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Content 
Equity
Skills News & Views
Volume
6, Issue 1, 15 January 2007
Registered as an electronic newspaper: ISSN 1684-5722
For archived editions, please visit http://www.equityskillsweb.com
------------------------------------
In
this edition:
1.
Tempered By Fire: Where HR Is. Where It Needs To Go.
2.
Ideopolis: Knowledge City-Regions
3.
Using Your Pay System To Improve Employees' Performance: How You Pay Makes
A Difference
4. Book Reviews: What Happy Companies Know
5. Case Law & Legislation Review:
Unfair Dismissal, Contract Of Employment
6.
How To Develop Talent In The Public Sector
7. Unsubscribe & Moving Soon
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PAID
FOR ADVERTISEMENT: Continuing Professional Development for Human Resources
Human
Capital & Talent Management Curriculum: End First Quarter 2007 from
HCI
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Strategy
and Core Skills: HCI
offers the first curriculum that incorporates core management, HR and
executive leadership skills with new strategic skills that will transform
your entire organisation into a talent-driven, knowledge economy
competitor.
1.
Talent Strategies for High Performing Leaders: Two Day Overview Programme
Talent
Strategies for High Performing Leaders is a transformational, two-day
workshop that provides an in-depth examination of the latest ideas, new
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Certificate explores the best-in-class models, new ideas and
next-practices that provide a foundation for developing and leading the
next-generation global workforce.
3.
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capture the most talented people in their markets. The five courses within
HCI's Talent Acquisition Certificate explore the latest models and most
important breakthroughs in innovative sourcing, assessment, hiring,
branding, and recruiting competencies.
4.
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organisations define talent as a recurring pattern of thought, feeling or
behaviour that can be productively applied. HCI's Talent Development
Certificate explores the ways leaders can transform intangible,
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5.
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competitive advantage in the knowledge economy. Today's leadership skills
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includes engagement, empowerment, collaboration and coaching.
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6.
Human Capital Metrics and Asset Management: Introduces a rigorous new decision science
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a financial asset.
7.
Integrating Talent Management Next Practices: Offers critical strategies to connect
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retention and measurement into an integrated, seamless talent management
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8.
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1.
Tempered By Fire: Where HR Is. Where It Needs To Go.
By
Robert Schuetz, Mercer Consulting who can be contacted at
---------------------------------------------------------------------
After
going through the recent restructuring and cost-cutting wars, few senior
human resource executives question whether they are viewed as “strategic
partners” within their company’s leadership. Armed with a deep
understanding of their industries and their businesses, they have been
acknowledged as playing a key role in making the tough decisions alongside
the rest of the senior management team. However, these same executives are
facing still further change. More is expected of the human resource
function every day, but fewer resources are provided it.
Much
of the transactional work that HR traditionally performed has been
outsourced – how capably isn’t always clear. Almost every senior HR
executive thinks talent management (broadly defined to include recruiting,
development and retention) will be increasingly critical, but few are
happy with the tools and techniques available to help them with it. Many
worry about whether their line colleagues are up to the face-to-face
people-management responsibilities that increasingly fall to them.
Organizational change has become a constant, and with it comes the need
for better change management – a responsibility often laid at HR’s
doorstep. No one is completely happy with the metrics available to measure
HR’s efforts. Despite all this, most HR executives see an exciting
future ahead for the HR function and for the rather different breed of
people moving into its ranks. From March through May 2005,
Human
Resource Consulting conducted seven dinner roundtables across the
Download
a complete chapter of this article at: http://www.workinfo.com/free/downloads/180.htm
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2.
Ideopolis: Knowledge City-Regions: Executive Summary
By
Alexandra Jones, Laura Williams, Neil Lee, David Coats
Marc
Cowling, The Work Foundation who can be contacted at
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----------------
Editors
Note:
----------------
In
November 2006 a highly successful first Gauteng Global City-Region Talent
Summit was held at the
The
executive summary below provides a baseline understanding of the
‘what’, ‘why’ and ‘how’ of city-regions. The article makes the
case for city-regions being part of the knowledge economy, and that
becoming a knowledge driven economy is key to being able to slog it out in
the global marketplace. The only country in Africa that can lead that
revolution is
Does
----------------
•
Increasing the volume of knowledge intensive economic activity is
essential if developed countries are to remain prosperous. This reflects a
transition from an economy based on land, labour and capital to an economy
where the source of comparative advantage is likely to be found in the
production of information and knowledge.
•
Knowledge intensity increases productivity growth and prosperity through
innovation. It is important to be clear too that the knowledge economy is
not just about science and technology: it is about highly skilled
individuals adding value to all industries and about knowledge intensive
industries, which are more likely to employ highly skilled individuals.
•
Cities matter to businesses in the knowledge economy: they are the places
that offer organisations access to highly skilled workers, affluent
consumers and the opportunity to innovate and exchange ideas.
•
The Ideopolis is the vision of a sustainable knowledge intensive city that
drives growth in the wider city-region. It gives cities a framework for
developing knowledge-intensive industries that will be economically
successful and improve quality of life.
•
Cities benefit enormously from using the Ideopolis framework to increase
their knowledge intensity. Cities with more knowledge intensive industries
and occupations are more economically successful and can improve quality
of life for many local people.
•
Ideopolises are characterised by:
•
High levels of economic success
•
High levels of knowledge intensity based on The Work Foundation’s
definition of knowledge intensity (see Box D on page 28)
•
A diverse industry base including distinctive specialist niches
•
One or more universities that have a mutually beneficial relationship with
the city, leading to industries built on research strengths, transfer of
knowledge to businesses and the retention of graduates
•
Strong communications infrastructure and good transport links within the
city and to other cities, including by air, rail and road
•
A distinctive long-term ‘knowledge city’ offer to investors and
individuals alike, created by public and private sector leaders
•
Strategies to ensure that all communities benefit from the economic
success associated with knowledge.
•
There are nine drivers of an Ideopolis:
1.
Creating the physical knowledge city – having the architecture and
accommodation that knowledge intensive businesses and workers require
2.
Building on what’s there – recognising the city’s existing strengths
and weaknesses and playing to these
3.
‘Diverse specialisation’ – having a diverse range of economic
specialisms for which the city is known
4.
High skill organisations – organisations that rely on the ‘high
road’ to productivity through high quality jobs and highly skilled
people
5.
Vibrant education sector embedded in community and economy – one or more
universities linking closely with the city and businesses, supported by
good education institutions helping all individuals develop their skills
6.
Distinctive ‘knowledge city’ offer – a distinctive offer for
knowledge intensive businesses and workers who are considering investing,
working and living in the city, supported by diverse cultural and leisure
facilities
7.
Leveraging strong connectivity within and outside the city-region – good
communications infrastructure combined with quick links both within the
city and to other cities via air, rail and road
8.
Strong leadership around knowledge city vision, supported by networks and
partnerships – civic or private sector leadership around the vision of a
knowledge intensive city, based on strong networks across different
industries
9.
Investing in communities – investing in strategies to ensure the
benefits of knowledge intensity are experienced by the whole community.
•
Ideopolises need to consider economic success and sustainability together.
•
The Ideopolis is a framework for growth within a region. Successful
Ideopolises need to work with, and will drive economic growth in, other
cities and areas within their region. Smaller cities can use the framework
to drive growth and work with the core Ideopolis:
Secondary
Ideopolis: Some cities are not the main drivers of growth in their
city-region, and so cannot become Ideopolises. They can, however, use the
Ideopolis framework to become Secondary Ideopolises’ or ’
•
There is a ‘tipping point’ at which knowledge intensive businesses
generate benefits for the city above and beyond any other sector. This
tipping point is increasing year by year. Based on the OECD definition of
knowledge intensive businesses, 17 per cent of a city’s businesses need
to be knowledge intensive for there to be a significant impact on economic
success. Based on The Work Foundation definition, 25 per cent of a
city’s businesses need to be knowledge intensive.
•
There is also a ‘tipping point’ at which knowledge intensive
occupations make a real difference: cities where more than 14 per cent of
the working population are senior managers are more successful.
•
Cities that have more than 19 per cent of their workers with degree level
qualifications see a significant increase in their economic success, and
this increases further when more than 29 per cent of the working
population have a degree.
•
An Ideopolis needs to be supported by powers and funding at a city-region
level.
•
Those cities that want to become an Ideopolis should:
1.
Conduct an ‘Ideopolis audit’: where is the city now in terms of
knowledge intensity, industry mix and demographics? What are the city’s
main strengths and weaknesses?
2.
Review whether the city could become an Ideopolis or a Secondary Ideopolis
and plan accordingly
3.
Focus on building on the city’s strengths, for example working with the
university to identify research strengths, working with businesses to
understand their needs in a location, or looking at the industrial legacy
of a city and striving to make a particular sector more ‘high value’
4.
Invest in local skills at all levels – tomorrow’s knowledge workers
already live in the city
5.
Concentrate on what makes the city distinctive as a way of attracting
knowledge intensive businesses and investment
6.
Ensure that any strategy to increase knowledge intensity and economic
success has a complementary strategy that allows benefits to be
experienced by the whole community, rather than by-passing those in
deprived communities or with lower skills.
•
The Ideopolis vision offers cities and their regions a framework to help
them increase their knowledge intensity and in turn this will drive
economic growth and an improved quality of life. It offers national
policymakers an insight into how the knowledge economy works at a regional
and sub-regional level, and into the policy levers that facilitate
knowledge-based cities and knowledge-based growth.
Download
a copy of this fascinating and detailed document at: http://www.workinfo.com/free/downloads/180.htm
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3.
Using Your Pay System To Improve Employees' Performance: How You Pay Makes
A Difference: Executive Summary
By:
Michael C. Sturman who can be contacted at www.hotelschool.cornell.edu
---------------------------------------------------------------------
One
goal of many pay plans is to improve employees' performance. This
investigation of pay policy assesses the effects on performance of
base-pay levels, merit increases, and lump-sum bonuses.
The
study shows that both "how much" is paid (the amount of the
reward) and "how" the money is paid (the relationship that
exists between performance and pay) influence employees' future
performance levels. As expected, the results show that how much you pay is
important. Both raises and bonuses increase future performance, but merit
raises had a greater effect than that of bonuses. In this study, the
benefit of a 1-percent increase in base pay was comparable to the benefit
from a 3-percent bonus. Even though the absolute level of one's salary was
not related to future performance, relative pay levels made a considerable
difference. Perhaps most important, the study also showed that how an
employee is paid can also influence performance. For merit raises, the
link between pay and performance was unrelated to future performance.
However, the extent of the pay-for-performance relationship with bonuses
was significantly related to future performance-provided the link between
pay and performance is clearly established.
Based
on these findings, pay structure can be designed to achieve greater
employee performance. To begin with, simply spending more on employee pay
would yield minimal results. Improving the merit-increase pool by one
percentage point but otherwise not making any allocation changes, for
example, would be projected to increase performance only by roughly 2
percent. However, if the same money was applied to pay-for-performance
bonuses, the analysis suggests a performance increase of better than 15
percent. Indeed, the results suggest that providing a strong
pay-for-performance link for bonuses rather than raises had the greatest
potential benefit, predicted to improve employee performance by nearly 20
percent.
Download
a complete copy of the report, which contains some very enlightening
findings that takes the reader beyond typical pay for performance models: http://www.workinfo.com/free/downloads/180.htm
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4.
Book Reviews: What Happy Companies Know
By
Dan Baker & Cathy Greenberg, Prentice Hall, 2006
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What
kinds of companies are best prepared to succeed - and to sustain their
success?
This
book argues that happier, psychologically healthy organisations perform
better. But what is a happy company?
The
not-exactly earth shattering answer is companies with a "culture in
which personal respect, appreciation, and trust become a major reason for
its business success."
In
other words, since engaged and motivated employees are the key to business
success, companies built around people, positive mindsets and long-term
goals consistently out-perform unhappy companies in which people are
driven largely by fear. This book explores how to build a happy,
high-functioning organisation and overcome even the most ingrained culture
of negativity. The authors, three successful psychology and business
writers, identify the key traits of the happy company and using real-world
case studies, present tools and best practices for infusing these traits
throughout a business.
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5.
Case Law & Legislation Review: Unfair Dismissal, Contract Of
Employment
By
Gary Watkins who can be contacted at www.workinfo.com
and www.caselaw.co.za
---------------------------------------------------------------------
#
Dlamini & others v Green Four Security
Case
No: D671/2003
Judgment
Date: 25 April 2006
Jurisdiction:
Judge:
Pillay, Judge
Subject:
Unfair Dismissal
Contract
of Employment
ISSUE:
The
Employees, security guards, were dismissed for refusing to shave their
beards, which was required by the employer’s policy.
The court held that the rule requiring guards to be clean-shaven
was an inherent requirement of job and the dismissals were not unfair.
Summary
of Facts: The Employees, all
security guards, were dismissed for refusing to shave or trim their beards
because it was against their religious convictions to do so.
They belonged to the Baptised Nazareth Group (Nazarenes) which,
they submitted, did not allow them to trim their beards.
There was a dispute about when the rule was first introduced and
also as to whether the Employees had been clean shaven when they were
first employed.
SUMMARY
OF JUDGEMENT: The
court held that even if the Employees were unshaven when they commenced
employment, the Employer could introduce a workplace rule thereafter.
Likewise, even if the Employees were clean-shaven when they were
first employed, their religion could have changed thereafter.
Therefore the issue was not to be decided on the contract of
employment at all, but on a Constitutional basis as the Constitution would
always take precedent over any workplace rule.
The court held that in this case there was an onus on the Employees
to prove that not trimming their beards was a central tenet of their
religious belief.
The
court found that Nazareths have a relatively small following in
The
court further held that the rule to be clean-shaven was applied
consistently to all employees, this did not impact on the Employee’s
religion and therefore the Employees were not discriminated against.
Even if they had been discriminated against, the court held that
this discrimination would have been justified as a clean-shaven facial
appearance was an inherent requirement of the job in the security
Industry, not only in
The
court accepted that as a general proposition, untrimmed beards are untidy.
An employer is entitled to set a uniform dress code as a condition
of employment. Compliance with a dress code can be compulsory for
practical reasons related to the nature of the job, such as the wearing of
safety gear, or for purposes of promoting an image or brand. In this case
the rule against wearing beards was driven by the practical and inherent
need to be neat, to look like security guards and to project the
respondent as a security company with a distinctive image.
The
impact of the clean-shaven rule would have been more serious if the
Employees were not flexible in the way they practised their religion. They
worked on the Sabbath, despite this not being allowed by the
In
this case the Employees were clear that any attempt to accommodate them
would not have been accepted by them as they were not prepared to
compromise or trim their beards. As
a result, the court held that the Employees were not discriminated against
and their dismissals were accordingly not unfair. No order was made as to
costs as the matter turned on a novel constitutional issue.
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6.
How To Develop Talent In The Public Sector: Sunday Times, 17 December 2006
By
Goodnews Cadogan who can be contacted at badnews@india.com
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To
talk about the skills shortage, let alone talent in the public service,
would require a book.
I
will focus only on talented leadership of which there are different levels
and forms in the public sector.
Two
young boys were rolling on the ground in a bank, playing, oblivious to
anything around them, when their mother yelled at them to get up. The
younger one stood up, looked at his mother and asked her innocently,
“Why?”
This
makes one’s thoughts drift towards the definition of what the public
service “needs” as talented leadership, like what parents want or need
— a submissive child or a child with highly developed thinking and a
questioning mind.
The
more you think about the bank incident, the more you think about the
typical public-service department as an organisation. This is a starting
point for capturing the challenges faced by the public sector as talent is
situation-specific.
Talented
leadership is about being switched on and being alive to the possibilities
of change.
What
is the role of human resources management executives in the quest to
acquire the best leadership talent for the public sector? The recruitment
agenda into leadership positions in
The
intention of the ministerial clusters is to break down the walls that
prevent the natural flow of services from related departments to the
public.
The
public service, like the young parent at the bank, needs to attract (at
the three tiers of leadership — director-general, deputy director
general and chief director) leadership talent that asks “why?”
It
needs the kind of talent that thinks deeply about the long-term impact of
today’s actions, or inaction, as well as the impact of departmental
plans on the delivery of the bigger sphere — the cluster to which it
belongs as well as the greater goals of the government.
It
is the depth of thought and conversation that would ensure better
execution of the public-sector ideals in an adaptive manner.
Having
defined what the public sector needs in the form of talented leadership,
it would be folly not to talk about talented leadership in the areas of
human capital, talent management and organisation design.
Apart
from providing a robust service that would ensure that salaries were paid,
leave records correct and performance management principles and practices
in place, the human resources executives should also have another agenda.
They
have to make their head of department’s goals their goals. This is the
attractive, but elusive, part of strategic HR as it involves meddling with
other people’s business.
It
is the human capital executive in the public sector that should help
convert some of the current leadership into talented leaders through
either change management or an actual change of management or leadership.
Coaching
and motivating current leaders to recognise the new world of work is
arguably the most daunting task. It involves managing organisational
politics and the relationship with the political masters as well as
setting the scene for cultural change.
One
needs to be a juggler comfortable with bruised egos, the high expectations
of talented leadership and managing across the extended organisation in
the form of ministerial clusters and different spheres of existence, be
they national, provincial or local government.
One
has to understand the strategic heartbeat of the government in general,
the department’s strategic driving force and its ability to comprehend
and leverage the knowledge of the whole system.
One
has to be able to direct this knowledge in ways that ensure the health and
viability of
In
dealing with the current recruitment agenda, the key would be to widen the
net beyond a group of close-knit, trusted associates when fishing for
talented leadership while still still being loyal to the organisational
and national challenges.
Cadogan
is business intelligence manager at the SA Revenue Service
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(c) 2006 Registered electronic newspaper: 1SSN 1684-5714