Over the past months most firm’s HR agendas have been dominated by headcount reductions and redundancies. It has been a difficult and depressing time for all concerned. And whilst the recession cannot yet be said to be over, forward looking firms are already recognising that a different phase of the economic cycle will soon bring new people challenges.
The time to prepare is right now and wise firms will seek out new ways rather than simply returning to the old. Three issues that should top every firm’s people agenda are:
- performance management
- learning and development
- retaining and attracting talent
Performance management processes, including appraisal systems, have in many firms been shown to be woefully inadequate. The starting point for performance management is to define ‘performance’. What gets measured gets done. Measure the wrong things and you get a wrongly directed organisation.
Most firms are good at setting financial targets and ensuring that people meet them. Unfortunately the targets set are rarely related to the strategic imperatives of the firm and over-emphasise top-line fee income and chargeable hours when this is only a small part of the picture of performance.
It is possible to use more imaginative goals, or key performance indicators, and to track results against them for important aspects of performance such as:
- client satisfaction (for example, using client service feedback and CRM data)
- marketing and business development (looking not just at new business wins, but at numbers of contacts and classifying them as to whether they are cold, warm, or hot, and monitoring work cross-referred within the firm)
- leadership (using employee opinion surveys or 360o appraisals to obtain feedback from staff about the way they are led). Group leaders should be measured not on individual achievements but on the success of the group they lead.
There is currently a window of opportunity to win support for a new approach, involving and engaging partners and staff in the process.
Learning and development have inevitably suffered as training budgets have been tightened. Yet this is an ideal opportunity to look afresh at the way firms help their people to learn. It would be a shame if post-recession firms simply returned to the old ways of inefficiently sheep-dipping people through expensive and often ineffective training programmes. There is an opportunity to reinvent and improve the way things are done.
There is a move away from traditional training and towards supported informal learning. This support may be provided through coaching or mentoring but there is increasing buzz in learning and development circles about how new web technologies can be used as learning tools.
Sometimes known as Web 2.0, these include blogs, wikis, podcasts, web video, social networks, etc. They can be wrapped into a virtual academy that supports informal learning.
These are different from e-learning with which some firms have experimented with varying degrees of success. Most e-learning, at least in its current state of development, can seem quite pedestrian and can fail to hold learners’ attention for long.
Intelligent use of these web tools can lead to a reduction in more costly trainer-led training.
However, these are simply new tools and they need to be blended with other approaches to get the best from them. For example, I am currently running a series of development programmes for a law firm which involves bite-size seminars, coaching, mentoring, action plan implementation, individual monthly emails, and a tailor-made virtual academy using Web 2.0 tools (see www.FirmAcademy.com). It is a million miles away from just sending someone on a training course.
This is not about adopting the latest fad, nor is it change for its own sake. There are real opportunities for driving significant improvements in learning and with the potential to save costs. There has never been a better time to do it.
Retaining and attracting talent will once again become key issues.
Creating a clear vision and common purpose for various units within a firm, and developing a high performance culture, will be key factors in retaining and attracting people. So firms, offices and business units need to ask themselves: ‘Why would highly talented people want to become part of our team?’
Clearly defined aspirations can serve as an answer. Many potential recruits will be attracted to a team that can say: “We are building a practice that within 3 years will be a leader in the XYZ sector. Would you like to be part of that?”
Offering training and development programmes that are clearly designed to support people’s to advancement will be another important factor.
The starting point for recruitment is therefore not to recruit at all, but to establish the kind of outfit that people would want to be part of. Organisations such as Google and Apple suffer no shortage of available talent. They are organisations that the very best in their industries want to be part of. The same might be said of some professional service firms, but too few.
These three top challenges – and opportunities –will face firms sooner than you think. Don’t leave it too late to prepare for them.