How GE is Reinventing Talent Management
GE’s exponential international growth and increase of millennials in the labor market has had dramatic implications for the profile of it’s workforce. Currently, 50% of GE’s 300,000 employees have been with the company for 5 years or less, meaning that many of them lack the personal networks needed to succeed and get ahead.
Although GE still manages to attract thousands of talented employees, this new wave of employees has had little tolerance for the bureaucracy of a conventional workplace. As the case with younger workers in general, they want to be in charge of their own careers and do not want to depend solely to their boss or HR to identify opportunities and figure out the training and experiences needed to purse their professional goals. What’s the solution to these challenges? GE hopes it’s HR analytics.
GE created a HR talent management system of self-service applications available to employees, leaders, and HR. All the apps are based on a generic matching algorithm built by data scientists at GE’s Global Research Center in conjunction with HR. It’s GE’s version of Match.com. It can take a person and match him or her to resources: online or conventional educational programs, another person, or a even an open position wining the company. In this newsletter, we will review how GE is using their HR analytics and IT tools to improve and simplify its core HR practices.
Career and Succession Planning
The tool for career and succession planning is the application that’s furthest along. GE launched it in early 2016 and significantly enhanced it in June 2017. The app is embedded in the company’s proprietary succession-planning platform, used for those in executive roles.
Using data on the historical movement of GE employees and the relatedness of jobs (which is based on their descriptions), the app helps people uncover potential opportunities throughout the company, not just in their own business unit or geography.
Lots of companies post open positions on their websites. What’s different about this tool, says Gallman, GE’s former leader in People Analytics and Planning, is that it shows someone jobs that aren’t open so that he or she can see what might be possible in his or her GE career.
Leaders can also use this tool to do better succession planning and career coaching—by identifying nonobvious candidates, regardless of race, gender, introverts or extroverts. Therefore, when management is thinking about who could possibly fill a particular role, they have a technology that helps us come up with additional possibilities.
Although, using analytics for career and succession planning is new, more organizations will soon embrace it as they begin to understand that one of the best ways to keep their people is to help them better understand other opportunities.
Training
GE’s new tool app recommends the training or education someone needs to better perform his or her existing job and to progress.
The plan is to connect it to a performance development app, which is now used by all salaried GE employees, that gives them a steady stream of constructive on-the-job feedback from their managers and team members.
The new tool will read an individual’s priorities and colleagues’ suggestions for improvement; match those with learning tools that others in the same country, level, and function have found useful; and offer options—for example, physical or online classes or reading material.
High Potentials
In the mid-2000s, GE ended the forced ranking of salaried employees, a practice instituted by Jack Welch, its CEO from 1981 to 2001. (He was famous for insisting that people in the bottom 10% be fired.) Until mid-2016, the company (under Immelt) placed salaried employees into one of five categories: role model, excellent, strong contributor, development needed, or unsatisfactory performer.
This practice was then replaced with the system of providing employees with a flow of constructive feedback. This, however, created a problem: how to identify superior performers and high potentials.
Using a technique called the Pareto frontier, the company’s HR analytics team is trying to figure out how to draw on “outcomes” data—salary increases, bonuses, promotion rates, selections to attend roundtables with leaders or go through management development programs—to see who stands out from the crowd.
Talent Retention
This application will predict, within a six-month window, when managers and professionals in a given function are likely to leave so that GE can intervene.
It will identify circumstances under which people often quit then alert HR managers when such incidents occur so that they can encourage employees to stay.
“If we can reduce GE’s average voluntary attrition rate—which, including retirees, is about 6%—by even a small amount, say one percentage point, it would have enormous productivity implications,” say sPaul Davies, a HR executive at GE.
Networks
The purpose of this application, which is in the advanced prototype stage, is to help employees build a network. “Knowledge work often depends on finding other people with particular skills to help you solve problems,” Gallman says. “This tool will allow people to understand where to go for that help. The best partner may not be your supervisor or your colleagues. That person may be on the opposite side of the world and in a different business.”
The system matches people with similar skills, education, and experiences; provided them with virtual collaboration spaces (WebEx meetings and GE’s version of Google Hangouts); and suggested topics for discussion. (What’s hot in the industry right now? How did you enter the field? What excites you the most about the work ahead?
Cultural Change
A final application, now in the early stages of development, would help GE pinpoint aspects of its organizational structure that influence its drive to become a faster, nimbler organization with a greater focus on customer outcomes.
For example, do people on big teams feel differently about the company than people on small teams do, and do they perform their jobs faster, the same, or more slowly? How much does a team’s distance from its business’s headquarters or its leader affect members and the amount of non-value-added work they do?
The HR team is using data from employee surveys, exit interviews, and organizational design to try to understand such factors.
Overview:
The promise of HR analytics in conjunction with IT is high. The discipline is attracting companies of all sizes, eager to take on the challenges. Talent is the most important asset asset to an organization—and historically, judgment around managing talent has been mostly intuitive and biased. Analytics, it offers a chance to make more rigorous those intuitive methods and to de-bias some of the judgment.
