When the Chinese talk about Crisis, they talk about Danger and Opportunity. Sometimes we miss the latter because we are so captivated by the former.
Therefore, let’s discuss the chances and opportunities we have now to redefine our future. Let’s just think about one not completely new topic: working from home.…
Running improvement projects in a wide variety of service organisations over the last couple of years, I had to relearn what I thought I had a good grasp of already. I had to restudy the basic drivers of productivity and process efficiency. Yes, it is certainly possible to drive productivity by process changes. Yes, IT can help to boost it even further. However, people often greatly underestimate an important source of productivity that we frequently leave untapped – humans. It is not about making your staff run faster to produce more in a certain amount of time. Rather, it is about what your team members do in that same amount of time. It is about their process efficiency.…
Your staff members complain about having too much work. The proportion of people on short-term sick-leave is consistently above average. And, the turnover rate is disturbingly high. Do these symptoms indicate that you need to increase your staffing? However, the average number of daily transactions processed shows that your staff should be able to easily handle the volume. Comparing takt time and processing time does not lead to any obvious issue. So, what is the problem?…
Strategic workforce planning is the process of matching workforce demand and supply over a foreseeable time period. Organisations conduct workforce planning that builds upon quantitative activities such as headcount planning and workforce analytics, and use these data as part of qualitative decisions to support and implement organisational strategies.
A friend recently spoke at an HR Conference on a competency development roadmap for Six Sigma professionals. During the break, a few participants went up to him and asked him what Six Sigma is. Only then it occurred to him that not every HR person is familiar with well known basic principles and management practices contributing to business performance and leadership development.
Given today’s need for HR professionals to be Strategic Business Partners, to be a ‘Voice of Conscience’ to the CEOs as well as Champion for the Employees, those with background in proven management methodologies and tools such as Lean, Six Sigma or Kaizen have a great advantage. An HR Professional who can present his business case for HR strategies and interventions with a compelling return on investment will be respected and regarded. Having the knowledge and exposure in cost and time estimates, in analytical thinking processes as well as fact-based strategies and decision making will open doors.
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Discussing workforce planning with an HR professional of a government entity in Singapore we explained our approach that starts from customer and strategy, goes via processes and concludes in workforce needs, in short. The answer I got from my client was “Why do you look into operations in order to do workforce planning. We want to do this without dealing too much with processes.”
I was surprised to get this reaction from an HR professional.…
Architect of High-Performing Organisations
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