By Adam Miller who can be contacted at www.wpmag.com

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 There was a time when a person’s career choices were limited to the original job path or company they chose when entering the workforce. As a result, many employees remained in the same career track with the same organization for their entire career. In those days, it wasn’t difficult to manage employees and their development, but times have changed. Today, employees have more career opportunities than ever, which is great for them but a real challenge for HR managers who must handle their development.

Opportunity Awaits

With companies growing domestically and expanding globally, employees now have access to an unprecedented wealth of opportunities for advancement, mobility and flexibility within their careers. They can move up the corporate ladder, switch to a new job function within the organization, move to another division, work remotely or even transfer to another country. While this diversity of career options builds morale and helps extend an employee’s potential and time within an organization, it also creates logistical challenges for HR departments responsible for tracking and managing each employee’s training, development, performance and compensation, among other necessary functions.

Between the growth of the global workplace and the advances in technology that make telecommuting possible, the pace of business and the way it is conducted has drastically affected the needs and demands of the traditional workplace. With numerous organizations now offering employees the ability to work from home—a great approach that responds to the much-sought-after work-life balance—comes a logistical headache for HR and training managers responsible for trying to keep employee development on track with training and other offerings.

Interestingly, job flexibility and employee mobility, which causes these management challenges, also presents an opportunity for organizations. Employees are not only offered more opportunities, they also are more open to change than ever before. This benefits the organization by enabling it to use and promote its talent better. For example, companies can optimize their talent by finding the most appropriate positions for employees based on their unique talents and skill sets. This helps increase retention as organizations focus on offering revised responsibilities as a means to keep employees challenged and rewarded.

Another benefit for the organization is the opportunity to be more proactive and responsive to the rapidly changing business environment. As the market demands, companies can more readily identify positions that need to be filled and the experience required to fill those roles. They can also go a step further to identify which employees can immediately fulfill those needs and build project teams that respond to the changing market landscape.

Doing Business Today

Times have changed and employees no longer stay in one position or company for their entire career. Those who do remain with one employer are shifting roles between departments, are cross-functional or make either lateral or progressive moves both domestically and internationally. As positive and strategic as these moves are, it can still be extremely difficult to keep pace with career shifts, especially with the speed of today’s changing business environment.

This shift from the traditional business model can be attributed to a variety of factors including globalization, the mindset of Generation Xers, who are more apt to jump from one position to another in search of a better work environment or higher salary, or the cost savings that many organizations achieve due to reduced overhead as a result of hiring contractors or remote employees. About 12 percent of the U.S. workforce qualifies as dispersed. In fact, leading global organizations such as IBM, Sun Microsystems and Agilent Technologies have adopted the virtual office concept with 40 percent to 70 percent of employees working remotely (BusinessWeek, Dec. 5, 2005). This indicates that this trend is on the rise and that HR departments will need to adjust their strategies to serve their employees.

The Global Perspective

The increased trend toward global business presents yet another challenge to managing today’s workforces. Organizations are expanding rapidly into other countries in search of inexpensive materials, new markets and new talent. It’s now commonplace for employees to transfer to a new division located outside of the United States to do the same job in a newly targeted region or to perform an entirely different function for their organization.

Again, while it’s a great opportunity for employees who seek job opportunities with organizations that offer these types of flexible, relocation programs, coordinating such a global workplace can be difficult for the employer who now must manage performance and development across borders. And those companies that opt to play it safe by not offering relocation options outside the United States find it difficult to compete in an increasingly tight labor market.

Expansion and globalization also force HR managers to keep up with the needs of the organization. They now must consider the changing scope of job descriptions, which have become far more flexible in recent years. Additionally, as the organization grows and new technology is introduced, there is a constant need for new positions and unique skill sets that previously were not required. This need is compounded by the increased turnover experienced by many organizations.

Fight Fire With Fire

Although the introduction of new technology can impact business methods and the structure of the organization, new technology is also the solution when it comes to managing the complex HR needs and demands of today’s mobile workforce.

Bearing in mind that a constantly shifting, mobile workforce creates many challenges for today’s HR professional, today’s organizations should investigate the benefits that a human capital management (HCM) solution can provide. HCM solutions can automate employee development processes and integrate learning and performance management. These features and functionalities can provide a measurable and accurate inventory of the organization’s skills and performance levels. Each employee’s skills, certifications, experience and performance can be tracked and managed regardless of changing roles or physical location. The job of managing the mobile workforce becomes significantly less daunting and is instead a process that can be managed successfully on a daily basis.

The ability to automate and streamline employee development and training is one of the numerous benefits an HCM solution provides. An automated employee development solution can identify and provide needed training to employees and help in the development of new and existing skill sets. This feature is crucial as organizations search for new employees to fill newly created or vacant positions as they develop existing employees for future promotion. Coupled with succession planning, integrated learning and performance can enhance the process for grooming high-potential employees by providing measurable performance indicators and automatically generating development plans that get employees to the next level.

Training and development efforts aren’t limited to employees who work out of an organization’s main office. Today’s advanced e-learning tools are Web-based, offering employees the ability to participate in required or assigned training courses remotely and at their convenience. This on-demand model benefits training managers because it reduces the costs of in-person training and creates training options that are more accessible to employees. Additionally, training managers can create online learning portals with customized training schedules, list employee-specific requirements, certification renewal dates and other important information. Such portals reduce the number of inquiries and help manage the process for all employees, not just remote workers.

Does Anyone Speak Cantonese?

Internal recruiting can be daunting for organizations with thousands of employees spread across remote locations, especially when filling positions with employees from existing positions, departments and countries. However, with the right HCM solution this potentially overwhelming task becomes virtually painless.

In the past, the learning data training managers collected on employees was kept separate from the performance data HR managers collected. With the help of HCM, organizations now can seamlessly integrate this data to provide the most comprehensive overview of an employee’s skills, performance and training. Such data includes details on compliance and certifications achieved or required, years of service, performance reviews, training completed and required, development plans and employee special skills such as languages spoken.

HR managers are then able to search for specific skills, titles, certifications, etc., and pull a list of employees from across the organization that meets the search parameters. For example, an organization wants to establish a sales office in China, but it needs to find an existing employee who is willing to relocate, has strong sales experience and speaks Cantonese. The HR manager plugs these requirements into the search function of the HCM solution and in seconds, the search finds the names of three appropriate candidates. The HR manager then can review each candidate’s employment history, training, certifications and performance reviews as measured against predetermined goals to determine the best candidate.

With this technology, organizations can identify candidates for special teams and projects, newly created or open positions and future succession planning and talent management needs. In addition, such a solution can help ensure that compliance standards are met and maintained for employees moving into and out of positions with stringent compliance requirements—a key element in managing and meeting stringent Sarbanes-Oxley mandates.

HCM Gets SaaSy

Although an employee development solution is available as standard software, it is also available as on-demand software or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) delivered over the Internet and significantly less expensive to purchase and install. On-demand solutions require little time to deploy, require minimal if any IT maintenance and can easily integrate with an organization’s other critical business applications such as CRM and ERP. Some of the many benefits of the on-demand delivery model include the ability to meet the rapidly changing business needs of today’s organizations.

Changes to an employee’s status can be made on the fly. New positions, lateral moves, annual compensation increases, career preferences and new direct reports or supervisors can be updated easily. As employees complete training requirements and meet established goals, their records are automatically updated to reflect these changes, which are then updated instantaneously for accurate planning and reporting in the future.

Flexibility Is the Future

As today’s leading organizations continue to embrace the changing business landscape, the demands on human resources to track and manage employee development will be tested as never before. Only by leveraging the same technology that creates these challenges will organizations be able to manage the needs of a mobile, global workforce effectively. HCM services offer one solution that will ultimately become the standard for harnessing the lightning-fast changes and demands of this new era in business.

Sun Microsystems: Managing a Distributed Workforce

With 38,600 employees dispersed across more than 100 countries, Sun Microsystems, a provider of computer technology products and services, developed a unique distributed workforce management system coined the Open Work practice. Sun’s Open Work practice gives employees the choice of where and when they work. With approximately half of its employee population participating in the Open Work practice, Sun has developed methods and tools to help managers successfully manage their distributed workers.

Naturally, managing a distributed workforce requires managers to possess the ability to motivate, maintain cohesion and establish trust across a distance because in an office setting these tend to be easier to carry out. “The world has evolved today to where pretty much any manager now has to be aware of a mobile or distributed worker on his or her team—especially as we are going global where managers have to manage teams that are not all in one place,” said Ann Bamesberger, senior director of Open Work solutions. “Since we have gotten the technological aspect pretty much down pat, we are now able to focus on the social elements to help managers excel.”

Through Web-based services such as online simulations, help chat lines and blogs, managers learn management best practices for their distributed workforce. “The simulations are example situations. It is structured in a multiple-choice format and if the manager answers the question incorrectly, he or she gets a tutorial on what they could have done,” Bamesberger said. “Also, we do a lot of blogging: It is a big part of our culture. Manager’s blogs tend to talk about effective conference calling, their pet peeves as managers, distance collaborations, best practices, etc.”

According to Bamesberger, there is a Sun software manager who has his own Web site about his usual workday. “He writes what some of his pet peeves are, what his preferences are, like does he like to be called early in the morning or does he like to be called late at night, and what does he do during the course of the day. So it is sort of a personal blog on who he is,” she explained. “And his direct reports really like that because it makes him more human, more accessible and helps the employees figure out how they can keep themselves present in a situation where an out-of-sight, out-of-mind attitude is easy to follow.”

Also, Sun tries to hold on-site quarterly meetings to improve employee relationships and communication. Bamesberger said that quarterly meetings are not held merely for social reasons, but are—of course—work-related as well. But the social element has to be there because these meeting serve as a way to integrate distance workers. “You have to make the people working on the outside who are not proximate feel like their work is as critical as the work going on in HQ (headquarters) as well,” she said. “Historically, most people have felt that the important work is done on premise and the distance work—the work that is farmed out to the hinterlands—is work that is not mission-critical. That attitude does not work and needs to change because if that is the way they feel, they are not going to build any trust, cohesion or respect. And everybody wants to do important work, and no one want s to feel unimportant.”

But with flexible and exceptional managers overseeing distributed workers, the benefits can be abundant. According to Bamesberger, a flexible work environment can change the way people work—individually and as a team. “By giving employees the option to choose the best work location and schedule suited for their daily lives, employee satisfaction improves, employees achieve better work-life balance, they are more motivated and perceived to be more productive as well,” she said. “The Open Work practice is also an excellent tool to attract new employees and for retention.”