Alex Hagan appointed Adjunct Faculty at The Conference Board's Strategic Workforce Planning Academy. Click to read more...
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Workforce Analytics
The "Peter Principle" is the idea that when promotions are made on the basis of prior performance, everyone will eventually be promoted to their own level of incompetence. It still has resonance some 40 years after is was first proposed, and it has an enormous impact on productivity, engagement, and retention in organisations today.
Any model or framework that type-casts people is dangerous when used inappropriately, but such models can be helpful in understanding the ways that different talent management initiatives will impact attraction and retention differently, depending on the employee.
Just because it isn't measured, doesn't mean it doesn't matter
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By Alex Hagan
Back in November, Seth Godin wrote:
"Sometimes, we can't measure what we need, so we invent a proxy, something that's much easier to measure and stands in as an approximation."
We do this all the time in HR out of necessity - we measure employee satisfaction because there's a connection between satisfaction and productivity, for example; and it's difficult in many (but not all) roles to measure productivity directly. Godin goes on to explain how this can become a problem when we focus on the proxy (in this example, employee satisfaction) and forget the goal (in this example, employee productivity):
"...When we fall in love with a proxy, we spend our time improving the proxy instead of focusing on our original (more important) goal instead"
I believe we often fall into this trap too - being obsessed with employee satisfaction metrics as if they are an end in themselves, forgetting that the point is to increase employee productivity - and that:
- There are many other paths to boosting employee productivity; and
- Not all of the ways to increase employee satisfaction will also increase employee productivity.
What are some other examples of the "false proxy trap" in HR?
(This post originally appeared at strategicworkforceplanning.blogspot.com, the other place I blog at from time to time)
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- Avoiding the false proxy trap (sethgodin.typepad.com)
