Insights from the HRI Annual Conference

You know business conferences. For the most part, they've not changed too much in the midst of so much other change. There's the quiet clinking of coffee cups in the morning and your favorite danish being whisked away just before you get to it. There are the handshakes, the head nods, the plethora of PowerPoint slides. And, in the case of HRI's annual conference, there's the allure of a warm beach just outside the conference room.
It's a bit surprising that in an age of online seminars and instant information we are still willing to endure crowded airplanes and spend time and money to attend conferences. Why do it? Networking plays a role, but perhaps more important is the simple and enduring reality that, at the best of conferences, stimulating ideas and practices are swapped even more generously than business cards. It's a fine place to watch for trends.
At this year's HRI conference and Advisory Board meeting, we've gotten some terrific insights into the issues that high-level HR professionals are thinking about. Here's a brief outline of a few that stood out in the first half of the conference.
First, despite some recent economic bumpiness, the "war" to recruit and retain top talent is still on. Corporations continue to focus on developing and disseminating leadership throughout their organizations. A number of questions are being asked. Where should our leaders come from? How many should be recruited from outside the organization and how many should be developed inside? How do we keep good people even during painful restructurings? How do we develop a diverse group of leaders?
These questions are important to answer, partly because intense global competition is forcing companies to get the most out of their human resources. There's a growing awareness that supervisors with good leadership skills are essential to the retention and engagement of employees. Various studies suggest that a poor employee-boss relationship is one of the primary reasons people leave their jobs or work unproductively.
At the conference, Ed Gadsden, Coca-Cola's Group Director of Strategy and Planning, provided insights into how his company is starting to develop a "talent forecasting" process so that his firm can be more proactive in finding good people, including executive talent. He also provided details about the Executive Business Analyst program he helped establish at Texaco, a program that has helped to increase Texaco's leadership pool even while making it more ethnically and internationally diverse.
Related to this emphasis on talent is the still burgeoning interest in Internet-related technologies. After all, so-called e-learning promises to transform training and development, allowing people to refine their skills, leverage their talents, and share their expertise on a just-in-time basis. Yet, HR professionals recognize that e-learning is just a piece of the puzzle and that Net technologies are having a major impact on everything from employee communication to corporate restructurings.
Sometimes these dynamics take on a life of their own. PJ Smoot, Director of Strategic Projects at International Paper (IP), described how IP went through a "wild west" phase in which different parts of the company developed their own Web sites to improve work flow and share information. Rather than trying to strictly manage the sites, IP's management pretty much allowed them to evolve naturally. The idea was to nurture and guide this evolution but not dictate too many specifics.
Lloyd Wilky, Director of Employee Services for Honeywell Global Business Services, described his firm's eHR program, with its goal of changing the interactions among line managers, employees and HR personnel. By providing line managers with systems that help them make better HR decisions, for example, the HR professional becomes less of a "middleman" and more of an enabler and encourager of good HR practices. Wilky noted that using the Web to change HR practices is often an "all or nothing" proposition – "You have to change the process totally to get the cost savings and productivity."
Among the other Net-related presentations was Ford Motor's description of its renowned Model E program, in which it became the first major corporation to provide home computers and Internet access to its employees. Also presented was DaimlerChrysler's endeavor to create an enterprise-wide knowledge management (KM) system. This emerging system not only includes the IT-based e-learning tools but architectural and work process changes intended to help people reach across functions and projects so they can learn from one another. One of the goals of the KM program is to counter the "brain-drain" that comes to all employers with the turnover of talented employees. That is, a good KM system can store some of the best ideas and knowledge of people even after they've left the organization. Once again, this reflects the emphasis on employee talent and the value of good ideas in today's marketplace.
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To read more about Ford's Model E initiative, please see
http://www.forbesbest.com/b2b/0100/030.asp