^The APQC Blog

(The first of a three-part series on lessons from the sharing economy for the way we work.)

Today to win, organizations have to outmaneuver the competition, and this is where finance needs to step up and become a better business partner. But how are CFOs, and the finance functions they manage, driving process improvement efforts that lead to this outcome? To answer this question and more, APQC’s Senior Research Fellow in Financial Management, Mary Driscoll, fielded a survey to determine what tools, techniques, and technologies will enable finance to reach its full potential and stay relevant in the eyes of the business.

In my last blog post, I asked APQC’s human capital management research program manager Elissa Tucker about how APQC’s HCM research can benefit professionals working outside the HR function. In this blog, I ask Elissa about other resources that professionals can use to overcome the people challenges that get in the way of productivity and quality improvement.

What are some of the people challenges that get in the way of leaders, managers, and even individual professionals as they work to achieve their business goals?

When I started scoping APQC’s Workplace Mentoring study, I thought I understood why organizations encourage employees to mentor and be mentored. First, mentoring is an inexpensive way to build employee skills and competencies so that they can become high performers and move up the ranks.  Second, the mentoring experience makes mentees feel nurtured and valued—and thus more likely to stay with their current employers.

That’s not a typo. I meant to say “your responsibilities” in the title. Employee engagement is commonly thought of as an HR concern. However, as I learned in conducting a recent email interview with engagement expert Don MacPherson, this is just one of many myths about employee engagement. In the interview, I asked Don to share some common misunderstandings about employee engagement.

Have you noticed? Over the last few years, workplace mentoring has become a hot topic. In APQC survey results, your AskUs questions, and conversations with members, we’ve heard that organizations today want and need mentoring. But why? Mentoring is not a new organizational tool. In thinking about this question, my conclusion is that mentoring uniquely addresses a number of present-day workplace realities.

We have executive buy-in for the analytics research initiative at APQC. And I have recorded video proof of it!

Finance process improvement is back in full swing—or is it? Some would argue that it’s not back, per se; they’d say it never left. Surely they are thinking of companies run by CEOs with the will to make process excellence a cornerstone of competitive strategy. But what about those without such support? Preliminary APQC research says finance process improvement is a compelling issue for most. Three reasons stand out.

In 2012, Williams launched a large-scale initiative to consolidate 12,000 documents from about 20 different organizations into a standard information architecture and process. APQC talked to Elisa Munoz, knowledge management consultant at Williams, about how Williams got leadership buy-in for content clean up, rationalization, and categorization and applied design thinking to create a solution that can be sustained in SharePoint.

I recently interviewed Eric Siegel, founder of Predictive Analytics World and author of Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die, about how to build a data-driven organization.