In the Season 6 finale of Redefining HR, I sat down with ADP Research Institute’s head of research, Marcus Buckingham. We discuss his career path and views on the evolution of performance in HR. We also examine the new HRXPS report and tool that Marcus helped develop to measure and assess the performance and impact of HR teams.

Going into the field of HR seemed like an inevitable path for Marcus. With his father and grandfather both establishing careers in different pockets of HR, Marcus became familiar with the topic. However, Marcus planned to go in a different direction at university before something altered his path forever. Marcus’ father was struggling to find good, qualified pub managers, and then he met a man named Donald Clifton, who described a system that would measure what great managers have encountered and then build a tool used in the pre-employment selection process. 

Intrigued by this system, Marcus’ father invited the man and his team home. That was when 16-year-old Marcus was offered the opportunity to travel to Lincoln, Neb., to learn to measure human characteristics. He was hooked after his first trip out there. From that point, Marcus’ HR path began, first with Gallup, then as an entrepreneur and now with the ADP Research Institute.

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Defining a Talent Brand

To define a talent brand, it’s important to ask a few questions, including whether an employee would recommend a company or organization as an excellent place to work to their friends or families. In today’s workforce, companies want people rallying around their communities and advocating that their organization is where people want to work. “The outcome of it is that you've got an awful lot of current employees advocating for your company as a place to work,” Marcus shares. 

He explains that if CEOs and chief HR officers want to create great talent brands, it’s not sufficient to build a website, even a great one, that talks about the organization’s good deeds for the community and employees. “[T]he overall outcome of it isn't felt by what you put out on your website,” he says. “It's felt by what somebody who actually works for you goes and says to their friends and family and their community about your place to work.” 

ADP Research Institute’s HRXPS report that 51% of the variation in someone’s likelihood of recommending a company comes from individual relationships with team members and team leaders. “And so yes, undoubtedly an awful lot of the company's talent brand is mediated through, indeed created through, your individual team,” Marcus says. However, that leaves almost half of the variation uncovered, and that’s where HR becomes important.

What HRXPS Measures

Everything involving HR is emotionally fraught, whether it’s a basic or complicated function. “Everything we do in HR touches the human in human resources,” he says, “I mean, it touches at our very emotional core, and we get stressed.” Therefore, everything HR professionals do has to be “emotionally intelligent, emotionally responsive,” which is what the HRXPS metric examines. 

If you are intentional and empathetic in your responses, HRXPS can help measure “how likely an employee is to recommend the company to friends and family.” The rate of such recommendations goes “through the roof” when HR responds to employee needs in emotionally intelligent ways. Thus, your talent brand is created through HR’s efforts to be responsive and attentive to employees.

The HRXPS metric was created not to replace managers but instead to work alongside them as part of the HR function, helping better measure the employees’ likelihood of recommending your company to their peers. The metric can also show how good experiences with HR show up over time. “It’s talent brand, it’s intent to leave, and it’s actually, did you leave?” And HR affects all of these areas, Marcus says. 

“Many of us in the HR function believed that we were doing important work, but weirdly, this was like the first time we'd dimensionalized that feeling,” Marcus says.

The Qualities of Organizations Who Score High on the Metric

The report breaks down the common traits for companies that score highly on the HRXPS metric. It’s essential for companies to understand and see the best practices for maintaining these scores and what qualities they possess. 

Marcus shared four essential qualities to keep in mind when trying to achieve higher scores:

• Share the mission and vision of your organization: “Just thinking about what is your fundamental mission and purpose is a jolly important thing to do,” said Marcus. HR’s purpose is “to build the sort of workplace that deserves the very best.”

• Establishing a single point of contact: “Can your HR function figure out a way that's cost-effective to make most people in the organization feel as though they do know there is someone they can call who knows them.” he says. Doing so helps the employees feel reassured and induces confidence, especially during these uncertain times. 

• Onboarding and team joining: HR spends a good amount of its energy on talent acquisition. Employees want to know that onboarding will be successful, including in helping them quickly become part of a team. “[T]he most important part of onboarding is team joining,” he says, “It's, ‘can you make me very quickly feel like I'm part of this team here?’” Getting this right reduces turnover within the first 90 days, Marcus adds.

• Frequency of performance attention: The workforce has shifted away from yearly performance reviews by opting for more frequent reviews. “Humans want frequent light touch attention about the near-term future,” he says. The way to stay connected with people on your team is to talk to them about those short-term goals consistently. The format and complexity of these conversations is less important, Marcus says, than always making that effort to show up as a team leader with “frequent light-touch interaction.”

People in This Episode

• Marcus Buckingham: LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, HRXPS Report

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