. Leave a comment below and tell us how you're planning to grow your altitude next year. Share what you've learned through a blog or via Twitter. You're not alone, thank goodness. Altitude-seeking HR people are all over, and they'd love to know you.

Follow me on Twitter: asklizryan

Employer Branding in China

On the last leg of a marathon, which has finished in Beijing. I'm the guest of a joint venture between our centre in Glasgow and a newly established, practitioner oriented research centre in Bejing. The Cente for Employer Branding and Reputation Management is a collaboration between Peking University (the number one university in China), Zhaopin.com (one of the largest recruitment consultants in China) and CCTV, which produces the 'Best Employer in China' awards. Such a coming together of big brands in China is testament to the emerging interest in this concept (somewhat similar to Australia in last blog), as was the three hundred or so HR executives, graduate students and staff who turned up to a conference on the subject where I gave the keynote speech and received a visting professorship from Peking University.


The Chinese project is being led to my long time colleague, ex-PhD student and co-author, Dr Hong Zhang, who is currently editing a book on employer branding in China, due out late next year. My impressions from meeting with colleagues are that employer branding and reputation management are concepts that will take root in this most complex of societies. There are two reasons underlying this prediction. The first is the concern with image and identity, which, according to colleagues, is a major issue with employers in China. Consulting report after consulting report lists image and reputation as major pre-occupations of Chinese CEOs. Part of this interest seems to be a result of a lack of confidence among Chinese companies, and part is due to the second reason - the talent management agenda.


Talent management - attracting, retaining, motivating and engaging people - still remains a major issue in the big cities in China, despite the downturn in economic growth (accurate statistics on this issue are not easy to come by). A recent McKinsey report on talent management in China seems to support this impression, which is also the belief of my new colleagues in the Centre. I'm based in an hotel located in a science and technology centre next to the two big universities in Beijing, which has every big technology company in the world resident on its huge science parks. These companies require talented people and the Chinese universities cannot put them out fast enough; nor can they deliver the right levels of quality to turn this country into the knowledge-based economy in aspires to. As a consequence, Chinese companies are beginning to operate in global labour markets for talent, and its shows. Compared to my first visit fifteen years ago, the number of non-Chinese working over here has grown enormously, so much so that they have begun to locate themselves in the equivalent of 'gated communities'.


This new venture has plenty of interesting questions to ask of employer branding and talent management, and I look forward to helping them.

A Great Week with Australian HR Professionals

I've just spent a spectacularly enjoyable and informative week with more than 250 HR professionals in Australia in Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney as a guest of ADCORP, one of Australia's largest marketing and communications firms. ADCORP specialises in employer branding, and during the course of interaction with their consultants and clients, it soon became apparent that they do some very good practitioner-oriented research and creative work in this field. As part of their programme to support their clients and to learn more about what academics have to say about these issues, they asked me to lead a number of sessions on employer branding and on other HR-related issues I'm currently researching, e.g. strategic leadership, Web 2.0 etc.

From these sessions, a number of items re-occurred. These are worth summarising for the people who attended because they and others may have better answers to the questions than I do.

The first is something we wrote about in 2003, when we produced the CIPD's first research report on employer branding: 'What's in a Name'? There is no doubt that, in some knowledge-based, professionally dominated, industries - healthcare, professional services, consulting engineering and education, what's in a name really matters. This was confirmed by a number of discussions, during which branding was seen to connote spin and anti-professionalism among key managers and professionals. On this issue, my argument has been for some time that the notion of reputation management is more likely to appeal to internal stakeholders in certain companies/ industries and probably more accurately reflect what the process is about - underscoring legitimacy in external and internal labour markets for good governance and leadership, ethical practices and CSR, as well as creating difference in these markets through branding.

The second notion that seemed to strike a chord was the need for HR to be the guardians of 'authenticity' in employer branding. Employer brands which aren't rooted in what really matters to employees and potential employees are unlikely to be effective. Indeed, these top-down 'designed' brands are more capable of creating cynicism through perceived attempts at 'brandwashing' and dissappointment among employees through overpromising and underdelivering. One of the lessons is that HR needs to drive employer branding to prevent it being dominated by corporate communcations and marketing, functions which often struggle with the notion of bottom-up design or co-creation.

This issue raised an important discussion around segmentation: should and can organizations tailor EVPs to segments, and on what basis should we construct segments? Among the many interesting discussions we had on this topic were ones related to how far you go with segmentation and how do you relate segments to high performance, and to what extent do you privilege the 'global' over the 'local'. A number of organizations have begun to segment their employer branding on the basis of lifestyles, but do EVPs that appeal to lifestyles produce significant benefits for organizations? Also some organizations are wrestling with the problem that idenity and employer branding are essentially local phenomena, yet organizations seek to impose and privilege the corporate brand over the local brand (perhaps reflecting the dominance of marketing and comms). Is this the right way around for employer brands in frequently culturally diverse businesses? Or should we go for the equivalent of endorsed branding strategy, which is sometimes used in customer-facing corporate branding? Again, context is all important; there is no 'one best way'.

A third issue was the role of leadership and its impact on branding. It was clear from discussions that the idea of leadership branding was seen as an integral part of employer branding. Either because leaders have an important influence on the reality of employer branding through their actions in 'walking the talk' or other wise, or because we expect them to, the reality is that leaders (and recruiters) really matter in how people externally and internally experience employer branding. So, should employer branding always incorporate leadership branding?

A fourth issue was measurement. Very little is done in this direction, though for nearly all participants measurement is an absolutely critical issue in making a business case and in evaluating effectiveness. So, we had a lot of discussion around the notion of how to measure employer brand equity through psychological contracting, surfacing images, brand awareness, and some of the more conventional recruitment and retention metrics. For employer branding to really take-off (and for HR credibility), measurement has to be a lot more effective than has hitherto been the case, even allowing for the fact that what is measurable isn't always meaningful and the value of intangible assets.

A fifth issue was the importance and use of the term, Gen Y, which is more widely discussed in Australia than it seems to be in the UK (where the demographic problem is more about managing an ageing workforce). As we have pointed out in recent publications and will do in our forthcoming report for the CIPD on Web 2.0, Gen Y is a crude term than may do more damage that good. The problem seems to be associated with the 'fallacy of misplaced concreteness', in which shorthand labelling (of often diverse groups) begins to have real consequences; the more we think of the younger age groups as Gen Y, the more we treat them uniformally as Gen Y, despite the wide variation of lifestyle and behavioural differences within this group. So, do we need to be a bit more sophisticated in our research?

Random Thoughts

1. I realized I’ve been in HR too long when I was reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to my daughter and when Grandpa Joe tells about how Mr. Wonka just shut down his factory and fired all 10,000 workers and all I can think about is, “You can’t do that! You just violated the WARN act. Being mad at competitors is not a valid reason not to give 60 days notice.”

2. Why is it that if I can’t answer the phone when someone calls, but I call them back within five minutes, they are never at their desks? Ever. It’s like “I must call Evil HR Lady before I leave for that Mount Everest Expedition.” I find this even more bizarre when people call from their cell phones. I mean, did you call me and then accidentally flush your phone or something?

3. And speaking of phones, if you see a number come up on your caller ID and you don’t recognize it, don’t just call it back and say, “someone called this number.” If the person left a message, listen to it before calling back. If no message was left that means it wasn’t important, so don’t bother calling. Besides, you don’t know who it was! Leave it alone.

4. So, it’s 9:30 at night and I’m working. I send e-mails to three different people. All three respond within minutes. Shouldn’t we take at least some time off each day?

5. When I hear massive layoffs announced at companies, my immediate sympathies are with the HR people who have to figure out the whole mess and create the documents for everyone. I realize this is a sickness.

6. Pies for Thanksgiving this year will be: 2 Cherry, 2 Pumpkin, 1 Pecan and 1 Key Lime. The latter is not at all traditional. What can I say? We’re a wild and crazy kind of family.

Leading People. Leading Organizations

I'm a little bit tired and cranky. (Although not as cranky as Mr. Crabby pants who got 5 needles jabbed into his little thighs today. Sorry--just a bit of mommy blogging here.) So, when I read this I wanted to grab some HR VPs and bang their little heads together:

During the past year, several companies, including AT&T Inc., UnitedHealth Group Inc. and Cigna Corp., have been hit with lawsuits in which employees claimed that they were not paid for the 15- to 30-minute task of booting their computers at the start of each day and logging out at the end.

I'll leave the legalities to the lawyers (although for the record, I would never in a million years support such a thing and I believe they will lose the case). Let's talk about the people. Remember them? We're supposed to lead them. This is supposed to cause HR to lead organizations.

Apparently, we were leading them to self destruction. (Where are we and why are we in this handbasket? we might ask ourselves.) Sure, employees aren't "working" while their computers are booting up. They may even be, gasp! talking to their co-workers or drinking coffee. But, they are in the office. They can't be somewhere else. They have to be in the building. Therefore, they are at work and should be paid as such.

How do you even monitor such a thing? What if I come in, turn my computer on and get up to get a cup of coffee (which I wouldn't do because I don't drink coffee), but right then my phone rings. I answer it and it's my boss and I have a 30 minute discussion with him about work stuff. By this time, my computer is all booted up. Then I go get coffee (or rather water, which is what I drink at work). Do I have to clock out? What if I'm just going to the kitchen/cafeteria/water cooler and back? What if I run into Bob from Accounting in the kitchen and we discuss business stuff? Aargh! How would you even administer this?

Oh, I know, it's probably call center people, so everything is clocked on your computer. Still. If I'm required to be in the building, I should be getting paid.

But, let's say, for argument's sake, that AT&T et al are legally right. Computer booting time can be unpaid. Just how much do you hate your people? Do you want them to leave? Do you want to drain the lifeblood out of them? Do you not understand that your best employees will find new jobs and that as a result, the quality of your workforce will gradually decline?

United Healthcare received the lowest rating from hospital executives. This does not surprise me. You cannot run a good business without good employees. You cannot get and keep good employees without good policies. If HR is encouraging this type of policy (please let it be Finance who overrode the HR people on this, please?) then they should be ashamed of themselves.

Trying to save a few bucks will result in you destroying your company. Your people are your company. Stop being stingy.

Gah. Now I'm even more fired up and cranky. I'm going to bed.

Happy Birthday Deb!

See, I remembered! Now you are in a protected class. The thing all of us HR types dream about.

Employer Branding in a Recession

I'm increasingly being asked to comment on the need for employer branding in the current economic circumstances? Just how relevant is it when the context for the 'war for talent' has changed? So here's my take on this.

Prediction in an increasingly unknowable world is fraught with problems, as books like the Black Swan point out. I'm not trying to play the recession down because for many people and industries, it is - and will become - very severe. However, there are a few longer term trends which seem to suggest that employer branding may become even more relevant than before.

The first point to note is that employer branding is not just, or even mainly, about attracting new talent but is also about engaging, motivating and retaining existing talent. And these processes are subject to the same kinds of dynamic expectations among employees that I noted in the last post. Most of the good evidence on engagement suggests that organizations in general are not getting any better at this, despite the enormous investment in ever more sophisticated HR techniques. In part, I suspect that this is because these self-same HR techniques and the promotion of so-called best practices are leading to a ratcheting-up of expectations by employees of what constitutes a good employer. The more exployers are drawn into branding, the more the ideal standards they promote influence minimum standards of legitimacy in this field. This ratcheting-up influence is likely to become even more exaggerated as evidence on the ideal standards among prominent firms in the 'employer of choice' game become seen as the norm as a consequence of heavy promotion in the business media. So the criteria for what may have been seen as an employer of choice a number of years ago becomes the the necessary table stakes, even in a recessionary context.

Second, demographics worldwide point to ageing populations, decreasing numbers of young people entering the labour force and changing expectations among those young people that do. These three demogrpahic trends may well be shaped by recessionary economics but suggest talent wars will not diminish in the medium to long term, so organisations that ignore them will only succeed in storing up problems for themselves by neglecting their external and internal images as employers.

Third, in every recession I have experienced over the last thirty or so years, there has always been a shortage of talented people in certain occupations, and the knowledge-intensive nature of industry and competition in developed (and, increasingly, developing) economies will just add to that problem. As intangible assets become an ever more important strategic driver for organizations, so -called talent wars are unlikely to diminish (which is evidenced by current reluctance among financial services to give up their much maligned bonus practices, one of the probable causes of their current problems - see a case we wrote in 2005 on 'The Financial Services Industry: Unfit for the Future' in our Corporate Reputations Book).

So, I'm not saying that the recession will have little impact - of course it will. However, organizations that have invested in employer branding should continue to do so, and those that haven't may need to think hard about how they compete in labour markets that are affected directly and indirectly by demographics, knowledge-intensity and ratcheting expectations.