I just returned from two fantastic professional conferences. While this is a little longer than my usual posts, this month I would like to share with you my key conference experiences last week that I think provides an ideal platform from which to launch our new product lines - HR Workouts and HR Boot Camp. My friends and colleagues know I am a frequent and enthusiastic conference attendee. I love learning from the speakers, lurking by the vendor tables and meeting new professionals. I had a former boss who thought almost all conferences were boondoggles; he never understood how attending a good conference could recharge my battery and make me more productive.

Michael, VP of Talent Development writes…

"Are there HR metrics that are better than the rest? Too often I see metrics that just seem like they are measuring the wrong things like quantity vs. quality. 

For example, we can report out how many people went through training, but we (as an industry) don't talk about the more meaningful thing to measure like how many training graduates got a promotion. 

That's my basic gripe…what are your thoughts and insights on how to get better as a profession?"

My January 11, 2012 blog received the most feedback of any blog published to date.  The comments usually started, “I really liked” or “It was really well written” and continued with the pregnant pause and a “but.”  What followed was a question such as “what does it have to do with HR or my Organization?” or “what does it have to do with what your firm does?” or “as a new business is that an appropriate topic for you to write about?”

I think these are all fair questions so I decided to put my planned blog on hold to address these queries.  Let me use a real example to illustrate how the news story 'Congress got Richer' applies to organizations and what HR Metrics Coach does. 

The growing wealth gap between Congress and the rest of America was a leading story on the December 27th nightly news. The evening television news reports were based on the New York Times article “Economic Downturn Took a Detour at Capitol Hill.” As the Lester Holt (NBC Nightly News) and my much-loved Diane Sawyer (ABC World News) reports went on, I became enraged! Not at Congress but at the so-called “journalism” – a word I use because of an inability to come up with a better one that is also printable.

Don’t get me wrong. Since I am not a paid congressional staffer or blood relative of a congressman, I do not approve of the 112th Congress’s performance, and my rage is not in defense of their ineffectiveness and ineptitude. As a former competitive speaker and trained attorney, I recognized the “art” (and/or tricks) of persuasion, but as a researcher, I am appalled by the intellectual dishonesty using data in a “news” story like this.

It's is my favorite time of year!  No, not the holiday season or my son’s birthday.  They are wonderful but, let’s be honest, a little stressful.  No, this is the time of year when we look both back (which satisfies my inner historian) and forward (which delights my closeted economist).  I have studied my version of the stars, census data, labor statistics, weather patterns, consumer spending/business investment, etc.  As an amateur futurist, let me share my outlook for 2012.