I am pleased to have this opportunity to share my experiences of participating in the 8th HR Metrics and Performance Summit, sponsored by IQPC, that was held in Miami, FL on February 28 – 29th. Since this was my first exposure to the group and this conference, I can tell you that it was not only informative and well attended by leading organizations such as Abbott Labs, Darden Restaurants, Prudential, Home Depot, Mass Mutual, City of Denver, United Airlines, Disney, Dell, but all of the presenters were highly skilled and polished during their sessions — sharing timely and very informative data and anecdotes.
Unfortunately, I won’t be able to mention each and every presenter, but here are some of the highlights.
The opening session began with a detailed presentation from Nadine Rastelli of CVS Caremark, who spoke to the importance of HR as a valid business partner, who can directly contribute to an organization’s bottom line. Nadine spoke about using metrics of turnover, training, and compensation costs — all to help directly contribute to an organization’s objectives.
A session led by Carl Schleyer of Sears Holding Company, turned the focus on how Sears uses their metrics and how they impact the “real value” of retention rates, and the bottom line.
The second day brought an interesting presentation from Tom Connolly, SVP of Human Resources, from the former MF Global. Tom spoke about the impact of HR during a downturn economy and how HR departments can deliver meaningful results to management in many areas during a stressful financial environment. Tom specifically spoke of the critical importance of “lean and mean” cloud-based software solutions, that can deliver out-of-the-box functionality, which provides immediate results without long and expensive implementation cycles.
The highlight of the second day, had to be the keynote address from Visier’s own CSO, David Weisbeck. Dave’s session focused on, “The Best Practices and Trends in Workforce Analytics” really hit hard why organizations need to be “lean and mean“ with an HR-focused workforce analytics application, that offers out-of-the-box, focused & relevant HR metrics, that are delivered in a cloud-based model — which provides immediate “speed to value” for organizations.
The 5 Best Practices for Successful Workforce Analytics that Dave highlighted were 1) begin with the end in mind, a Stephen Covey mantra to make sure that HR groups communicate the goals to the rest of the enterprise. 2) Deliver value at every step – do not call it a “pilot” but rather a phased roll-out. 3) Create transparency and openly share data and the findings. 4) Keep it simple – if you cannot quantify or validate the metric, do not use it and 5) Use technology to support your goals and make sure everyone knows the speed to value in delivering the metrics. Read a new article authored by Dave, “The Top 5 Best Practices for Successful Workforce Analytics”
At the conclusion of the conference, the event sponsors including Visier were recognized for their generous contributions and providing an opportunity for the participants to network and socialize, during breaks from the information sessions.
As a first time attendee to this HR event, I really enjoyed the experience and found it very informative to hear from leading HR professionals, who spoke openly with their peers about the challenges they are facing, about some of the representative test projects they currently have underway, and what lies ahead for the future of HR and HR Analytics.
I want to thank the organizers for a well-organized and attended event.
-Steve
Steve Zackon, Director of Sales, Eastern Region, Visier Workforce Analytics
