American Gas - August/September 2014 - (Page 25)

* Employee demographics such as tenure, age, salary, job type, and commute time * Employee actions/workforce conditions such as promotion and raise patterns, manager and support ratios, work environment, and salary distribution * External economic conditions (Big Data) such as competitive job market data, unemployment, and economic data Using these drivers, it is possible to forecast the turnover and retirement risk of each employee both short-term (over the next six months) and long-term (over the next several years). In addition, it is possible to model the likely affect of hypothetical events on attrition. An individual manager could explore how changes to promotions, pay distribution, and working group reorganization could affect turnover rates or even inﬂuence the retention of a speciﬁc individual. For an organization, it could show how a salary freeze, reduction in force, or changes in the economy will impact overall turnover and retirement rates, and help to shape HR policies. Using Vemo's data-mining approach, a major Northeast U.S. utility can now: * Pinpoint the difference in retention for management trainees and experienced professional management hires, which assists in deciding how to replace retired employees. * Measure whether efforts to increase spans and reduce layers will result in higher turnover of certain employees. * Model the impact of each promotion and lateral transfer event upon the retention of the employees whose job is changing. The net result for this utility has been more effective hiring practices and timing and better-informed budgeting for people expenses. There is now a tremendous upside for such organizations to invest in their workforce planning efforts. New tools incorporating predictive analytics, including big data sources, allow for more accurate and actionable forecasts for both turnover and retirement that can be incorporated into operational decision-making. Peter Louch is founder and CEO of Vemo, a cloud-based workforce planning and analytics technology provider. LEARNING CAPTURE AND TRANSFER YOUR KNOWLEDGE By Ken Mall A s we travel around the country, we see more and more HR managers caught off-guard as some of their longest-tenured employees announce their retirements. As the economy has recovered over the past ﬁve years, many employees are approaching the point where they feel they have enough ﬁnancial security to walk away from their jobs. Many American utilities are starting to utilize workforce analytics to get a better sense of which individuals are going to retire and when. But they still need to answer the question, How do we distill and bottle 30-plus years of institutional knowledge and share it with future generations of employees? Knowledge management is about using the current and future brain power of an organization to achieve the organization's goals in a systematic and organized manner. It has two critical components: * Knowing what knowledge is important to manage. If you asked 10 workers if their knowledge about their job was critical to the company's operations, nine would say yes; the tenth probably didn't hear the question right. Capturing all that knowledge would take years and yield little overall value. * Knowing what type of knowledge needs to be managed. Explicit knowledge has been documented, typically as reports, processes, or policy manuals. Tacit knowledge, or know-how, is mostly undocumented. Not all tacit knowledge is important, but it is likely that most of the important knowledge is tacit. Effective knowledge management converts critical tacit knowledge known by a few (or by just one) into explicit knowledge to be transferred to many. No two knowledge management plans are alike. But here are some basic steps all organizations should consider in deﬁning knowledge management priorities and creating a plan to meet current and future needs: * Perform an organizational analysis. Identify current practices in documenting practices and procedures. Examine the corporate policies, support methods, technological applications, and tools used to perform important work in the organization. Where there are multiple departments, there may be information silos leading to redundancy in both functions and work. * Conduct a job task analysis. Engage subject matter experts in identifying and documenting the important and tacit job tasks performed in each job. Job analysts work with SMEs to determine their job tasks and how they are organized. The result is a highly detailed job task list. With several AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2014 AMERICAN GAS 25

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American Gas - August/September 2014