Ten Best Practice HR Tips - Human Rescource Best Practise | MeetTheBoss

Summary

The video script explores the critical role of HR in driving business success, emphasizing the importance of talent management, leadership development, and organizational culture. Leaders from companies like McDonald's, IBM, and Mattel share their experiences in addressing HR challenges such as succession planning, workforce planning, and creating dynamic, non-siloed organizations. IBM's Corporate Service Corps exemplifies the impact of innovative HR practices on leadership development and employee retention. The script highlights how strategic HR efforts can transform business outcomes and foster a more engaged, motivated workforce.

Takeaways

• 👨‍💼 Michael Morris emphasizes the dedication of 21,640 employees to maintaining business operations across 11 states.
• 💡 Jorgen Vig Knudstorp stresses the importance of having a strong organization capable of making critical decisions.
• 🧠 Vint Cerf highlights Google's success in hiring intelligent individuals as a key factor in their achievements.
• 👥 The voiceover (V/O) points out the significance of human resources (HR) in driving business performance and avoiding common pitfalls.
• 🍔 David Fairhurst shares his experience of transforming McDonald's image by focusing on employee pride, commitment, and training.
• 🔄 David Fairhurst suggests HR should be less self-indulgent and more focused on understanding business needs and employee value propositions.
• 🌟 V/O and David Fairhurst discuss the potential of HR to create energy and drive business performance when aligning people strategies with business objectives.
• 🔄 Alan Kaye from Mattel discusses the challenges of integrating different company cultures post-acquisition and the importance of organization review.
• 📈 V/O and David Fairhurst advocate for strategic workforce planning over traditional succession planning to meet future business needs.
• 🔁 Alan Kaye warns of the risks of relying too heavily on external hires, advocating for a balance between internal promotions and external talent acquisition.
• 🌐 Stan Litow from IBM describes how leadership training combined with social responsibility can lead to innovative solutions and increased employee commitment.

Q & A

How many people are dedicated to keeping the lights on in the 11 states mentioned by Michael Morris?

21,640 men and women.

What does Jorgen Vig Knudstorp emphasize the importance of having in an organization?

A strong organization capable of making the decisions it needs to make.

What is one of the key strategies Google has employed according to Vint Cerf?

Hiring smart people.

What was the public's perception of McDonald's before David Fairhurst joined, as mentioned in the transcript?

The public had a very bad opinion about McJobs and the people working in them.

What did David Fairhurst see inside McDonald's that contradicted the public's perception?

He saw pride, commitment, and training among the employees.

What two key questions does David Fairhurst believe HR should focus on?

1) How to truly understand what the business needs and what drives business performance. 2) What employees truly value about working for the organization.

What does David Fairhurst suggest HR should talk about instead of its own title?

How HR can contribute to business needs, drive sales and profitability, and understand what differentiates the company as an employer.

How does Misty Reich, HR Director for KFC, suggest aligning HR strategies with business objectives?

By first understanding the business's core strategy and then determining how people resources can drive towards that strategy.

What was the challenge Mattel faced after acquiring different companies with distinct cultures?

The challenge was creating a cohesive organization without destroying the individual entrepreneurship of the acquired companies.

What is the 'Quality of Organization Review' process that Mattel implemented?

An annual process where senior management and HR present to Mattel's CEO and discuss their organization's performance, issues, key personnel, and succession planning.

What does David Fairhurst believe is a more effective approach to talent management than traditional succession planning?

Strategic workforce planning that aligns talent capabilities with the operational income drivers of the organization over the next three to five years.

What warning does Alan Kaye give about hiring from outside the organization?

That hiring too heavily from outside can lead to a lack of internal development and a potential over-reliance on external talent.

What is the IBM Corporate Service Corps and how does it benefit IBM's leadership development?

It is a program where selected leaders work in teams on critical social problems in various countries, which enhances their teaming skills, cultural adaptability, and understanding of global markets.

What was the outcome of the Harvard Business School's independent evaluation of IBM's Corporate Service Corps?

100 percent of participants indicated that the program increased their likelihood of completing their career at IBM.

Outlines

00:00

💡 Dedicated Workforce and Leadership in HR

Michael Morris emphasizes the dedication of over 21,000 employees in the business. Jorgen Vig Knudstorp stresses the importance of having a strong organization capable of making necessary decisions. Vint Cerf highlights Google’s success in hiring intelligent people. The narrative shifts to human resources (HR) and its evolving role in businesses, shedding light on common perceptions and the need for HR to be a proactive force. David Fairhurst of McDonald's shares his journey in addressing misconceptions about McJobs and HR’s need to focus on its purpose rather than its name.

05:01

📈 HR as a Driver of Business Performance

David Fairhurst explains how HR can significantly impact a business’s performance. He underscores the need for HR to understand what drives business performance and align its efforts to support profitability and employee satisfaction. He outlines how creating synergy between business needs and employee values can foster energy and drive results. Fairhurst stresses the importance of future talent management, breaking down organizational silos, and supporting leadership in fostering integrity and value-based guidance.

🎯 Strategic Workforce Planning and Succession

David Fairhurst continues by discussing the limitations of traditional succession planning and advocates for a more dynamic and integrated approach called strategic workforce planning. This method requires HR to work closely with business intelligence and strategy teams to align talent capabilities with the company's operational drivers. He highlights the need for a shift in how organizations approach talent management to meet future needs in a non-siloed and adaptable manner.

⚖️ Balancing Internal and External Talent Development

Alan Kaye reflects on Mattel’s early emphasis on hiring external talent, which led to challenges in fostering a unified culture. Over time, the company shifted towards promoting internal talent, resulting in 90% of promotions coming from within. However, Kaye warns that over-relying on internal promotions can also be a risk. The conversation touches on the importance of balancing internal development with external hiring to maintain a healthy talent pipeline and business growth.

💼 Investing in People for Long-Term Success

David Fairhurst addresses the common concern that investing in employees leads to them leaving the company. He counters this by asserting that giving people transferrable skills actually increases their loyalty and reduces turnover. The discussion moves to IBM, where Stan Litow shares how the company has successfully combined leadership training and social responsibility through its Corporate Service Corps. This program offers top employees a chance to work on global social issues, enhancing their skills and commitment to IBM.

🌍 IBM’s Corporate Service Corps: A Model for Leadership Development

Stan Litow describes IBM’s Corporate Service Corps as a unique leadership development program, akin to a corporate version of the Peace Corps. Emerging leaders are sent to various countries to tackle critical social issues, fostering cultural understanding, teamwork, and leadership skills. This program not only builds sophisticated leaders but also strengthens participants' loyalty to IBM, with 100% of participants stating it increased their likelihood of completing their career at the company. The program is celebrated as a best practice in HR for developing future leaders and retaining top talent.

Keywords

💡Human Capital

Human capital refers to the employees of a company and the value they bring through their skills, knowledge, and experience. In the video, the importance of human capital is highlighted as companies, like McDonald’s and IBM, focus on investing in their people to drive business performance and build organizational strength.

💡Succession Planning

Succession planning is the process of identifying and developing future leaders within an organization. In the video, both McDonald’s and Mattel focus on succession planning as a key strategy to ensure continuity and growth by preparing employees for senior roles, rather than relying heavily on external hires.

💡Organizational Silos

Organizational silos are divisions within a company where departments or teams become isolated and fail to collaborate effectively. The video critiques these silos as a hindrance to progress, emphasizing the need for HR to eliminate these barriers to create a more dynamic and integrated approach to talent and business strategy.

💡Leadership Development

Leadership development involves nurturing employees’ leadership skills to prepare them for higher-level responsibilities. The video mentions various companies like IBM and McDonald's, which invest in leadership development programs to create a strong pipeline of future leaders, ensuring that their organizations continue to thrive in competitive environments.

💡Strategic Workforce Planning

Strategic workforce planning involves aligning the workforce with the long-term business goals of the organization. In the video, David Fairhurst of McDonald’s talks about the importance of planning talent development in a way that meets future business needs by forecasting operational drivers and mapping talent against those needs.

💡Cultural Adaptability

Cultural adaptability refers to the ability of employees to work effectively across diverse cultures, especially in a global business environment. In the IBM example, employees in the Corporate Service Corps are trained to enhance their cultural adaptability, which is crucial for operating successfully in international markets.

💡Corporate Service Corps

IBM's Corporate Service Corps is a leadership development program where employees are sent on international assignments to work on social issues. The video highlights how this program not only develops leadership and teamwork skills but also fosters a commitment to social responsibility, increasing employee retention and motivation.

💡Transferable Skills

Transferable skills are skills that employees can apply in various roles or industries. The video emphasizes that by investing in developing these skills within employees, companies like McDonald’s and IBM are more likely to retain their workforce, as these employees become more valuable and loyal to the company.

💡Non-Incremental Change

Non-incremental change refers to significant, transformative changes within an organization, often necessary to adapt to new challenges or achieve substantial growth. The video discusses how HR plays a critical role in facilitating both incremental and non-incremental changes to maintain continuity and foster innovation.

💡Integrity and Values-Based Leadership

Integrity and values-based leadership is about leading with honesty, ethical principles, and a clear sense of purpose. In the video, leaders are encouraged to focus on integrity and values as core elements of their leadership style, ensuring that their decisions align with both organizational goals and the well-being of their employees.

Highlights

Michael Morris highlights the dedication of 21,640 employees in maintaining operations across 11 states.

Jorgen Vig Knudstorp emphasizes the importance of having a strong organization capable of making crucial decisions.

Vint Cerf praises Google for hiring smart people, a key factor in their success.

David Fairhurst believes HR needs to focus less on what it calls itself and more on understanding how people drive business performance.

Fairhurst also stresses the importance of understanding what employees value most about working for an organization.

Misty Reich from KFC underscores that HR must align with the business strategy to effectively manage people resources.

Alan Kaye discusses how Mattel faced challenges in integrating distinct company cultures after acquisitions, focusing on the need for organizational cohesion.

Mattel implemented an annual organization review process that involves senior management and HR presenting organizational issues and talent assessments.

David Fairhurst calls for more dynamic, fluid, and non-siloed approaches to talent and workforce planning to meet future business needs.

Fairhurst counters the argument that investing in employees leads to them leaving, stating that transferable skills actually increase retention.

IBM's Corporate Service Corps is highlighted as a model of leadership training and social responsibility, sending employees on global assignments to solve critical social issues.

Stan Litow explains how IBM's Corporate Service Corps develops leadership skills through international projects that require cultural adaptability and teamwork.

Harvard Business School found that 100% of participants in IBM's program reported increased likelihood of staying with the company.

Alan Kaye reflects on how Mattel shifted from hiring 75% of senior talent from outside the company to promoting 90% from within, but cautions that they may have overcorrected.

David Fairhurst critiques traditional succession planning for being too static and advocates for strategic workforce planning that aligns talent with business profitability drivers.

Transcripts

>> Michael Morris: There’s 21,640 men and women who have dedicated their lives to keeping

the lights on in the 11 states that we do business...

[pause]

>>Jorgen Vig Knudstorp: You’ve got to make sure you have a strong organization that’s

capable of making the decisions it needs to make...

[pause]

>>Vint Cerf: The other thing that Google has done remarkably well is to hire smart people...

>>V/O Human resources.

Human capital.

The people people.

Have you said ‘if you want a job done properly, do it yourself’ more than twice this year?

HR have the solution.

More than a quicksand of red flags, law suits and pointless rules.

Done right, HR is a game changer...

Like every business discipline, HR has its thinkers.

The people who change the definition of what’s expected.

When David Fairhurst joined McDonald’s, the fast food giant was in the news for all

the wrong reasons.

McJobs, McLibel and McMorgan Spurlock.

>>David Fairhurst: I experienced that at most dinner parties that I went to where people,

good or bad, would have an opinion...

>>V/O: Most people had a very bad opinion about McJobs in particular, and the people

that were in them.

David, however, saw something else.

>>David Fairhurst: That was at odds with the pride, the commitment and the training that

I saw when I came inside this organization.

Turning that around was – and is – a huge task.

But while the rehabilitation of the golden arches may not be complete, profits and perceptions

are on the up.

It started, says David, by addressing the issue of what HR calls itself.

For years if not a decade HR’s been very self-indulgent around what it calls itself,

whether it deserves a seat at the table and quite frankly it needs to earn its seat at

the table and in my view needs to be less self-indulgent about looking at its name and

its purpose.

What HR should be talking about rather than what it calls itself is around, “How do

you truly understand what it is that your business needs?

What’s the engine around people that drives your business performance?

How can you get more sales and profitability from people?”

Then secondly, “What is it that your people truly value about working for you organization

to really understand what it is that differentiates you as an employer?”

>>V/O: Bring those two things together, says David, and you create an energy that can be

released around your people.

And when you do that, the HR department can talk about...

>>David Fairhurst: What is the future talent needs of our organization?

How can we generate better insight around people?

How can we get rid of organizational silos that destroy progress in an organization?

How can we support change in business?

How do we support leaders in terms of integrity, values based leadership?”

V/O: This program may not yet be offering a completely balanced diet, but Misty Reich,

HR Director for KFC, agrees with David.

>>Misty Reich: First you need to understand what is it that

the business is trying to accomplish?

What is the core strategy?

And then from that point do you start talking about how the people resources in that business

can drive towards that.

>>V/O: One of HR’s many key roles is to ensure continuity in an organisation: non-incremental

change to encourage progress, incremental change to encourage growth, fresh blood and

steady hands.

It is a difficult balancing act, and one which toy manufacturer Mattel focussed on intently

following some acquisition-based culture shock.

>>Alan Kaye: Even Fisher Price, that had been an acquisition for earlier, had a very – its

own and distinct culture.

We had just bought the American Goal Company in Madison, Wisconsin, had its own and distinct

culture.

And it was very disjointed.

And it’s very hard to develop people in an environment like that.

And I think that’s what we were facing.

So, early on, the key was, “How do we create, without destroying the individual entrepreneurship

that was going on in these locations?”

>>V/O: One part of the solution was a process Mattel call...

>>Alan Kaye: The quality of organization review.

>>V/O: Every year, the senior management from all divisions, with their heads of HR, present

to Alan and Mattel’s CEO.

>>Alan Kaye: How their organization is doing, what their organization issues are, who are

the key people, who are the people at the very senior levels, and who are behind them.

We have these extensive reviews going on, and as you can imagine, if that’s going

on at the senior-most level of the organization, it filters down.

So, it’s going on through the organization.

And then, we take that review, Mr. Eckert and myself, and we do this with the board,

probably twice a year, where we review the senior-most talent of the organization with

the board.

So, they know who they are.

They get to see them during presentations.

So, we really make this succession planning process that we have very, very much a piece

of everything we do here.

>>V/O: At McDonald’s, David Fairhurst believes succession planning is also integral to the

business – but not in its current, most common form...

>>David Fairhurst: The reality is that that is not dynamic enough to meet the ongoing

needs of the organization.

What you need to be doing is to be thinking about strategic workforce planning.

So in other words what are the operational income drivers of your organization over the

next, say, three to five years working in a non-silo way with your business intelligence,

your business strategy people to figure out what’s going to drive the profitability

then very simply to map your talent capability against those drivers of the business.

So my call really is if you’re going to meet the business needs both now and in the

future we need to be far more dynamic, fluid if you like and non-siloed in the way in which

we approach talent in organizations and that requires I think a different attitude towards

talent.

>>V/O: But with a word of warning, here’s Alan Kaye.

Be careful what you wish for...

>>Alan Kaye: I would say that, early on, hiring in a maybe senior manager and above, we’d

probably hire-in from the outside about 75-percent of the talent coming from the outside of the

organization.

There was almost a philosophy of, you know, you need new blood, you need new ideas.

Bring it in from the outside, versus develop from within.

We needed to turn that around.

And we spent a lot of time with leadership development.

We spend a lot of time in succession planning, now, understanding who’s ready for the next

move, what do they need, and when?

And we’ve really come full circle.

Now, we’re about – I’d say, we’re about 90-percent promotions are from within,

10-percent from the outside.

And, as an HR professional, I would say we’ve swung the pendulum a little too far.

>>V/O: That you should always invest in your people may sound like a no-brainer, but...

>>David Fairhurst: Well you get a lot of people over the years say, “If you invest in people

they leave the organization how do you get a return on your investment?”

>>V/O: When the truth of the matter is...

>>David Fairhurst: The more you give people transferrable skills the less likely they

are to transfer.

>>V/O: For a frankly brilliant example of what can be achieved when you strive for best

practice and are creative with your investment in people, we move from potato chips to silicon,

from Big Mac to Big Blue, from – oh, enough of that.

IBM has combined leadership training and social responsibility to incredible effect.

>>Stan Litow: In a tour of the IBM research facilities I saw a number of tools that from

my experience in the public sector and in the voluntary sector might be particularly

significant in addressing a variety of different social problems that were among the most difficult

for people to grapple with.

What was clear to me at IBM is that we had some unique capabilities, and again our innovation

and our technology, but then clearer and clearer to me it was our people, the talent within

our company, the people who had significant amount of engineering talent, business consulting

talent, software developers, researchers, and that was really a unique capability that

could be coupled with innovation and technology to bring about substantive change.

>>V/O: The result?

The A corporate peace corps, or corporate service corps, to give it the correct IBM

title.

And this is what great HR can do for your business...

>>Stan Litow: A corporate service corps, and yes we do characterize it as a corporate version

of the Peace Corps, is fundamentally about leadership and leadership development.

We have seen a shift in our business model to become a fully globally integrated enterprise,

and what that means is there’s a greater premium for people operating on a global stage.

You need a much greater cultural understanding.

You need to understand teaming skills in ways that are at a much higher level, and what

the corporate service corps offers to our best emerging leaders within the company,

this is 500 people selected in a very competitive way over each year, and they’re assigned

in teams of 8-10 in communities in Nigeria or Ghana or Tanzania or Vietnam or the Philippines

or Egypt or Romania, and they work as a team living together, working on a critical social

problem, usually connected to economic growth, job development, using their technical skills,

working as a team of people from the U.S., from Canada, from the UK, from China, from

India, from Africa, working together and solving a critical problem in their assignment.

So at the end of that process what we’ve identified is people have completely improved

their teaming skills, their cultural adaptability, their understanding of growth markets, their

understanding of the relationship between government, business, and the not-for-profit

sector.

So it’s a way of building the most sophisticated level of leadership in the next generation

of your leader.

>>V/O: And that’s not even the best of it...

>>Stan Litow: Then there’s another advantage that perhaps you might not have thought about

going into it.

An independent evaluation done by the Harvard Business School, 100 percent of the participants

in the corporate service corps indicated that participation in this program increased their

likelihood of completing their career at IBM.

We’re talking about top talent, and if you talk within HR departments not just at IBM

but in most companies, your top performers who have been with a company for seven or

ten years are those that you’re most at risk of losing if somehow they don’t feel

excited and motivated about their work, and nothing could be more exciting or motivating

to an IBM young emerging leader than participation in the corporate service corps.

>>V/O:And those are the MeetTheBoss tv first three of our top ten HR best practices.

In part two, why David Fairhurst kept referring to...

Organizational silos that destroy progress in an organization?

>>V/O:And the business changing power of practical HR metrics.