HRO Today July/August 2016 - 14

Cover Story
things that jumps to mind is our focus on values-based
leadership. There is a large percent of our workforce
that has been with the company less than five years so
we are doing values-based leadership training. It's not
about spending a lot of money; it's about getting people
together to discuss our values of integrity, teamwork,
commitment, excellence and sustainability. We want
to share stories of how those values come to life and
connect people to them. This helps steward the culture-
also one of our key priorities.
HROT: How are you tracking the impact of the Enterprise
People Strategy?
Hauer: One of the newer things we are doing is called
Employee Insights. Instead of doing an annual survey,
we target different groups of employees every quarter
with a shorter, user-friendly survey that can even be
accessed on mobile devices. We are looking at different
populations and different attributable data sets so we
can make correlations. Are there gender differences?
Location differences? We can really mine the data in
a much different way than we have ever been able to
before, and we can get a real sense on how we are doing.
For example, for our values-based leadership training,
we can target a survey for employees who have
been through that training and see if their employee
experience has been different. This will help us see if the
training has had an impact on our employees' behaviors
and their response to the company.
Linking strategy with the Employee Insights tool will
give us real-time data and help drive and shape how we
execute our people strategy.
HROT: How did you get executive buy-in for the Enterprise
People Strategy initiative?
Hauer: The key to getting executive buy-in is ensuring
that the strategy is not a one-off initiative. It is about
having and showing a clear understanding of how the
enterprise people strategy will help drive the business
strategy.
As a company, we need to shift from a heavy equipment
manufacturer to a solutions company. If you can link how
focusing on cultural stewardship will help employees to
think about solutions instead of just product, you will get
buy-in a lot faster. Saying it's an important HR initiative is
not enough.
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HRO TODAY MAGAZINE | JULY/AUGUST 2016
HR team members
should be focusing on
what motivates people
and how to deliver on a
business strategy.
HROT: How are you leveraging analytics in your talent
decisions?
Hauer: We have a small HR analytics team that is really
focused in on having the right people, in the right place,
at the right time. We run analytics on anything that has
to do with the talent lifecycle, from strategic workforce
planning and predicting future needs, to where we
attract people and how we retain them. But the devil is
in the detail.
One of the more recent examples is linking talent to the
solutions provider we need to be. We are going to need
a lot more digital talent, and those employees are often
a lot different than our traditional Caterpillar hires. We
are using data analytics to understand the marketplace
for digital talent, where the talent is, and what attracts
that type of talent. We are also working with social
media sites to figure out where people are and how we
might need to recruit differently. For example, in the
past, we always felt that we needed to hire employees
for our headquarters in Peoria. For talent in the digital
space, Peoria may not be their location of choice. We are
looking to build hubs in other geographies and use data
to make the case that we'll be able to get the talent that
we've struggled to get in the past in these locations.
HROT: What is currently your toughest HR challenge?
Hauer: To be frank, we are in our fourth consecutive
down-turn year as a business, and there are a lot of
tough decisions being made right now. There have been
reductions in headcount, among other decisions that can
weigh heavily on our employees' minds. It can be quite
HRO Today July/August 2016

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