Obamacare Texas RatesI describe HR benchmarking at GE and Digital to illustrate that it not only can be but has been done. Information derived from benchmarking organizational practices and principles can become a valuable tool for management. It can force broader thinking, show Obamacare Texas Rates, and help establish a baseline against which to measure progress. To build organizational competitiveness, benchmarking is a valuable precondition. The benchmarking trap The benchmarking trap occurs when managers who want to improve organizational capability select one organizational practice (training, for example), identify a handful of Obamacare Texas Rates companies who have excellent reputations in the area, and visit those companies to examine that one practice. These best practice visits give managers in-depth insights and perspective on what other companies do on the single practice on which they are focused. The visits become traps, however, if the practice is assessed in isolation from other organizational issues. Someone wanting to learn about Obamacare Texas Rates, for example, may visit three or four corporate training centers but may not come to understand management’s commitment to training or how training programs fit within the company’s overall management philosophy. In another form of the benchmark trap, benchmarks may be too narrowly derived by relying only on things that are “easy to count.” Some firms measure revenue per employee because these numbers are in an annual report and can be tracked easily. The good news with these Obamacare Texas Rates is that they are replicable; the bad news is that they may be inconsequential and even invalid, providing the wrong information. A firm may have a very high productivity measure (high revenue/employee ratio), for example, because it outsources many activities. The high productivity ratio thus may not reflect organizational capability as much as the firm’s structure. HR professionals who are strategic partners need to avoid benchmarking traps by making sure that HR benchmarks are not isolated in a single practice area but represent a confluence of HR practices. They also need to assure that the information collected from benchmarking research and analysis becomes part of a dialogue, not unthinkingly established as a standard. In fact, while many who benchmark use the information as a standard, it should in reality be used only as a baseline. The most successful Obamacare Texas Rates companies benchmark to find out what others do, not so they can do it that way, but so they can do it better. |