Eye on the Workforce

More guidance at this IRS site:   http://www.irs.gov/publications/p15a/ar02.html.

Think you have a problem going from needs to execution? Check out this disconnect with IT onboarding reported in this survey.

IT Leaders say that onboarding programs are extremely important

• to establishing a new hire's ability to be productive/add value
• to establishing a new hire's level of cohesion within their team
• to finding out a new hire's ability to be successful within the company long term

IT professionals agree with leaders on this.

So the next questions is: what attention has been paid to onboarding programs? An amount of attention that corresponds to "extremely important"?

Apparently not.

Most IT leaders and managers surveyed say that onboarding programs are not a top priority. Evidently they do not even get the attention they deserve. 

Only about 12-13% of IT leaders and professionals rate their onboarding programs as extremely effective.

So chances are when you are a project manager and have to onboard new resources, you will be starting  with an inadequate process. Plan to supplement the program in your project.

• Work with your HR professional to quickly determine what the major gaps are in case you don't already know.
• Rank the gaps and find ways to fill in the critical pieces. Perhaps HR has already been working on solutions or maybe they have examples that you can use.
• Look for helpers elsewhere in the organization who may have ideas. Look into social media to connect newbies with those who can help them integrate.
• Spend more time in early "get to know you" meetings. Use this time to have experienced workers help those who are new to the organization.
• Don't forget contingency employees. Create an appropriate process for getting them productive quickly/

Oh, and do your best to get onboarding moved up the list of organizational priorities. It's difficult to find good people and it would be a waste to delay their integration and disappoint them.

Over recent weeks in The Eye, I have been covering many topics that may have seemed unrelated, but now as a group point to an effective workforce management strategy. Here's a list of the drivers:

• The IT industry is at "full employment", making it difficult to hire the skills you need.
• IT organizations must develop skills from within to maintain workforce performance
• IT organizations must use informal training and social learning techniques an tools to train quickly  and cost-effectively
• There are many more high performers in the workforce than previously assumed

 Why You Should Care #1

You need workers with excellent skills to make your projects successful. The current environment is putting a constraint on your ability to field a project workforce with those skills. Some of the hardest skills for you to build are those of managers (including team leads) or of IT experts in rare skills who can train others.

 One solution to build these skills is through mentoring. Mentoring is a "informal training" that can be enabled by social tools and techniques available today. It allows an IT organization to quickly upgrade the skills of the many high performers ready to add more value to projects. While coaching is a technique suited for hard skills, mentoring is particularly suited for soft skills used by managers and leaders.

 In recent years mentoring has been growing up. For example, there is now at least one product (from Nobscot Corp) that matches mentors and protégés based on mutual professional interests similar to the services that match couples. You can read how one company used this product here (registration required).

 In any case a lot has been learned about what works and does not work in mentoring programs. See what Bloomberg and Harvard Business say here.

 Why You Should Care #2

You need some "you" time. That is, you need time away from the fires to enjoy being a protégé yourself, to do better in your career, especially to improve the types of projects you manage or to climb the career ladder. Don't wait for a program to be put in place if you do not have one, find a mentor!  Make sure you are ready as a protégé with these basics. There has never been a better time than now to position yourself for career advancement!

Learning is as important today to maintaining your workforce performance as it has ever been, and now we have better means of discovering what really works as new technology and techniques change the landscape. So you are keeping up with workplace learning technology, aren't you?

OK, you might have a couple of other items on your plate and need a briefing. Answer this multiple choice question to get started on this update.

Which of the following statements is/are true about high-impact learning organizations as compared with the national average?

(a) They have a higher training staff per worker
(b) They have a higher amount spent on training per worker
(c) They have a higher amounts of outsourcing

As an IT project manager, it is important for you to move toward best practices because IT is at "full employment", the implication being that it is much easier for IT workers to move to another position outside of your organization that they feel is better. For example, they may choose an organization that helps them better improve their skills. At full employment you will find it very difficult to hire the skills you need. It is more efficient to build the skills you need in your existing workforce .

So use best practices from those who have implemented them successfully: High-impact learning organizations. High-impact learning organizations have 

• Lower staff per worker than the national average
• Higher amount spent per worker
• Higher amounts of outsourcing for the training function

Use similar tactics in your organization - or project - to increase the impact of your training dollars.

• Reduce training staff by using informal/social learning . Tools and techniques have been developed for this type of decentralized organizational learning and they are very different from centralized training department approach. Many have been subjects of this blog and my articles on gantthead.
• Determine the best way to spend more on each worker. Consider that high-impact learning organizations  can train workers 20 hours annually. Leveraging informal trainers for decentralized real-time learning and making experts available via social media makes this easier.
• Use contract training groups, now with more justification, to meet your immediate skill-building needs.
• Use your gantthead network to see what others are doing. Find out what has worked and not worked for them.

For more information, read the Bersin Learning Factbook summary.

This final series installment adds more obstacle-hurdling tips, but these tips are interrelated to the first two, meaning you should establish all these tips in a single "package" in order to maximize teaming.

You think it is too difficult to do all this at once? Look, if teaming was easy, your workforce would engage in it faster, more often,  and more successfully. But they don't, so make it easy early so you have a smoother project later.

Team Obstacle #3:  Interdependent tasks cause problems between new team members early in teaming relationship. With no bonding to ease resolution, productivity may be slowed by confusion that is difficult to unwind.

• Let team define workflow and how to handle related tasks. Let them define their task-completion roles and relationships and roles. No assumptions! Make everything explicit. (This dovetails with tip for Obstacle #1 on mutual accountability. It also helps create a sense of identity, also connected with Obstacle #1.)
• Make sure you allow time clearly labeled for this definition. This activity forces very targeted team learning while it occurs - and when later updated. It enables team self-monitoring. (In other words, less for you to worry about.) With clear interrelationships, a low performer can be managed by the team before being escalated to higher levels of management. A bully or manipulator (see Obstacle #2) can be stifled by having little freedom to maneuver.

Team Obstacle #4:  Difficulty in communication between team members.

In today's workplace there is a need for an increasing production rate, but that is countered by dispersed teams who may even work in different time zones. The rapid communication necessary for productivity can be difficult. The solution promoted by Valentine and Edmonson in this  Harvard Business School working paper * (pdf) - which listed the obstacles  used in this series - was co-location in a shift environment. That is fine in the health care industry, but less possible in IT project management. How can you improve communications?

• Create distinct and flexible communication channels for teams. These can be standard team sites for sharing files and posting discussions, but let the teams the vehicles themselves. While a team customizes communication, members agree on collective needs and create a team identity, even if a team is made up of FTEs and contingent workers functioning in multiple locations and time zones. It even eases Obtacle #2 by removing the difficulty and stress of individual professionals interacting with each other the first time.

There were a lot of recommendations in this three-part series. Consider using a team checklist to ensure that teams complete these items. Team leads will appreciate the job aid.

Bonus Tip:  The first item on the list is to review the list and if anything cannot be done, escalate as a routine issue to get instructions.