In his new book, Talent on Demand, Peter Cappelli attempts to address an issue that I would hope all companies are thinking about today: how to manage the unpredictable demand for talent.
Unlike other books on talent management, this book uses terms and examples that CEOs and CFOs can understand. Instead of just talking about turnover, productivity and other HR metrics, Cappelli, director of the Center for Human Resources at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, talks in terms of making money: “And making money requires that you understand the costs as well as the benefits associated with your talent management choices,” he says.
The gist of Cappelli’s book is that most companies are relying on outdated and ineffective strategies to develop their internal talent, while being way too dependent on outside hiring.
For example, many companies still use a development model for employees that assumes they will be with them for their entire careers. Under what Cappelli calls the “Organization Man” model, companies train employees to learn the skills that are specific to their business needs, with the understanding that those employees will grow with the company.
But the reality today is that companies can’t predict what their talent needs are going to be 10 years from now, and even if they could, it’s not likely that their employees will stay with them for that long.
Most employers have realized that and thus have become overly dependent on outside hiring, which has its own set of challenges.
Cappelli argues that employers should instead adopt “on-demand talent management,” which means developing employees according to competencies that could be valuable no matter where the business is in 10 years.
He advocates on-the-job training, but cautions companies against rotational assignments, because too often good talent ends up waiting on the sidelines for their rotation to come up, and nothing is more frustrating to an employee than waiting. Other ways that companies can get the most bang from their buck in on-demand training are:
Peer training, where employees can volunteer to mentor others.
Outside training, where organizations lend employees to outside charities or even to clients (as consulting company Mercer does) to learn from those experiences.
Cost-shared training, where employees are asked to foot some of the bill for their outside training. One way to do this is through training wages, where employers pay employees less while they are in a training program. Another way is through tuition assistance programs, or having them go through training before they take on a job.
All of Cappelli’s points are pretty interesting, and companies should take many of them seriously.
But the real problem today with companies is that they too often give lip service to employee development, but fail to follow through. I can’t count how many times a week I hear companies say how much they value their people, that they’re the No. 1 asset, etc. But when the going gets tough, those same people are the first to get the boot.
Since we seem to be heading into a recession, I wonder whether companies will embrace Cappelli’s ideas on developing talent, or will just resort to the old ways of mass layoffs, with the hope that they will be able to find the talent again when the market picks up. What do you think?
There is a trend in business publishing of couching business lessons in parables and stories, and while it may have started with the saga of Sniff and Scurry in Who Moved My Cheese?, it certainly hasn’t stopped there.
I understand why authors use fables featuring mice, horses and even Santa Claus. Books about work can be, well, work, and anything that makes the experience more engaging, interesting or at least palatable is likely to garner more readers.
Call me a grump, but I’ll take my business books straight up, without the cutesy literary devices. If the book has real-life drama that imparts a business message, I’ll gladly read that. You may disagree with some of its conclusions, but Moneyball was a great read about talent acquisition. Likewise, you could learn a lot about ethics—or their absence—from Conspiracy of Fools.
Occasionally, novels have something to say to readers about business culture, and workforce issues specifically. Two recent examples are Company by Max Barry, and Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris. Then We Came to the End will be released in paperback next month. Both books deal with highly dysfunctional organizations, and employees’ efforts to figure out how to survive in them.
The company in Company seems to sell training packages. But like the main character in the book, a newly minted MBA who is about to take a trip down the corporate rabbit hole, you’d never know that from its mission statement:
“Zephyr Holdings aims to build and consolidate leadership positions in its chosen markets, forging profitable growth opportunities by developing strong relationships between internal and external business units and coordinating a strategic, consolidated approach to achieve maximum returns for its stakeholders.”
What is really going on at Zephyr is something much more comically diabolical than that corporate doublespeak would let on. If you ever thought your employer was messing with your head as some kind of experiment, you’ll appreciate what’s afoot at Zephyr. The company’s human resources operation occupies the third floor, and since Zephyr has some odd notions about corporate culture, this means HR’s floor is actually third from the top of the building. The first floor belongs to the CEO, who seems to exist only in voice mail. Likewise, HR seems inhuman. There’s just a desk, and a calm, terrifying, disembodied voice that, when it speaks, seems to know every employee’s secrets.
Things are funny in a more realistic way at the failing Chicago advertising agency that is the setting for Then We Came to the End. Everyone is about a day away from being laid off—or, as the office lingo goes, “walking Spanish,” after a Tom Waits song and a pirate term. The anxiety levels are high. The book is told in first person plural, which seems like a gimmick at first, but you’ll find it grows on you—it’s easier than getting used to talking mice or Santa as CEO.
Few books capture a workplace’s intense, hilarious, pathetic and occasionally terrifying atmosphere as well as this one. There’s an honesty to it that cuts through all the malarkey you tend to find in the business books that offer easy answers about complex workplace issues. Take this section, on the complicated nature of a diverse workforce and the bad feelings roiling around a senior art director, Karen Woo:
“We hated Karen Woo. We hated hating Karen Woo because we feared we might be racists. The white guys, especially. But it wasn’t just the white guys. Benny, who was Jewish, and Hank, who was black, hated Karen too. Maybe we hated Karen not because she was Korean, but because she was a woman with strong opinions in a male-dominated world. But it wasn’t just the men; Marcia couldn’t stand her, and she was a woman. And Marcia loved Donald Sato, so she couldn’t be a racist. Donald wasn’t Korean, but he was Asian of some kind, and everybody liked him as much as Marcia did even though he didn’t say a whole lot.”
You won’t learn everything you need to know about managing a workforce from either book, but you’ll get some insights that you won’t find among the monkeys and other faddish mascots that populate some business books.
Any time of the year, HR is among the toughest jobs out there—psychically, anyway. But the holidays, as they are collectively called in PC land, might be the worst time of year for the profession: It’s raise time, bonus time, spend-your-vacation-days-or-else time and, perhaps worst of all, office party time. I can’t begin to count how many press releases we get at Workforce Management about how HR should prevent and police bad party behavior. Lucky you.
Don’t you want to gouge your eyes out just reading that? Then imagine the reaction among HR people at the American Red Cross, or Boeing, or any of the other companies that have seen their morale, fundraising and maybe even stock price brought low by such romances. (It’s interesting to me that this book is very much geared to women. Maybe the men don’t need the tutorial. Or maybe they’re just looking for playmates, not office mates.)
To their credit, authors Stephanie Losee and Helaine Olen have a chapter called “Don’t Go There,” explaining why sleeping with a married colleague is a bad idea. Chapter 2 is all about HR and is subtitled “Why you should love and adore human resources even though they’re always sending you all those annoying memos.” I’ll let you be the judge of the authors’ “takeaways” from the chapter:
Human Resources, in Office Mate-ese, translates to “matchmaker.”
Human Resources professionals are rarely opposed to interoffice dating, contrary to popular opinion.
As invisible as they seem in the process, your friendly neighborhood Human Resources person is the first person you should thank when you find love at the office.
Anyway, in the spirit of the season, the authors are offering employees tips on how to pursue romance at your holiday party. They give 10 pointers—I’ll edit it to five:
Don’t indicate your interest in a colleague at the office holiday party. An average happy hour on an average Friday night when the work gang heads to a bar together is a much better time. The entire firm isn’t present. And if you’re rejected, you can leave.
That goes double for your boss. No, triple. Your boss is there to relax with colleagues, not fend off requests for raises or juicy assignments or—heaven forbid—advances from a subordinate who has decided the time is right to reveal a long-simmering crush.
Don’t dress sexy. There’s no conceivable benefit to showing more flesh than you would on any other day. Dress up; don’t wear a neckline that’s, well, down.
Don’t go home with a co-worker. Your career is at stake here. The office is a great place to meet your partner in life. Not a sex partner of the one-night variety.
Don’t be the last one to leave. Be an adult. Dress beautifully but demurely, stop drinking after you’ve downed half of whatever someone hands you when you walk in the door. Don’t close down the place.
Not bad advice, really. If your employees listen up, the tips might save you from having to clean up after a failed-romance debacle—either literally or legally. But I can’t vouch for what might happen at your organization in 2008 if your employees all read Office Mate between now and the end of the year.
Dozens of books are written every year about workplace culture. Some are formulas that promise readers the secret for creating a great place to work, abetted by goofy props like stuffed fish or plastic carrots. Others are object lessons on how easily a workplace culture can be destroyed by mistrust, fear or the truly awesome power of the jerky boss.
A new book by Alex Frankel does a fine job describing what workplace cultures really feel like, not to the gurus and the managers and the HR consultants, but to the people on the front lines of retail and service jobs.
Frankel describes what it takes to really bond employees with employer. It’s having a sense of mission and teamwork and that “shared vision” that so many gurus talk about. But the tough part is that he is describing organic company culture, which no guru can ever inject into a workplace and call the job done.
He gives a shout-out to Workforce Management for introducing him to the Container Store, a company he was eager to experience from the inside. But that store, along with Whole Foods and Home Depot, wouldn’t hire him. Frankel thinks he flunked the culture pre-screenings, and talks about the profiles created by Unicru to help companies achieve the right personality match for retail.
Frankel’s chapter on the boot camp that is Enterprise Rent-A-Car is great. Enterprise says its mission is customer service and tells employees not to use the word “insurance,” but it really pushes them to sell “trips,” the internal term for triple insurance coverage. They’re praised and rewarded for it.
Some who leave Enterprise before making the leap to management, where the money is good, talk about having escaped a cult, and the intense training and teamwork has some of those overtones for Frankel. Of one trainer at Enterprise, Frankel writes, “On paper, her job was to train us, but she was also a cheerleader for Enterprise, the brand, and her strongest value to the company was no doubt her ability to proselytize, to bring us into the huddle. Despite my better judgment, I was starting to believe in Enterprise myself.”
At the Gap, Frankel spots, and is afraid he’s been spotted by, now-departed CEO Paul Pressler, who is quietly shopping, sans entourage. Frankel has heart-pounding rush hours behind the counter at Starbucks, but the green apron doesn’t bind him. Turnover is brutal in the stores, and he finds something hollow at the heart of the vaunted barista culture.
As he prepares for his next undercover op, he writes, “After the stint at Starbucks, I’d hoped to land at a workplace that has a strong culture but did not expend so much effort in building what amounted to a fake sense of belonging.” He finds it at two companies that, on the surface, don’t seem to have much in common: UPS and the Apple Store.
“At UPS,” Frankel writes, “I gained a strong sense that I was a part of a ticking clock, that I was a part of the thumping, beating heart of capitalism. UPS was the only workplace where I felt as if I was actually learning a craft and helping shape the final product, instead of acting the part of a craftsman. UPS was the company that had best married back-end technology with what I came to think of as the company’s human front end.” As an employer, you couldn’t hope for more of a workforce endorsement than that.
What’s so engaging about the book—and, in a way, so tough for an HR reader—is the realization that there is no instant formula for creating an inspired and inspiring workforce. It’s as hard as being a UPS delivery person on December 23, and as Frankel tells it, it is just as rewarding when it happens.
= Member Only
, it certainly hasn’t stopped there.
and even 
. Books about work can be, well, work, and anything that makes the experience more engaging, interesting or at least palatable is likely to garner more readers.
was a great read about talent acquisition. Likewise, you could learn a lot about ethics—or their absence—from 
.
by Max Barry, and 
by Joshua Ferris. Then We Came to the End will be released in paperback next month. Both books deal with highly dysfunctional organizations, and employees’ efforts to figure out how to survive in them.
and other faddish mascots that populate some business books.
Any time of the year, HR is among the toughest jobs out there—psychically, anyway. But the holidays, as they are collectively called in PC land, might be the worst time of year for the profession: It’s raise time, bonus time, spend-your-vacation-days-or-else time and, perhaps worst of all, office party time. I can’t begin to count how many press releases we get at Workforce Management about how HR should prevent and police bad party behavior. Lucky you.
Dozens of books are written every year about workplace culture. Some are formulas that promise readers the secret for creating a great place to work, abetted by goofy props like stuffed fish or plastic carrots. Others are object lessons on how easily a workplace culture can be destroyed by mistrust, fear or the truly awesome power of the 