Your business leader needs your help
I spoke recently to a retail executive at a major chain. “Nancy” runs operations for a 300 person store. Her key business problem is to run the store according to the staffing levels set by the budget.
However, there is a major people complication: workers just don’t show up.
There are other complications too, like public, dramatic break-ups in the middle of the store and the occasional refrigerator heist scheme (she has some good stories!), but mostly it is about poor performance & absenteeism.
In order for Nancy to sustain customer service levels, she needs to weed out the chronically absent. She must be in a position to fire those individuals and to staff with dependable people. As you can imagine, Nancy spends a good amount of time stressing and losing sleep over these issues.
Fortunately, there is good data to help solve the problem. Comings and goings are tracked carefully. Performance “conversations” are documented and recorded, with dates and context. The HR representative has full access to this information.
In theory, Nancy could easily move from suspicion to action. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. Since she does not have direct access to the data, she must request a data report from the HR rep. Though the HR rep has access to all of the data, it is not necessarily easy for her to pull together the specific information Nancy is looking for. In addition, it is not the HR Rep’s priority. She has plenty of other things going on and Nancy’s request is just one of them.
Typically, it takes a week for Nancy to get the information she needs. By then, suspicions have flown, stress has mounted, the worker is still employed, and the business is suffering.
Do you see a problem here? The HR system and function is in a position to add tremendous value to the business operations, but instead it is a bottleneck.
We need to figure out how to get the data into the hands of the business leader directly, to put the HR rep in a position of understanding the needs and adding value, not controlling the information flow.
I’ll be talking about this on Tuesday, March 1st – join me!
Adrian Bowles
Alan Silberberg
Dennis Howlett
Elizabeth Herrell
Esteban Kolsky
Frank Scavo
Jeff Ashcroft
Maribel Lopez
Naomi Bloom
Paul Papadimitriou
R "Ray" Wang
Sameer Patel
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Hi Amy,
If you trace the origin of whatever information system is tracking absences, I’d bet dollars to doughnuts that a hefty portion of the ROI was justified on reducing absenteeism. In this scenario, I think “bottleneck” is too kind of a word. By not acting on the information, HR has reduced the value of that information to zero, which in turn wipes out a significant portion of the ROI for the system. Viewed in this light, HR has a fiduciary responsibility to insure the information retains it’s value. This can only be done by proper and timely sharing of information.
What happens to employees who violate fiduciary responsibilities? Do we call for HR to fall on their sword?