Understanding HR competencies

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- Over the past decade, organizations have become more complex, dynamic, and fast
paced. As a result, senior managers recognize that attracting, retaining and managing
people effectively is more important than ever. To do that effectively, we'll examine nine
critical competencies for HR success. But first, here's some background on how they were
developed. Beginning in 2011, the Society for Human Resource Management conducted a
multi-year study that included input for more than 1200 HR professionals from 33 nations
and survey responses from 32,000 participants. Extensive analyses of these data identified
nine competencies. Each one of them includes sub-competencies and behaviors , along with
proficiency standards by career level, early, mid, senior, and executive levels. Here's an
overview of each of these nine competencies. The first is human resource expertise. This is
the ability to know and apply the principles and practices of human resource
management to contribute to the success of a business. Next is relationship
management. This is in reference to your ability to manage interactions among people, to
provide services to help line managers manage, and to support the organization. Another
important competency is consultation, your ability to provide guidance to
employees, managers, and other stakeholders. Leadership and navigation covers your
ability to direct and contribute to performance and to processes like staffing, performance
management, and rewards. A key competency at all levels is communication, ensuring you
can exchange information and convey understanding with employees, managers, and other
stakeholders. Related to this is global and cultural effectiveness, your ability to value and
consider the perspectives and backgrounds of all parties. The seventh competency is ethical
practice, meaning can you support, uphold, and model the values of your organization while
mitigating risk? The eighth competency is critical evaluation. This is the ability to understand
the logical connections between ideas in order to evaluate arguments and to make business
decisions and recommendations. The final competency is business acumen, your ability to
understand and apply information in order to contribute to your organization's strategic
plan. What does all of this mean for you? Well, it's important that you know about these
competencies. It's even more important that you work on developing each of them
throughout your career and that you're able to demonstrate them on the job. Note that the
first competency is technical expertise in the many areas of HR and that the remaining eight
competencies are all behavioral. Technical HR knowledge certainly provides a sound
foundation, but consider the remaining eight behavioral competencies as a roadmap to
business and career success. After all, employers are less interested in your ability to know
and more interested in your ability to do. Ultimately, your ability to perform will determine
how successful you are in your career.

Developing employees through training

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- Pay is important to many people entering the workforce today but there's something else
that young people tell us is as important if not more so, the opportunity for training and
development because lifelong learning is no longer a luxury, it's a necessity. Young people
can expect to have eight to 10 jobs by the time they reach their mid 30's and they can
expect to be laid off three to four times by the time they reach their mid 50's. Training and
retraining is essential to maintain skills. Consider just a few of the many benefits of
training. Training can sharpen your technical skills, build your knowledge base, improve the
ways you interact with managers, customers and other employees. Promote greater
innovation, allow you to practice so you can perform at constantly high levels and convince
you that you can perform well in your career. Let's say you're trying to learn a new
skill. What does effective training look like? It incorporates five key features. Here's a brief
description of each one. The first is goal setting. More than 500 studies have demonstrated
goal settings proven track record of success and improving employee performance in a
variety of settings and cultures. The best training programs are crystal clear about their
objectives. They allow you to set challenging goals and they supplement the ultimate goal of
finishing the program with sub goals during the training. As you clear each of these hurdles
successfully, your confidence about finishing the program grows. Next is behavior
modeling. You can learn a lot by observing others. We will imitate other people's actions
when they lead to things we care about. For example, promotions, increased sales or more
accurate tennis serves. The model's actions serve as cues about appropriate behavior. A
model is someone who is seen as competent, powerful and friendly and has high status
within an organization. He or she demonstrates the behaviors to be modeled clearly and in
detail and provides lots of repetitions of them. Another key feature is meaningful
material. It's easier to learn and remember material when you can relate to it. Meaningful
material is rich in associations and it's there for easily understood. For example, if I tell you
that the proper way to hold your ski poles is to keep them in front of you like you were
reading a newspaper paper, can you relate to that. Next practice, practice makes
perfect. Anyone learning a new skill or acquiring knowledge must have an opportunity to
practice when he or she is learning. Practice and repetition helps you to refine technique. If
you're learning a skill or to store knowledge of facts in your longterm memory. And finally,
there's feedback. Feedback is essential, both for learning and to keep people motivated. The
best feedback is immediate, specific and it's something you can control. For example, your
presentation will be easier to follow if you use a consistent font size. In many ways, you'll be
training throughout your career. To get the most out of it. Be sure that it incorporates goal
setting, behavior modeling, meaningful material, practice and feedback.

Organizational development
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- Suppose you manage a work group that's not functioning particularly well and you know
that you're not the only manager in your organization who faces this problem. What might
you do to turn the situation around? What can your fellow managers do to improve the
performance of the work groups that they manage? One approach is called organization
development, which itself is based on action research, a systematic, long-range program
designed to improve the performance of your work group as well as that of the broader
organization. While action research may assume many forms, one of the most popular is
survey feedback. The process begins with a preliminary diagnosis, for example, by an
outside consultant who's known as a change agent. He or she should be skilled in the
methods of Applied Behavioral Science. The preliminary diagnosis may include
interviews with managers and a few of the employees in each work group. The purpose of
these interviews is to enable the consultant to get a general sense of the key issues the
work groups are concerned about. The next step is a comprehensive assessment of the way
each of the work groups, including yours, is currently functioning. One way to do this is to
administer anonymous questionnaires to all group members, for example, using a rating
scale that ranges from strongly agree to strongly disagree, you and each of your employees
rate a number of items, typically 10 to 30 or so. For example, these might include items such
as decisions usually are made on the basis of the best information available, cooperation
across different parts of the organization is actively encouraged, and there is continuous
investment in the skills of employees. The outside consultant then tabulates responses for
each individual work group and for the organization as a whole. You, as well as each of your
fellow managers, receive a summary of this information based on the responses of the
employees who report to you and for the other managers, the employees who report to
them. Then the outside consultant meets privately with you as well as with each of the
other managers to maximize understanding of the survey results. Following this, the
consultant/change agent attends a meeting, face-to-face or virtual, of you and your work
group members, the purpose of which is to examine the survey findings and to discuss
implications for corrective action. The role of the consultant is to help you and your work
group members to understand the survey results better, to set goals, and to formulate
action plans to improve the way the work group functions. The consultant then repeats this
process with every other work group throughout the organization. Roughly six months or so
after each work group actually implements its action plan, the consultant returns for
another preliminary diagnosis and the entire process begins anew. If the plans are
successful, your work group, as well as the others, will improve over time and the results of
those improvements can be demonstrated objectively. This is what organization
development is all about.

Performance management
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- Consider the following situations, the athlete searching for a coach who really understands
her, the student scheduled to see his guidance counselor at school, the worker who has just
begun reporting to you, his new boss, what do these situations all have in common? The
need to manage performance effectively. Think of performance management as a kind of
compass, one that indicates a person's actual direction, as well as his or her desired
direction. Like a compass, your job as a manager is to indicate where that person is now and
to help focus attention on where he or she should be heading. There are solid payoffs for
doing performance management well. If you work for an organization with a great
performance management system, you will have a clear line of sight that links your work to
the success of your organization. You'll perform better in your work, and you'll probably be
amply rewarded for your excellent performance. Obviously, if performance management
were easy to do, more firms would do it. One of the reasons it's difficult to execute
well throughout an entire organization is that performance management demands
daily, not annual attention from every manager. It's part of a continuous process of
improvement over time. Let's say you're a manager with four direct reports. To manage
their performance effectively, you need to do three things well. The first is defined
performance. If you're crystal clear about your expectations with each of your direct
reports, they'll know what's expected of them and they'll stay focused on meeting your
expectations. How do you do this? By paying careful attention to three key
elements, goals, measures, and assessment. Set specific challenging goals for each of your
people for this clarifies precisely what you expect and it leads to high levels of
performance. Merely setting goals is not sufficient though. You also must be able to
measure progress towards each goal. A goal such as make the company successful is too
vague to be useful. But measures such as the number of defective parts produced per
million or the average time to respond to a customer's inquiry are much more
tangible. Once you've set challenging goals and tangible measures, your next task is to
assess progress towards those goals. When you do that, you offer each of your direct
reports a scorecard that will get their attention. The next step is to facilitate
performance. To do this well, recognize that one of your major responsibilities as a manager
is to eliminate roadblocks that get in the way of successful performance. Here are just a few
examples of obstacles that can inhibit maximum performance, outdated or a poorly-
maintained equipment, delays in receiving supplies, and inefficient work
methods. Employees are well aware of these and they're only too willing to identify them if
you just ask for their input. Then it's your job to eliminate these obstacles. Once you do
this, the next step is to provide adequate resources, more money, better equipment, or
more staff. After all, if employees lack the tools to reach the challenging goals they've
set, they'll become frustrated and disenchanted. Conversely, employees really appreciate
it if you provide everything they need to perform well and they will respond in kind. A final
aspect of performance facilitation is the careful selection of employees. After all, the last
thing you need as a manager is to have people who just don't have the skills or the
temperament to do their jobs well, for example a customer service agent with a toxic
personality. All of this leads to the final element of a solid performance management
system namely encourage performance. To do that well, you have to do three more
things, provide rewards in a timely fashion soon after your people achieve their goals, and
distributed rewards fairly, explaining clearly why and how you rewarded your
people. Remember, like a compass, your role as a manager is to provide
orientation, direction, and feedback. Do those things well and you too will be richly
rewarded.
Understanding global cultures
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- Cultural differences profoundly affect how different people view the world and
operate in business. To help you navigate cultural landscapes, let's briefly consider 10
factors. The first factor is sense of self and space. People may adopt humble bearings
in some places and march of behavior in others. Americans have a sense of
space that requires more distance between people while Latins and Vietnamese
prefer to get much closer. Dress and appearance may vary dramatically around the
globe. Dress includes outward garments as well as body decorations. Many cultures
wear distinctive clothing, the Japanese kimono, the Indian turban, the Polynesian
sarong. The manner in which food is selected, prepared, presented and eaten often
differs by culture. Feeding habits also differ, ranging from bare hands to chopsticks,
to full sets of cutlery. Communication and language may appear impenetrable to an
outsider. Moreover in many cultures, directness and openness are not
appreciated. An open person may be seen as weak and untrustworthy, and directness
can be interpreted as abrupt, hostile behavior. Providing specific details may be
seen as insulting to one's intelligence. Insisting on a written contract may
suggest that a person's word is not good. Time and time consciousness. To
Americans, time is money. We live by schedules, deadlines and agendas. We hate to
be kept waiting and we'd like to get down to business quickly. In many countries
however, people simply will not be rushed. They arrive late for appointments and
business is preceded by hours of social rapport. Relationships may be based on age,
gender, status and family relationships as well as on wealth, power and wisdom. In
some cultures, the elderly are honored, in others, they are ignored. While most US
firms frown upon the practice of hiring or contracting work directly with family
members, in Latin America or Arab countries, it only makes sense to hire someone
you can trust. values reflect what is important in a society. One such norm is that in
Eastern countries, business people strive for successful business outcomes after
personal relationships have been established while Westerners develops social
relationships after business interests have been addressed. International managers
ignore those kinds of norms at their peril. Beliefs and attitudes. In many countries,
religion expresses the philosophy of a people about important facets in life. Work
motivation and practices. Your knowledge of what motivates workers in a given
culture combined with the knowledge of what they think matters in life will be critical
to your success as an international manager. In the United States, individual
initiative and achievement are rewarded but in Japan, managers are encouraged to
seek consensus before acting and employees work as teams. Finally, consider mental
processes and learning. While some cultures favor abstract thinking and
concepts, others prefer rote memory and learning. Each culture has a reasoning
process but it manifests that process in its own distinctive way. If you don't
understand or appreciate those differences, you may conclude erroneously that
certain cultures are inscrutable. This framework should help you understand global
cultures better even though it's a journey that has no finish line. So continue to
research and be curious about global cultures. Doing so will have immediate payoffs
for you and for your organization.

What makes international HR different?

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- In my work with multinational companies, many people have
asked me, "Does international HR differ from domestic HR?" Well,
the answer is yes, there are a wide variety of issues to
consider, whether you're managing international assignments or
taking one yourself. The first is additional HR activities. There are
many additional issues to consider, such as taxation, the
coordination of salaries and multiple currencies, premiums and
allowances in international compensation packages, relocation,
orientation, and language translation services. Another difference to
consider is deeper involvement in employee's personal
lives. Suppose you have a spouse and two children, and you're
offered an international assignment. You and your company will
now need to think about issues related to dual career
couples, coordination of dependence, housing,
schooling, healthcare, recreation, and tax preparation, just to name
a few. It's also important to think about different approaches to
management that you might encounter in an overseas
assignment. These differences are based on cultural
differences related to topics such as time and time
consciousness, relationships at work, expected ways to
behave, differences in communication styles and language, and
differences in the ways that decisions are made. It's also important
to consider fairness, when there's a mix of expatriates and locals in
the workforce. Finally, there are broader external influences to
consider, such as different legal frameworks, employee relations
practices, and relationships with host governments. Another
distinguishing characteristic of international HR management is
heightened risk exposure. In addition to political and economic
risks at the level of the organizations, it's important that you
consider risks that might affect individuals personally, such as those
related to personal security, natural disasters, terrorist activities, and
public health risks. There's also human capital risk, as reflected in
the financial consequences of a failed international
assignment. Companies often define failure in several ways. One is
the failure of an individual or his or her family to adjust to a foreign
environment. Another is an early return to their home country, or
from a failure to achieve the business objectives of the
assignment. Companies have found that the cost of a failed
international assignment can be as high as a million U.S.
dollars. Suppose you were offered an international
assignment. What might a company look for? Many firms focus only
on technical ability, but that has nothing to do with your ability to
adapt to a new environment, to deal effectively with foreign
coworkers, or to perceive, and if necessary, imitate expected ways to
behave in the new environment. Are you adaptable, flexible? Can
you deal with ambiguous situations? Are you open to new
ideas? And are you highly motivated to succeed in an international
assignment? These are important characteristics that companies
look for in international assignees. The goal of cross-cultural
training is to prepare persons of one culture to interact effectively in
another culture or to interact more effectively with persons from
different cultures. To survive, cope and succeed, managers need
training in three areas, the culture, the language and practical day-
to-day matters. Female expatriates need training on the norms,
values, and beliefs that host nationals possess about women, and
also on how to deal with challenging situations that they may face
as women. After hearing all of this, it seems reasonable to ask, why
do people accept overseas assignments? Why do they go? As
companies global ambitions grow, fast track executives at
companies such as General Mills, Procter and Gamble,
Gillette, General Electric and ExxonMobile see foreign tourists as
necessary for career advancement. Evidence indicates that US-based
multinationals actually do perform better when they have CEOs and
senior managers with international assignment experience.

Compensating international employees

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- Consider this situation, you've just been offered a position as
Director of International Business Development for the coffee
company you work for. If you accept the job, you, your spouse and
your two young children will be based in Shanghai for the next
three years. Your boss asks you to discuss this opportunity with
your spouse and to meet next week to discuss it further if you're
interested. Your spouse is excited about the move as are
you although both of you have many questions. The most urgent of
these involves the compensation package that the company is
willing to offer. It's now time to meet with your boss. She's
anticipated most of your questions about international
compensation and is fully prepared to discuss those at the
meeting. As you're walking into the meeting, there are several
issues you want to discuss. Will the financial incentives be attractive
enough for you to leave your home country? Will you be able to
maintain your standard of living while in Shanghai with due
consideration of your career and family needs? Will the company
ensure a smooth re-entry back home at the end of your
assignment. At a general level, many companies use a balance sheet
approach to international compensation. The objective of this
approach is to keep employees whole that is to allow them to
maintain the purchasing power of their salaries in the new
location. Let's say just for illustration that you and your family spend
25% of your monthly income on housing, another 25% on goods
and services, a third 25% on income taxes and that the remainder
goes to savings. In Shanghai, you can expect to pay 25% more for
housing. Likewise goods and services will also be 25% more
expensive. And you'll also be paying income taxes, both in China as
well as in your home country. The good news is with the balance
sheet approach, companies will cover all of the excess costs that
you incur for housing, goods and services and income taxes. As a
result, you would still be able to save 25% of your income each
month and you'll be no worse off financially than if you had never
left home. An international pay package consists of four key
components, a base salary, a foreign service and hardship
premium, a variety of allowances and employee benefits. While
physical threats, danger and discomfort due to the environment are
not major concerns in Shanghai, the cultural differences are
considerable as is the inconvenience of relocating and placing your
children in the local educational system. As a result, in this example,
the company be willing to add a foreign service and hardship
premium of 20% to your base pay. In addition, you'll receive
allowances for the difference in the cost of living, the cost of
housing and education and allowance wants to cover home
leave for you and your family once a year, the full cost of
relocation. And since your spouse also works, a spousal assistance
package. Companies in general also pay for tax preparation and
they guarantee that you do not pay any more in total taxes than
you would have at home. This is called tax equalization. Finally,
most companies also provide international medical coverage in all
required benefits. The total cost, a three-year international
assignment typically costs three to five times home country salary
alone. As you can see, there are lots of issues to consider before you
accept an international assignment. Doing your homework ahead of
time can ensure that you get the best possible deal for you and for
your family.

Dive deeper into HR

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- I sincerely hope that you've enjoyed each of the videos in this
course. Hopefully we've stimulated your interest to dive a little
deeper, at least with respect to some of the topics. Here are several
additional sources that you can consult for more information. First,
consider the website of the Society for Human Resource
Management Foundation. On that site, you can click on
resources and find a wealth of information. There are several other
professional societies that offer lots of helpful information and
materials. These include the Association for Talent
Development and WorldatWork, the Total Rewards
Association. Another great resource to check out is the variety of
print and online monthly magazines, such as HR Magazine, Human
Resource Executive online or Workforce Magazine. These magazines
contain timely useful treatments of HR related topics. Finally, if
you'd like to consult more in-depth textbooks in HR, here are three
leading ones to consider: Fundamentals of HR by Noe, Hollenbeck,
Gerhart and Wright. Fundamentals of HR by Desler, Managing
Human Resources: Productivity, Quality of Work Life, Profits by me,
Wayne Cascio. Remember, you'll be dealing with people-related
business issues that is HR management issues throughout your
entire career. The journey to master this area has no finish line but
you've taken a very important first step. I hope that you'll find the
rest of the journey to be just as rewarding as the beginning, good
luck.