2007 a mediocre year at best for HR

At this time last year, I would have thought the US economy was in for a banner year and expected several great mergers and acquisitions to happen. In fact, the year was mediocre at best for the HR industry. No big mergers, no major breakthroughs. Just a lot of product enhancements, new releases, moderate growth in sales and business as usual. From an HR point of view the major issues continue to be:

1) immigration i9 verification
2) the lack of available and skilled talent
3) lack of qualified leadership
4) lack of proper metrics to measure HR-related issues
5) integration of HR technology

Sounds so 70ish … so old, so passé.

So, what are we going do about it? Probably not too much. It’s our nature as HR Executives - we typically don’t take charge and we don’t foster creativity. About three years ago, I had the privilege of listening to Dr Jack Zenger on the power of follow up. He indicated that all training was useless unless proper manager follow up and support was given to the person going through the training. WOW .. and unfortunately most people do not provide the follow up. All this money people spent going to conferences, bringing training in house… it's all wasted … and that was upsetting as much of this money comes from an HR budget.

So, of course, I had a big idea. What if we could put a follow-up system in place at our annual conference and helped all attendees with a major goal that they wanted to achieve in the next six months? Wouldn’t that be a breakthough? Wouldn’t HR people see the light and want to take this tool and methodology into their workplace to ensure projects and goals were met? After discussions with Fort Hill Company and the wonderful Cal Wick we came to an agreement where all attendees would have complimentary access to such a tool.

During the three-day conference, with 200+ senior HR executives (all with 1,000 + employees), the “cream of the crop” in terms of company profiles and experience, I thought – wow, this could be the breakthrough we needed in the industry. Oh how wrong was I. First of all, only about 25% of the people took the time to even submit their goals and then when the first follow-up reminder went out we were down to less than 10% who logged where they were in their follow up. I asked Cal Wicks how this could be … they were all senior HR executives, they are all committed to making their workplace better and meeting goals. His response (bless his heart). “Actually, these HR Executives are better than the others we have worked with. HR and specifically training people are in the lowest possible quadrant for executing on their goals.” When he benchmarks his data for professionals it is not surprising that engineers would come out higher than HR people but surely we cannot be in the bottom 10%. I frequently complain about lack of metrics … maybe the problem is bigger. Maybe it's goals. How can we measure against goals if we are not seriously committed to keeping them?

So my number one 2008 resolution… help as many HR Executive make goals and keep them as much as possible. Please share some of your business-related goals with me. And in case you are wondering what my other goals for this year are, they include:
1) Use all my holidays
(this includes the three weeks I carried over
from last year)
2) Get more active and lose some of this weight
3) Figure out how to grow HR.com to $20M in sales
in the next three years
4) Simplify things

Here's to a wonderfully productive 2008!