23 December 2021
The gift of the health crisis: the glimmer of a working world humane and full of values
The health crisis has turned the way of many people’s lives upside down. But like any revolution, the crisis has brought with it some beneficial rethinking. In the context of this Christmas season, we can say that it has brought back traditions on a certain number of professional levels, after decades of racing towards globalization, digitalization and financialization of the economic world.
23 December 2021
« Sustainable leadership »: myth or reality in 2022? Towards a new era of talent management?
Sustainable leadership seems to be the new buzzword, but what are we talking about? Does it imply that in the upper echelons of corporate decision-making, the leader’s main objective today is to last through the display of declarations of intent on corporate social responsibility?
23 December 2021
TOD creates the Human Capital Development Indicator – IKVH
To measure the impact of all its actions with its clients, thanks to its profiling and man-job suitability measurement tools in terms of commitment dynamics, TOD has developed an indicator to measure an organization’s performance in terms of human capital development.
15 July 2021
Human resources: expenses or assets of the company?
Human resources: expenses or assets of the company? Historically, the observation is unanimously shared: from Jean Bodin’s “there is no wealth but men”, an economic philosopher in the 16th century, to the modern theory of human capital, which won the Nobel Prize for Economics to their authors Schultz and Becker, the importance of the human factor in the performance and growth of companies has been unanimously recognized. And yet, the valuation of the human contribution to the wealth of companies remains inversely proportional to its real inclusion in the accounts that are supposed to reflect its performance. Far from being considered an asset for the company, the words used to describe and treat the human dimension leave one dreaming: salary costs, FTEs, social charges, training accounts…. All these words are heavy with constraints rather than opportunities and call for a Cost Killer rather than a visionary who values a portfolio of talents. And yet, it is these talents that constitute the true wealth of the company and represent its most valuable intangible asset, in the accounting sense: “an identifiable item of the entity’s assets that has a positive economic value for the entity, i.e. an item generating a resource that the entity controls as a result of past events and from which it expects future economic benefits”. Like football clubs, it would be appropriate to include this asset in the capital. Especially since, unlike other assets, it does not depreciate over time, but rather is appreciated in the light of experience, training acquired and commitment to performance. However, we can see today that this asset, far from being valued, is constantly being depreciated: failed recruitments, unsuitable management, disengagement, ill-being, absenteeism, etc. The evaluation of this intangible asset, imperfect as it may be, would make it possible to evaluate companies at their fair value, current and future, and could give rise to a rating based on its valuation; with a ranking of the best-performing companies, and assessment criteria justifying investments or fundraising, beyond the current financial and accounting rules; not to mention the impact of collateral valuations such as the commercial image of the company, its employer brand, the mobilization of potentials..etc. Beyond societal considerations, it is the creation of value that is at stake and its consideration for new business dynamics. For the heart of business to beat.
19 March 2021
AI at the service of meaningful and humane management for committed employees and more efficient companies.
We believe in “A world where man uses AI to become more human”: indeed, AI can allow us to no longer look at, scan, and evaluate the men and women of the company as resources, but to consider them through their human values as real actors, builders and integral parts of the company. Nowadays, companies are facing a real war for talent and commitment. It isn’t attractive anymore for people: it has trouble recruiting, it has trouble committing its employees over time and retaining the best. Nearly 30% of executives hired on permanent contracts leave their new employer less than a year later, and the reasons for these failures are always the same: new employee does not find enough meaning in his or her work, he or she is not sufficiently valued or solicited, or he or she feels a misalignment between his or her personal values and the values of the company; all of these considerations remain essentially human, behavioral or managerial and illustrate the difficulty of the company to keep the promises of the candidate experience. All of these ills originate in the processes themselves, which most of the time consist of putting CVs in job descriptions, or assimilating men and women to jobs and skills that are managed according to reference systems, processes that have been taken over by artificial intelligence without adding the necessary humanity to alleviate their harmful consequences (disengagement, boredom, even suffering). In a CV, there is no personality or desires section and even less human values section, because these cannot be measured in numbers and are difficult to express with words. And yet it is the values that moderate the candidates, their commitment drivers, their desires, their personality, everything that makes them unique, but which is invisible in a CV, that will make them strong. And it is the sharing of these human values that will make the teams strong. AI has been used in the field of human resources, initially with excellent intentions, those of freeing HRDs from repetitive tasks with low added value (payroll, time management…) or automating processes to make them more objective and reduce discrimination. But unfortunately, this has led to the dehumanization of processes that were already not particularly human. Candidates or employees no longer find themselves in this hyper-digitalized world of work, which sometimes locks them up for life in boxes, which no longer sees them as men and women but as digitized CVs, skills, “resources” or even “charges”… It is rather a question of being interested in artificial intelligence as a means of paradoxically bringing a more human look to the men and women of the company and of wondering how to integrate the power of the human into the algorithms to serve the development and the performance of companies. We are convinced that AI will never replace the essential: human relations and management, the manager’s ability to give a soul to his team, to take it further, faster, higher, but AI can help, especially in highlighting this invisible human potential beyond the skills and experience verbalized in the CVs. AI can only rely on processes and models that man has designed, it cannot modify them alone. It can learn to enrich them through experience and the growth of its database, but always according to the procedures established by humans. Therefore, if processes are at the origin of the difficulties companies face in HR management, it is not enough to digitalize existing processes or to increase their power thanks to big data: for example, in recruitment, scanning the whole web to find the ideal CV and enriching it with all the personal data that the candidate will have carelessly left lying around on social networks will not bring any major change in the results. It is essential to rethink the HRD in order to meet the company’s challenges. We are convinced that AI is a great opportunity for HRDs to become the central artisan in building the company of the future. Here are some very concrete solutions to enable a more human management of human resources: 1- AI to reveal human potential from recruitment throughout the careers paths. All these impediments would be removed if it were possible to know the values that animate candidates or employees, the aspirations that give meaning to their work, their own driving forces, which make them excited and which need to turn to give their full potential, all these invisible qualities that yet make all their strengths. By mobilizing the results of neuroscience and psychology to build digital tools, technologies allow us to identify human behaviors more precisely and predict their interactions, to evaluate the human values and drivers of each person. By revealing the true dimension of human capital, these digital tools (AI) aim to become real engagement boosters, catalysts for innovation and business transformation. More technically, the methods used are based on multiple decision trees, classification and regression on which our explanatory and predictive models are based. The statistical references are derived from work carried out in the field of neuroscience and behavioral psychology since the 1960s, which makes their current use particularly robust. The choice of metrics is based on managerial experience and the biases in the decision-making processes have been removed by a test population of more than 1000 executives. In most cases, the decision tree is intended to predict how a candidate or employee will perform in a project or position and how they will create value for themselves and the organization given the environment and context. Each node in the tree examines the alignment of a candidate “characteristic” (quantitative or qualitative) with a job expectation or promise. The respective candidate and job “characteristics” are themselves described through classification trees. The characteristics can be continuous variables or of a yes/no form. Without being “random forests” in the mathematical sense of the term, the multiplication of trees seeks to take into account the complexity of human matter. The principal component analysis of the data taken
25 November 2020