Sunday, November 9, 2008
Just Want to Have Fun - Kanexa
How Kenexa is blending psychology and technology to create passionate workers.
At the suburban Philadelphia offices of Kenexa, people grin at one another all day long. Sometimes they hug. Bright posters of the company's guiding principles dot the walls: YOU'RE ALLOWED TO LAUGH YOUR WAY THROUGH A PROBLEM AND MAKING FRIENDS REPLACES OUR ORGANIZATIONAL HIERARCHY. The CEO, Rudy Karsan, spouts odd koanlike talk: "The world is like a roomful of jars. Every time you open a jar, there's untold treasure in there."
Ah, but there's treasure in such psychobabble. Kenexa is the leading human-resources-services company in America. Sixty percent of the Fortune 100, including Caterpillar, General Motors, Time Warner's, and Wachovia, hire Kenexa to help get inside the minds of their employees and build worker loyalty. It has what analysts say is the sector's most sophisticated data-crunching software, as well as a squad of scientists -- statisticians and industrial and organizational psychologists -- to help turn correlations into action plans as well as profit: Kenexa's revenue has tripled since its 2005 IPO, to $182 million. In HR, a discipline viewed by workers at most companies as unhelpful at best and horrendous at worst, the company's secret is its Cyndi Lauper -- like conviction that employees just want to have fun.
The company's secret: its Cyndi Lauper -- like conviction that employees just want to have fun.
According to Kenexa, turnover among managers who feel pride in their company is 21% lower than among those who don't. Adds the Kenyan-born, Canadian-educated Karsan: "When you're in a job that you enjoy and you're good at, you're not just a better worker. You're a better spouse, a better parent, a better citizen."
But this isn't just about group hugs. Kenexa's scientists do interviews and surveys to learn what inspires employees. (Managers: Apparently, employees love sessions where you just listen to them.) Its industry-leading software runs the data through sophisticated algorithms, identifying correlations and possible causations. Then Kenexa devises strategies to improve work environments and recruit, evaluate, and keep talent. For example, after studying several service industries, Kenexa recently developed a program in which potential hires use avatars to act out scenarios -- from remembering the proper arrangement of items in a hotel room to making judgment calls about inebriated drinkers at a bar -- to measure how naturally engaged an applicant would be on the job.
But first, Kenexa has to get itself hired. When Aetna's HR head for business operations, Craig Hurty, first approached Aetna CEO Ronald Williams about measuring employee motivation, Williams had just one question: How does it change financial performance? Kenexa's researchers presented statistics showing that companies with higher satisfaction scores had 700% higher shareholder return. "When I sent those results to our CEO, I was up in his office that same day, and we spent half an hour going through the results," Hurty says.
Karsan notes that knowing employees are passionate is pointless if a company doesn't know how to exploit the passion. Kenexa's software helps suggest action plans drawn partly from a 4,000-client database of what has worked in the past for its highest-scoring clients. Last year, the company took on a huge and complex case at Boeing, where it drilled down to departmental groups as small as 30 people and delivered tailored plans directly to the company's 15,000 managers. "It used to be that we'd take the survey, we'd look at the results, everybody would say, 'Oh, that's nice,' and we'd put it on the shelf where it would gather dust until we did the next one," says John Messman, Boeing's employee-relations director. Today, he says, everyone from the CEO down to division managers discusses not just scores, but also strategies to goose engagement.
Karsan says Kenexa "sells its own dog food internally." Everything from recognition programs to in-house competitions to the corporate structure is constantly subject to employee feedback, and everything is meant to boost involvement and loyalty.
Kenexa draws a line straight from its employees' behavior to its success. The company now has offices in 18 countries, including a newly opened 25-acre research campus in India. "It doesn't matter where in the world you go," he explains. "Through their work, people find dignity."
From Issue 130 | November 2008
Source: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/130/the-employee-whisperer.html
Akin Soetan: Soft skills and hard facts
Soft skills and hard facts
- Author:
- Akin Soetan
- Posted:
- 16:39 30 Jan 2008
Last year a survey by the US Society of Information Management listed the top 10 professional concerns of CIOs. The issues are perennial and remain essentially the same in the UK, although they might not be listed in the same order:
- Attracting, developing and retaining IT professionals
- IT and business alignment
- Building business skills in IT
- Reducing the cost of doing business
- Improving IT quality
- Security and privacy
- Managing change
- IT strategic planning
- Making better use of information
- Evolving CIO leadership role
In today's IT function, it is a given that IT leaders and professionals make an effort to understand the business and ensure the alignment of business and IT strategies. The more forward-looking departments also make the effort to build business skills in IT especially among the leadership.
Despite this, nothing much has changed in terms of the influence and impression that IT professionals wield in the business landscape. IT departments are seen more as a support function than as critical to business. Few CIOs enjoy a position on the main board of the business even though they have contributed extensively to growth and have an end-to-end view of the business that few can boast of.
So why do only a few CIOs and IT directors make it to those lofty positions on the board and in doing so lift the impact and influence of their IT departments to heights that the others can only dream about? The answer to that question may lie in an evaluation of the time allocated to different business activities identified by the CIOs in the survey:
- 23% Relationship management with business
- 16% Strategy
- 13% Relationship management with IT
- 9% IT governance
- 8% Architecture
- 8% Operations
- 7% Non-IT
- 6% Software development
- 3% Other
It is instructive that these stats show that 46% of the working time of the most successful CIOs and IT leaders is spent on the softer aspects of business such as relationship building. Such aspects extensively affect how decisions are made, and influence what gets done and who gets what, when and where. Relating with other parts of the business is time-consuming, but it needs to be done the most effective IT leaders have cottoned on to this and work at it to good effect.
As professionals rise through the IT ranks, they soon realise that IT has become more than a technical pursuit done by reclusive people who cut code and fix faxes. Today IT is no longer merely a service function but critical to business success. IT professionals require an enhanced skill set that embraces all the softer skills and sits side by side with professional and technical skills.
The key soft skills
To gain the recognition they deserve and sit at the table with other functions - accounts, legal, marketing, and sales - IT professionals need to become proficient in the people stuff as well as the technical stuff. At the highest levels the technical issues start to matter less than the soft, people issues:
• Relationships: learn to build win-win relationships with key people - anyone and everyone
• Organisational politics: like it or not, politics are a fact of organisational life, and you need to learn to navigate the stormy waters while maintaining your integrity
• Influencing: learn to master the art and in particular have an impact at board level
• Reputation: learn how reputations are made and what you can do to change yours for the better
The most effective CIOs have been able to change the outlook of their IT departments and increase the impact they have on the business by addressing these areas. Business and IT leaders can enhance the effectiveness of their IT departments by making a conscious effort to develop their key personnel in these areas rather than leaving it to chance that they will acquire the necessary soft skills as they rise through the ranks.
The IT professional now requires an enhanced skill set to develop effective relationships throughout the business with customers, suppliers, bosses, subordinates, colleagues and most importantly the board.
Effective relationships require an appreciation of the motives and drivers behind people's behaviour and the ability to reconcile differences. Outcomes in the political arena depend on subtle interactions and interplays between people.
Each situation will be different and what is successful in one may prove disastrous in the next. To survive in this challenging environment, the IT professional will need to master the art of organisational politics, turning every interaction into a win-win outcome and building effective relationships with everyone.
IT managers and directors ignore the need to develop the softer skills and build relationships both internally and at the business level at their own peril.
Akin Soetan is research fellow at the Information Systems Research Centre, Cranfield School of Management
Source: http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2008/01/30/229183/soft-skills-and-hard-facts.htm
Harvard Business in You Tube

Harvard Business Publishing (harvardbusiness.org) provides emerging leaders with the practical insights, tools and resources necessary to become effective executives and managers functioning at the highest levels of business.
Tranforming Giant - CSR
An Interview with Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Professor, Harvard Business School. Some multinationals, despite their size, manage to be nimble, innovative, and connected with local communities.
Reflection:
I really like this conversation on CSR. The few companies that I rank very high in my career are those who take CSR very seriously. It empowers the employees to change the world in their own ways. In Komag, the company actively involved in young entrepreneurs program sponsored by AMCHAM, school projects by SIPI, rural hardcore community in Butterworth and many more; Pfizer sponsors medical assistance with mobile van to various rural areas, each HOD allocate a budget to help a local community annually.
Stop Measuring ROI on Soft Skills Training
Stop Measuring ROI on Soft Skills Training
by Charles H. Green on Thursday, October 16, 2008 (post #358)
Let’s tackle a garden variety corporate orthodoxy: the one that says your company shouldn’t do training without a measurable return on your training investment.
Variations on the theme: if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it; all training must be defined in terms of behavioral objectives; each objective must link to behavioral milestones, each quantifiable and financially ratable.
Let me speak plainly: Subjecting soft-skills training to pure skills-mastery financial analytics is intellectually dishonest, foolish, wrong-headed, useless at best and counter-productive at worst.
There, I said it.
Now let me explain—and offer an alternative.
There are are sprinklings of truth in the rush to measure soft-skills ROI—but they are surrounding a germ of crap, like a Bizarro oyster and anti-pearl. Worse yet, the ones who buy and propagate this dogma are those who buy training, and those who sell and deliver it.
The ROI-behavioral view of training is fine for pure cognitive or pure behavioral skills. If your focus is on teaching Mandarin to oil company execs, mastering the report generation functions of CRM systems, or teaching XML programming, you can stop reading this now.
But if you're talking about communications skills, trust, customer relationships, listening, negotiation, speaking, giving and receiving feedback, consultative thinking, influencing, persuasion, team-building and collaboration, then read on. There are at least four problems with measuring "return" on these kinds of programs.
First problem: definitions. We evaluate golf coaching by lowered golf scores—neat, clean, unarguable. But try defining “good communication.” Or trust. Or negotiation. You might as well define the taste of water, or the quality of love. To accept behavioral indicators (“she smiles, she touches me”) is to miss an essence.
Second: causality. All causality is unprovable, though we know when to accept it anyway. “I had 3 lessons with a golf coach, and cut my score by 8 strokes. It was the coaching—you can quote me!”
But what if I take one course in trust, and another in listening. Suppose my sales go up next year by 50%. Which course did it? Or did my company’s 70% growth have something to do with it? Or my happy new marriage? Too many variables.
Third: the Hawthorne effect. (Or, the Heisenberg Principle in physics). Sometimes the act of measuring alters the measurement of the thing being measured. If I know I’m being graded on listening, I’ll do whatever it is I think that you think makes me look like I’m listening. Which destroys real listening.
If you hype net-promoter scores, many will game the scoring—thus reducing the genuineness that underlay the original idea.
Fourth: the perversion of individual measurement. Most soft skills deal with our relationships to others. The drive to individually behavioralize, then metricize, has the effect of killing relationships—an ironic outcome for relationship-targeting training.
Suppose a course teaches focusing more on the customer, listening, helping others achieve their goals, helping teammates grow—worthy objectives, found in many programs.
The only reason to define those results financially is to evaluate them financially. Thus someone—somewhere between the CEO and the person getting trained—is responsible for deciding to do more, or less, relationship-building programs—by using short-term individual measurements, usually with short-term incentives.
Hence the perversity: training people to focus on relationships, by measuring and rewarding them individually.
“The more unselfish you are, the more money we’ll give you for being unselfish.
“The more you get rated as providing ‘excellent customer service,’ the more we’ll pay you” (which leads to pathetic begging by CSRs)
“The more you focus on others, the more we’ll pay you.
“Quick, get over here, I want to genuinely listen to you so I can raise my quarterly bonus and get promoted.”
Raise this perversity to the level of an industry over decades, and you can understand why pharmaceutical and brokerage companies have accrued such low ratings on trust.
So what’s the answer? Simple. And you don’t even have to give up your addiction to metrics.
Just measure subjective rankings.
Ask people these simple questions, over time:
1. Would you do that training again?
2. Would you recommend others attend?
3. Would you include it in your budget?
4. How do you rate that training compared to these other five programs?
You can run regressions, chi-squares and segmentations on that data to your heart’s content—as long as it’s measuring subjective data in ranking terms. Just stop trying to monetize interpersonal relationships by measuring ROI on soft skills training.
Charles H. Green, author of Trust-Based Selling and co-author of The Trusted Advisor, is a consultant and speaker on trust issues for some of the world's best companies. He has written about trust in business relationships at Trust Matters since 2006. Read more...
Source: http://trustedadvisor.com/trustmatters/425/Stop-Measuring-ROI-on-Soft-Skills-Training
How to measure the impact of soft skills training
How to measure the impact of soft skills training
- Before measuring RoI, make sure the training solution is aligned with core business needs
- Use an ongoing skills audit to provide evidence of why training in specific areas is needed
- Be clear on objectives and identify key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure training against
- Estimate outcomes from the start – do not start a training programme unless the initial expectation of benefits improvement is justified by the cost.
Thursday, November 6, 2008
Sunday, November 2, 2008
Haslinda Abdullah @ Betsy Bennet, PhD
The Phillips ROI Methodology
ROI Methodology | |
| Programs > ROI Methodology | |
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The Phillips ROI Methodology
Your Complete Impact Measurement Certification System
Today, one of the most critical skills any professional can possess is being able to show the accountability of various processes and functions. More than any time in the past, senior executives and other stakeholders are questioning the value of a variety of programs, projects, and processes. Professionals must show how this value can be measured and reported in credible, methodical way. The ROI certification, which now boasts 10 years of success, is the standard for achieving and verifying that an individual possesses these skills.
Figure 1
Elements of the ROI Methodology
Figure 2
Evaluation Levels of the ROI Process
EVALUATION LEVELS
| LEVEL | MEASUREMENT FOCUS |
| 1. Reaction & Planned Action | Measures participant satisfaction with the program and captures planned actions. |
| 2. Learning | Measures changes in knowledge, skills, and attitudes |
| 3. Application and Implementation | Measures changes in on-the-job behavior and progress with application. |
| 4. Business Impact | Captures changes in business impact measures. |
| 5. Return on Investment | Compares program monetary benefits to the program costs. |
The evaluation levels categorize data, reporting a chain of impact as reaction leads to learning, to application, to impact, and to return on investment (Figure 2).
Figure 3
The Phillips ROI Methodology™
The Phillips ROI Methodology™ model provides a step-by-step process for collecting data, summarizing and processing data, isolating the effects of programs, converting data to monetary value, and capturing the actual ROI (Figure 3). The Phillips ROI Methodology™ shown above is applied through a 10-step process.Step 1
Develop/Review Objectives of Solution
First, the planning is initiated and the specific business drivers of the solution are identified. Discussion and decisions revolve around how the solution will satisfy the business drivers. Business measures are clearly identified. The objectives are established/revised to ensure that stakeholders agree on the application/behavior change and the business impact measures to be influenced.
Step 2
Develop Evaluation Plans and Baseline Data
The detailed planning process takes place in this step. The purpose of the evaluation is clearly defined and baseline data is developed/collected. If the purpose is to calculate the ROI, the entire ROI Process (10 steps) will be followed. If the purpose is only to determine behavior change, then the evaluation will stop short of collecting business impact data and calculating the ROI. If the purpose is to determine business impact, then data will be collected at all levels. Step 2 includes determining the data collection strategy and developing the necessary detail planning documents that specify how steps 3 through 10 will be carried out.
Step 3
Collect Data During Solution Implementation
Step 3 begins the implementation of the data collection strategy that was planned in step 2. In step 3 the client organization usually collects the L-1 and L-2 data during the solution implementation (satisfaction/planned action and learning). This data is later reported along with follow-up data from step 4.
Step 4
Collect Data After Solution Implementation
In step 4 application/behavior change and business impact are collected. Business impact data is converted to monetary values to calculate the ROI. Throughout the process, data is collected at all levels to show a chain of impact up to the highest level that satisfies the purpose of the study.
Step 5
Isolate the Effects of Solution
In step 5, the data analysis phase of the process begins. The effects of the solution are isolated to determine the extent that the business measures were influenced by the solution.
Step 6
Convert Data to Monetary Value
This step is applied when the purpose of the evaluation includes calculating the ROI. If stakeholders have determined that there is no interest in the ROI calculation for a specific initiative, then the business impact and behavior change data is reported minus the calculation.
Steps 7 – 10
Step 7: Identify Tangibles
Step 8: Capture Costs of Solution
Step 9: Calculate the Return on Investment
Step 10: Develop, Repost and Communicate Results
Data from step 7 (intangible benefits) are reported along with business metric improvements. Barriers and enablers to implementation/behavior change are also reported. Any improvement in behavior and business metrics influenced by the solution (isolation) is reported in step 10. When the ROI is calculated (step 9), the costs (step 8) are compared to the benefits that are converted to a monetary value from step 6. Additionally, all of the data from steps 3, 4, 5, and 7 are also reported.
Conclusions and recommendations are also reported. Conclusions address information such as what caused the results, and what worked and what did not work. Recommendations address next steps and how the findings can be used to implement improvement.
Throughout the process of a follow-up study, data on behavior is always collected. Behavior change is one of the major key variables that determines if or how much the business metrics improve. Why behavior does or does not change and how it changes is of major interest. Data collection instruments and methods are carefully planned and developed to collect the most credible data from the most reliable sources to determine the contribution.
Source: http://www.villanovau.com/Home/Content/VU/Program_ROI_Meth.aspx#figure1
