US FOCUS
HR driving business value
A recent article by members of global management consultancy McKinsey’s US team features insights into how HR can move away from its traditional focus on operational matters and take its place at the decision-making table. This is, of course, a debate that has
been raging for some years, but the authors of The CEO’s Guide to Competing Through HR believe that the time is now right to “accelerate the reinvention of HR as a hard-edged function capable of understanding the drivers of strategy and deploying talent in support of it – most importantly as a result of the availability of new technological tools that unleash the power of data analytics”. To advance the agenda, the authors suggest, businesses need to:
• Rethink the role of HR business partners – Senior HR people who advise on talent issues must “stop acting as generalists and show that they really own the critical talent asset”
• Use people analytics to identify talent actions that drive value – A recent McKinsey survey of North American CEOs highlights that, although many organisations already have extensive analytics capabilities, they lack the ability to embed analytics into HR processes consistently and use their predictive power to drive decision-making
• Rethink HR operations so
they are not a distraction from HR’s “higher mission” – This involves raising service levels and improving the employee experience, using next-generation automation tools and standardised processes to drive productivity
• Support the new priorities by deploying HR resources in more agile ways – Operationally, HR functions need to be able to create a “solid backbone” of core processes that “either eliminate the clutter or camouf lage the complexity to the business”, while delivering the basics, such as payroll, benefits, recruitment, and simple employee and manager transactions
benefits from the inevitable rising demand for innovative manufactured products in both mature and emerging markets. “There needs to be a transformation in
our education system to create new channels of apprenticeship in skills and functions that will be necessitated by the new era of manufacturing,” Bill Graebel says. “There also needs to be a shift in how those jobs are valued in society as a whole, so that going to a technical college rather than a university is a beneficial platform from which to create a career.” Like Mr Graebel, the McKinsey report’s
authors see education as fundamental to the US economy’s future success. Whether people in the US believe they can thrive economically in a digitally disrupted world, they say, largely depends on their level of education. Bill Graebel is optimistic about the
future. “I believe there are many new-age manufacturing jobs that will be rather ‘clean’ and create great pathways for solid middle- class incomes. I also think there are several forces that are stimulating companies to more strategically nearshore or reshore jobs that went offshore in the past.”
Addressing skills shortages Skills shortages in some sectors of the US economy highlight the need for improved education and training if the country is not to become overreliant on labour from overseas. Atlas’s latest survey provides a snapshot
of relocation and the challenges companies are facing in connection with it. It reveals that, in 2016, lack of local talent, reported by 44 per cent of respondents, was the factor most affecting relocation. It was followed by expansion efforts (43 per cent) and company growth (41 per cent). Shortages of local talent were a headache
for firms of all sizes, with 40 per cent of large firms, 43 per cent of medium-sized firms, and 47 per cent of small firms citing them. Atlas’s findings don’t surprise Blueback
Global’s Arden Ng. “While technology advancements are moving at a lightning pace, the social aspects have not caught up. America is still facing a homegrown talent shortage. Although the influx of foreign talent has helped to meet this shortage, the federal government will have to moderate this in tandem with its immigration policies.” Tom Atchison, CEO of National Corporate
Housing, sounds a note of caution about new administration’s immigration agenda. “Business is constantly evolving, and this has historically played into America’s number- one strength: we are a nation of immigrants. Immigrants often risk everything to come
to a new country and create a prosperous life. They are ‘wired’ to be optimistic, self- assured, creative, solution oriented and risk- takers. We are a diverse society that is able to harness the best of many cultures.”
Aligning talent and mobility Interestingly, the findings of global relocation services provider Cartus Corporation’s 2017 Domestic US Relocation Policy and Practices Survey were similar to those of the company’s 2009 survey as far as talent shortages were concerned. The majority of respondents said that they were either seeing no increase in talent shortages or that talent pressures had increased only “somewhat”. In the 2017 survey’s findings, targeted
recruitment replaced offering sign-on bonuses as the strategy most often used to deal with talent shortages, though the latter still took second place. Intensified campus recruiting, more focus on intern programmes, enriching relocation packages on a case-by-case basis and/or approving exceptions, and offering short-term or temporary assignments, were other methods used to overcome talent shortages. Toronto - based global relocation
management company TheMIGroup has observed a shift in assignee- selection techniques. Says marketing manager Kelly Jesson, “Traditionally, the assessment process was performed behind the scenes; HR would select possible candidates from a talent pool, assess their suitability for an assignment, and then hand off the selected assignee to global mobility to begin the pre- departure training and administration. “Of late, more companies are seeing
the value in introducing global mobility earlier in the process, creating a collaborative approach that improves the chances of success, increasing the efficiency of the overall process. Global mobility professionals have the most comprehensive understanding of the classic assignee ‘red flags’, and can help identify whether these barriers are surmountable, or can risk jeopardising the success of the assignment. “The incorporation of successful
candidate assessment strategies is not just applicable to relocation, but can have a positive spillover effect into other components of talent management, such as evaluating an employee’s overall capacity to develop within a company, which effects recruitment and business planning.”
New mobility trend The Cartus survey identified another element that employers must juggle when
22 | Re:locate | Autumn 2017
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