Are skills management and productivity compatible?
8 April 2008
Read by 1966 persons
Title: Skills Management and Productivity: Are They Compatible? Due to global crisis and competition, productivity imperatives are impacting behavioral skills management. The increasing temptation to automate evaluation processes risks removing the human element from decision-making.
"Push-button" technologies that quickly deliver "the right candidate" without ever meeting them exist. However, the risks of such standardization are well-known: decision-maker irresponsibility, disconnect from human realities, destruction of emotional and identity ties with the company, emergence of "consumer" or "mercenary" behaviors among candidates – with the expected consequences on turnover – or even unlawful practices. It is therefore necessary to resist this "productivist" pressure, as well as the technological euphoria that suggests technology can achieve anything, both good and bad. So, how can we meet the new economic demands of increasingly international skills management processes and increasingly frequent mass recruitments, while balancing "productivity" and the "human dimension"?
The most frequent productivity demand relates to time savings. Behind this seemingly well-targeted expectation is often the desire to minimize the time spent discovering the candidate or employee, while, of course, being highly effective in the final decision. The primary productivity lever is clearly not in this essential phase of a recruitment or mobility process. We know that the success of recruitment increasingly depends on its speed of execution. Therefore, it is the overall decision-making process that needs to be analyzed from the perspective of the following question: how many days, weeks, or months pass between receiving an application, internal or external, and the final decision?
The real potential for economic and qualitative gains may lie in an approach other than "time reduction," namely the efficiency of these same processes. When it comes to evaluating and managing human skills, it is certainly more worthwhile to consider the following question: how will these processes generate gains? This involves reducing turnover and diagnostic errors, improving an employee's average time in their position, building effective onboarding and managerial coaching strategies, developing mobility management strategies, ensuring fairness in decision-making processes, etc. Approaching the productivity of skills management processes from the perspective of these essential questions means considering "time" more as an element to "optimize" than to "reduce."
Beyond the choice of a tool, a global solution is needed where the tool is only a support for deploying a work method that should: make decision-making processes reliable and objective; provide traceability for the decision; involve all stakeholders in a process (from HR manager to operational manager); create an internal career management dynamic for all employees; adapt tools to each company's context and offer diverse methodologies to adapt to different objectives and environmental constraints.
The productivity of skills management processes must be considered both in terms of time reduction and, more importantly, in terms of generating medium- and long-term gains. This is the only way to avoid the risk of dehumanization inevitably linked to technological advancements and to combine economic gains with the development of the human dimension in the company.
Published January 19, 2009
Posted online May 10, 2009
entreprendre.ma
"Push-button" technologies that quickly deliver "the right candidate" without ever meeting them exist. However, the risks of such standardization are well-known: decision-maker irresponsibility, disconnect from human realities, destruction of emotional and identity ties with the company, emergence of "consumer" or "mercenary" behaviors among candidates – with the expected consequences on turnover – or even unlawful practices. It is therefore necessary to resist this "productivist" pressure, as well as the technological euphoria that suggests technology can achieve anything, both good and bad. So, how can we meet the new economic demands of increasingly international skills management processes and increasingly frequent mass recruitments, while balancing "productivity" and the "human dimension"?
The most frequent productivity demand relates to time savings. Behind this seemingly well-targeted expectation is often the desire to minimize the time spent discovering the candidate or employee, while, of course, being highly effective in the final decision. The primary productivity lever is clearly not in this essential phase of a recruitment or mobility process. We know that the success of recruitment increasingly depends on its speed of execution. Therefore, it is the overall decision-making process that needs to be analyzed from the perspective of the following question: how many days, weeks, or months pass between receiving an application, internal or external, and the final decision?
The real potential for economic and qualitative gains may lie in an approach other than "time reduction," namely the efficiency of these same processes. When it comes to evaluating and managing human skills, it is certainly more worthwhile to consider the following question: how will these processes generate gains? This involves reducing turnover and diagnostic errors, improving an employee's average time in their position, building effective onboarding and managerial coaching strategies, developing mobility management strategies, ensuring fairness in decision-making processes, etc. Approaching the productivity of skills management processes from the perspective of these essential questions means considering "time" more as an element to "optimize" than to "reduce."
Beyond the choice of a tool, a global solution is needed where the tool is only a support for deploying a work method that should: make decision-making processes reliable and objective; provide traceability for the decision; involve all stakeholders in a process (from HR manager to operational manager); create an internal career management dynamic for all employees; adapt tools to each company's context and offer diverse methodologies to adapt to different objectives and environmental constraints.
The productivity of skills management processes must be considered both in terms of time reduction and, more importantly, in terms of generating medium- and long-term gains. This is the only way to avoid the risk of dehumanization inevitably linked to technological advancements and to combine economic gains with the development of the human dimension in the company.
Published January 19, 2009
Posted online May 10, 2009
entreprendre.ma
