Human Resources: Thought Leaders

Thought Leaders
Industry Gurus Live

Dear HR Professional.,

Welcome to the Thought Leaders - Interviews with Industry Gurus Newsletter! You are receiving this email because as a member of the HR.com community you have expressed an interest in receiving our Thought Leaders update. It is our mission at HR.com to always provide you with the most relevant and up-to-date HR information. To alter your subscription preferences or noted areas of interest please update your online profile here. New articles are added daily.

Thought Leader: Dr. Jac Fitz-enz on "Workforce Intelligence"

For over 30 years Dr. Jac Fitz-enz has been writing about HR metrics, doing keynotes at most of the major conferences and has several books on alignment and ROI. He recently spoke with HR.com's CEO, Debbie McGrath on how his work changes business.

Jac Fitz-enz is the Thought Leader who made most of the metrics today a reality. His writing on alignment and ROI are truly some of the best read books for the human capital industry.

Jac started the Saratoga Group, which has since been sold to PWC Saratoga and he is no longer actively involved in that organization. Saratoga Institute was the first organization that collected data from many of the audience here today and provided normalized benchmarks back to us, so we could see how we were doing in the effectiveness of measuring our human capital.

JF: Going back 30 years as you said, I started this idea of quantitative analysis of HR because the HR function was pretty much denigrated in those days. It couldn't talk in terms of value added; it only talked about how people felt. As you know, while managers are humanistic, they also like to make money and they are more interested in what's happening as opposed to how people are feeling.

The underlying issue for me, and as far as I am concerned it's a truism: nothing happens in organizations unless people make it happen. If you think about all the assets and resources that an organization has, people are the only ones that are active. Equipment, material, and buildings; everything else is just passive. It lays there until a human being picks it up and uses it in some positive way. So, to think that things, rather than people, can make a difference to me just doesn't make any kind of sense.

So, what we started working on was tracking what was happening, and looking for some kind of effects in terms of internal efficiencies of the HR department. This gradually grew over the years as we put up benchmarks and started, in 1985, to talk about what was going on nationwide and collect data. At one time, I think we had 550 companies submitting data. At Saratoga we would sort that data by industry, location and size of the company, so that people could see how they compared to someone else.

This was really the genesis of the whole metrics and benchmarking movement. What has happened in the last five to eight years is that after a very slow start, we have seen some real traction now. A lot of people are working in the metrics areas and beginning to do benchmarking and talk quantitatively about the value of the work that they are doing.

The problem is, most of them are still focused internally on the HR department, and to some extent, on the operations of the company. They are looking at internal efficiency of the HR function: How many people can we hire with how many recruiters? What does it cost? How long does it take? How many training programs have we put up? How many people have we trained?

And all of that is fine except that's basically a measure of money spent. There is no talk about value added. That's why you have to go to the next level and begin to relate HR activity to what's going on in the business and in particular, to how it affects what I call QIPS (quality, innovation, productivity and service). Those are the fundamentals of any business. They are the four things that we have to do well if we are going to succeed in a business.

What I am trying to do now is demonstrate that there really is customer and shareholder value from the work that HR does. I call it workforce intelligence. The Great Place To Work Institute provided us with a number of pieces of information that supported what we were talking about. There is anywhere from the 4:1 to 5:1 differential in favor of the 100 best companies as opposed to the market in general as typified by the SNP 500 or the Russell 3000.

Basically what this is saying is that Great Place To Work Companies outperform the market. That's exactly what we have been trying to show for years and they have actually gone out and proven it. I don't think there is any question that good management pays off and paying attention to the human side of the organization provides financial returns.

DM: Does that imply that becoming a member of the Great Places To Work Institute on measuring of your human capital really gives you a competitive advantage?

For All Members:
- View the entire article here. All articles are now available to all logged in members of HR.com for FREE.
- View the webcast archive of the interview here.

For Premier Members:
- Download PowerPoint file of the interview here.
-Download MP3 sound file of the interview here.

Debbie McGrath, founded HR.com in August, 1999. She is committed to establishing the most helpful Knowledge hub, community and marketplace for human resources on the Web.

Debbie brings to this latest business an extensive background in recruiting, publishing and the Internet. She was President of The CEO Group, an international organizer of high tech career fairs, and developer of Internet recruiting software. Simultaneously, she served as publisher for a large recruitment journal, a monthly publication called htc. In August of 1998, The CEO Group was sold to Kaplan (now BrassRing.com), a fully owned subsidiary of the Washington Post Company. During her tenure she served as President of the Canadian and European operations, as well as Vice President of Worldwide Sales.

Sponsored by

Join us for our next live Thought Leader interview with

John Chaisson on The Talent Management Organization

September 18, 2006
1:00 - 2:00 p.m. ET

In this live webcast you will learn:

What we mean by the phrase "talent management organization."
What progress companies have made in implementing talent management.
The main barriers to implementing systematic talent management.

This upcoming webcast is free for ALL Members of HR.com (MP3 and PowerPoint downloads only available to our Premier and Corporate members).

Still a Guest Member of HR.com?

Upgrade to Premier Membership now for only $299US per year and receive unlimited access to all webcasts, powerpoints, and podcasts.

If you enjoy the Thought Leader interviews, then you will enjoy our recently published book,
Thoughts From The Top: A Collection of Interviews with Business Gurus
by HR.com Publishing

Thoughts From The Top: A Collection of Interviews with Business Gurus is an amazing anthology of higher thinkers including, David Ulrich, Kenny Moore, Marshall Goldsmith and Erin Brockovich. It's 348-pages of exclusive interviews with top experts discussing the proven strategies, the philosophies, and the best methods they have used to strengthen their organizations. Each chapter features a different expert who reveals his/her best practices to help professionals deal with the people side of business.

Buy this book today!

View HR.com's privacy policy and terms of service.

Thought Leaders - September 14, 2006