ORC Sightlines

May 2008

In this issue:

Diversity Champion Frank Quevedo Wins First-Ever ORC Peter Robertson Award

Strengthening its commitment to advancing equality, inclusion, and diversity in today’s global workplace, ORC Worldwide announced the recipient of its first Peter Robertson Award for Equality and Diversity Champions. Frank Quevedo, vice president of Equal Opportunity for Southern California Edison (SCE), will be honored at a special reception on June 26 in Washington, D.C., where Naomi Earp, chair of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, will present the award.

Named for a pioneer in equality and diversity work in the U.S. and around the world, the ORC Peter Robertson Award recognizes exceptional individuals and their tireless commitment to ingenuity and persistence in propelling forward the value of diversity in organizations and communities around the world. In its inaugural year, the award program is the first of its kind to officially recognize the significant contributions of individuals, rather than an entire organization or its leadership.

A Voice and a Vision

As vice president of Equal Opportunity for SCE, Quevedo leads an organization focused on supporting a strong commitment to workforce diversity and equal opportunity for all employees, fostering a nondiscriminatory work environment, and ensuring the company benefits from the skills and experiences of employees. For their diversity efforts in and outside the workplace, Quevedo and his leadership have helped SCE win a host of awards over the past decade, among them selection by Fortune magazine as one of the top 50 companies in America for ethnic minorities.

Among Quevedo’s many remarkable accomplishments during his career, he was nominated by then Governor Reagan and appointed by President Nixon to a local draft board, being one of the youngest — and few — Vietnam veterans appointed during the Vietnam conflict. In 1976, he was appointed by Governor Brown to the State Bar Board of Governors and was subsequently elected as its treasurer (1979), the first non-lawyer to hold that office. He also held the office of vice chair of the State Bar Judicial Evaluation Nominees Commission in 1981-1983, serving thereafter as a member in 1988 and 1989. Quevedo served as chief of staff to Commissioner Tony Gallegos at the U.S. Equal Opportunity Commission during the Reagan administration. Selected by Hispanic Business magazine for its annual “100 Influentials” listing on four separate occasions, he also belongs to several boards and advisory committees, among them the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute.

The ORC Peter Robertson Award for Equality and Diversity Champions ceremony on June 26 will be held at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, Pentagon City in Washington, D.C. The ceremony also will feature a keynote address by Cari M. Dominquez, former chairwoman of the EEOC, and bring together members of the corporate diversity and civil rights communities with past and current government officials.

Read more about the award at: http://www.orcworldwide.com/hr/edi/award.php. For additional information, please contact Liz MacGillivray, Diversity Chair, U.S. Networks and Global Diversity Forum, +1-212-852-0406; Deirdre Golden, Head of Equal Opportunities Practice–Europe, +44 (0)20 7591 5600; or Nita Beecher, Compliance Chair, WON and Employment Law and Litigation Group, +1-314-726-1740.

Talent Management Executives Debate Workforce Segmentation

In the past several years, many companies have worked hard to put talent management on a strategic footing and rationalize investments in people according to expected returns. These companies have analyzed work to separate out roles that are critical to accomplishing the business mission from those that might be performed by contractors or outsource providers without loss of competitive advantage. They have assessed employees to identify targets for special development and deployment. The result in many of these organizations has been a realignment of HR programs away from a more scattershot “a little bit of everything for everyone” approach to a systematic, purposeful concentration of resources on future senior leaders and other key talent pools.

Recently, though, some talent management leaders have been asking whether turning their attention away from the solid contributors who make up the majority of their workforce to focus on a small minority might have its own hidden costs.

McKinsey & Company, who ten years ago released the original “War for Talent” research that helped to spur the new strategic approach, recently published an article arguing that the current environment demands new methods for determining the distribution of talent management investments. Members of ORC’s Global Talent Management Network—talent management leaders in large European and American multinationals—have also been contemplating this emerging issue and devoted much of their meeting earlier this month to it.

One thing that became clear from their discussion was that renewed concern for the “vital many” has not led most organizations to abandon the idea of segmentation. The companies represented at the meeting all attempt in some way to differentiate among roles and individuals, and to apply resources strategically. But the definition of “return on investment” is coming under scrutiny. The value of engagement has entered the calculus. The methodologies of segmentation are now being applied to refining employers’ understanding of the value proposition for different groups of employees to answer the question “What is it that drives these employees and makes them want not only to work here, but to contribute their best?” A few companies are beginning to study whether segmentation based on employees’ motivations and goals (e.g., those looking for career advancement versus those looking for security or work/life balance) can help them make more successful selection and deployment decisions.

For more information about the Global Talent Management Network or ORC’s human capital strategy and practice consulting capabilities, email Jodi Starkman or Michal Fineman. Both can be reached by phone at +1-212-719-3400.

Workforce Planning for Knowledge Transfer in Science and Engineering Organizations

In many companies the impending retirement of a large number of baby boomers has added extra urgency to knowledge management efforts, especially in scientific and engineering functions. The problem of transferring tacit knowledge—more a matter of nuance and shadings, tricks of the trade learned through years of experience, rather than readily explained and archived facts and procedures—is a challenge for HR professionals as well as for their knowledge management colleagues. At their meeting last month, members of the Human Resources in R&D Network shared the strategies they are deploying to meet the challenge. At the core of most of their efforts is the recognition that knowledge transfer is as much a workforce planning issue as one of training or designing IT solutions.

Workforce planning generally involves studying the capabilities the company will need (and won’t) in order to implement their business strategy, understanding the capabilities resident in the current workforce and how that workforce will change in the future, and then figuring out how to fill any gaps. The usual options for filling gaps are to hire talent with the needed capabilities, teach existing staff new skills and knowledge, or use external help (contractors, vendors, partners). As R&D operations become more globalized in many companies, “siting” strategy—dealing work to the organization’s labs or engineering centers around the world based on where the capacity for the particular assignment is available—also enters into the picture.

Most companies will use a combination of these approaches, but the exact formula will depend on specific circumstances in each. For example, while some companies are filling in with consultants in order to avoid adding permanent staff that may not be needed long term, others are deliberately weaning themselves from dependency on outside contractors in order to embed essential knowledge within the organization. In some companies, where the majority of the R&D workforce are baby boomers, it just may take too long to develop enough replacements from within; therefore, buying talent from the outside, rather than knowledge transfer, may become the dominant strategy. But in companies with a younger workforce and more lead time, or with enough of a spread among the generations, it may make more sense to invest in identifying critical knowledge holders and successors and in creating programs that bring the two together to teach and learn.

Members of ORC's Human Resources in R&D Network noted that successful knowledge capture and transfer depends on creating an organization-wide mindset that sharing knowledge is a good and valued thing to do. In some organizations, this will require a major culture change. Ironically, the very situation that has precipitated the issue—that is, the retirement of large numbers of baby boomers—also may facilitate solutions. The newest generation entering the workforce is the “my face” generation. Experienced with a battery of online sharing tools such as social networking sites, wikis, and blogs, in the future they may become the standard bearers for a “sharing organization.”

For more information on the Human Resources in R&D Network, contact Michal Fineman or Tara Finnegan, both available at +1-212-852-0354.

Work Organization and Worker Well-Being: An Emerging Issue for EHS and HR Managers

A growing body of research shows that the way work is organized can affect employees’ general well-being and physical and psychological health. Given rising healthcare costs, the difficulty and expense of replacing valuable knowledge workers, and the competitive pressures driving attempts to increase worker productivity, we are seeing intense interest among employers, especially among health, safety, and environmental people, in addressing the health implications of work organization.

In in its publication, The Changing Organization of Work and the Safety and Health of Working People, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health defines ”organization of work” as the work process and the organizational practices that influence job design, including how jobs and human resource policies are structured. Job and task characteristics that have the potential to affect health outcomes include:

Implicated organizational practices include:

According to a survey of members of ORC’s Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) Group, the three top organization of work concerns for employers are poor organizational climate, poor worker-management relations, and inadequate flexibility arrangements such as flexiplace, flexitime, work-family policies.

Speaking about the issue at a meeting of the OSH Group earlier this month, ORC consultant Ann Brockhaus noted that an integrated approach to managing causes of injury and illness, both on and off the job, holds the best promise for improved employee health and cost savings to companies. However, very few companies have mounted an integrated response to organization of work and its implications for safety and health. In over half of OSH member companies, the issue is owned by the HR department. Fourteen percent say no one owns the issue. Only a very few are structured so that responsibility is explicitly shared by multiple functions, even though most agree that this would be the preferred arrangement.

For more information on organization of work or ORC’s Health, Safety, and Environmental networks and consulting services, contact Ann Brockhaus, +1-202-293-2980.

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