What is “Lean” HR Service - IQPC.com

What is “Lean” HR Service?
When it comes to “lean” there is no better place to start than GE, where lean got its
name.
SSON recently spoke with Stephen Brown, who in his previous role as head of global
talent acquisition at GE Healthcare, pushed “lean” across all aspects of the
recruitment process. Having started on the operational side, as a client of recruitment
services, Stephen knows only too well how quickly a bottleneck is translated to “bad
service” – and what it costs the operation in terms of time lost. Today, at GE
Healthcare, the recruitment team and its in-house clients work in a strong partnership
and continuous improvement has become a daily mantra. RPO has become a strong
element of the lean process at GE healthcare. KellyOCG has become a long-time
trusted partner in GE Healthcare‟s lean HR services strategy.
SSON interview with Steven Brown, Sr. Human Resources Manager, CT & AW - GE
Healthcare
Recruitment process outsourcing is increasingly making headlines as corporations
seek the flexibility of scale it offers, as well as the expertise of specialist recruiters.
We ask Steven Brown, previously Global Talent Acquisition Leader for GE healthcare,
how RPO supports GE Healthcare’s competitive edge.
BH: Steven, could you please start out by explaining how the RPO partnership
between KellyOCG and GE Healthcare came about?
SB: The partnership between Kelly and GE goes back about 11 years. But the
partnership specifically between Kelly and GE Healthcare, around Lean, really started
in 2006. At that point, my predecessor was really looking for opportunities to improve
overall customer service and customer delivery of the staffing process. That's when
Kelly and GE Healthcare really sat down and did -- in GE terms -- a workout,
meaning, taking a look at all the processes and trying to evaluate how we could
improve on them.
And so they looked at key metrics with regards to cycle time. They looked at key
services with regards to overall customer satisfaction. Now the interesting thing was
that previously, we didn't look at Lean to be applied to staffing, even though we had
used it elsewhere around GE Healthcare. GE has, as you know, a strong history in Six
Sigma, and Lean was really adopted for our manufacturing workforce.
But we thought there were elements, in regards to workflow, bottleneck, time to
delivery, etc., in some of those processes, where Lean thinking could be applied.
I was actually an HR manager at the time, and so I was a customer of this staffing
process. About a year and a half later is when I actually joined the staffing team as a
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US staffing leader, and continued a lot of the methodology. But as most of my HR
background has been tied into operations, I certainly got what Lean process was all
about.
Part of the challenge, when you adopt a Lean process, is not just the implementation
but continuous improvement around that. You can't just put Lean in and just say, well,
I'm done. You need to continue to listen to what the customers are saying, continue to
look at your key process indicators, and continuously evaluate: where can we
eliminate waste? And in our case, eliminating „waste‟ meant eliminating the delays,
the bottlenecks in the process. And so I went from customer to supplier, and really,
over the three years that we‟ve been doing this, we went from being just US-based, to
applying some of these concepts globally.
BH: And does your team run these processes globally?
SB: Well, yes. Having started as US staffing leader, I then took on the responsibility
of global staffing leader. And so a lot of the conversation, the methodology, the
principles, … while not fully adopted globally, were nevertheless easily applied,
because much of this thinking is just best practices, right?
BH: Of course.
SB: So, if you look at them as best practices, then you can share them. Maybe not the
entire value stream map, because each of those really needs to be adopted locally. But
at least the methodology and the best practises were starting to move beyond the US.
BH: When you were a customer, Steven, what were your biggest complaints? And
how did you feel, as a customer, that the changes being instituted with Lean were
improving your experience?
SB: That's a great question. As a customer, I always thought that the staffing function
should have candidates waiting for me -- because they should read my mind, right!?
So they should know when I had an opening forthcoming and needed candidates. I
think when they started introducing some of the changes in staffing, one of the things
that really helped was that they share, with all HR managers, the target date and the
target cycle time – which is approximately 60 days. And within these 60 days, they
share the breakdown of when things should happen. In fact, not only when things
should happen, but also who had ownership during the sub-cycle processes. I think
previously, this was probably a bit of a mystery.
Again, as a customer, I thought: why couldn't they just have a slate of candidates
waiting? But when they laid out the process -- for example, between days 1-3, you
host a job launch -- well, what that meant was that I had to actively work with staffing
to talk about that job. And days 3-10, they would begin sourcing candidates. And then
by day 15, they would send me candidates. And then I had to provide them with
feedback. Etc.
So it was a really nice way of laying out the ownership and the process. I have to say
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that was the first time the process made sense to me. And it highlighted the
partnership that needs to happen. And part of that partnership is knowing how to
continue to improve it.
BH: So, now you've got this new process, how do you build continuous improvement
into it? What I mean is, how do you get the client to engage – because Lean requires
both sides‟ inputs, right?
SB: Yes, so part of the conversation during the job launch is, here's your role and
here's my role. We agree to have regular meetings to make sure we're flowing along.
So you put those operating mechanisms in early within the process and you can then
check if there is a kink in your process. For example, have you changed the profile of
the candidate? And if you have, let's stop and look at where we are, where we need to
go … because now you have changed something within the system. Again, going
back to my operational days, you literally have to step back and look at the whole
process as separate „points‟. You don't go all the way to the end and say, I guess it
didn't work. Frankly, when you look at Lean and continuous improvement, it is
common sense. It‟s about saying: what is the best way for delivery? What do you need
in place in order to get a better result?
BH: What were some of the hurdles? I imagine you experienced a certain amount of
push-back?
SB: Sure. The client just wants the end-result. And suddenly you‟re asking him to get
more involved? The way that we manage this conversation -- and, again, it's an
ongoing conversation -- is that we have to look at bringing on talent as an investment,
same as you look at capital equipment. The more that you can get people to
understand, and the more they're involved, the better the output will be. Not that we're
asking them to do the job, but we're asking for their partnership.
Initially, the reaction was predictable: Listen, you're the staffing professional, I just
want to get to the end result, and I want the product to be fantastic. Once people
started seeing the results, it not only improved cycle time, but it also improved
diversity metric (women and people of color) . Being a customer doesn't exempt you
from being involved with the process. In fact, it should encourage you to be involved
with the process, because you have to live with the result.
BH: When you were responsible for the global talent management, how were you in
effect benefiting GE Healthcare? How were you making a difference?
SB: Ultimately, when you look at a staffing process that works well, in essence, you
have reduced the amount of time in a vacancy. So, if you are able to engage your
management team, your hiring managers, early, then you're able to fill those jobs in a
very smart, timely way. Therefore, the productivity of the team and the enhancement
of the talent you're bringing in has a direct impact on the bottom line.
We only use Kelly for our US team. Outside the US, Kelly is not our RPO provider.
And yet the principles that we established in the US with Kelly have been elements
that we've started to use much more broadly, outside of the US.
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BH: So, given everything else you've explained, why outsource the recruiting
function? How does that fit in with the Lean strategy, the Lean idea?
SB: I would have to separate those two ideas. We already had the RPO relationship
before we moved to Lean. So, what the RPO allows us to do, really, is twofold. One, it
allows us some scalability. So, as our volume, our hiring volume, changes up and
down, it allows us to either add or take resources off the program, so we're able to
continue to meet the overall customer needs.
The second piece is that, when we look at the competencies related to being a
recruiter, we had to decide: did we want to build that competency in-house, or did we
want to buy that competency? And the conversation it really led to was: if you want to
be really good, ie, have a really strong recruiting model, then we should probably
have people who want to be recruiters doing the work, as opposed to an in-house
model, where you may end up having two challenges: One is, you have recruiters who
really want to be HR managers, but recruiting is their stepping stone into being an HR
manager. Or the second challenge: you have recruiters who you may not be able to
grow and stretch, because there is not an internal career ladder, and that is not your
focus, as people come and go. So we just made a conscious decision -- of all the HR
roles we want to have within our organisation, did we want to concentrate on this pool
of talent? And eventually we decided, no, we didn‟t. We think it's okay to buy as long
as the process is seamless. We don‟t emphasize the fact that we are “outsourcing”, but
rather that we're using professional recruiters and staffing strategists to help fill our
jobs.
BH: Do you think it's important to make that distinction, Steven? Do you think there's
a hesitancy related to anything that's termed outsourcing?
SB: Yes, I think so. Think about it. If you had a choice to have something done within
the company versus outsourcing it, sometimes the perception is that outsourcing
means maybe it's less important. In-house may imply you have more ownership in the
outcome.
So we are careful when we talk about KellyOCG, or any of our RPO providers, to
emphasize that they're part of the GE Healthcare staffing solution. In the US, they are
actually co-located on-site with the GE staffing group. Outsourced is not
disconnected. It is connected to our staffing solution.
BH: Back to Lean, for a moment. Would you not say that the ideas underlying the
move to RPO really support the goals of a Lean environment?
SB: I would even go further than that, First of all, you can't separate the two. And
secondly, Lean is here to stay. It is part of our solution. We could not imagine a
staffing function that does not incorporate Lean anymore. Lean is completely
embedded with RPO.
BH: I imagine Lean has also massively impacted KellyOCG‟s organisation.
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SB: Yes, I think they have benefited from this as much as GE Healthcare has
benefited from it.
BH: Steven, thank you so much for your time.
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