Social Media & Recruitment � Analysis of Pros & Cons and Risks & Rewards

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The Flip Side of Authentic Employer Branding

Contributor:  Jason Lauritsen
Posted:  08/05/2008  12:00:00 AM EDT  |  0

As employer branding has become mainstream an important element gets overlooked in the brand discussion: authenticity. This brand messaging may be the most important element of brand strategy, but likely the most often ignored. As recruitment professionals, we believe our job is to create messaging and advertising that will get people to apply to our organization. What gets ignored is that this messaging and advertising must be based on a real quality or feature of the organization. Real means that a current employee would not give the “bitter beer face” if you asked him about it.

When I became the director of talent acquisition at a debt collection agency, the team was using a recruitment advertising campaign labeled “The Flip Side.” This campaign’s basic premise was, “Working for us would be different than what you expect.” The industry wasn’t well respected, and because of that, people weren’t lining up to come work for us. The campaign showed some current employees doing “fun” things with quotes about what it’s like working at our company. We were illustrating “The Flip Side” of our industry. Our print advertising, our online advertising and our Web site were all designed around this campaign.

At first glance, this seemed like an intriguing idea—until I started asking questions to test its authenticity. I asked some of the current employees about “The Flip Side.” In most cases, I was greeted with the aforementioned bitter beer face. Upon further investigation, I found that “The Flip Side” didn’t really exist. The campaign was designed by the recruiting team in an effort to attract candidates, but it wasn’t authentic to the actual employment experience at the company. This was the recruitment bait and switch. And it wasn’t taking new employees long to figure it out. In excess of 50 percent of our new hires were quitting the company within 30 days.

Truly effective employment branding is built on an authentic understanding of what motivates employees in your company to keep coming back each day. Authentic brand development starts with research on employee perceptions of working for your company. This can happen through surveys, focus groups or other interactive sessions. Good research will ensure that your brand messaging will connect to what your employees would actually say is great about working at your company.

In our case, we terminated “The Flip Side” campaign immediately and began doing research. We found that our employees didn’t come to work for the fun “Flip Side,” but they did like working for the company because of its professionalism and commitment to people. A new era in recruitment messaging was born for us, this time based on reality. The results followed. Within two years of the launch of our authentic brand messaging, the number of new hires quitting within 30 days was less than 10 percent, and our employee referrals had increased to account for over 30 percent of our total hires.

As recruiters, it’s tempting to sell what you think will attract applicants regardless of its basis in reality. Don’t fall into this trap—it gives recruiters a bad name and hurts your company’s image.

First Published on Human Resources IQ.

Jason Lauritsen is the Vice President of Human Resources for Union Bank and Trust, a regional financial services organization headquartered in Lincoln, Nebraska. His HR experience spans from owning an executive search firm to leading large corporate HR organizations. He is also a writer and speaker on various topics in human resources, leadership and professional development. 

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Under The Microscope: Will Kenny on Corporate Universities and Just-in-Time Learning

Contributor:  Will Kenny
Posted:  08/12/2008  4:13:00 PM EDT  |  0

Corporate Univerisities play an important role in the continuous learning of many employees. Will Kenny, the president of Best Training Practices talks to e-BIM about how to make a successful Corporate University and the just-in-time learning approach to training your employees.

What do all Corporate Universities need to do to be successful?

Resist complacency. Typically it takes a great deal of effort and a lot of internal networking to build a Corporate University. Once it is established, it seems to take everyone's energy just to work out the bugs and get it running smoothly.

And once it starts running smoothly, there is a tendency to put less effort into that internal networking that allowed the Corporate University to be built in the first place. The staff of the Corporate University can easily overlook the need to maintain—and even strengthen—relationships with other parts of the organization.

To be successful, Corporate Universities need to provide a service to other departments and functions in the organization. When Corporate University professionals ask, "How can we help X get better results from their employees?" they do well.

I believe the best Corporate Universities are run much like small, independent businesses, the kind that know they have to keep in touch with their customers, respond to their markets and continually improve product quality to be successful.

Explain the just-in-time approach in regards to Corporate Universities. Why is this approach an effective strategy?

The just-in-time approach is a response to a common problem, namely, that an employee may get training that he or she cannot actually apply for some time. By the time the situation arises where the training is useful, much of it has been forgotten.

Just-in-time, in contrast, seeks to provide the appropriate training close to the time when it is needed. In theory, that delivers better retention and application. As a result, there should be significant time and resources saved because you don't have to retrain content that has already been covered and forgotten, and because supervisors and colleagues don't have to provide as much on-the-job remedial training and guidance to "revive" knowledge and skills that have already been trained.

Just-in-time implies a more modular approach, cutting the content into units that can be delivered as needed. And many people assume that just-in-time means online delivery, with employees tapping into the training they need more or less on their own. But that's an oversimplification, and an important word in your question is that little "an." Just-in-time is an effective strategy, but just one of many. Schedules, resources, development costs and other factors can limit your ability to deliver information just-in-time, so rather than imagine that everything will be delivered just when it is needed, training departments need to do their homework and figure out where this strategy can be applied to deliver the greatest return.

I sometimes think that if we dropped that catchy "Just-in-Time" phrase (which comes to us from manufacturing practices) and talked about "The Right Training at the Right Time," we would make better decisions about how to employ this strategy.

You’ve said that the failure to address the poorly performing programming and tools can be the death of a Corporate University. Why do you feel this way?

Experience. Death comes to the Corporate University quickly. They don't tend to fade away, they tend to be eliminated with a single stroke, when they have lost broad support within the organization and competition for resources is tight.

"Poorly performing programming" may simply mean the wrong programming for the current environment. In other words, we may be doing an excellent job of training people, but we are training them on things that are no longer the most important issues for our internal customers in the organization. We are becoming irrelevant, and we could be missing the mark, not because the quality of our performance as instructional designers and facilitators is poor, but because we aren't closely connected to the current demands in the workplace.

We're in a tough economic environment right now. Product lines will be cut in many corporations because they can't afford the luxury of investing in people, tools and equipment that don't deliver benefits to the organization. Under those circumstances, front-line managers who are battling to get the budgets they need are going to cast hungry looks at the resources devoted to staff functions, including training, and they will support us if they feel we are helping them get more out of their budgets, with programming that clearly fits their needs and objectives.

Why is communication important in a company?

Communication is the most important part of my job, your job and the job of the person sitting next to you, no matter what the job titles are. Communication is what creates a company or organization, as opposed to a collection of individuals. Without that communication, we don't get the increased power of a group of people working together, the power of collaboration. With communication, two people can accomplish much more together than can two individuals working separately.

If you don't think that communication is the essence of your job, no matter what you do for your company, try this little experiment: For the next two days, don't make or answer any phone calls, don't write or read any e-mails or memos and don't go to any meetings.

If your day isn't driven by influencing other people and responding to other people—which is what I mean by "communication"—there's no reason for you to be part of a larger organization.

What are some obstacles to communication? How can companies overcome these obstacles?

Value, consistency and commitment.

Few companies recognize that communication is really the essence of the organization—what makes it a company instead of just a bunch of people. Communication is an afterthought, something you tack on after you have figured out everything else. Valuing communication as the core activity of the company is a great first step.

Consistency is often lacking, both "cross-sectionally" and "longitudinally." Take a cross section of what different managers are saying on a given topic at a given time and you'll often find contradictions. And longitudinally, there's a tendency for messages to change over time, not just because new messages become relevant, but because people get bored with delivering core messages repeatedly and move on to something else. Employees get used to fads sweeping out of the executive offices, and when the company delivers a new message, they just wait for it to go away and be replaced with something different.

Commitment to repeated communication of core values and key practices is crucial to providing that consistency and keeping everyone aligned with corporate strategies. But it takes a lot of determination, a willingness to stick with a known message that needs continual reinforcement, instead of tossing it aside for something newer and sexier. One tool to develop that commitment is accountability for communication. When the company looks explicitly at how it communicates its key messages, there is less likely to be this sort of drift, and the company can expect better results from its employees.

In general, I work on the side of creating communication tools for companies so they can use to influence employees. In other words, I work on the writing, content development and instructional design side of things, rather than as a front-of-the-room facilitator. (I’ve done plenty of facilitating, but I just find the design and development side of it to be more interesting!)

Sometimes this means designing an entire curriculum focused on a particular function. Often it means creating course materials, anything from content for online modules to leaders' guides, management presentations or various exercises and activities.

Rather than coming in and training their employees, I typically help them figure out why their current efforts to effect or maintain a particular practice or change aren't working. I educate them about what it will take to influence employee performance, and I create tools they can use with internal "amateur" facilitators to get the results they seek.

Why exactly would a company need training? What are some of the reasons companies call you, and how do you help?

When a company calls me for the first time, it is usually after they have tried to solve their problem themselves, a couple of times, without getting results. They are trying to implement a best business practice, correct a bad habit in the way employees do their work or roll out a new corporate strategy, but their own communication efforts have not reached the front-line employees in ways that "stick."

At that point, they have probably heard about me from a colleague and call me in to see if I can produce better results. And I focus on diagnosis and treatment.

It's important that we start by finding out what they have tried and by determining why that hasn't worked. I never sail into a company with preconceived solutions, although I often have a pretty good idea of what's going wrong. Looking at what they've done and listening to them carefully as they talk about the results they hope to achieve is essential to producing better results.

With a good diagnosis, good treatment is usually fairly straightforward. For me, that consists of designing and developing training and communication tools they can use themselves to produce better results.

Of course, after we have worked together on several projects, clients no longer wait until they are frustrated with their own efforts before calling me in. Clients commonly work with me repeatedly, and I have several clients I have been working with for more than 20 years. Those companies call me as soon as they see a communication need that fits the pattern of problems I have solved for them in the past. When should companies not call consultants for training?I’ve talked elsewhere about the importance of supporting training, whether with systems and tools, or whether through what is rewarded and what is discouraged by supervisors and managers. If you don't have, and are not willing to create, an environment that will support the training in question, save your money. The best consultant you can find can't deliver training that will make a difference.

Beyond that, it is hard to formulate general rules, but I can give some advice about how to make the decision to call someone in. I think it helps to start with the "outsourcing" attitude that might be found in other functions. For example, sometimes technology staff have to decide whether to build software themselves, hire someone to build it or buy it off the shelf. They base their decisions on the level of expertise they have, the level of resources they have, the speed with which they have to deliver a solution, whether this is a one-time event or a continuing series of events, whether the additional expertise an outsider might bring justifies the cost and so on.

I also recommend that more clients separate the "diagnosis" phase from the "treatment" phase when they contact a consultant. In other words, instead of hiring someone to "solve our problem," start by having them help you define the problem and recommend options for addressing it. Then you can decide if the consultant in question is also the best choice to implement one of those options.

Are there any experiences you had that have shaped your vision?

Like most people in the training business, I have repeatedly encountered situations where training, by itself, could not solve the company's problem. And I have often been asked to create a course to "fix" something, when I can see that the course won't work because the new employee behavior won't be consistently supported when employees return to their desks. That could mean that their supervisors have a different point of view about what employees should be doing, or it could mean that the systems and tools employees have to use will work against the new way of doing things.

I’ve learned to look for the business problem the client is addressing and to be a little cautious when they call me in with a training solution already in mind. They may be right, but I want to talk to them about the bigger picture enough to make sure that the training they have suggested will really have an impact.

I’ve been at this long enough to be comfortable telling a client, even a new one, when I think he or she is headed down the wrong path, or when he or she needs to take steps outside of the training project to get results. And I'm willing to walk away from a project if I know I can't make it work. It doesn't do me or my client any good to invest a lot of time, effort and money into a project that I know won't help the company.

What is your number one philosophy that you try to teach all of your clients?

Effective communication is the most powerful tool you have to reach your goals for the company (or department, or function), and it isn't easy. I can help overcome a lack of communication skills with the tools and consulting I provide, but without an awareness of the central role communication plays in everyone's job, regardless of job title, and without explicit attention to communicating goals, expectations and best practices, those brilliant strategies the executives hatch will have little impact on how employees execute their functions with customers, suppliers and colleagues.

More and more, I talk about "work-style change" as the goal of training and purpose of spreading best business practices. We know how hard "lifestyle change" can be: exercising, losing weight, eating healthier foods. It doesn't happen after an "event," such as reading a book, watching a program or taking a course. It happens when a person clearly understands what needs to be done, and when the environment supports the change and regularly reinforces that understanding.

Any best practice worth following, any change that will make the company stronger and more successful, demands this kind of long-term view of behavior change and the supporting commitment and investment to make it happen.

Interview by Jessica Livingston, editor

Will Kenny has devoted more than 25 years to helping organizations establish and sustain best business practices. Through his consultancy, Best Training Practices, Kenny applies his experience in training and employee communications to help clients effect culture change and to guide employees to new "work-styles" that advance key corporate strategies.

Kenny works directly with clients of all sizes to diagnose and treat their employee communication problems. From small businesses to national and international corporations, a wide variety of clients depend on Kenny for consulting, instructional design, training development and business writing services.

Training professionals, whether on staff or independent consultants, look to Kenny for ideas that enhance their impact on employees and their success as businesses. Kenny publishes The Training Tipsheet, a free bi-weekly e-newsletter touching on employee communications and training, managing best practices and reaching employees in ways that truly change how they work.

And Kenny is always happy to respond to questions, comments and ideas at will@besttrainingpractices.com.

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How Social Networks Improve Employee Productivity and Organizational Performance

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The Learning Initiative: Creating the Value in On-the-Job Training

Contributor:  Elizabeth Black
Posted:  07/01/2009  5:38:00 PM EDT  |  1

Most business owners and executives know the value of training their workforce. However, in our time-compressed and fiscally-challenged world, more often than not, formal classroom training occurs infrequently, and companies are resorting more frequently to on-the-job training. If your organization needs to create just-in-time training because someone needs to be able to perform the job now, think about the following scenario:

While I was standing in line at a fast food restaurant, I observed the following interaction:

Rosa, who clearly was new to her job, was being given the following instructions by Robert, another employee, on how to ring up a special order—"Press number three, hit no onions, subtract medium drink, add medium chocolate shake.”

While explaining, Robert was standing in front of the register, hitting the buttons. Then he said, “Got that?”

Rosa said, hesitantly, “Yes,” and I knew, at that moment, that she had no hope of replicating that sequence for the next “special order,” nor did she understand what Robert had just done.

How many times is on-the-job training performed in this way in countless businesses?

The sequence often goes like this: Trainer explains how to perform steps while actually performing the tasksLearner observes from a distanceTrainer asks if learner understandsLearner almost always replies affirmativelyWhat’s Wrong With This Picture?

Authors Jim Caple and Roger Buckley, in their book One-to-One Training and Coaching Skills, call this method, “Sitting by Nellie.” The thought is that simply by sitting (or standing) and observing, learning will occur by some form of “psychological osmosis.” It assumes that just because someone is proficient in doing a task, he or she will be good at teaching it to others.

Not only is this usually not the case, but it also assumes that all learners learn the same way. The reality is that there are multiple learning styles, and most people have preferred ways of learning. Think about how you would like to learn a new software program. Would you like to read the accompanying manual? Would you prefer to take a lecture class where the computer screen was projected onto a large screen for everyone to see what the trainer was doing, or would you prefer to load the software onto your computer and work through it by trial and error? Each of these methods uses a different learning style, and the best training utilizes a combination of these to appeal to the broadest base of learners.

It was pretty obvious from the look on Rosa’s face at the fast food restaurant that she was confused, and this is exactly what happens too often in most workplaces when on-the-job training is done without any thought to the best way to teach something to another person.

Ways to Improve On the Job Training

The next time you are asked to create on the job training, consider the following hints:

Explain the “What” and the “Why”—Take time to explain the job or task at hand. For example, suppose that you are training a new assistant in your office to do medical coding for a group of physicians. You know that if the assistant does not input the correct code for each procedure, the laboratory will reject the paperwork and the patient will not be able to get the procedure, or you will have to spend time on the telephone correcting the error. In this case, taking time, upfront, to explain not only what must be done to enter the data properly but the reasons you are asking her to do it in a certain way, could go a long way toward explaining the context of the job or task and the consequences of doing it improperly.

If you have time, you could provide some examples of times when the coding had not been done properly; examples or stories help solidify the learning. You might also do the explaining by asking questions rather than telling. This type of training engages learners since it is really a dialogue rather than a one-way monologue where the learner has to listen and remember.

Now Teach the “How”—Research tells us that trainees learn only 16 percent of what they read, 20 percent of what they see, 50 percent of what they see and are told, but 90 percent of what they get to practice doing. Additionally, in order to accommodate the various learning styles, you should provide time for observing, reflecting and doing.

In the case of the physician’s office, the person doing the training could enter a patient’s data and the proper codes while the trainee was observing. In order to take it farther than “Sitting By Nellie,” though, we would add the steps of reflecting and doing. Reflecting is the opportunity for the learner to comment upon what she is observing. It also provides the learner with time for every step in the task to sink in, and everything should be less of a blur than had she simply observed each step in the process.

Finally, the trainee should have an opportunity to practice doing the task while the trainer observes. The caution here is that the trainee will be slow to perform the steps since there will be someone “looking over her shoulder,” but it is a good way for the trainer to observe each step. The trainer should provide feedback—both what the trainee did well and what could be improved—at the end of the task—in this case, the finalization of the medical form. If an error needs to be corrected immediately, of course, the trainer will want to do so, but if it is not critical to the successful completion of the task, the trainer should wait until the task is finished and then suggest ways to do it differently. After two or three practice tries, the trainer and the learner should have a brief conversation summarizing the “what” and the “why” and allowing the learner to ask any final questions she may have at this point.

If you follow the steps outlined above, on the job training can be a very effective way of learning to do what is required on the job. Just don’t try to get it perfect the first time—especially if there is a line up of hungry people in front of you!

 Elizabeth (Betty) Black and Joanne Dustin, in partnership as Synergy Consulting Collaborative LLC, offer a unique, self-directed career development program for both for-profit and non-profit organizations.  For more information, contact them at www.careercollaborators.com.  

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How Best To Document: Addressing the �Time� Factor

November 5,2008 by Devora Lindeman

When you create documentation about an employee’s behavior or performance, you are writing for a future audience. By looking at the documents, a future reader who was not there, does not know the players and may not even know anything about your business, should be able to tell what happened and should have no questions about the situation described in the document. When employment lawyers request files in the context of an employment discrimination lawsuit, we hope that the complainant’s personnel file will have documents describing all the gory details about his or her performance that we have heard about from our client.

Typically, however, this is not the case. Sometimes, the documentation on the employee is practically useless because it is incomprehensible.

Remember that documentation must include the “who,” “what,” “where,” “when” and sometimes the “why” of the situation. When any of these are missing, the documentation becomes less helpful, if not completely worthless.

Handling Time in a Document

Time is an important factor to consider in any documentation. There may be two or more “whens”: 1) When you are writing the report and 2) when the events you are writing about occurred.

Always date the report the date you are writing it.Always make clear the date when the event (or events) you are writing about happened.

Here are some other factors about time to keep in mind when documenting:

When you write the date either on the report or in the report, you need to include the day, month and year. Do not forget the year. Especially when an employee is employed for years, if there is a report in the file that says “June 6,” we may never know what year it was written. Get in the habit of writing a full date on notes, phone messages, reports and any documentation. You never know when it could be important.Do not just say that an event occurred “last Tuesday.” Look at a calendar and figure out the date to ensure accuracy.Keep in mind that it might also be important to note the time of day that something happened, and whether it occurred before, after or during working hours.Time can also be relevant when there is a sequence of events. Be sure the order in which things occurred is clear.

Here is an example:

Chris:

Sarah came in a lot later than I thought she would. This was unacceptable and was not approved ahead of time. Ruth had to cover for Sarah, which meant Ruth could not do everything she needed. Margaret told me that Sarah was going to be a little late.

Stephanie

How many problems regarding time can you find with this memo?

Here is a suggested revision:

November 6, 2008

Chris:

Sarah came in a lot later today, November 6, than I thought she would. Margaret told me yesterday that Sarah was going to be a little late today. I thought this meant about 15 minutes.

Sarah came in 1½ hours late today. This was unacceptable and was not approved ahead of time. Ruth had to cover for Sarah, which meant she could not do everything she needed.

Stephanie

Learning to handle the “time” factor in documentation can be helpful to the company in the future when that document plays a role in the company’s legal defense. Make sure to train your managers and executives in writing proper reports that contain all the necessary information so they clearly communicate to the reader, not only today, but also in the future.

First published on Human Resources IQ.

Devora L. Lindeman is a Partner with Greenwald Doherty LLP, a labor and employment law firm exclusively representing management in relationships with employees and unions, with offices in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. She provides management training to employers and employer associations on these and other topics. Lindeman joined Greenwald Doherty in 2007 with many years experience in management-side labor and employment law. Previously an attorney at Proskauer Rose, LLP, she divided her practice between human resources consultation and court and agency litigation. Lindeman spent a number of years at a labor and employment boutique firm prior to that. Since she has a business background, she understands employers’ needs and works with them to creatively solve employee issues. Much of her practice involves counseling clients on issues that arise daily, such as responding to workplace discrimination or harassment complaints, dealing with wage and hour compliance issues, accommodating individuals with disabilities, dealing with leave laws such as the Family and Medical Leave Act and routinely addressing the other myriad of situations that arise on a daily basis when one has employees. She also reviews and drafts employee policies and handbooks and assists employers with employee agreements, such as non-compete and confidentiality agreements, as well as those involved with reductions in force. Lindeman lectures to trade and business associations on various employment law topics.

Lindeman received her undergraduate degree from Sarah Lawrence College and graduated from Rutgers School of Law—Newark with Highest Honors. During law school, she served as the Notes & Comments Editor for the Rutgers Law Review. On graduation, she was inducted into both the Order of the Coif and the Order of the Barrister. She then clerked for the Honorable Stanley R. Chesler, U.S.M.J., in the District of New Jersey. Lindeman has practiced management-side labor and employment law ever since. She is admitted to practice in New York and New Jersey.

function submitCommentsOrder() {var commentsOrder = $('#commentsOrder').val();$('#setCommentsOrder').attr('action','/columnarticle.cfm?externalID=345&commentsOrder=' + commentsOrder);$('#setCommentsOrder').submit();}  Comments Sign in or Sign up to post a comment CathyG 11/09/2008 10:33:10 AM EST

As a career consultant who works with employees, I think this post als offers a good lesson for documenting cases for promotion and protecting oneself against an unfair situation. Good info.
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When and Why an In-House HR Shared Services Solution Makes Sense

This Roundtable discussion took place in March 2010 and was published by SSON as part of its HR series.

Roundtable Panel

• Edward Golitko, Senior Director, HR, EMC 

• Robbi Wendel, IS Applications Manager, Nissan North America 

• Jim Scully, President and Founder, Shared Services Institute 

Moderator: Niamh Byrne, Online Editor, SSON

SSON: After years of HR outsourcing, some companies are bringing some HR services back in-house. Why do you think there has been this change? Jim, can I start by asking you?

Jim: The Shared Services Institute just finished a pretty comprehensive survey on HR shared services practice, and this is one of the areas that we looked at. It looks as though it is a counter balancing trend; there is quite a bit of activity in both directions – both sides of the field, to use an American football analogy. First of all, I don’t see companies moving these things in-house for costs alone. There is some unfulfilled expectation underlying it. Some of that comes from decisions made at very beginning of the decision to move to outsourcing when companies compared their current state versus a future outsourced state. Organizations that built a capability for in-house delivery are actually asking themselves that same question and getting a different answer now. Now that they’ve implemented Shared Services, they are comparing the outsourced environment to the now future state of in-house, and they are deciding that the right thing to do is to bring it back in.

Robbi: I concur with that statement. A lot of that has to do with the technology, ease, security and comfort that comes with that having that in-house – and the knowledge and the benefits of having the data in-house, too. 

SSON: Perhaps you can give us an example of how that is working for you at Nissan

Robbi: Sure. We see that when our employees have that in-house touch, they just have a better comfort level – a comfort level that you don’t have when it is outsourced. There is a different rapport and I don’t know that surveys capture that very well.

SSON: At Nissan, are there examples where you have looked at outsourcing but you have decided to keep it in house?

Robbie: When we looked at Enwisen, we were trying to consolidate disparate HR operations and that’s why we wanted an in-house solution. We also needed to consolidate all our HR systems at the same time, so going to an outsourced model wouldn‘t have worked for us. The Shared Service model for Nissan meant not only a system for case management, but also for the knowledge center - consolidating policies and procedures and allowing employees for the first time to have that access and that ‘touch.’ Outsourcing wasn’t going to provide them with that opportunity.

Edward: I think there are a number of reasons [why companies are trending in-house]. Around three and a half years ago, it was like a mandate: ‘we must outsource a certain percentage of your operations’ – it appeared to be all the rage. Even if it didn’t make sense, you had to do it, because that is what everyone else was doing. But there are a number of reasons why we are looking to bring it back in-house:

• Presence in China and India and in lower-cost offshore locations. We have a payroll service center with ADP that we are running in India, so why do we want to be paying for the administration and everything else in another service center? Can’t we bring it in-house and use the same thing?

• Technology eases this transition. You can think about it conceptually and actually convey it to your management team. The cost of doing this internally is less expensive, and once you have the model you get the synergy between the different areas of finance and HR where you can back each other up.

• Ownership and control. When you outsource to someone else, you are giving control to them. We pride ourselves in running pretty good businesses, and having ownership and control.

• Consistent Training 

• Efficiency. We use Wipro and Infosys in some of our other areas, and we are going through a whole HR change as we set up regional centers: one in Ireland, a mini one in the US for the Americas, and one in India.

In summary, we are finding that we can do Shared Services in-house technology consolidation in HR, and other areas such as finance are doing the same thing. It gets down to effectiveness, efficiency and cost. There’s a little bit of momentum now. If you look three years ago, I wouldn’t think it would be put together this well.

SSON: So can I direct this next question to you then, Edward. What elements do you think make sense for companies to do in-house?

Edward: In a very highly-specialized area where you don’t have the expertise – those you probably want to keep outsourced. Areas that we are looking at, like many companies, are the more mundane daily items that day-to-day consume the time of an HR specialist making $100,000 and that can be answered by either technology or by somebody in India just as well. All you have to do is train the right employees to do that.

Other things to push out are higher levels of information, like programming. What we find is that by the time we get it to India, and do the communications back and forth, you lose so much in efficiency and effectiveness in communication that it’s better to pay the higher price here, and get it right once, rather than with the lower cost model and try to do it three or four times. It’s almost as much an art as it is a science; you have to feel your way through the organization to make those determinations.

SSON: Jim, can I ask your thoughts on that? What elements do you think it makes sense for a company to keep in-house and those to outsource?

Jim: In the survey I mentioned earlier, we asked our respondents to tell us for each functional area within HR, if it is entirely insourced, mostly insourced, mostly outsourced or entirely outsourced. As you might guess, the mix is across the board. If you find a group of people that outsource it completely, you will find a group of people that will insource it completely. However, there seems to be three categories that these functions fall in, and I think it is pretty instructive for how these decisions are being made.

• One category – call it “our way” – includes HR functions that are close to the core value proposition of HR: to attract, retain, reward and motivate employees. These are the kinds of functions that companies are saying, ‘we’re going to do this our way – we’re not just going to take some other way of doing this, because it has got some serious implications about whether we deliver value.’ They want it inside so they have control over it. Or, if they do outsource it they want the vendor to do it their way. Areas that in the survey tended to fall into this category are staffing, recruiting, training, HRIS, and employee relations

• Category two – which I’ll call “their way” – is the opposite. It includes functions that are further away from the core value position of HR and are more driven by external standards or regulations. Things like, relocation, workers’ compensation, unemployment compensation, and COBRA administration were more outsourced in the survey. I call this the “their way” category because the way they are performed is defined more by factors and trends outside the company.

• The third category crosses all areas and I call it the “better way” category. This is where the solution, whatever it is today – insourced, co-sourcedor outsourced – is not really working to the company’s satisfaction and they’re looking for a better way of doing it. A good example of this would be the FMLA leave administration. Whereas a lot of it is in-house today, the survey shows a lot of interest in future outsourcing. This makes sense, since FLMA is very time-consuming and not working very well at many companies. So in summary, there is interest in both outsourcing and insourcing and our survey findings suggest that those decisions fall into the three categories I just mentioned.

Edward: We have done that with Qualified Domestic Relations Orders (QDROs) and FMLAs and areas that are very technical. You don’t want to be retaining a one- or two-person expertise that has a potentially high risk if you don’t do it right. It’s areas like those we have looked to outsource rather than try to keep them internal.

Jim: And if you try to outsource things that you really want to do your way, you have to realise that your vendor is going to have one arm tied behind their back in terms of being able to deliver value. It is difficult for an outsourcer to do things on a client-specific basis and really do it better and cheaper.

Robbi: I agree, because you are going to end up with a heavy touch contract and you’re going to be dissatisfied with the service. Anytime where there is a lot of face-to-face, or a lot of personal contact, and like Ed and Jim have said is highly custom, you are just not going to be happy with outsourcing.

Going back to the question of what would you outsource, I would say anything that is highly technical or highly customized is not ever going to be a good candidate for outsourcing. But sometimes the transactional bit works to that advantage. The size of the company is sometimes the determinant. It’s not a one size fits all, that’s the message out there. There’s not a clean-cut decision.

Jim: I would say that our data definitely agrees with the statement just made.

Edward: Geographically, we’ve looked at a number of applications that we have had, for instance with Infosys, and found we could do it for somewhere around fifty percent less of the costs than they can, because we have shared service center already working on the payroll, and these other operations now. When we first outsourced it, we were saving sixty percent of the costs compared to doing it in-house. Now we are saying that we can bring it back in-house and keep it offshore and reduce it even further than we did then. But per Robbi’s comment, you have to have the volume to do that, and we do have the volume at EMC.

SSON: What technology and trends are helping you insource?

Jim: One of the major things is software-as-a-service because if you think about it, the technology enabler has been a big part of value proposition for outsourcing. A great many of outsourcing decisions were made because there was a need to implement enabling technology, and companies looking at a buy vs. build proposition decided to take advantage of what the vendor could offer. SaaS is simply outsourcing that sliver of the whole delivery pie; it’s just taking the enabler piece and outsouring that. An in-house provider is taking advantage of the functional capabilities as well as the economies of scale that an outsourcer would provide, so that’s definitely one trend.

The other is that you just have to look at the sheer volume of shared services start-ups, particularly in the last three years. Organizations are building internal capabilities, and therefore insourcing becomes more feasible and attractive.

SSON:  Robbi, what about you? How do you think the technology is enabling the insourcing of services rather than outsourcing them?

Robbi: In our case, we were very quickly able to bring our Shared Service Center up to speed, out of the gate, using both a knowledgebase and case management system: the Enwisen solution.

We were able to take our own HR representatives from different branches that had never worked together before, consolidate and train them, and consolidate the data. We went from zero to a hundred miles an hour in less than nine weeks. I don’t think we could have outsourced that quickly, but I think that with this technology model, we were able to do an insourcing model more quickly.

Our culture has been very heavy-touch: with our inventory, our plant – which is a non-union shop – with our representatives. Our technicians are used to very personal contact, and we didn’t want to change that, nor did we want them to feel as though we were losing that. With the new model, they weren’t losing anything – they were  information, and they had that access to HR. So for us it was a very positive transition.

SSON: Edward, do you have any points to add to what Jim and Robbi have just said?

Edward: Yes, I think that we probably haven’t outsourced as much as maybe the others have. We wouldn’t have been able to in-source without technology. Now we’re turning it on globally, and so we are going after Ireland, UK, Germany, US, India, Australia, and Canada all at once, so we’re taking a big bite. The deployment of other countries is in order of their population, so you get to a place where ninety percent of our employees are on the same platform. You would have a horrendous time trying to co-ordinate all of that with the one outsourcer, so without the technology I wouldn’t even consider taking this project on because of the complexities.

SSON: Whether you are insourcing or outsourcing, or you have a co-sourced model, there are challenges involved – either technical or from a people management view. Would some of you be able to talk about some of those challenges and how you overcame them?

Jim: I’ll talk about some of the things that we are experiencing with other organizations. First, every outsourcing arrangement is to some extent a co-sourcing arrangement, because there is almost always a retained organization, even if it’s less than a full person. So it’s really a question of the degree to which you are co-sourcing.

The other point to make is that you never outsource accountability, and that is the Number One challenge that I see. Because you never out source accountability, organizations maintain whatever resources they need to ensure that, at the end of the day, the service they need is delivered. That can take the form of checking vendors’ work, doing work that you’re actually paying the vendor to do, and overseeing elements of the vendor’s work. Failing to get the value by doing what you are paying someone else to do is one thing that I see repeated. 

The other thing that I see is the tendency to outsource tasks based on the nature of the work without thinking about the whole process. If a little piece of the process goes to the vendor, and the client retains the rest, based on the nature of the work, you can end up with a fragmented process with extra hand-offs, errors, rework, etc. The right type of work was outsourced but the process was messed up. Those are two of the bigger challenges that I see. 

My suggestion would be to start with what is the best process: and that process is going to be the one with the least amount of waste activity. Then look for opportunities to outsource, preferably full processes rather than bits and pieces.

Finally, there’s the junk drawer analogy. Every house has a junk drawer where all the little things that don’t really have a place to go – the rubber bands, stray batteries, this and that. When you’re working with a vendor, they tend to have a very well-defined list of services that they provide, and if it’s not on that list, they don’t provide it. So what happens is that you start filling up your company’s junk drawer with all those services you can’t outsource, and you end up having to do a lot of work that you didn’t anticipate, because it’s not on the vendor’s list. So, again, it points to the problem of outsourcing discrete activities versus process responsibility.

Edward: It is about the process and you have to look at the whole process holistically rather than the fragmented applications. It’s one of the things I struggle with:  ‘how is this going to look, how’s this is going to get done, how is the work going to flow, what’s the employees’ experience, how are you going to achieve the results, how does that cost compare with one that does exactly the same thing and will it get you the same results?’

I think that when you are doing things internally versus externally, this may or may not be debatable. If you are going to outsource versus insource, the outsourcer has a much higher degree of responsibility to provide a high degree of accuracy in what they provide to you, because they are selling a product and people are very demanding. Internally, sometimes, you don’t have to be a 100 percent. Sometimes trying to be a 100 percent is going to cost you more money than the benefit. And I have debated this with people. Do you do every job 100 percent or do you take that ten percent of energy and resource it somewhere else? I think that when it’s internal, you have a greater degree of flexibility on that.

The other thing that has been a struggle for us is when you get rejection from people who are resisting change: they don’t want to change, or they don’t want to give up what they do. There is always the contingent that is reluctant to come onboard.

Robbi: One thing that we struggle with, with outsourcing, is the turnover for the offshore team. Just about the time that you get someone with the knowledge and training on your processes and business structure and how you do business, then they leave – you don’t have the control over an outsourcer’s turnover. There is always that issue. And when you are working from an IS business standpoint, then your internal business issues are very difficult to always have to explain to resources. It’s a complication you have to factor in.

SSON: How is this HR model helping you to add value back to the business?

Jim: Many of the benefits that come out of Shared Services model are not the business benefits that were originally listed in the business case. They are the benefits that you really only get through an in-house solution. I’ll just give you a few examples. Say you build HRIS and project management capability in-house and an organization enters into a merger or acquisition. Part of your business case becomes the avoidance of contractor and consultant costs to manage that project. It can be hundreds of thousands of dollars in some situations. The ability to integrate mergers and acquisitions and enhance the value of those is not typically stated in the business case. Other examples include being the driver of administrative best practices or being a driver of enterprise-oriented information and services. Those are things that come with the project’s maturity. I was part of a Shared Services organization that, when I departed, was already ten years old, so I have this experience. These are things that you don’t see initially, but they do come to pass.

Edward: It is still a little premature for us.

Robbi: In the last few years, it has definitely been rewarding for us. We expanded initially from the US to Canada. And now we are looking to expand to Mexico, so it has definitely added value to our employees. We are expanding what we call our WIN HR portal, our employee portal. So anything that we can put at the finger tips of our employees is adding value to our employee. We are very excited to provide that value, too. And all the feedback that we have been given from the case management and the call centre in Shared Services is positive. So that’s further adding value to our employees, and therefore it is adding value to our company. It has been an overall positive experience.

Enwisen is the leader in Software-as-a-Service solutions that help employers provide better HR Service Delivery – with fewer resources and lower costs. Enwisen's HR Service Delivery Suite includes solutions for HR Shared Services, including a personalized, searchable HR Portal/Knowledgebase and HR Case Management tool; Onboarding; and Total Rewards.  Enwisen's HR Portal/Knowledge also is used by many employers as its employee portal, or deployed in conjunction with tools such as SharePoint to create and maintain effective HR portals.

Hundreds of employers have utilized Enwisen's HR Service Delivery and HR Shared Services solutions to apply a multi-tiered approach to HR Service Delivery (for more information on this approach see the Multi-Tier whitepaper here in the Resource Center) to transform HR – realigning resources and saving hard dollars.  According to Gartner's 2008 “Multi-Tier Approach to HR Service Delivery” report, employers deploying this approach can reduce their HR Service Delivery costs by 20-50 percent.

Enwisen has produced measurable results for employers of all sizes and industries, including Unisys, Nissan North America, Hershey Entertainment & Resorts, Embry Riddle University, Fox Entertainment, ConAgra Foods and more. 

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