Strategic Human Resources and technology
It’s All About the Fit!
Hiring is becoming more competitive in the local market again. Local unemployment figures for February 2011 showed a slight decrease from January 2011. According to the Bureau
of Labor Statistics, the February 2011 unemployment rate for Washington, D.C. was 9.5%, while the unemployment rates for Virginia and Maryland were 6.4% and 7.1%, respectively. Job growth continues to be a leading factor in the overall decrease in unemployment. While this is great news for individuals looking for employment, companies remain charged with the critical task of finding the right talent. At the same time, employers must realize that the decrease in unemployment is causing the workforce to change.
Filling your open positions requires a great match of both skills and cultural fit. Rightly, companies want to search for that “perfect fit,” but they may have limited time to conduct a thorough search. The result: weeks and months can go by, existing staff become overextended and the company falls victim to the short-staffing phenomenon of hiring a ‘warm body’ that seems to meet the basic needs. This type of pressured hiring nearly always results in mistakes.
Unfortunately, the financial impact of a bad hire is staggering. In a study completed by CCH, one in four hiring managers reported that even one bad hire cost their businesses more than $50,000 in the last year alone.
Companies can avoid this type of costly mistake by taking a few proactive steps with respect to hiring:
- Understand your true organizational culture. Perception is often not reality, so solicit feedback from your team in order to gain a better understanding.
- When interviewing potential candidates, consider their cultural fit as much as their skill sets. It is typically much easier to train a new employee on a particular skill than it is to try and teach them how to blend in with your organization’s culture.
- Ensure that candidates understand the outcomes of the position. Clear communication of the short- and long-term goals serves both you and the candidate well.
At Helios, finding the right candidate and hiring for ‘fit’ is our priority. We can help our clients find top talent through two different recruiting models, which saves them both time and money. Please contact Bridget Pulivarti at bpulivarti@helioshr.com to learn more about how Helios can help your company find the right fit for your organization.
Top Reasons for Small and Medium Businesses to Consider HRIS
Is your business growing or expecting growth? Are more and more of your employees working remotely and across the country? How can a small or medium sized organization manage these challenges along with new compliance obligations that accompany these changes without adding HR staff? With the right technology, your remote employees can stay connected with easy access to their data, and your current HR staff can effectively manage the organization’s personnel data and maintain compliance with federal and state employement regulations. Here are some top things you should consider in leveraging a Human Resource Information System (HRIS):
1. Enhanced Efficiencies/Improved Recordkeeping: Many organizations’ Human Resource departments are overburdened with the administrative task of recordkeeping. Benefits eligibility, EEO information, I-9s and Family and Medical Leave are often tracked using a burdensome manual spreadsheet or database that is difficult and time consuming to maintain. However, an HRIS will provide a single, secure repository for confidential HR information that is available 24 hours a day 7 days a week from any location with access to the internet.
By using an HRIS an organization can reduce time spent by HR on remedial tasks while ensuring accuracy of their records. An organization required to maintain security clearances or certifications can track this data in their HRIS and ensure notification when clearances and certifications are pending expiration.
2. Improved Productivity via Employee Self Service: Employee Self Service (ESS) quickly reduces HR data entry tasks, allowing staff to focus on strategic HR initiatives. With an HRIS employees are able to log in and manage their own data, with the ultimate approval continuing to be granted by Human Resources. An employee can log in and change an address, update W-4 data, emergency contact information, dependents, beneficiaries and direct deposit information. According to the 2010-2011 CedarCrestone HR Systems Survey results, 60% of respondents reported utilizing employee self-service and manager self-service modules in their HRIS.
In that same survey 60% of organizations reported facing pressure to increase productivity, reduce labor costs, and still provide superior service levels. When employees can enter and find information online it translates into fewer calls to the HR and payroll departments. In addition to reducing or eliminating the use of paper forms, many organizations can maintain a lower HR to employee ratio.
3. Automated Benefits Management: Annual open enrollment processes can go from a time consuming task requiring HR to spend time educating and following up with employees, to completion with the click of a mouse. HR staff can click a button that initiates an automated open enrollment process.
Employees receive a notification that explains any changes and walks them through the updated plan options. After an employee makes a selection, the information is sent directly to the benefit carriers and their new elections take effect.
4. Single Point of Entry for Data: A fully integrated HRIS system eliminates theneed to enter an employee’s information in multiple systems. Once the employee’s record is created that information will immediately populate all other applications. The information will be available to Payroll, IT or Security with the click of a mouse. With this single point of entry, information is far more likely to be accurate as the likelihood of data entry errors is reduced.
This single data entry method allows maintenance of an efficient HR staff-to-employee ratio as your organization grows. According to the Institute for Corporate Productivity’s 2010 Future of HR Survey, the ratio of HR staff to employees for high performing companies with fewer than 100 employees is 1:57. For larger organizations, this ratio grows to 1:124 for high performing organizations. With the help of a fully integrated HRIS system, an organization can expect to optimize the ratio of HR staff to employees throughout a growth phase.
If your compliance is still tracked manually it’s time to consider a cost efficient technology upgrade that will ensure compliance and prepare your organization for growth. Prepare now with an HRIS system that will cost far less than you may think and will demonstrate its value in increased efficiencies and opportunity to scale.
Cultivating Success
In anticipation of the upcoming 5th anniversary of the Apollo Awards, Helios HR checked in with some of the previous winners to see what they have been doing to continue to foster a culture of continuous learning and development. Stay tuned each month as we highlight different organizations and count down to the annual awards breakfast ceremony at the McLean Hilton on June 1st, where we recognize the finalists and winners for 2011.
“It is important to sustain our culture with every new hire and with every project and client that we take on.” – Lynn Ann Casey, CEO, Arc Aspicio
At Arc Aspicio, there is an intentional focus on providing employees with mission-critical skills important to both organizational success and individual career development. Our culture today is innovative and entrepreneurial. Stewardship is a core value of the company. We make the employees responsible for the company’s success and for moving the organization forward. Two years ago, we made an intentional investment in hiring a Director of Talent and Operations because we knew that bringing in the best talent and keeping it would be our biggest challenge. Creating a role of that sort is unusual for a company our size, but it proved to be a great investment. We’re a 25-person company now, and we have two people focused exclusively on talent leadership. It is a big investment that has really paid off. We’ve grown revenue by 50 percent in 2010 without bringing on additional staff. We’re more efficient and productive. That’s due to the people we’ve hired and the resources we’ve invested in them.
Because we go for the best, it takes a bit more work on our part to find people that we want to be part of our organization for the long term. To find the people we want, we are using a social networking tool called Jobvite. Jobvite has been a huge part of our success. Everyone in the company participates in using that tool. We implemented it 18 months ago, and it helps us attract more people. It targets people who know the people that are already working for us. Since it is word-of-mouth and 100 percent employee referrals, it’s generating a very strong candidate pool. Today, 80 percent of our employees have been referred by other employees. Plus we have 1,800 qualified candidates in the pipeline. We have to have the right people on board and in the pipeline because we want to grow organically - by having our current clients asking us to do more work. If we hire the right people, organic growth occurs easily because clients are happy and our business grows due to word of mouth.
What Do Your Employees Need to Achieve Their Goals?
As we enter the last stretch of Q1 in 2011, your organization may be cementing performance goals and initiatives. However, setting the goals may seem much easier than achieving them.
Goal Alignment, cascading goals and the TOPS ideal (Tied to Organizational Priorities and Success) drives many companies to begin the goal setting process by announcing yearly goals and initiatives. Ideally, before goals can be aligned employees must be able to understand how their actions affect the organization’s success. It is a common practice for goal setting to align with the performance management process. Reviewing progress made towards individual goals no less than quarterly, and often monthly is common.
To make this clearer, managers must be able to translate the organization’s goals to their direct reports, making the connection from organization goals to employee goals more visible.
Once this vantage point is clear, employees can set their individual goals using the SMART formula (Specific, Measureable, Attainable, Realistic and Time-bound). We recommend that managers take the role of supporter and sponsor in this step. Encouraging employees to take ownership of setting the goals ultimately helps ensure their accountability for goal attainment. Ideally, identifying resources for goal attainment is a collaborative process that leaves the employee motivated and ready to take on the challenge of the goal.
As your organization gears up for Q2 and the remainder of 2011,points to consider include: align individual goals with organizational goals; identify resources for successful achievement; communicate the impact of ongoing changes to resources; and recognize the need to check in and provide feedback to all employees, including your high-performers. Building a high level of communication with employees allows them to feel supported during their successes, but more importantly, during times when obstacles may present themselves.