TM - April 2008 - (Page 52) required to do it, from top to bottom, to understand what our cultural expectations are, what we believe are the values in the company structure and what our mission is and how they’re connected. It’s really important to make sure you have expectations set early on. Every leader is measured and held accountable. We have moved people out of leadership roles because they were not able to create that culture of engagement, or that culture that’s going to allow people to have a real strong talent mindset. “It’s great to understand what you need to do, but it’s probably more important to understand who you need to be.” — Carleen Haas, Vice President of HR, Humana We blew up the old pay system that used to be attached to jobs, with minimums and maximums and midpoints. We decided that we were going to look at the set of skills, the set of knowledge, the set of behaviors someone needed to have in order to be successful, and then price those in the marketplace. There’s much more alignment between pay and performance now. We are not as big on financial rewards because, [while] salary is important, people really want to be recognized for what they do well. We spent a lot of time focusing on how people want to be recognized. Some people love it if they can stand in front of a whole room and be recognized; for other people, it makes them just crazy. So it’s important when you’re talking about recognition and incentives to know how people want to be rewarded and to individualize that. TM: Haas: How does all of this affect compensation? We’re a very strategic HR department, and a lot of people would like us to go back to being personnel. We’re not about service. We don’t have customers. When any HR person walks into a room, the business acumen needs to go up and not down. That’s challenging for people who have been around a long time to accept a human resources department that has an opinion. [There’s also] the challenge of growing your company from 14,000 to 25,000 in two and a half years. How do you get your leaders to stay up to speed? How do you make sure that everybody is consistent? How do you get the message past the mid-level leaders and roll out this human capital philosophy so it goes all the way down to the front line? How do you get people to own all of this stuff? This is the first time in the history of the world that you have four generations in the workplace. We have 3 percent traditionalists, 37 percent baby boomers and then 60 percent Gen Xers and Millennials. How do you deal with a generation that really wants a lot of feedback and wants it instantly and is used to text messaging as a way of doing business? There are a bazillion challenges. TM: Haas: What challenges impact talent management in your organization? Diversity and inclusion are critically important. If we’re going to be consumer driven, we have to mirror the changing demographic. We need to look at our workplace, our communities and our marketplace to really leverage inclusion in the way we want to. And we define diversity really broadly. Ethnicity is important, gender is important, age is important. Those are all the things that you can see. But we also want diversity of thought because we’re trying to be an innovative company that disrupts the industry. So we need a whole lot of diversity of thinking. We wanted to make sure we had some programs in place that would help us to jump-start that outside-in thinking. TM: Haas: In February you kicked off an inclusion initiative. Tell us about that. We’re perfectionists. We’re not nearly where we want to be. We’re always looking at what’s next on the horizon. We’ve got to move the needle in a lot of ways: deal with the changing generational talent; manage talent virtually in a way that’s good for the company and good for the associates; and leverage diversity in better ways, more effective ways. It’s been a blast. TM: Haas: What’s next for talent management at Humana? 52 April 2008 talent management magazine www.TalentMgt.com http://www.TalentMgt.com
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