Leadership

Earlier this month, DCU Business School and Professor David Collings hosted a really insightful round table on how the HR profession can go about increasing their sphere of Influence in the work place. A number of HR professionals met up to explore this topic and discuss ways of achieving optimal results and to hear the views of Shirley Kavanagh Head of Talent and Organisation Effectiveness who shared her thoughts as follows: Participate in and Enable Business Strategy - HR should move from the concept of an enabler of Business Strategy to also participating in the creation of Business Strategy Ensure Organisation Effectiveness – HR needs to take a broader view of HR into thinking about the effectiveness of the Organisation as a whole. This can help to ‘land’ HR activities and make them more business relevant.  This organisation effectiveness agenda includes culture, organisation structure and design, Leadership Development and excellence in all people manager processes Build connectivity in solutions – HR must not deliver individual solutions. There should be a ‘story’, a connectedness to each solution to ensure that there are strong links to both business strategy and between solutions. Never lose sight of the objective and remind stakeholders of that objective also. Too often people get caught up in building a solution….but a solution for what? HR Structure must be created to ensure collaboration, joined up solutions, and value added partnership with the Business. Build your structure based on core principles and effectiveness, this may mean making a bespoke structure that fits the culture and structure of your [...]

Recently Accenture, one of the world’s largest companies, announced that it is going to "ditch" annual performance reviews for over 33,000 staff. Accenture plan on introducing a more “fluid” system, in which employees receive timely feedback from their managers on an ongoing basis following assignments. Accenture says that all the time, money and effort spent didn't ultimately accomplish their main goal — to drive better performance among employees. Similarly this year, Deloitte announced that it was piloting a new program in which, like at Accenture, rankings would disappear and the evaluation process would unfold incrementally throughout the year. My thoughts are as follows: Many PDR processes are purely box ticking exercises – if this is not the case for your business, then you might even share the secret of your success with us! Regular reviews of work is a far more effective and natural means of providing feedback to employees. Everyone should know where they stand and there should be limited or no surprises along the way The simpler the PDR process the better – short and sweet is good If you are going to go down Accenture’s path be aware that some managers are either too busy or incapable of providing constructive feedback to their team members. Senior management need to be aware of this and compensate for this lack of skills where possible If you are going to stick with your more formal annual PDR process, please make sure you follow through on the piece which refers to “anything that we can do to help you do [...]