iProcon Insight Newsletter

March 2008 - Issue 1 Features Welcome White paper: The challenge of changing organisational culture White paper: HR Service Excellence and how Self Service can help Mini Case Study: Strategic HCM in Practise - Last week in my local pub BiteSize: Take a 2nd look at people metrics! - The e-mail free Friday: does it solve anything? - Use Podcasts for recruitment! Recommended book: Cultures of Creativity Events
A warm welcome to the 1st issue of our HCM newsletter! This free service aims at helping you to keep in touch with the latest thinking in Human Capital Management, Business Strategy, Change Management, Innovation and Organisational Culture. It is by no means restricted to an audience in the HR function but adds value to all managers in strategic roles. Your feedback is most welcome, so please help us to serve you better by sending us your comments: what did you find valuable, what not so? What did you miss? Drop us a line: contact@iproconhcm.co.uk If you find this newsletter valuable, don’t hide it from your friends and colleagues but forward it and invite them to subscribe. To find out more about iProCon HCM consultancy services, browse our website or contact us via e-mail or phone.
Organisational Culture: What is it? How can you CHANGE it? There are many definitions of organisational culture ranging from the articulate; “a pattern of shared values, norms and practices that help distinguish one organisation from another” to the more complex; “a pattern of basic assumptions that the group has invented, discovered or developed in learning to cope with its problems of external adaptation and internal integration” and the incredibly simple; “The way we do things around here.” However it is clear that the term culture in an organisational context reflects a multitude of facets ranging from values, leadership styles, controls, and reward mechanisms plus many other aspects that combine to create a set of behaviours that visually define and energise the organisation. A view evident in almost all organisations explored is that changing culture is something that is extremely difficult to achieve. Debate on the subject ranges from how best to achieve cultural change, to what extent it can be changed, and to whether any level of permanency can be achieved. With these issues in mind, iProCon HCM consultants have compiled a paper that seeks to delve into the complex subject of organisational culture to explore the following questions: Why is it so difficult to achieve a change in an organisation's Culture and why is it so often doomed to fail? How do you go about successfully changing culture? And what are the practical steps to undertake? In order to achieve a balanced and comprehensive review of these questions iProCon HCM have combined the findings of numerous academic papers and journal articles with the use of real life case study examples drawn from their own experience of delivering Cultural Change. In summary, the paper concludes by recommending eight practical steps to achieve a meaningful and lasting culture change... Click here to read the full article
HR Service Excellence and how Self Service Technology can help Based on data from several surveys and practitioner interviews we summarized how organisations across the world use Self Service Technology to improve their employee services. While most of them are still focussing on process efficiency only, some achieve a positive contribution through empowerment. Average organisations differ from best practice ones not only in the scope of processes covered, but in further dimensions such as percentage of the workforce covered, usability and degree of integration of individual services. Find out where your HR service organisation stands against best practise and how you transform an inward looking HR Service Centre into an innovative and customer focused service provider, perfectly capable to beat the competition from external providers. Expect a promising reward but also strong resistance not least from inside HR during this transformation. Click here to read the full article
Mini Case Study - Strategic HCM in Practise Last week in my local pub… If you keep your eyes and ears open, you find lessons about the importance of good HCM every day. These stories are most impressive, when you are involved as a customer, while you often may not see their significance from inside, if your own organization is affected. Click here to access this month’s mini case Have you encountered other cases where the human part of the equation was missing thus seriously reducing performance? Let us know – we are on the lookout for mini case studies like this for further issues of the newsletter.
BiteSize Take a 2nd look at people metrics! Your attrition rate is low? Fine, but are you retaining the right people? Many organisations measure staff turnover, but if you get a number of 5%: is this good or bad? Do you lose the right people or those you’d better retain? If you measure attrition you should relate it to performance metrics. Are primarily those people leaving who have good performance ratings? In this case you have a problem. If the poor ones leave, this may just be what you want. Unfortunately, most organisations measure attrition as an isolated KPI, which doesn't say anything at all. This is an issue going with most metrics. Usually, they only give you a solid insight to act upon when put into context by combining them with other metrics from HR and further processes. The e-mail free Friday: does it solve anything? The rising tide of e-mails drives some organisations to take desperate measures, the e-mail free Friday being one of them. In “E-mail free Friday – salvation from the e-mail flood?” (from the German magazine “HR Performance”) Sabine Olszewski suggests that this cannot be a solution but only adds to the stress because people expect it will only be worse on Monday. Instead she suggests a number of measures to make e-mail communication in an organisation more efficient and effective, such as: Consider, whether an e-mail is the right medium for your purpose. Quite often a phone call is much better. Have a clear policy about e-mail format end etiquette. Use a separate e-mail for each topic and state this very clearly in the subject line. Reduce the number of CC and BCC addresses. Learn techniques and technologies to have an empty inbox at the end of each working day. Don’t react to each e-mail when it comes in, but work through your e-mails in bulk several times a day. If you’ve opened an e-mail, act on it: delete it, answer it or set a reminder Use Podcasts for recruitment More and more organisations use Podcasts to promote their vacancies. Providers like Jobs in Pods help you to produce a spoken job advert, which can be published on their site as well as anywhere else.
Recommended book Cultures of Creativity The “knowledge source” on our website already offers you a selection of interesting books around the topics of this newsletter. This month's featured book is one rarely found on management reading lists. “Cultures of Creativity” is a hidden treasure. Published by the Stockholm Nobel Museum, it gives you insights into creative environments, where Nobel Prize winning thinking finds the right circumstances and into the work of some outstanding Nobel Prize winners. Click here to read a brief summary and review
Events Flexible Working is a hot topic as it opens an additional source of talent and is recognized as one of the best policies to boost employee engagement. The Event "The Impact of Flexible Working Practices on Performance" on 30th April in London features speakers from various organisations to provide new insights. HR is often seen as a huge overhead function doing jobs line managers are supposed to do. The CIPD conference “HR and the Role of Line Managers” (1st May, London) shows how to help line managers to become better people managers and deals with the future of HR in this context.

Use Podcasts for recruitment