Great book on Internal Labor Market

There are market benchmark data you can purchase or you can participate on their market survey to find out where your company is relative to the same industries or related to other industries. That is external factor and like it or not, it is not 100% apple to apple comparison.

What about internal data that is available in your fingertip? that cost you nothing and yet equally powerful! That give you a true picture of your current internal Labor market.




I recommend you to read "Play To Your Strengths - Managing Your Internal Labor Markets for Lasting Competitive Advantage" by Haig R Nalbantian, Richard A Guzzo, Dave Kieffer and Jay Doherty. This book is available in Amazon.com. it is worth to invest.


In chapter4, the author mentioned internal labor market, it show number employee hire, promoted and left of an organization. Take this ideas, I built an web application, consolidated information from vary sources (SAP PA/PA, OM, PM, C&B), compiled it into a simple HR dashboard, just like what is described in Chapter 4 ILM diagram, a business tools that provides a lot of flexibilities to cater for fundamental need for each and every organization. From analysing, understanding, simulating and implementing Organization Development (OD) intervention where is applicable.

Does exit interview has any value?

If you are HR professional, do you think "Exit Interview" has value? For me is "Yes" and "No".

YES - because it highlight to us where the short flow is, and we need to address it to prevent it from happening again. What will be the common drive force for people leaving the organization? normally, there are more than 1 reason why people leave. One of them bound to be MONEY and another one will be better career opportunities. It interpret that your company is only pay to the market, secondly there are too many blocker around; or you are the blocker.

NO - because how many us leave the organization will tell you the truth reason behind during exit interview? For a leaver, they will think....

- What is for me?
- What is the risk to me?

Let look at the other side of the coin. So, if people telling you the truth, and you are not able to address the issue, others will think, what is the point of telling you the truth again!

THE "TRUTH" WILL ALWAYS NOT NICE TO HEAR

But instead, they will tell you all the company nice thing and good stuff that he/she can recall, and the rest that he / she cannot recall, you know very well what I mean. People always want to kept a good impression during the exit interview, and hope 1 day when opportunities arise, he/she can come back to work.

What do you think?

Understand Your Customer need

Understand your customer is very important, is the business process / project that you are working on is a "Value added" or "Add Value", the make a lot of different.

Your customer like "Add Value" which make their life easier. If "Value Added", it is very hard to get their buy in, chance is your customer will just do what your asked for on top of what they are already doing it now, another word purely "fulfill" the minimum, does it sound familiar?

What is "Return On Investment - ROI" your bosses will asked for every process automation.
This formula I was thought:-

Cost of Labor > Cost of Technologies Investment

Cost of Labor = Headcount x base pay x time spend

Cost of Technologies Investment = Hardware Investment + Software Investment

Training the End User...this is painful part of HR system implementation...can technologies help?

Now a day, a lot of Human Resource system come with employee self service solution. It is quite common the training material was textual, informative and confusing, or grand mother story. The more sophisticated the Human Resource system the longer the story.

With the same material, a presenter can come up with many version of presenting the material and it is not consistency and there is not encore. What about Train The Trainer (TTT)?

Shi Fu teach his/her student only 80% of the skill, 20% is kept to protect him/herself.

Do you agree!

User only use the HR "self service" system on need basis or in the blue moon.

Is there a solution?

Yes. If you goto any Microsoft and Apple tutorial website, you will notice they are providing audio visual training material. Click here to view one of the product demo.

There are many way to skin a cat, this is one of the best way to save time and money. That is what your boss like to hear.

Common tools used

I designed, develop and implement will following tools commonly found in most organization.

1. Microsoft IIS Server - Web Server
2. Notepad / Web editor- Writing simple HTML and ASP Script
3. Free HTML and ASP code
   
4. Microsoft Office Professional

• Excel - Graph, Pivot table, Statistic Micro
• Word - Mail Merge
• Powerpoint - simple process map, data flow diagram
• Access - Database table, reporting tool

With the above tools, mix and match, you can write simple web application that give great mobilities. You can sit back a relax and enjoy.

Every solution is uniquely craft and design. So bottom line there is not 1 size fit all, surely not now.

Flawless operation

Big guy up there like to talk about upsizing, downsizing and finally rightsizing. After the size, the next topic talk about the high cost, low cost and right cost. How to run HR operations flawless effective and efficiently in MNC organization.

Business application design is my major and programming is my second strength. That is a great start. I understand what IT people think and I understand what business want.

"Chicken and Duck talking" this is common phrase I used. It is never easy for HR professional and IT professional come to same point of view when come to HR related project? How often both professional understand each other resource limitation? The truth is no nice to know. One party want flexibilities because there external environment constraint, another party want a scope of work and control the project boundary. The story never end. In addition, the more you depend on third party resources, the higher chances that your project going to be delay, another word....."Wait, Wait... until the cow come back". Normally time is never enough and everyone has it own priority.

For me is quite easy. I have the abilities to design and built the custom business application address certain change of policies or business needs, and normally it is custom business application and only use once. As a result, earning trust from peer, vendor, bosses, business partner and customer. As the time fly, I have my own library of source code that are reuse for any impromptu project.

Next, I have excellent key work partner across the organization, great support from peer and my bosses.

360 Assessment

360 Degree assessment is a of the method to collect multiple view/input of an employee. Parties involved normally covers the employee BOSS, Key Work Partner, Peer and his/her subordinate. The key work partner can be from the same organization or different organization, it depend the nature of work of the employee that you are assessing.

There are outsourcing company out there provides "360 degree assessment" service.

To built 360 degree assessment tools in the web is relatively straight forward. Just 2 database tables will do. Relationship Reference Key to identify the source of input and Survey questionnaire.

Once you got the data from the 360 Degree assessment, next will be a dashboard to give you a breakdown analysis of Boss input, Average of Key Work Partner, Peer and his/her subordinate input. It will be up to individual how to interpret the data.

Where can you use this method? May be Succession Planning or Performance Management Assessment.