Analytics – from the World of Finance to the HR Organization

In the finance and banking industries, organizations have employed for years mathematicians, statisticians, engineers, physicists, and highly-skilled specialists with super-strong analytical skills. They put these skills to work, sifting through volumes of financial, economic, and social data to identify trends, pick out the “needles in the haystack,” and determine the probability of markets going up or down. Their brain power, combined with machine resources, is focused keenly on exploring and acting on new ideas to increase the return on investments, whether through gaining a sub-second advantage in trading or in long-term ventures.

However, the idea of tapping big data in the context of the workforce, in order to gain a competitive edge, is just beginning to sink in with many HR organizations.

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Why ‘Pay For Performance’ Is a Sham

When Peter Drucker published his first major book, The End of Economic Man, in 1939, the median compensation for chief executives of the biggest companies in America stood at about $1 million a year (in today’s dollars).

The median pay was still at roughly $1 million, in inflation-adjusted terms, when Drucker’s 1954 landmark, The Practice of Management, came out. Executive compensation was at the same level when his Managing for Resultsappeared in 1964. Ditto when Drucker’s Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices was released in 1973.

Then things exploded.

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The Challenge Of Pay-For-Performance: What’s The Real Value?

For those of us who work in compensation, the “peanut butter” approach to pay-for-performance may not be new.

This approach consists of taking merit increase and variable pay budgets and spreading them thinly and evenly across the employee population. However, thin swipe of peanut butter may not make a very filling sandwich for the high performers who have been working through their lunches and missing dinners with their families.

So how do we use limited compensation dollars to recognize the contributions of our top-performers, while also keeping the rest of the employee population happy?

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Are Your Human Resource Metrics Relevant?

There are many presentations and discussions about how analytics and “Big Data” can improve decision making—a simple Google search on the terms returns close to 8 million results. Organizations find their workforce analytics especially challenging as human resources (HR) departments attempt to grow beyond creating reports for the sake of reporting. When you think about…

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The Art of Getting Up Again

Early in my life I envied many of the people I came in contact with. They seemed so happy and so successful that I often wondered what was wrong with me. Sure, I was usually happy in my life, but was true success going to pass me by?

As I have grown older and gotten to know many of the people I once envied, I have come to find out that unbeknownst to me they had suffered many setbacks in their lives. It was just that I didn’t know them well enough at the time to be aware of it. There are actually very few people in this world any of us would really want to trade places with if we were required to not only take their success, but also any and ALL baggage they have.

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Five Presentation Mistakes Everyone Makes

We all know what it’s like to sit through a bad presentation. We can easily spot the flaws — too long, too boring, indecipherable, what have you — when we watch others speak. The thing is, when we take the stage ourselves, many of us fall into the same traps.

Here are five of the most common, along with some tips on how to avoid them.

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7 Ways To Ruin A Newly Hired Employee

I once read an article filled with tips for how to get new employees off to a great start in a new job: long lunches with various team members, cute little gift baskets, and plenty of free time to let them ease their way into their new roles with a new company.

This is not that kind of article.

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Can Finance Have a Seat at the Strategy Table? Not Without Change, New Survey Reveals.

A NEW CFO PRIORITY: TALENT DEVELOPMENT WITH A FOCUS ON SOFT SKILLS In previous years, the finance function sat mostly on its own and “crunched the numbers” without having much input into daily operations or long term strategy. However, the finance role has evolved to one that needs to provide sharp and meaningful analyses to…

2 Commentsaccounting, Finance, FP&A, Management, Risk Management, Strategy