HRviews

1. Compensation Executives are Cautious about Pay Increase
According to data collected by CLC Human Resources’ HR Barometer survey, a large majority of compensation executives expect no change across the next twelve months in signing bonuses (75%), the number of employees receiving promotions (53%), or new hire base pay (50%). The exceptions are short- and long-term incentive payouts, which just 23% and 38% expect to stay the same, respectively.

2. UK Organizations are Unprepared for an Aging Workforce
A report released by the Chartered Institute for Personnel Development (CIPD) finds that only 14% of UK managers consider their organization well prepared to cope with demographic changes, particularly the aging of the workforce. Further, 34% of managers claim that there is a complete absence of board-level recognition of aging workforce issues. More than a third of UK workers will be over 50 years old by 2020.

3. More Organizations Rely on Interns to Fill Full-Time Positions
In a survey conducted by the Wall Street Journal, a quarter of the respondents say that more than 50% of their new-graduate hires were interns at their companies, while 14% say more than 75% had been interns. Experts say that the trend toward intern-pool hiring has become very strong in the past three to five years, and internship recruiting is likely to largely replace entry-level recruiting in the next few years.

4. Organizations Focus on Short-Term Assignments to Reduce Cost of International Assignments
The International Assignment Survey released by Mercer reports that the number of international assignments has increased by 4% in the past two years. However, organizations are focusing on short-term assignments to help control costs, with 50% of organizations reporting an increase in short-term assignments. Further, nine out of ten organizations are revising or are planning to revise their expatriate policies, including benefits and allowances, in order to save costs.

5. European Maternity Leave Proposals Expensive for UK Companies
An assessment carried out on behalf of the European Parliament estimates the cost of extending maternity leave to 20 weeks on full pay at £2.5 billion a year in the UK. Women in the UK are currently entitled to a year off, with the first six weeks on 90% pay, followed by 33 weeks on statutory maternity pay of £124.88 a week, and the remainder is unpaid.

6. U.S. Workers Stay with an Organization for a Median of 4.4 Years
Data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reveals that the median number of years that wage and salary workers have been with their current employers is 4.4 years. The employee tenure measure, which is released every two years, was last recorded at 4.1 years in 2008. The decline is partially due to the significant job losses among less tenured employees during the recession.

(Source: CLC Human Resources, September 24, 2010)

There are times when I try to picture the future. 10, 15 years from now when I would probably like to have found the secret of the ‘far niente’ mood, be in control of it, having discovered that perfect balance between work and life and travel and hobbies. Also, I can easily picture how I would be able to communicate with my family members, my friends and my work colleagues from wherever I am in the world since I know that technology will continue to make this simply easier and easier for us. I also know that many things will change rapidly in the world of business and across industries due to the new technology. For now it is a puzzle to foresee the exact changes and their impacts; however words are coming out depicting what is lying ahead of us. McKinsey & Company (Shoshana Zuboff, in “Creating value in the age of distributed capitalism”) has tackled the subject of the upcoming Distributed Capitalism, the mutations about to happen and some pieces of the puzzle have been put together.

Piece 1: enterprises that can leverage technology and real-world social connections to solve their piece of the premium puzzle – creating individualized ways to consume goods and services at a radically reduced cost – will prosper as they realize wholly new sources of value that remain invisible to companies still bound by conventional business models.

Piece 2: Shift from mass production to customized demand.  The mass-production business model has come under assault during the past decade, perhaps most successfully by the combination of Apple’s iPod and its music service, iTunes. The iPod is a cool gadget, but it is also a gateway product, one of the first to achieve both scale and commercial success while expressing a new mutation. Apple had the ability to reinvent the consumption experience from the viewpoint of the individual, at a fraction of the old cost.

Piece 3: Winning mutations – those that create value by offering consumers individualized goods and services at a radically reduced cost – express a convergence of technological capabilities and the values associated with individual self-determination. The iPod and scores of other successful mutations have infiltrated the economy sufficiently to provide preferred alternatives to established sources of goods and services across many industries.

Can distributed capitalism go further? What happens when it confronts forms of physical assets and social support that cannot be reduced to information – arenas where face-to-face experience is essential? This is when distributed capitalism, which until now has manifested itself almost entirely in the digital world, will begin to mature as it takes aim at core economic functions with a second wave of more complex mutations that combine virtual and real-world assets.

As HR professionals, all these changes will obviously impact our ways of supporting the business and the executives’ strategic thinking. One radical question to start thinking of is how a mutation could destroy the boundaries of the industry we operate in. Also there will be unique opportunities for companies able to decipher the emerging pattern of mutation and to convert that understanding into new business models that support the complex needs of the 21st-century individual.

People’s emotional well-being — happiness — increases along with their income up to about $75,000, researchers report in Tuesday’s edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

For folks making less than that, said Angus Deaton, an economist at the Center for Health and Wellbeing at Princeton University, “Stuff is so in your face it’s hard to be happy. It interferes with your enjoyment.”

“Giving people more income beyond 75K is not going to do much for their daily mood … but it is going to make them feel they have a better life,” Deaton said in an interview.

This is an interesting research since it seems that it is not about the practical aspect of being able to do more with that money, it is purely about the feeling you develop: you have a better life. Buying more or buying more expensive things are not going to make you happy, or at least it’s not a long-term feeling, rather a momentary emotion that you can have that ’stuff’ when you decide to. Knowing though that you are there, over the average salary range can give you the long-term feeling of happiness that you are doing well.

As we all know, HR is becoming more strategic and businesses start to see the value of an HR partner. With this, a new role has evolved that will probably in the long run be what the HR profession is all about. The new role is called the HR Business Partner and it has emerged into a very complex position that actually encompasses four jobs in one. The HRBPs must balance tensions between the different roles they play and each of the four roles has their critical competences. In this post, I would like to outline these competencies since, as mentioned above, this role is fairly new and we all need to become aware of what this position requires so we can better prepare for it.

At the core we have business acumen and innovation. These are strong competencies that require skills and knowledge that accumulate over years. Innovation taps into everyone creative side and it results form years of study and experimentation.

Below is a snapshot of the HRBP Competency Model (source: Corporate Leadership Council)