Ethan’s Proprietary Process to Conduct a Human Capital Audit
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Developed by Ethan L. Chazin, MBA
1. Begin by taking a snapshot of your current organization’s vitality. You do this by going up-down your organization to the three levels (Leadership, Middle Management, and front-line client-facing staff) and then across your organization’s functional areas (Marketing, HR, Finance, Operations, Customer Care, Community Engagement, Programs…) At every level and in every business Unit/functional area, the objective is to identify where there are vacancies. For each vacancy, you will want to prioritize your urgency to fill each of the roles.
2. For every individual, you want to identify the skills, background, experience, certifications, training, language proficiency, culture immersion, memberships, Affiliations, volunteer work that each employee possesses that is NOT currently being leveraged/taken advantage of in their current role. You will use this information to develop a career action plan, re-architect their job description, think of job rotations for them. Start by placing each individual into the most appropriate category (box) of the nine (9) box matrix that assesses employees (use their most recent performance review) based on their current Performance and their Potential on a scale of LOW > MEDIUM > HIGH.
3. Conduct an organization-wide employee Return on Investment assessment. Ask Ethan for his assessment how to conduct an eROI, as well as how to measure the success rate of your organization’s “Quality of Hires”.
4. Conduct The Chazin Group workplace culture vitality survey.
5. What initiatives does your organization plan on undertaking that will require new skills, or skills that are not possessed. You want to assess this with a view toward taking advantage of marketplace opportunities, while also minimizing threats. Some examples might include: rolling out new products, offering new services, new R&D requirements, a shift in your business strategy, new market entrants, changes in applicable state/Federal regulatory environment, etc. You are overlaying your business plan onto your workforce development strategy.
6. Create a coaching, mentoring, sponsorship program. Needs to be funded for an initial two-year basis. Assign a team comprised of all three levels of your organization and representing multiple functional areas on the Working Committee. Develop a formal program plan including your candidate nomination process, people to participate as coaches/mentors/sponsors, and candidates that will likely be nominated, based on your Working Committee’s objective standards of selecting candidates.
7. Create an employee idea generation program: Assign a team comprised of all three levels of your organization and representing multiple functional areas. You want to develop a formal program that funds employees who have ideas to develop new products, create new service offerings, reduce costs, improve operational efficiency. Think of using Google’s “Blue Sky” initiative, as a starting reference point. Organizations you can emulate/model include Samsung, Wegman’s Trader Joe’s, Patagonia, DuPont, Zynga…
8. Employee survey: measure organization-wide employee satisfaction, your people’s collective sense of control over their work (autonomy). Apply the Daniel Pink criteria of people’s feelings of control (scale 1-10) on how they do their work, when they do it, where they do it and who they do it with.
9. Assess your entire HR management flow process including the following steps in the process: talent acquisition (recruiting, interviewing, hiring, on-boarding), your talent development (6-Boxes strategy), and your Terminations (off-boarding, layoffs, outplacement services…)
10. Shift control over your people’s work from being controlled by your Management, to self-directed/self-managed teams. The 20th century command-control pyramid organizational structure dead. In its place is a flatter, more nimble and thus responsive MATRIX organization. Fewer levels of bureaucracy enable your people to respond faster to opportunities and avoid risks.