The False Proxy Trap

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:

1. There are many other paths to boosting employee productivity; and
2. 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)

The ROI of Talent Management Programs

By Alex Hagan

I've been working with a great organisation here in Melbourne over the last few weeks and ran a 2-day Strategic Workforce Planning workshop with them recently.  One of the questions that kept coming up was how to engage the executive in Strategic Workforce Planning to ensure that the program is successful.  In my experience, as well as aligning the workforce strategy to the business strategy, Strategic Workforce Planning is an effective way way of providing evidence that each initiative is providing a Return on Investment - or showing where they are not, and how to improve. It's not easy, at times, to quantify the costs of HR programs in in an organisation - but there are ways of doing it.  Turnover and Absenteeism are relatively straight-forward, but how do you put a price on innovation? productivity? creativity?   Even more challenging is predicting the extent to which a particular program will increase or decrease these factors.

Wayne Cascio, who I was fortunate enough to meet last year, has some great resources - including the book "Costing Human Resources" - with some techniques for costing some of these aspects.  For factors such as innovation and productivity, case studies can be instructive - but as each organisation is different, a well-crafted analytics strategy is the only way to really prove the "return" on your people investments in your organisation.

Business talks the language of numbers - and though it can be challenging, justifying proposed HR programs, and uncovering the value of existing ones, is one way of elevating Human Resources to become a strategic partner to the business.