Tue, Oct 28 2008 / 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM ET

You may have heard the expression “truth in advertising.”  Our webcast today, “Lessons in Achieving Business Strength…One Touchpoint at a Time”  also me recall a wise comment I heard once, that “cynicism comes from behaviors not matching espoused values.”  

Today’s webcast presenter, Jon Kaupla, provides insights on how the best companies develop “on-brand behaviors” throughout the talent life cycle.  HCI members, we look forward to hearing your experiences, questions, comments, and ideas…

There’s a particularly poignant picture today in the New York Times showing a shot of the Lehman office in London.  For those of us in human capital, there is little as heartbreaking as the process of downsizing. We know that at times it’s a business necessity, but no one who has endured a layoff situation– as administrator of it or the targeted employee– comes away unscathed.

(photo by Kevin Coombs/Reuters).  The question for those of us in the surviving organization– what to do about keeping and motivating the remaining employees?  How can we keep them focused on the corporate initiatives and dissuade them from polishing their resumes?

Wayne Cascio, professor of management at the University of Colorado  sums it up nicely: “Often the first casualty in a downsizing is employee morale…(those who survive) are looking for signals, and they want to know how they are going to be better off.  They want to know if they have a future.”

Here at HCI in the strategy community we talk often about how retaining high performing employees is the most cost effective way to strengthen our organizations.  Besides open and honest communication, how can we manage this during a period of layoffs or restructuring?  Let’s start a discussion and share some best practices!

Listen up, human capital professionals– this is what our friends at Saba and the Performance Institute tell us:

FACT: There will be a shortage of 15 million skilled workers by 2010.

FACT: Sixty percent of new jobs require skills only 20 percent of workers have.

FACT: Twenty-eight percent of young workers actively are looking for a new job.

In the Talent Strategy Community at HCI, we talk a lot about the war for talent and my mantra for this community: Attract, Retain, Develop.  That’s because we as HCM professionals know something critical about our companies– our people are our most valuable asset, now more than ever.

Jeanne Meister writes in her blogthat “managers frequently cite completing performance appraisals as one of their least favorite tasks and that is often an understatement. But quietly there is a movement afoot to “consumerize” business software. This means that software is being designed and tested by “user experience teams” with the goal of making software “intuitive,” engaging and, importantly, free of training.”

Having a core strategic business process initiative is crucial, and 2.0 simply represents the next stage in planning– making it more intuitive and user friendly, and thus especially appealing to the X and Y employees in your organization. Employee performance management at this level makes the process personal– drilling down from corporate, to department to the individual contributor.

The Human Capital Institute is happy to be able to host a free webcast focusing on this topic on Wednesday, September 3 at 2 pm et. Susan Tonkin, senior product marketing manager at Saba, will focus on business impacts to help your organization transform.  Join us to share your thoughts and ideas.

Peter Cappelli’s new book Talent on Demand asserts that failing to manage your company’s talent pool is “equivalent to failing to manage your supply chain.”

(Cappelli, who needs little introduction here, is a management professor at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and director of Wharton’s Center for Human Resources, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and served as senior advisor to the Kingdom of Bahrain for Employment Policy from 2005-2007.)

He says of the “talent on demand” approach: “The idea is that we have to manage talent — the vast majority of U.S. employers, according to surveys, have just given up trying to forecast or plan. But we also have to address the problem that the business environment is highly uncertain. So rather than pretending that long-term plans will work, we have to find ways to be responsive and adapt to that uncertain environment.”

Anyone who has worked in and around supply chain know that there are fundamental questions being asked constantly: Do we have the right part in stock? How long will it take to get the right material? What will it cost?  “Managing supply chains is about managing uncertainty and variability,” notes Cappelli. “ This same uncertainty exists inside companies with regard to talent development. Companies rarely know what they will be building five years out and what skills they will need to make that happen; they also don’t know if the people they have in their pipelines are going to be around.”

Rarely when we think of supply chain do we think of the human side– the “touchy, feely” human resources side of hiring and retaining our employees. Yet if we’re all looking towards our bottom line, isn’t this a common sense– albeit jarring– approach to human capital?

All of us in the human capital community have some level of experience with implementing and utilizing HR technology.  Some have been successful long term implementations with strategic business plans in place– but many of us have seen that is the exception rather than the rule.  What are successful companies doing to make their technologies work for their people and their bottom line?

With ten years of survey data, and lots of experience doing business cases for HR technologies, Lexy Martin of CedarCrestone authored a white paper on how to use that material to support business case development. The Value of HR Technologies: Metrics and Stories seeks to uncover the value organizations have achieved from various workforce technologies from looking at ten years of research as well as through three in-depth customer case studies showcasing the benefits and impact these organizations achieved from these technologies.

Join us for this eye opening free webcast  (July 31 at noon e.t.) that looks at how in-depth research can change the way we view HR technology. We’ll highlight the United Nations’ substantial cost savings from its global integrated ERP implementation in human resources, finance, and customer relationship operations; Applebee’s common-sense approach to creating a talent management-based organization in an industry with incredibly tight profit margins and how it helps them open new sites; and Oracle’s groundbreaking use of Web 2.0 tools, integrated with HCM technologies, and areas that may over time show hard dollar savings. These real life studies will showcase how your organization can increase efficiencies and ultimately improve the bottom line.

Tomorrow the Human Capital Institute will be hosting a free webcast devoted to this topic, presented by Judy Sweeney, VP and Head of Research at Taleo.  We talk extensively about the who’s and the what’s of the multi-generation workplace, but what are we doing in practicality to attract, inspire and retain these future leaders? Is your human capital initiative in line with the future leaders of your organization?

A study by the Chartered Management Institute uncovered the following:

“Careers literature on Generation Y suggests the growing development of microcareers, where tenure in any job is much shorter, and characterises young managers as highly impatient and far more willing to move jobs regularly. Although the findings demonstrate a trend towards shorter stays with any one organisation for a third of young managers, there is still a significant proportion of the sample who are staying on a longer term basis: 31 per cent had been in their current jobs for more than 6 years and 32 per cent had been there between 3 and 5 years.”

So– one of our funademental problems is retention, always.  Yet this is not about workplace generalizations, it’s about workplace strategies that work for the long term.  Join us at noon e.t. on 7/15 to share your best practices– and learn some new ones.