Who was Doreen Craton? Most likely you have never heard of her, but a million baby boomers who are not ready to retire at age 65 should take a moment to note her passing.
Back on Jan 18, 1983 Doreen was a school teacher in Manitoba who received a birthday card for her 65th birthday along with a forced retirement notice. Mrs Craton was not ready to retire, she has more that she wanted to do and more importantly had the energy to do it.
The argument back in 1983 was she had to move out of the way to let in new, young blood with new ideas or else the school system would go stale. A finincial arguement was that these young people had familie to support and deserve the opportunity to have the jobs - it was there turn. In contradiction to this thinking, the Human Rights Act of Manitoba passed a few years earlier protected Manitobans against discrimination based on age. The battle was on.
The Court of Queen's Bench agreed with Doreen and the Winnipeg School board appealed, but eventually backed down avoiding Mrs Craton becoming a household name as a trailblazer for the rights of senior workers everywhere.
Doreen kept on teaching for another five years until at the age of 70 she was injured when she was knocked down by a track athelete training in the school hall. Mrs Craton fractured her pelvis and never returned to the classroom.
Doreen Maud Craton passed away June 19th. She was 91.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
Measuring What Matters
In the December 2008 edition of Talent Management, Jac Fitz-enz continues his line of thinking about transforming the analytics used in HR. He quotes Jeanne Harris co-author of Competing on Analytics:
“The key for CIOs is to think long term and enterprise-wide about how they are going to capture, cleanse, manipulate, analyse and present data across the enterprise, to ensure there’s a common version of the truth. Then business managers can focus on the insights they’ve gained from the data, rather than arguing over whose data and analysis is correct.”
Dr. Jac goes on “Reread that statement and substitute CHRO for CIO. What if HR started thinking like that about the wealth of data that passes through its processes to hire, pay, develop and support the enterprise’s human capital? Wouldn’t that go a long way toward winning HR a seat at the proverbial table? Isn’t it about time that HR graduated from the kindergarten metrics of numbers of people hired, trained and retained to something more useful to the C-level?”
We are fans of Dr. Jac… and we are also fans of helping organizations measure what matters. Measures like quality, captured and applied at each step of the employee lifecycle from attraction to termination. And hard data like core learning and behavioural attributes that allow us to determine which are most predictive of retention, productivity, engagement and success.
It is possible for HR to reliably inventory individual attributes and capabilities to evaluate organizational capacity, and then manage the relationship between human capital and the achievement of strategic objectives in a way that few have done until now. We just have to stop wasting our time with kindergarten metrics and start measuring what matters.
“The key for CIOs is to think long term and enterprise-wide about how they are going to capture, cleanse, manipulate, analyse and present data across the enterprise, to ensure there’s a common version of the truth. Then business managers can focus on the insights they’ve gained from the data, rather than arguing over whose data and analysis is correct.”
Dr. Jac goes on “Reread that statement and substitute CHRO for CIO. What if HR started thinking like that about the wealth of data that passes through its processes to hire, pay, develop and support the enterprise’s human capital? Wouldn’t that go a long way toward winning HR a seat at the proverbial table? Isn’t it about time that HR graduated from the kindergarten metrics of numbers of people hired, trained and retained to something more useful to the C-level?”
We are fans of Dr. Jac… and we are also fans of helping organizations measure what matters. Measures like quality, captured and applied at each step of the employee lifecycle from attraction to termination. And hard data like core learning and behavioural attributes that allow us to determine which are most predictive of retention, productivity, engagement and success.
It is possible for HR to reliably inventory individual attributes and capabilities to evaluate organizational capacity, and then manage the relationship between human capital and the achievement of strategic objectives in a way that few have done until now. We just have to stop wasting our time with kindergarten metrics and start measuring what matters.
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