Gauging HR's contribution
Anne Sado
President
George Brown College
George Brown College of Applied Arts and Technology offers applied education courses and programs out of three campuses in Toronto. The college employs 1,100 full-time faculty, administrative and support staff in its day programs, plus between 500 and 2,000 part-time and casual staff.
At George Brown College in Toronto, finding the right people is of utmost priority because, after all, it’s what they know and communicate that sets the learning institution apart.
Anne Sado, president of the college, uses measurements to confirm that HR has hired the right people for the job.
Faculty must be recognized experts in their fields, but they must be equally adept at conveying that knowledge to students from all walks of life and in all age groups.
In the past couple of years, the college’s HR team has managed to find about 400 people. That was largely to replace the faculty members hired some 35 years ago and are now starting to retire, but also in response to increased enrolment that occurred when the Ontario secondary school system cut out Grade 13 two years ago.
“Recruitment and retention,” says Sado. “It starts there.”
Through its annual student satisfaction survey, the college keeps tabs on whether students believe their program is giving them the right knowledge and skills, and how they rate the overall quality of their learning experience. In a student survey conducted October 2004, 84 per cent said they’re getting the right skills, and 76 per cent rated the education experience as “good or very good.”
“Those are very important indicators to us,” Sado says, as they confirm “that we have the right people.”
In addition, she points to an employee satisfaction survey, in which overall job satisfaction has risen from 69 per cent in 2000 to 76 per cent in October 2004. Plus, 92 per cent of staff say they have a “personal commitment to helping George Brown succeed.”
Sado says those metrics help convince her that HR is doing its job in terms of recruitment and retention.
Since joining the college in January 2004, Sado has refined its balanced scorecard “to more closely represent the strategies we’re trying to achieve.” Because faculty members must stay on top of developments in their fields, Sado focused the scorecard more on the learning and growth of staff. She pays close attention to the training budgets, which amount to about $750,000 in the central pot plus about $650,000 in various faculty and division budgets.
Another metric used by the college is its number of grievances and arbitrations.
“That’s an indication of how well the college management team is doing,” she says. Because contract negotiations take place through a provincial agency that bargains on behalf of Ontario colleges, “it’s hard for me to gauge, but I’d say we have a reasonably good relationship with the union,” says Sado.
Sado meets with her executive director of HR each month and receives regular reports on staffing levels (part-time and full-time), grievances, arbitrations, employment equity (annually), and participation in professional development and training activities. Salaries, one of the college’s biggest expenditures, are broken down into different categories for analysis.
HR also reports quarterly to the senior management committee and annually to the board.
One measurement that the college is still developing is “the cost of absence,” says Sado. “That’s a cost to the organization. Right now we don’t have that information so that’s what we’re looking at developing,” she says.
“Anything that has the potential of being a significant cost to the organization should be measured.”
She says softer measures, such as anecdotal information from employee surveys, are also important. “I don’t think you should try and quantify everything because you might lose the intent of what you’re trying to achieve.”
Marty Komsa
CEO and President
Windsor Family Credit Union
Formed in 1985 after a merger of four credit unions, the Windsor Family Credit Union employs 115 full-time and part-time staff at five Windsor, Ont.-area locations.
Getting the best people to come and stay at the Windsor Family Credit Union is the top human resource concern for CEO and president Marty Komsa.
“We pride ourselves on hiring the best people out there. And in order to get the best people, you have to understand what the people’s values are, and you have to try to make sure you don’t impose your values on them,” says Komsa.
“Rather you have to understand their values and make sure the organizational structure will allow them sufficient room to grow, to learn their expertise. If you do that, it’s easier to have them buy into organizational goals that you want to accomplish.”
One of the credit union’s proudest HR accomplishments, says Komsa, is “putting the HR function in what I refer to as a matrix form.” In this matrix system, the overall HR strategy is laid out in 12 steps. They include recruitment, orientation, staffing, training and development, benefits, salaries, performance management, records management, legislative compliance, HR management, employee relations and exit process.
Over the years, the credit union has developed specific strategies for each of these. “And every year we go back to these steps and revamp them, remodel them, revisit them and ensure that we are leading edge on every one of these steps,” says Komsa.
There are very few HR functions that are not measured at the Windsor Family Credit Union. New hires at the credit union have to take training on aspects of the financial services industry, and within 90 days of joining, they have to achieve a score of 90 per cent or more in their various compulsory tests. This goes for everyone, from the financial service manager to the clerk at head office, says Komsa.
On a twice-a-year basis, all employees go through performance reviews to report on how they’re meeting both quantitative and qualitative goals. The sales staff, especially, have sales goals that are measured weekly, monthly and quarterly.
Qualitative goals include such areas of performance as teamwork, communication with other members of the staff and new ideas. A financial service manager, for example, has to come up with three to five new initiatives or ideas for products a year, and that’s because “they’re closest to the members. If they don’t tell us things the members are looking for, then how the heck are we going to know?” says Komsa.
On top of that, the credit union is ISO 9001:2000 certified, which makes it only one of two credit unions in Canada to be certified with the international standards body, says Komsa.
“Every year we actually go through an ISO recertification process and they run us through the gamut. They make sure we’re doing everything we say we’re doing. We have to make sure that everybody works to specified standards, and those standards centre around customer satisfaction.”
But just as important to Komsa are the sort of things that can’t be quantified: employee values. With more than half of the workforce under 40 years of age, Komsa says one of the biggest HR challenges for the credit union is to understand the values that are important to the younger generations of workers.
“Whether they be university graduates, college graduates or individuals coming to us from other industries, they have a set of values that as an organization we have to respect and understand, in order to provide an environment that allows them to be happy and content and also grow as individuals,” says Komsa.
To get a good pulse on employee values, the credit union conducts focus groups with employees within their first 18 months. There’s also what’s known as a CEO-advisory committee, a group of 12 employees who, every quarter, sit down with Komsa for breakfast away from the office.
“They can tell me what they want. Everything they tell me in there is confidential. It stays with me. I don’t have to discuss any of those things with the vice-presidents,” says Komsa. “And you’d be surprised how much stuff they tell me and how much I tell them. But that’s another way for me to get closer to the employees.”
Michelle DiEmanuele
Deputy Minister and Associate Secretary of the Cabinet, Centre for Leadership and HR Management
Government of Ontario
Michelle DiEmanuele’s role includes overseeing HR and staffing issues for Ontario’s civil servants. The province employs 63,000 people, including 900 HR professionals.
The Ontario government currently tracks “the full gamut of HR activities,” says Deputy Minister Michelle DiEmanuele. That includes average age, promotions, full-time equivalents (FTE) count and exits. But plans are afoot to implement what she describes as “a more sophisticated metrics world that goes beyond the makeup of the workforce and where there might be gaps.”
DiEmanuele has an ambitious plan for the next six months to make changes to the performance of the organization’s HR function.
Performance metrics around delivery of HR will be examined, including the amount of time it takes to recruit staff and what return on investment there is for learning and development.
“We’re running pilots now that look at the cycle time associated with recruitment and then we’re going to set benchmarks and measure them on a regular basis,” DiEmanuele says.
DiEmanuele plans to look at overall performance indicators in key areas such as learning and development.
“It’s not just about how well are we delivering learning and development, but what are we actually getting for it, how can we track the outputs from performance development? Can we actually quantify the benefits from that doing a 360-degree review a year later and does it show improvement?” she says.
She’s also looking at organizational metrics, which include health and wellness and the leadership issues. She describes it as a “monthly snapshot” that a leader can look at and determine whether the organization is meeting its objectives from a human capital perspective.
The government’s HR directors are already expected to provide regular progress reports. They meet every two weeks and work from 90-day plans.
“I would say we have a fairly aggressive check-in,” says DiEmanuele, adding that the directors look at “what are we doing, how are we doing and where are we going.” The 90-day plans are updated weekly in terms of progress and are reviewed every quarter. “When we produce the metrics report in six months, that will be a more numerate set of updates every month.”
The biggest challenges faced by the government, according to DiEmanuele, are health and wellness, an aging workforce and how best to manage talent and succession. The HR functions of greatest interest? “Recruitment, recruitment, recruitment,” says DiEmanuele.
“We’re hiring someone’s potential,” she says, adding that if recruitment is done right, “and if you hire people who have skills for today but potential for tomorrow, I don’t think you can go wrong. If you’re just going out to plug holes, then you’re not selling what your organization has to offer.”
If a particular area of business is going exceptionally well, often the manager of that area gets the credit, DiEmanuele points out. “But what has been the HR value to getting you there? Chances are you’ve got some fairly innovative, interesting human resource practices going on behind the scenes as well. When you’re measuring business or service effectiveness, make sure that people understand there’s a value of HR contributing to that. If you’ve got long-term success in those areas, then the chances are you’ve got human resource practices and supports that are really focused on people.”
DiEmanuele sees the HR function as extremely important and says every single HR activity done by the government needs to be justified by hard metrics. “We spend money on behalf of our ministries and our lines of business and the taxpayers of Ontario and we should be able to justify and exhibit value on everything we spend. If we can’t, we shouldn’t be in the business.
“It’s hard to measure what people call the ‘soft skills.’ You just have to be disciplined and you have to be tenacious, but there is a measure, and I think HR should be as disciplined and as tenacious as areas that focus on either financial or service improvements.”
Michael Coates
President and CEO
Hill & Knowlton Canada
Hill & Knowlton Canada is an industry leader in public relations, public affairs and strategic communications. Part of a larger global company of 1,500, Hill & Knowlton Canada is headquartered in Toronto and employs 165 people.
“I don’t want bureaucracy. I want action.”
That pretty much sums up Michael Coates’ approach to business as head of Hill & Knowlton Canada. Since the public relations industry is all about people — employees and clients — his focus is on keeping staff motivated.
“I talk to employees every day, and I listen to what they have to say, because if I have a happy company, I have a happy clientele. When we have churn of staff, we have churn of clients.”
Although the firm doesn’t have a lot of hard metrics in place to measure the effectiveness of its HR function, “we certainly measure employee turnover,” says Coates. “We’re not a huge company so it’s easy to do. We very much see that as an indicator of employee satisfaction.”
The firm also does an annual staff survey, which includes a menu of various job satisfaction indices, “everything from the type of work they’re doing, to management’s ability and success in communicating with individuals, to paid benefits. Everybody here is part of a 20/20 review process that’s done online. The head of HR is evaluated by myself, her peers and reports. We get a sense of how successful she is in performing her role as head of the department.”
For Coates, the main indicator of performance — from all employees, including his human resources staff — is execution. “Where companies continually fall down is in the execution of their strategic plans. There’s no end of strategies and people who want to talk about strategy. But for strategy to be successful, it’s got to be executed and I look to HR as one of my very important departments to execute on our business strategy.”
Coates says he highly values his two human resources staff. In a smaller firm such as his, there aren’t a lot of layers between himself and his head of HR, Ruth Clark, whose office is adjacent to his. “We’re joined at the hip,” he says, adding that when he needs something done, “I yell through the wall, ‘Ruth, how are you coming on this project?’”
Coates says that one of his greatest successes since he became CEO a decade ago has been working with his human resources staff, who have helped him “put in place a culture that has very much helped drive the financial performance of the company.” He adds that working daily with his HR manager helped him put in place “the systems, the processes, and generally speaking the culture that we needed to become successful.”
He says that some “people think I’m crazy to admit this, but our employees are really my most important concern. Some people say, ‘Don’t you mean it’s your clients?’ and I say, ‘No.’ If I have best-quality employees who are happy and productive, I have happy client relationships. That has been a major thrust of what I’ve worked with HR on, over the past 10 years.”
Nizar Somji
Founder, President and CEO
Matrikon Inc.
Edmonton-based Matrikon employs more than 500 employees in several offices around the world. The company focuses on high-end IT solutions for the industrial marketplace, including chemical companies, refineries and utility companies.
Nizar Somji says the greatest HR success at Matrikon is the fact that the key people who run the organization were hired right out of school and have all been developed internally.
“I think that’s a tremendous achievement,” he says, giving credit to his human resources manager, who is “very important in terms of developing our people.”
Somji founded the high-tech firm in 1988 and since then has steadily grown the company from one employee to 500-plus. He says that the biggest human resources challenges his company faces are “not any different from anybody else’s” — namely, the retention and the development of employees.
“We want to put together the right structure so people feel excited and motivated to continue to stay.”
As the company continues to grow, Somji tries to create a culture that provides people with challenges to develop and grow. Matrikon has put together a number of leadership-track training initiatives and seminars.
“It’s about identifying the future movers and shakers. It’s a continuous process, spending time with people to develop them to be able to be the kind of leaders we have been,” says Somji.
One metric Matrikon uses is an employee assessment tool that gathers feedback from both an employee’s peers and reports. It also gauges employees’ performance in terms of what clients say about them. He receives weekly progress reports from his human resources department and documents some of the key HR initiatives and results on a quarterly basis, in his reports to the board.
Somji is directly involved in hiring for senior positions, including industry specialists and senior sales people. His focus in terms of human resources is to develop, mentor and monitor people in their first nine to 12 months at Matrikon. He takes small groups of employees out to lunch on their six-month anniversaries at the firm to get to know them and he examines how new employees develop and think.
“I’m looking for them to have an understanding of how the company operates.” He searches them for the same kind of entrepreneurial focus that has taken the company to the level of success it has seen and “how they need to be pushing as opposed to expecting to be pulled. This is a company that is entrepreneurial in nature — a lot of creative people have come and built it.”
Somji’s personal philosophy of running a successful business is simple. “I hire people who are going to worry for me. If they’re worrying for me, then they’re taking care of the bottom line so I don’t have to be worrying about it all the time.”
Rowan Saunders
President and CEO
Royal & SunAlliance Canada
Headquartered in Toronto, Royal & SunAlliance Canada has more than 2,000 employees in offices across the country. The firm is one of Canada’s largest property and casualty insurance groups in terms of direct premiums written, with a total of $1.5 billion as of 2003.
“In our business, metrics are very important,” says Rowan Saunders, who heads Royal & SunAlliance’s (RSA) Canadian operations. It’s hardly a surprising statement coming from someone in the analytical insurance industry, where details are so closely scrutinized.
“If you don’t measure, you’re not going to know how much progress you’re making. As we have rigorous performance targets and metrics on our business leaders, we apply the same level to our HR executive as well.”
In the property and casualty insurance industry the key to success is to have the right group of employees with the right skill sets in the right positions, says Saunders. It’s very important for HR to hire very motivated people who are high performers, and to make sure they possess the appropriate level of core competencies.
“Because our business is in financial and intellectual capital, there are metrics that we hold on the HR department as to whether our employees are truly high performing,” he says.
During the company’s annual assessment process, which focuses on employees’ performance and potential, various categories are scored and tracked, including productivity, age ratios, performance management ratios, the number of new hires and the amount of staff turnover. The review allows management to see how many employees are rated in the “superior” performance category as opposed to merely “good.”
“The people review is full of metrics,” says Saunders. The HR staff is also measured this way, so part of their assessment focuses on how the rest of the employees have improved.
“How effectively we’ve moved scores year over year is a metric we can judge the HR team on. Because if the HR team has the right recruiting, the right compensation, the right process around operational goals and training leaders on how to appropriately lead, motivate and manage their employees, the scores will get better over time. That’s the quantitative measurement that we get.”
Saunders also assesses whether Royal & SunAlliance’s HR people are doing a good job in recruiting staff by examining customer feedback on how well they think employees are performing. “The customers will tell you if you have an engaged and committed workforce who are going the extra mile to deliver strong service,” he says.
Another metric that he looks at is the revenue line. Saunders says that if a company is growing in its chosen areas, that proves its employees are actively competing in the marketplace. “That is a measure of whether your HR team has been successful in delivering what their objectives were.”
Royal & SunAlliance also does annual surveys to find out what employees think, which can also be used to measure how well the HR department is performing. “What comes out very strongly is that RSA is a great place to work,” says Saunders. “We want to benchmark that and keep that score going higher and higher.”
Saunders says that Royal & SunAlliance’s greatest successes are its abilities “to attract the top talent in the marketplace and to be clear with employees on the role they play in the organization,” and that’s something that the HR department plays a major role in.
Saunders’ human resources executive reports directly to him and is involved in all key issues, including strategic management.
“HR plays a critical role in the organization. It deserves a seat at the top table,” he says, adding, “You need to have the human resource element at the top table to be a successful organization that’s helping to drive and shape strategy and then of course support that afterwards.”
With files from Ann Macaulay, Joyce Grant and Uyen Vu.
President
George Brown College
George Brown College of Applied Arts and Technology offers applied education courses and programs out of three campuses in Toronto. The college employs 1,100 full-time faculty, administrative and support staff in its day programs, plus between 500 and 2,000 part-time and casual staff.
At George Brown College in Toronto, finding the right people is of utmost priority because, after all, it’s what they know and communicate that sets the learning institution apart.
Anne Sado, president of the college, uses measurements to confirm that HR has hired the right people for the job.
Faculty must be recognized experts in their fields, but they must be equally adept at conveying that knowledge to students from all walks of life and in all age groups.
In the past couple of years, the college’s HR team has managed to find about 400 people. That was largely to replace the faculty members hired some 35 years ago and are now starting to retire, but also in response to increased enrolment that occurred when the Ontario secondary school system cut out Grade 13 two years ago.
“Recruitment and retention,” says Sado. “It starts there.”
Through its annual student satisfaction survey, the college keeps tabs on whether students believe their program is giving them the right knowledge and skills, and how they rate the overall quality of their learning experience. In a student survey conducted October 2004, 84 per cent said they’re getting the right skills, and 76 per cent rated the education experience as “good or very good.”
“Those are very important indicators to us,” Sado says, as they confirm “that we have the right people.”
In addition, she points to an employee satisfaction survey, in which overall job satisfaction has risen from 69 per cent in 2000 to 76 per cent in October 2004. Plus, 92 per cent of staff say they have a “personal commitment to helping George Brown succeed.”
Sado says those metrics help convince her that HR is doing its job in terms of recruitment and retention.
Since joining the college in January 2004, Sado has refined its balanced scorecard “to more closely represent the strategies we’re trying to achieve.” Because faculty members must stay on top of developments in their fields, Sado focused the scorecard more on the learning and growth of staff. She pays close attention to the training budgets, which amount to about $750,000 in the central pot plus about $650,000 in various faculty and division budgets.
Another metric used by the college is its number of grievances and arbitrations.
“That’s an indication of how well the college management team is doing,” she says. Because contract negotiations take place through a provincial agency that bargains on behalf of Ontario colleges, “it’s hard for me to gauge, but I’d say we have a reasonably good relationship with the union,” says Sado.
Sado meets with her executive director of HR each month and receives regular reports on staffing levels (part-time and full-time), grievances, arbitrations, employment equity (annually), and participation in professional development and training activities. Salaries, one of the college’s biggest expenditures, are broken down into different categories for analysis.
HR also reports quarterly to the senior management committee and annually to the board.
One measurement that the college is still developing is “the cost of absence,” says Sado. “That’s a cost to the organization. Right now we don’t have that information so that’s what we’re looking at developing,” she says.
“Anything that has the potential of being a significant cost to the organization should be measured.”
She says softer measures, such as anecdotal information from employee surveys, are also important. “I don’t think you should try and quantify everything because you might lose the intent of what you’re trying to achieve.”
Marty Komsa
CEO and President
Windsor Family Credit Union
Formed in 1985 after a merger of four credit unions, the Windsor Family Credit Union employs 115 full-time and part-time staff at five Windsor, Ont.-area locations.
Getting the best people to come and stay at the Windsor Family Credit Union is the top human resource concern for CEO and president Marty Komsa.
“We pride ourselves on hiring the best people out there. And in order to get the best people, you have to understand what the people’s values are, and you have to try to make sure you don’t impose your values on them,” says Komsa.
“Rather you have to understand their values and make sure the organizational structure will allow them sufficient room to grow, to learn their expertise. If you do that, it’s easier to have them buy into organizational goals that you want to accomplish.”
One of the credit union’s proudest HR accomplishments, says Komsa, is “putting the HR function in what I refer to as a matrix form.” In this matrix system, the overall HR strategy is laid out in 12 steps. They include recruitment, orientation, staffing, training and development, benefits, salaries, performance management, records management, legislative compliance, HR management, employee relations and exit process.
Over the years, the credit union has developed specific strategies for each of these. “And every year we go back to these steps and revamp them, remodel them, revisit them and ensure that we are leading edge on every one of these steps,” says Komsa.
There are very few HR functions that are not measured at the Windsor Family Credit Union. New hires at the credit union have to take training on aspects of the financial services industry, and within 90 days of joining, they have to achieve a score of 90 per cent or more in their various compulsory tests. This goes for everyone, from the financial service manager to the clerk at head office, says Komsa.
On a twice-a-year basis, all employees go through performance reviews to report on how they’re meeting both quantitative and qualitative goals. The sales staff, especially, have sales goals that are measured weekly, monthly and quarterly.
Qualitative goals include such areas of performance as teamwork, communication with other members of the staff and new ideas. A financial service manager, for example, has to come up with three to five new initiatives or ideas for products a year, and that’s because “they’re closest to the members. If they don’t tell us things the members are looking for, then how the heck are we going to know?” says Komsa.
On top of that, the credit union is ISO 9001:2000 certified, which makes it only one of two credit unions in Canada to be certified with the international standards body, says Komsa.
“Every year we actually go through an ISO recertification process and they run us through the gamut. They make sure we’re doing everything we say we’re doing. We have to make sure that everybody works to specified standards, and those standards centre around customer satisfaction.”
But just as important to Komsa are the sort of things that can’t be quantified: employee values. With more than half of the workforce under 40 years of age, Komsa says one of the biggest HR challenges for the credit union is to understand the values that are important to the younger generations of workers.
“Whether they be university graduates, college graduates or individuals coming to us from other industries, they have a set of values that as an organization we have to respect and understand, in order to provide an environment that allows them to be happy and content and also grow as individuals,” says Komsa.
To get a good pulse on employee values, the credit union conducts focus groups with employees within their first 18 months. There’s also what’s known as a CEO-advisory committee, a group of 12 employees who, every quarter, sit down with Komsa for breakfast away from the office.
“They can tell me what they want. Everything they tell me in there is confidential. It stays with me. I don’t have to discuss any of those things with the vice-presidents,” says Komsa. “And you’d be surprised how much stuff they tell me and how much I tell them. But that’s another way for me to get closer to the employees.”
Michelle DiEmanuele
Deputy Minister and Associate Secretary of the Cabinet, Centre for Leadership and HR Management
Government of Ontario
Michelle DiEmanuele’s role includes overseeing HR and staffing issues for Ontario’s civil servants. The province employs 63,000 people, including 900 HR professionals.
The Ontario government currently tracks “the full gamut of HR activities,” says Deputy Minister Michelle DiEmanuele. That includes average age, promotions, full-time equivalents (FTE) count and exits. But plans are afoot to implement what she describes as “a more sophisticated metrics world that goes beyond the makeup of the workforce and where there might be gaps.”
DiEmanuele has an ambitious plan for the next six months to make changes to the performance of the organization’s HR function.
Performance metrics around delivery of HR will be examined, including the amount of time it takes to recruit staff and what return on investment there is for learning and development.
“We’re running pilots now that look at the cycle time associated with recruitment and then we’re going to set benchmarks and measure them on a regular basis,” DiEmanuele says.
DiEmanuele plans to look at overall performance indicators in key areas such as learning and development.
“It’s not just about how well are we delivering learning and development, but what are we actually getting for it, how can we track the outputs from performance development? Can we actually quantify the benefits from that doing a 360-degree review a year later and does it show improvement?” she says.
She’s also looking at organizational metrics, which include health and wellness and the leadership issues. She describes it as a “monthly snapshot” that a leader can look at and determine whether the organization is meeting its objectives from a human capital perspective.
The government’s HR directors are already expected to provide regular progress reports. They meet every two weeks and work from 90-day plans.
“I would say we have a fairly aggressive check-in,” says DiEmanuele, adding that the directors look at “what are we doing, how are we doing and where are we going.” The 90-day plans are updated weekly in terms of progress and are reviewed every quarter. “When we produce the metrics report in six months, that will be a more numerate set of updates every month.”
The biggest challenges faced by the government, according to DiEmanuele, are health and wellness, an aging workforce and how best to manage talent and succession. The HR functions of greatest interest? “Recruitment, recruitment, recruitment,” says DiEmanuele.
“We’re hiring someone’s potential,” she says, adding that if recruitment is done right, “and if you hire people who have skills for today but potential for tomorrow, I don’t think you can go wrong. If you’re just going out to plug holes, then you’re not selling what your organization has to offer.”
If a particular area of business is going exceptionally well, often the manager of that area gets the credit, DiEmanuele points out. “But what has been the HR value to getting you there? Chances are you’ve got some fairly innovative, interesting human resource practices going on behind the scenes as well. When you’re measuring business or service effectiveness, make sure that people understand there’s a value of HR contributing to that. If you’ve got long-term success in those areas, then the chances are you’ve got human resource practices and supports that are really focused on people.”
DiEmanuele sees the HR function as extremely important and says every single HR activity done by the government needs to be justified by hard metrics. “We spend money on behalf of our ministries and our lines of business and the taxpayers of Ontario and we should be able to justify and exhibit value on everything we spend. If we can’t, we shouldn’t be in the business.
“It’s hard to measure what people call the ‘soft skills.’ You just have to be disciplined and you have to be tenacious, but there is a measure, and I think HR should be as disciplined and as tenacious as areas that focus on either financial or service improvements.”
Michael Coates
President and CEO
Hill & Knowlton Canada
Hill & Knowlton Canada is an industry leader in public relations, public affairs and strategic communications. Part of a larger global company of 1,500, Hill & Knowlton Canada is headquartered in Toronto and employs 165 people.
“I don’t want bureaucracy. I want action.”
That pretty much sums up Michael Coates’ approach to business as head of Hill & Knowlton Canada. Since the public relations industry is all about people — employees and clients — his focus is on keeping staff motivated.
“I talk to employees every day, and I listen to what they have to say, because if I have a happy company, I have a happy clientele. When we have churn of staff, we have churn of clients.”
Although the firm doesn’t have a lot of hard metrics in place to measure the effectiveness of its HR function, “we certainly measure employee turnover,” says Coates. “We’re not a huge company so it’s easy to do. We very much see that as an indicator of employee satisfaction.”
The firm also does an annual staff survey, which includes a menu of various job satisfaction indices, “everything from the type of work they’re doing, to management’s ability and success in communicating with individuals, to paid benefits. Everybody here is part of a 20/20 review process that’s done online. The head of HR is evaluated by myself, her peers and reports. We get a sense of how successful she is in performing her role as head of the department.”
For Coates, the main indicator of performance — from all employees, including his human resources staff — is execution. “Where companies continually fall down is in the execution of their strategic plans. There’s no end of strategies and people who want to talk about strategy. But for strategy to be successful, it’s got to be executed and I look to HR as one of my very important departments to execute on our business strategy.”
Coates says he highly values his two human resources staff. In a smaller firm such as his, there aren’t a lot of layers between himself and his head of HR, Ruth Clark, whose office is adjacent to his. “We’re joined at the hip,” he says, adding that when he needs something done, “I yell through the wall, ‘Ruth, how are you coming on this project?’”
Coates says that one of his greatest successes since he became CEO a decade ago has been working with his human resources staff, who have helped him “put in place a culture that has very much helped drive the financial performance of the company.” He adds that working daily with his HR manager helped him put in place “the systems, the processes, and generally speaking the culture that we needed to become successful.”
He says that some “people think I’m crazy to admit this, but our employees are really my most important concern. Some people say, ‘Don’t you mean it’s your clients?’ and I say, ‘No.’ If I have best-quality employees who are happy and productive, I have happy client relationships. That has been a major thrust of what I’ve worked with HR on, over the past 10 years.”
Nizar Somji
Founder, President and CEO
Matrikon Inc.
Edmonton-based Matrikon employs more than 500 employees in several offices around the world. The company focuses on high-end IT solutions for the industrial marketplace, including chemical companies, refineries and utility companies.
Nizar Somji says the greatest HR success at Matrikon is the fact that the key people who run the organization were hired right out of school and have all been developed internally.
“I think that’s a tremendous achievement,” he says, giving credit to his human resources manager, who is “very important in terms of developing our people.”
Somji founded the high-tech firm in 1988 and since then has steadily grown the company from one employee to 500-plus. He says that the biggest human resources challenges his company faces are “not any different from anybody else’s” — namely, the retention and the development of employees.
“We want to put together the right structure so people feel excited and motivated to continue to stay.”
As the company continues to grow, Somji tries to create a culture that provides people with challenges to develop and grow. Matrikon has put together a number of leadership-track training initiatives and seminars.
“It’s about identifying the future movers and shakers. It’s a continuous process, spending time with people to develop them to be able to be the kind of leaders we have been,” says Somji.
One metric Matrikon uses is an employee assessment tool that gathers feedback from both an employee’s peers and reports. It also gauges employees’ performance in terms of what clients say about them. He receives weekly progress reports from his human resources department and documents some of the key HR initiatives and results on a quarterly basis, in his reports to the board.
Somji is directly involved in hiring for senior positions, including industry specialists and senior sales people. His focus in terms of human resources is to develop, mentor and monitor people in their first nine to 12 months at Matrikon. He takes small groups of employees out to lunch on their six-month anniversaries at the firm to get to know them and he examines how new employees develop and think.
“I’m looking for them to have an understanding of how the company operates.” He searches them for the same kind of entrepreneurial focus that has taken the company to the level of success it has seen and “how they need to be pushing as opposed to expecting to be pulled. This is a company that is entrepreneurial in nature — a lot of creative people have come and built it.”
Somji’s personal philosophy of running a successful business is simple. “I hire people who are going to worry for me. If they’re worrying for me, then they’re taking care of the bottom line so I don’t have to be worrying about it all the time.”
Rowan Saunders
President and CEO
Royal & SunAlliance Canada
Headquartered in Toronto, Royal & SunAlliance Canada has more than 2,000 employees in offices across the country. The firm is one of Canada’s largest property and casualty insurance groups in terms of direct premiums written, with a total of $1.5 billion as of 2003.
“In our business, metrics are very important,” says Rowan Saunders, who heads Royal & SunAlliance’s (RSA) Canadian operations. It’s hardly a surprising statement coming from someone in the analytical insurance industry, where details are so closely scrutinized.
“If you don’t measure, you’re not going to know how much progress you’re making. As we have rigorous performance targets and metrics on our business leaders, we apply the same level to our HR executive as well.”
In the property and casualty insurance industry the key to success is to have the right group of employees with the right skill sets in the right positions, says Saunders. It’s very important for HR to hire very motivated people who are high performers, and to make sure they possess the appropriate level of core competencies.
“Because our business is in financial and intellectual capital, there are metrics that we hold on the HR department as to whether our employees are truly high performing,” he says.
During the company’s annual assessment process, which focuses on employees’ performance and potential, various categories are scored and tracked, including productivity, age ratios, performance management ratios, the number of new hires and the amount of staff turnover. The review allows management to see how many employees are rated in the “superior” performance category as opposed to merely “good.”
“The people review is full of metrics,” says Saunders. The HR staff is also measured this way, so part of their assessment focuses on how the rest of the employees have improved.
“How effectively we’ve moved scores year over year is a metric we can judge the HR team on. Because if the HR team has the right recruiting, the right compensation, the right process around operational goals and training leaders on how to appropriately lead, motivate and manage their employees, the scores will get better over time. That’s the quantitative measurement that we get.”
Saunders also assesses whether Royal & SunAlliance’s HR people are doing a good job in recruiting staff by examining customer feedback on how well they think employees are performing. “The customers will tell you if you have an engaged and committed workforce who are going the extra mile to deliver strong service,” he says.
Another metric that he looks at is the revenue line. Saunders says that if a company is growing in its chosen areas, that proves its employees are actively competing in the marketplace. “That is a measure of whether your HR team has been successful in delivering what their objectives were.”
Royal & SunAlliance also does annual surveys to find out what employees think, which can also be used to measure how well the HR department is performing. “What comes out very strongly is that RSA is a great place to work,” says Saunders. “We want to benchmark that and keep that score going higher and higher.”
Saunders says that Royal & SunAlliance’s greatest successes are its abilities “to attract the top talent in the marketplace and to be clear with employees on the role they play in the organization,” and that’s something that the HR department plays a major role in.
Saunders’ human resources executive reports directly to him and is involved in all key issues, including strategic management.
“HR plays a critical role in the organization. It deserves a seat at the top table,” he says, adding, “You need to have the human resource element at the top table to be a successful organization that’s helping to drive and shape strategy and then of course support that afterwards.”
With files from Ann Macaulay, Joyce Grant and Uyen Vu.
