Matthew Brush is the Director for Human Resources, Human Capital Planning at Corning Incorporated.  Matthew has been helping to shape Corning's Human Capital Planning Processes 2001 and he assumed leadership of those efforts in October 2003.  Before that, Matthew completed several HR assignments in Corning's Telecommunication Sector and he joined Corning as HR Director for the Optical Networking Devices Division in 2000, was named HR Director for the combined Corning Photonic Technologies Division in May 2002.

Prior to joining Corning, he gained broad HR experience through multiple assignments in companies in health insurance, biotechnology, food and beverage, and technology in Internet industries.  He held a number of staff roles including compensation and benefits, HRIS of staffing, as well as a multi-site field implant for HR manager assignments.  Immediately prior to joining Corning, he also was the co-founder and Chief Talent Officer of an Internet-based recruiting company.

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AM:  Can you begin by telling us a bit about your role at Corning?

MB:  Yes, perhaps the most relevant part is the Director of Human Capital Planning, which I have held, as you mentioned, since 2003.  In that role, I helped to shape the current version of Human Capital Planning, and will be sharing a bit about how that has evolved later on in the presentation.  In addition to Human Capital Planning, I was recently appointed HR Director for our Global Staff And Business Services groups.  So, I am now responsible for global IT Procurement and Transportation, Finance, HR and Corporate Services.  I have got a full plate, but I continue to be working on human capital planning through this year and will be working on a transition to another member of the staff for next year.

AM:  Can you give us a definition of human capital planning as you use it?

MB:  When I start talking about human capital planning, it's very important to contrast that with finite workforce demand planning. There has been a long history in HR of doing finite demand planning where you look at every job or position looking at needs by year with a high precision approach.  These are difficult to maintain and sometimes it's hard to demonstrate the business impact.  This can fall into that category of activity-based HR as opposed to impact-based HR.  When we talk about human capital planning, we are really focusing in on those roles that are either going to impact business strategy or be impacted by the strategy.  Of course that statement implies that we have a way of figuring out what those roles are.  We will talk about that in a minute.  In terms of the precision we are really looking more for directional accuracy rather than high precision in terms of numbers.  We really try to build a process that's integrated into both the client businesses strategy processes and the HR functions strategy processes so it becomes easier to maintain and easier to demonstrate business impact.

AM:  Now how did this approach evolve?

MB:  Well, there is a bit of a time line here.  We actually started in 2000, when our company was still experiencing explosive growth just prior to the telecom boom, trying to drive better alignment between HR's services and service delivery model and what the client business's strategies were.  We did some work with Professor John Boudreau using his HC Bridge Model.  At that time, he was still at Cornell University.  So we had a learning laboratory approach, where we worked with him to develop some tools and approaches.  We were very much looking for a decision science approach, much the way that in the finance world, the finance decision science grew out of an accounting professional practice.  We were looking for some decision science tools that we could use in HR that built on old personnel practices.  Clearly, the focus was on understanding business strategy and using that understanding to identify pivotal talent - meaning identifying those roles in the business that would have the biggest impact on the execution of the strategy. 

We really went from a pilot process to a production process by piloting it in a couple of divisions and then having all the divisions do it. Our takeaway from that was "what do we do with this information?"  So, at the end of 2003, going into 2004, we started to build a next generation approach that was a little more applied.   Working with another consultant, Sibson Consulting, that would take us past the "what next" to the "I get it" stage.  That required building a Socratic method approach which allowed us to define what the questions were that we needed HR people to be able to answer as opposed to having certain scripted answers about what the right approach would be. 

Then we really focussed on the human capital implications of business strategy, not only to create a better linkage with HR strategy but also to look regionally around the world and give us some tools that would help us to reach another of our transformation goals, which was to be more global in our mindset and our processes.  One of the tools that we used to make that happen was a tool from the marketing profession around segmenting talent, so that we weren't just looking at pivotal roles that would impact strategy, but that we would also look at the roles that were impacted by the strategy.  That point was quite relevant for us because at that time the telecom boom had ended.  We were still trying to transform the HR function and we were using the same objectives, but the emphasis was very much on scaling down instead of up, managing the top quartile costs while still providing business linkage and making sure that we were building a global mindset. 

We built a set of diagnostics around helping the business unit HR leads to figure out how to get the highest and best use of the talent that was available. That became a key way for them to engage with the general manager of clients and we built in a strong international and regional voice. 

We are currently organized into nominally global business units, but we support that through a regional structure in EMEA, a regional structure in Greater China, and then several other smaller regional structures so we had to find a way to build in a voice for those groups to tell HR what their needs were.  I would characterize the time from 2004 to 2006 as a period of continuous improvement where we intentionally said let's not invest a whole lot more in IT tools, let´s not invest a lot in bells and whistles, let´s make sure we are using the tools we have to their fullest before we try to develop more. 

We did develop a structured interview guide to get some more focus to the highest and best use diagnostics and we have also this year integrated our diversity work, which we do both in terms of North American demographic diversity and what we call global diversity, which is the attention that we pay to making sure that we are truly managing as a global entity.  In fact, our Chief Diversity Officer, who has taken over portions of talent management, will be the receiver for Human Capital Planning next year, so she will have a very tightly organized set of tools to get after talent.  I would characterize that we are in the phase of our generalists feeling like they get it by and large.

What lies ahead? To continue driving engagement with the General Manager Clients and with our management committee.  We intentionally did not deploy this to general managers because that tends to provoke an immune response from them.  We deployed this as a scaling exercise for our HRM´s and we now have generated some pull from general managers as they realize that their HRM is now asking questions they are not accustomed to having them ask and generating insights that they are not accustomed to getting from them. 

We are also spreading some of the lessons we have learned to our sister corporate functions in terms of how groups like legal and finance engage with their customers and figure out what the right service offerings are. And we are really looking to use human capital planning output to clearly influence the business unit activities under that. There are some examples of where we have made decisions around outsourcing and training and development that were clearly based on insights we got from Human Capital Planning.  My SVP of HR,Kurt Fischer, has been very generous in allowing us to spend the time sharing new projects externally with the profession because we believe John Boudreau has gotten onto something good here and that Sibson added value to it.  In some of the conferences we go to people talk about HR needing to become a strategic partner, we think this is a great way for HR to do that.  So, we are really looking to the future for this to something that our people can drive on their own.

AM:  When you talk about the Socratic method, I think it refers to the four-step process that you have.  Could you tell us about that? 

MB:  Yes, actually what we do is we try to generate the questions that an HR person needs to engage with their general manager to figure out the right HR offering. There is a four-step process that really focuses on building the skills of the HR person in the business so that they can more effectively connect with their client, the general manager, and bring actionable data back to the function.  In the first step, we are really trying to determine the type of talent required to execute the business initiatives that the client business is undertaking.  There is a fair amount of work there in terms of deconstructing business strategy, looking for what the strategic intent is, what the sort of sustainable competitive advantage is that we are counting on and the role people play in terms of keeping that business ahead of the competition, looking at where the barriers are. 

Also in a company like ours where there is a fair amount of corporate initiatives, we have to figure out how those corporate initiatives will impact the business and work through a process of asking the questions such that you do that segmentation.   We don´t look at all roles.   We look at those roles that will impact strategies and those roles that were impacted by the strategy to figure out the type of talent we need.  Then we take that data to the second step where we determine the number and the timing of the people that will be required over the term of those critical business initiatives.  Since this is built to run in parallel with our business strategy process or deep dive process, it winds up being a two- to five-year look into the future. 

We built some tools where we could model not just the net number of people we would need in these roles, for instance a certain type of engineer going from 30 to 50 for a net increase of 20. We can actually model out workforce dynamics in terms of the proficiency of the workgroup.  This helps us understand who might need additional training, who might not become proficient even with training and we have to do something else with and also allows us to model different kinds of turn over, whether it is voluntary turnover externally or retirements or transfers within the company.  Retirements are particularly important for us because we tend the hire in cycles and when you hire a large cohort of engineers, you have to be careful that 25 to 30 years later you are watching for when they are going to retire, otherwise you will get swamped.  In fact to go from 30 to 50 engineers on a net basis you might actually have to hire 30 or 40 engineers to cover the workforce dynamics.  So you have a notion of; we are not giving points for precision, we are giving points for thinking things through correctly and getting the right directional answer.  It is an iterative process you go through each year.  You have time to correct from directional accuracy to a detailed plan on an annual basis.

Then we move to understanding the true requirements on a gross basis, we move into step 3 where we identify and prioritize the talent gaps in the roles that we are considering.  Those gaps may be gaps where we have too much talent or not enough talent and then we determine the best approach to close the gaps. Now if it´s a case where we are short on talent, we have built some tools to help the HR person think through the relative merits of growing your own versus going externally and picking up the talent that you need. 

When it comes to having too much surplus of talent, we are very careful to look at the role first and the pool of talent first to figure out if we in fact have too much talent.  It may be the case that we can invest less in certain roles by streamlining the work, outsourcing work or automating the work to free up resources to invest in roles that will impact strategy.  In doing that we need to figure out what to do with the people that are impacted and that may mean retooling them for jobs in the same division or moving them to other divisions or moving them out of the organization entirely, which unfortunately we did get a fair amount of experience with through the telecom down turn.  We actually cut our workforce from just over 40,000 to just over 20,000 and we subsequently rebounded to close to 25,000.

In step 4, this is really where we asked the HR leaders in the business to identify the actions necessary to get the most out of the talent that is in the business, but there is also some work in that section that is function related.  Each HR leader in each business prepares a plan that summarizes steps 1, 2, and 3 and says here is what I am going to do with the resources I have at my disposal in HR in my business and here are the issues that I need support from the corporate centers of excellence, whether that is compensation and benefits, staffing, training and development, diversity or employee relations.  We know that this is getting some traction because we hold a session in July where those HR managers come and present that material to the HR leadership team and we have some GMs who are saying I want to be there, I want to talk directly to HR and this is the mechanism that they use to do that.

Now then there is some internally focussed work, we take that information, and we look for themes and patterns.  We know we can´t do everything so we have to have a process for prioritizing and for HR to do Human Capital Planning on itself. We look to not just what the businesses are saying they need but also what the imperatives are that come out of our HR function transformation initiatives. We have to mix those two with corporate initiatives that are largely driven either by regulatory environment changes externally or by management committee decisions about things like how we comply with stock option expensing and so forth.  We use the process then to identify where HR should be allocating its resources which culminates in a three-day offsite with the HR senior leadership team in October where we actually put together our annual operating plan for the next year and then of course, it goes right back into the planning cycle for the next year. The process basically launches with step 1 in April. We get to the beginning of step 4 in July and we are closed with step 4 in generally about October.

AM:  Do you use competency identification throughout any of this?

MB:  When we built this process in 2003, we had some divisions that had competency models, and some that didn't and we didn't want to require it.  The best way to characterize it is, if you have competencies they fit, but you are not required to.  We are working on a Talent Management System that we are piloting in HR and actually doing beta work in some other functions like Global Finance, Global Manufacturing and our Intellectual Property Department.  We look at it according to HR transformation objectives and client business strategy.  Balancing that with the input from the human capital planning process to drive our talent management system, which is centered on what is the work and the role requirements?  In role requirements we talk about accountability which are the key impact deliverables that a job or role is on the hook for, responsibilities which are the day-to-day tasks and activities, deliverables that you have to deliver to reach those accountabilities.

Also included is our competency model, which uses a common framework across the corporation and then things like required experience and some interfaces.  It is a fairly well defined role requirement and that becomes the pivot point or the hub for all of the people decisions that we make around people review, looking at the portfolio of talent we have relative to the key jobs in the organization, doing talent assessments, doing performance management and rewards and how we develop people.  That is all supported through an online talent management process that we are actually developing right now, so you are getting a real time look at what we are doing around talent management.

AM:  For an organization to embark upon this type of initiative, would you recommend one of the initial steps are then to clarify role requirements? 

MB:  Well, yes, actually this is a fundamental part of our transformation in terms of changing what we expect our field HR people to be doing.  Historically, they have been the service delivery arm of the Centers of Excellence; receiving and delivering information from them to the business and a tactical focus, problem solving focus, this is a new skill set for them.  They do a lot more strategic thinking.  We do more teaching how to understand the business and functional strategies and identify the right actions to take based on them rather than just doing process administration. That is really important to have in place and I think you have to have a leadership team that is willing to be open about questioning; what are the services we offer and how do we deliver them?  If you don´t have that it makes it much more difficult to engage in the process in a meaningful way.

AM:  Upfront, there is a lot of communication and collaboration and meeting time that seems to go into this.   What level of resources would you suggest that an organization anticipate that they put towards this type of process? 

MB: I think it is important to have good calendar management as a function because the way we have done this, we have built our human capital planning process to run concurrent to an existing largely finance driven strategic planning process, which we call Deep Dive.  The process runs April through June and it does take a lot of the HRM´s time to engage in that, perhaps 20% or 30% of their time at that time of the year and several of these one day and half day presentation sessions in July to get the information back into the function and digest it.  It is really helpful as a developmental experience to have each of the HR leads for each of the businesses hear what is going on in the other businesses, not only so they understand what is going on, but also so they can see how other people think on the strategy questions.  Then of course for the HR leadership team, there is a fair amount of preparation for this three-day offsite in October with the SVP and his staff and there is myself and internal or effectiveness or design Ph.D. who spend multiple days preparing for that offsite.  So, it is not something that can be done on the cheap.  It actually helps you identify those people in the organization who try to do things the last minute.  The process does not lend itself to last minute work.  You can´t do all four steps of the process the week before the meeting; you have to do the work, you have to find, you have to unearth the information and synthesize it.  For people who don´t like process, this is very difficult.

AM:  Can you speak to the benefits of the whole process?

MB:  We really view Human Capital Planning as a key accelerator of our HR transformation, which I have been talking about implicitly as we go along, but let me be explicit about it.  In the growth period we said we have to get more linked to business strategy in terms of the services we offer and how we deliver them.  We have to become more global, both in mindset and in terms of processes.  We have to become scalable at that time, in terms of growing faster because we were constantly behind meeting the needs of the business and we wanted to get the top quartile cost and we define that as success.  Now after the market turn, the emphasis changed, but there were still the same goals.  Cost clearly became a top issue and scalability meant scaling down rather than up, but we now try to have around 10% of our cost in a given year be scalable without having to hire or fire people and we still are looking at global and business linkage.  That is a testimony to the robustness of the transformation goals that we set.  Human capital planning really is the tool; it is the primary driver of how you identify the correct service offerings dictated by the businesses and the right delivery model, which addresses scalability as well.  I also mentioned that we had a strong regional voice for Greater China, EMEA, Japan and internationally. 

Corning is a very old company, 150 plus years. We have largely been North American-based up until the last five years. We are now more than 60% closing in on 70% of our employees outside of the US, and so that has had huge implications for HR, what services we need to deliver and how and where we need to deliver them.  It is really Human Capital Planning that has benefited our transformation on a number of those discreet objectives.  Probably the one that it did not impact directly was top quartile cost, but it certainly helped us figure out how to prioritize our investments in our efforts to get under top quartile cost.

AM:  You mentioned that you provide tools to HR to help assess whether it is appropriate to grow existing talent or go outside to look for that talent.  Can you speak a little further about some of those tools?

MB:  Yes, actually we did not want to spend more than we had to on developing tools for this.  In fact a lot of the time we would say the most important tool that we are trying to deploy or develop here is the gray matter in our generalist's head.  We had built out of our project budget what might have been in the order of maybe $150,000.  To develop the approach and the tools we probably spent $25,000 on actual IT resources, which is a scandalously small amount.  The tools are very focused on not trying to provide a tool that you plug data into and the answer comes out fully formed, it is about creating tools that allow people to model different scenarios and for example, look at the different impact of a turnover rate. In China, for desktop IT support people, we were able to show the difference between our turnover rate in the US, which is in the low-single digits (a phenomenal number) and the data that we had in China, which might be in the 20% plus range for a non-local company to hire those types of people.  We then look at the implications of those two different numbers in terms of; what the mix of contract employees and Corning batched employees should be.  We were trying to build tools that would not deliver the answer, but would facilitate a discussion that would get to a better answer then we could without them.

AM:  You have also spoken about steps taken to ensure that you are making the highest use of your available talent.  Can you take us through some of those steps as well?

MB: We use a model that we have developed since then that really tries to look at alignment, engagement, capability, and accountability.  For people who are model junkies they love it, for people who aren't model junkies it is okay.  It organizes about 120 diagnostic questions that get after leadership team alignment because we think it starts around understanding and being aligned on a single strategy, their roles and responsibilities relative to each other and what their decision rates are relative to each other.  Then we put employee engagement in the middle of that model where we make sure that the employees are organized appropriately to get the work done, are getting information they need to get the work done and are otherwise resourced appropriately.  Then on either side of the engagement piece of the model, we have the organizational capability and accountability. 

Organizational capability speaks to how well we move talent through the organization; talent management and how well we develop individuals.  We have a series of tools that help us understand what the employee value proposition is not so much just in terms of financial value but what are the things that motivate people and how good are we at delivering those statements on an individual by individual basis? Then on the accountability side what we look for is do we have the metrics in place to know what success looks like? Do we have rewards and recognition that flow when success happens? Do we do performance management to do continuous improvement on performance, whether success is happening or not?  It is a fairly detailed model that allows us to use about 120 questions using the structured interview guide that we developed to define with the general manager about where the quickest wins are to drive a more effective organization. 

AM:   What is the process in terms of actually communicating the information on down throughout the organization to the individual level?

MB:  This is an area that we are just getting to with this Talent Management System.  You of course have to be very careful when you segment your workforce that you recognize have differing levels of value.  It is good information to have, but it has to be managed carefully.  In our Talent Management Process, what we are doing is defining the roles that are most key.  Over time we will probably move from our current approach, which is to publicly commit to developing all employees. You would expect a 150-year-old values driven company to have an approach that says we are going to develop all employees, but for most people that is going to mean a lot of self-service, a lot of Internet-based resources, and some standardized offerings.   For those people who are either in roles that have been identified as directly impacting strategy or in roles that feed those roles, we might invest more customized development time or provide additional accelerated development opportunities.  So we are not quite there yet, but this Talent Management Process is helping us to become more transparent with people about what is expected of them.  How they measure up against those expectations.  What the actions are that they can take to close the gap.   It will be much more of a closed loop process than what we had before and that, we believe, is going to help us develop great HR talent.

AM:  What would you identify as the critical pieces that need to be in place to make sure you have success?

MB:  Well, having not only just gone through this, but also having worked with other current and potential clients of the consultant and having done some writing with the consultant one of the thing that is clear is you have to have crystal clarity on what it is you are trying to achieve by doing Human Capital Planning.   Through that understanding, you can make a good decision about whether this approach to Human Capital Planning will work for you.  One of the things you can observe going to an HR conference these days is, there are many products that have been around for years that are now suddenly being called human capital something or other. 

Just as we started with the definition of the difference between Finite Workforce Demand Planning and Human Capital Planning you have to be very careful to define what you mean by Human Capital Planning and whether it will fit with your business.  Part of it depends on the complexity of the business, the rate of the change in the business, the predictability of the business, and the specificity of labor requirements.  I went with the consultant to another potential client; we spent a half day talking about what their issue was and what Human Capital Planning could do.  We actually told them, "what you need is really some specific OD consulting or design or effectiveness, not really Human Capital Planning."  The most critical thing is understanding what problem it is you are trying to solve before you jump to Human Capital Planning as the solution.

AM:  What would be your words of advice to HR representatives who felt that this was appropriate within their organization?

MB:  I think one of the things that we learned was that we had some high-powered external resources and they clearly made our process better than otherwise it would have been.  For HR practitioners those kinds of people can be intimidating, so we found that having a dedicated internal person made a big difference because it was a familiar face to the generalists, particularly having someone who has walked in their shoes a bit.  They are more willing to ask silly questions and more willing to take some intellectual risks with an internal person than they were with a high powered external consultant.  This has little to do with the skill level of that internal person and more to do with the relationships that exist in the organization and people's willingness to take some risk.  We thought that was really important. 

The other thing is probably to say don´t try to bite off too much or, to say it another way, don´t let your pursuit of perfection get in the way of doing something that adds value today.  We clearly did something that I would not say was a quick and dirty solution, but was very targeted, very focussed, and very simple.  We have intentionally not put a lot of bells and whistles on it and won´t expand capability a whole lot until we feel that all of the users of it are getting 100% of the capability out of it before we start to add new features.

AM:  Well, you certainly accomplished a great deal.  It is a very interesting story.  I just want to remind our audience that Matthew is joining us for our national conference in the fall.  He will be conducting a workshop at that time entitled Human Capital Planning - The Sustainable Discipline Driving Corning´s HR Transformation.  

MB:  While we are talking about the national conference; I will be joined by one of our really talented internal OD consultants at the conference.  We will certainly provide much more detail about the human capital planning process and some of the tools and go deeper into things like segmentation.  We will also be talking about, as the title indicates, how this really has touched so many pieces of HR and it really has become one of the key levers that the SVP uses to manage the function.  I will be delighted to talk to people who have questions at the conference.