HRMS Hot Spots

While listening to my 5 and 7 year old daughters play the game that they were making up as they went along, I got an eerie sense of similarities between the conversation that they were having and the ones that I imagine go on in many HR departments:

Girl 1: You try to hit that tree with the water.
Girl 2: Ok, if I hit the trunk I get 1000 points.
Girl 1: Ok... and if you get the water in the circle around the tree you can still get 500 points.
Girl 2: What if I can get that exact leaf on the branch?
Girl 1: Wow! That is really hard! If you get that, you can have 5000 points.

Watching this exchange it strikes me that this is not unlike how we set goals for our workforce. Hopefully, there are some more concrete reasons involved than "Wow! That is really hard!" but the basic concept is the same. You do your work this way and you get paid so much; if you do it a little better, a little more accurately you get a little more; and if you can do something really special there might be a bonus in it for you.

Having worked out the point scheme, play proceeds with the girls alternating turns to try and hit the tree with the water. They are both hitting around the trunk and on the trunk (no body has yet hit the leaf) and I am marvelling at their ability to add in their heads since nobody is calling numbers outloud. After a few minutes, I ask them who is ahead. The 7 year old looks at me and says "I have no idea... I'm not keeping track of who has how many points".

Moral of the story? If you have no tracking and response system for results of a goal based system, you can set up the best reward system in the world, get buy in from the employees, and it will still get you nowhere.

For those of us on the web it was hard to avoid the competition between Ashton Kutcher and CNN to see who could get 1,000,000 followers on Twitter first. (For anybody that has not seen the information on it, just Google "Ashton CNN" and you will get plenty of hits.) So big deal... a media giant and a celebrity are playing out on the internet... what does that mean to us?

Looking at it from an HR perspective what it has done is raise awareness of this social networking technology. Being able to send 140 character update to anyone who is tuned in might, on first glance, seem to be useless in an office environment. However, looking more closely, I see a couple of different uses.

The first one is all business. It could make a very useful type of alert system. Having a team or organization following each other would allow one person on the team to instantaneously be able to let the rest of the team know "Customer so-and-so is ticked off today. Be extra careful in your approach" or "Congrats to Tim on his new certification" or "The Colorado office is closing down now due to weather". Of course all of those things can be done through email or instant messenger, but both methods are restricted in different ways. We all get so many emails that it might be a couple of days before somebody actually realizes that the Colorado office was closing down. For instant messaging, the sender would have to know who to send the message to for it to be effective. The direct, follower initiated (push) approach of Twitter is much more compelling.

The second use is a little more people oriented although it definitely has a productivity side to it as well. One of the most common issues faced by teams that are globalizing is the lack of feeling connected to each other. It is not that they cannot get things accomplished or work productively, but there is a missing team dynamic. What tends to be missing is the "water cooler" time or the gopher effect of people popping up over the top of their cubes to talk to each other for a minute about an informal topic; "I went and saw that movie the other day and it was great" or "My child was in his first play last night" or "does anybody know a good plumber?". Besides those types of personal connections, there is also the missing element of being able to ask the people around you "does anybody remember where the website for that policy is?" or "what was the name of that person in accounting we were working with?". Being able to tweet these kinds of things would create a more personal environment and feeling of being more connected to the team. That in turn leads to reduced turnover and increased effectiveness of the team.

There are still lots of drawbacks and questions and probably many other productive uses still to be discovered. But thanks Ashton and CNN for bringing this to the forefront for us to consider all aspects more closely.

Many job candidates list certifications as a part of their resume - Certified Project Planner, Certified Public Accountant, A+ certifications, Oracle Certifications ... - the list could go on all day. The question is, do recruiters take the time to verify these certifications? What is the process that is gone through to double check if the candidate is truly certified? It is enough trouble for recruiters to go through to verify a candidates College degrees and those requests are fairly common and processes well spelled out. Are there those out there who contact the companies that provide the certifications to verify that their candidate truly has one? Are there web services available that provide certification checking? If there are... what type of security issues does that present?

Lots of questions... anybody out there have any experience with these?

After a customer requested information from me on implementing Pay cards in Oracle Payroll, I decided to look into this process more closely. Looking at information on the American Payroll Association site, there is a paper (http://legacy.americanpayroll.org/pdfs/pt5f/f1005.PDF) that has the following information:

According to the APA’s online Paycard Portal, unbanked employees—individuals
with no formal banking relationship—represent approximately 10 million households in the United States. Consulting and research firm Celent Communications reports that 10% of unbanked households were using payroll debit cards at the end of 2002. Participation is expected to increase to 25% by the end of 2006. This projection represents a significant opportunity for companies wishing to go the paperless payroll route.

Given that this paper was presented in 2005, which was well before the current economic climate, it presents a sort of premonition of the increase in numbers of unbanked employees that companies could be serving.

According to Elaine Stattler in her article for Payroll Manager's Letter ( http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-27773491_ITM ) there are several things that should be considered when implementing Paycards:

1. State Laws regarding Paycards


2. Costs


3. Training (including training for non-English speaking employees)


4. Initial Employee Resistance

Once all of those have been addressed, this is a seemingly good solution for those employees who want quicker access to their pay and do not want to have to arrange transportation so that they can stand in line just to pick up their check and then have to arrange to have that check cashed somehow.

I was wondering how many of you have Pay cards implemented and how it works out for you. What percentage of your population takes advantage of them? Have you seen any pros or cons that you would like to share?

My name is Karla Dixon. I have been working with Oracle Human Resources support for 10 years. Before that I worked in a variety of industries using my degree in Human Resources Management and my curiosity about new technologies. This space will look at the changing environment for Human Capital Management and technologies that are included in those changes for better or worse.

Look forward to seeing your comments and feedback.