October 24, 2011 at 9:48 pm
Comments posted to this topic are about the item The HR Sorecard
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October 25, 2011 at 3:28 am
It's a nice idea, but would involve getting access to HR data which, in my experience, HR departments tend to be rather twitchy about!
Regards
Lempster
October 25, 2011 at 3:58 am
Twitchy-ness aside, I also say "Great Idea"! We already get some of the data related to employee turnover simply because my group is responsible for shutting down some system accesses. Since we also are responsible for setting up access for new employees, we have a "seat of the pants" feel for the ratio of terminations to new hires.
I have a great relationship with the HR department where I work, in part from having once had my cubicle in their area. Now, if I could just get off the 14-hour days caused by the loss of a team member, I might have time to look into this... :crazy:
Steph Brown
October 25, 2011 at 6:47 am
Do people tell the truth in exit interviews? People may be reluctant to say what is wrong because they don't want to burn any bridges.
If that's the case, then I would hesitate using anything from the exit interviews. It could skew or hide what is really happening.
You can use statistics about the amount of churn to focus on a particular area. But, use caution. I have seen departmental management get fired because churn looked bad, but, the HR people forgot the seasonality of the department. BI systems are interesting to work on but I've seen too many people take the output as gospel and not use their own intelligence.
October 25, 2011 at 7:18 am
Human Resource departments are similar to IT departments in that both of them are a cost to the organization without generating revenue
How many companies can work successfully for a day or two with no HR functions? How many of those can say the same if all of their IT hardware was down? Or, if that's not apples-to-apples, how about no IT staff?
A manager at a former employer of mine took exception to IT being called an overhead department. His reply was "let's turn off the server room and see how much overhead that is".
Even as a DBA, I've done work that directly affected customers and our value to them as a supplier. I've never worked in HR, but I haven't seen that from their department.
Woah. I think I needs me some breakfast!
Rich
p.s. I love HR. 🙂
October 25, 2011 at 7:44 am
Lempster (10/25/2011)
It's a nice idea, but would involve getting access to HR data which, in my experience, HR departments tend to be rather twitchy about!
In the US, Sarbanes-Oxley is a true PIA. It is difficult to get access to anything that is financial or HR based. In some companies, you have to have an approved charter to be able to request the security to work on almost anything.
The days of working secondary projects for "fun" is going away, at least for the large, publicly traded companies.
Regards,
Joe
October 25, 2011 at 7:52 am
OCTom (10/25/2011)
Do people tell the truth in exit interviews? People may be reluctant to say what is wrong because they don't want to burn any bridges.If that's the case, then I would hesitate using anything from the exit interviews. It could skew or hide what is really happening.
Yes and no, and you'd have to take the data with a grain of salt, maybe assign some factor that discounts validity, or accounts for some mis-truths. I have heard people go both ways, sometimes brutally honest, sometimes completely false.
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October 25, 2011 at 7:53 am
richj-826679 (10/25/2011)
Human Resource departments are similar to IT departments in that both of them are a cost to the organization without generating revenue
How many companies can work successfully for a day or two with no HR functions? How many of those can say the same if all of their IT hardware was down? Or, if that's not apples-to-apples, how about no IT staff?
It's still overhead. Not that it's bad, but like water, power, phone, it's overhead that doesn't directly relate to revenue.
The MBAs have given this overhead a bad name, but it's necessary and should be there.
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October 25, 2011 at 7:54 am
Joe Johnson-482549 (10/25/2011)
Lempster (10/25/2011)
It's a nice idea, but would involve getting access to HR data which, in my experience, HR departments tend to be rather twitchy about!In the US, Sarbanes-Oxley is a true PIA. It is difficult to get access to anything that is financial or HR based. In some companies, you have to have an approved charter to be able to request the security to work on almost anything.
The days of working secondary projects for "fun" is going away, at least for the large, publicly traded companies.
Regards,
Joe
I think that's not true at all. No one is suggesting you do this without any approval or without controls. People in IT work on financial and HR systems every day. The SOX stuff means that controls are in place, audits occur, and there is some oversight, not that the work is prohibited.
If you want to tackle a project on the side, you still need to get approval and notify managers.
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October 25, 2011 at 10:52 am
Therein lies the rub. In large corporations, you support the business, who pays for your time. When it comes to side projects, there's precious little budget, or inclination to spend same on such initiatives.
I have (what I consider to be) a ton of great ideas to improve processes and efficiency in our space. But IT is charged with doing other divisions' projects. Our projects, unless they are enterprise-level infrastructure, are on the perpetual back burner. And there's no gas there. So we can pretty much forget about being given resources to do our cool projects.
October 25, 2011 at 12:57 pm
Steve Jones - SSC Editor (10/25/2011)
richj-826679 (10/25/2011)
Human Resource departments are similar to IT departments in that both of them are a cost to the organization without generating revenue
How many companies can work successfully for a day or two with no HR functions? How many of those can say the same if all of their IT hardware was down? Or, if that's not apples-to-apples, how about no IT staff?
It's still overhead. Not that it's bad, but like water, power, phone, it's overhead that doesn't directly relate to revenue.
The MBAs have given this overhead a bad name, but it's necessary and should be there.
If it is overhead, and cannot be tied back to revenue or some other value added to the business, then it's probably not worth doing. There's a difference between things that add NO value, and expenses that are not easy to allocate to a specific value stream.
That said - just because it's not one of the lines on the annual statement doesn't mean it can't add value. Take it from this MBA: activities that increase morale, reduce turnover, or make the company work are not only necessary, they're valuable.
Walk up to your CIO and ask him if it would be valuable to be more effective at hiring appropriate talent, or give them a reason to want to work through lunch, or saves someone 2 minutes per iteration on a repeating task.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Your lack of planning does not constitute an emergency on my part...unless you're my manager...or a director and above...or a really loud-spoken end-user..All right - what was my emergency again?
October 25, 2011 at 1:28 pm
I like this idea quite a bit. Since I have not had a chance to read any of the other posts, please forgive me if this request is out of line.
I think it would be helpful to have people throw out ideas of what kind of data would be useful. What I come up with is likely going to be different than others. If 30 people offer suggestions, we are likely to have at least 5-10 very good suggestions to start with.
Dave
October 25, 2011 at 6:27 pm
djackson 22568 (10/25/2011)
I think it would be helpful to have people throw out ideas of what kind of data would be useful. What I come up with is likely going to be different than others. If 30 people offer suggestions, we are likely to have at least 5-10 very good suggestions to start with.
Google "HR Scorecard" and the first hit (after the ads) looks very promising.
The first rule of thumb I would put out there is the old rule of "it depends", in this case it is likely to depend on what HR want, what their key points of pain are, what their data looks like and so forth. (eg some companies are much more likely to be worried about retention than others, ditto training, OH&S, etc etc)
October 25, 2011 at 7:38 pm
Matt Miller (#4) (10/25/2011)
Steve Jones - SSC Editor (10/25/2011)
richj-826679 (10/25/2011)
Human Resource departments are similar to IT departments in that both of them are a cost to the organization without generating revenue
How many companies can work successfully for a day or two with no HR functions? How many of those can say the same if all of their IT hardware was down? Or, if that's not apples-to-apples, how about no IT staff?
It's still overhead. Not that it's bad, but like water, power, phone, it's overhead that doesn't directly relate to revenue.
The MBAs have given this overhead a bad name, but it's necessary and should be there.
If it is overhead, and cannot be tied back to revenue or some other value added to the business, then it's probably not worth doing. There's a difference between things that add NO value, and expenses that are not easy to allocate to a specific value stream.
That said - just because it's not one of the lines on the annual statement doesn't mean it can't add value. Take it from this MBA: activities that increase morale, reduce turnover, or make the company work are not only necessary, they're valuable.
Walk up to your CIO and ask him if it would be valuable to be more effective at hiring appropriate talent, or give them a reason to want to work through lunch, or saves someone 2 minutes per iteration on a repeating task.
You are looking at it the wrong way. I have not taken any real accounting classes, but every company I have worked for terms their departments as "cost centers" for a reason. Departments cost money to run. Sales generates income. Purchasing does not. Purchasing can do more for the bottom line than sales, but they are still looked at as not generating revenue. If you have a 10% margin, and sales increase from $100,000 to $110,000, the net effect is another $1,000 in profit. However if purchasing cuts a deal that saves the company $10,000 in purchase costs, that full amount goes to profit - yet it is still not looked at as generating revenue.
IT does not generate revenue no matter how you want to measure it. We cost money. Hopefully if we do our job right we allow the company to save money in other areas, and maybe, just maybe, we allow revenues to increase by making something more valuable. The exception to this would be software companies, but most IT staff work outside of that area. We don't sell our services or products, we provide a service to an organization that allows the company to do more with less.
These facts can't be changed, but long term maybe companies will eventually begin to understand that HR, IT and other areas do in fact add value if not revenue.
Dave
October 25, 2011 at 8:42 pm
Steve Jones - SSC Editor (10/25/2011)
richj-826679 (10/25/2011)
Human Resource departments are similar to IT departments in that both of them are a cost to the organization without generating revenue
How many companies can work successfully for a day or two with no HR functions? How many of those can say the same if all of their IT hardware was down? Or, if that's not apples-to-apples, how about no IT staff?
It's still overhead. Not that it's bad, but like water, power, phone, it's overhead that doesn't directly relate to revenue.
The MBAs have given this overhead a bad name, but it's necessary and should be there.
I agree it's necessary and should be there, but I don't agree that it's always an overhead.
I've mostly worked in the IT business - what we've been selling is IT facilities/services/features. It's a profit centre, not an overhead, in companies like that.
But not only in companies like that: at Neos we were selling entertainment systems to hotels; some hotels decided to increase the room rate to cover the cost of entertainment features - I guess those hotels could count the cost of the IT we provided as overhead. Other hotels (and residential complexes) had different room rates acording to whether those features were thrown in or not - that made the IT services we provided a direct and clear revenue/pofit/loss stream, so the IT we provided was not an overhead. Yet other hotels charged by usage, and either made a profit on the IT systems we provided or made a loss on them - again, not an overhead but a revenue/profit/loss stream (whether successful or not).
Also remember that "overhead" doesn't mean "not valuable" or "not necessary".
I've observed over the years that MBAs with an accounting or sales background fail to understand that and if they are allowed to get too high up the management tree they destroy the company they work for. Even some managers with sound technical background and/or a real understanding of basic economics fall into that trap, because they believe the claptrap the MBAs from Havard (or wherever) with no understanding of the business feed them. I picked havar (the oldest US University) as victim here because its age and its reputation mean its MBAs are more able to foist this "all overhead is bad" nonsense on people than MBAs from less old universities like Yale; if this were a mostly British forum I would have named my own school (Oxford) instead. Almost nowhere in the world is exempt from post-modernist rubbish in its MBA (or equivalent) courses. Competent managers of course don't regard "overhead" as valueless, but an MBA is of course no warranty of competence.
Another thing to remember is that all R&D is an overhead; it doesn't contribute to current revenue (and contributions to future revenue are speculative/imaginary, not real/measurable today). Now try telling Bill Gates or Larry Ellison (or Steve Jobs if you can find a competent medium) that it's an overhead and should be eliminated and see what they think.
Tom
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