Operational Effectiveness in Use fo BAS

The effectiveness of BAS in controlling building systems is seen to reside in conjoint man machine function. In an emerging industry paradigm, data is extracted from the BAS and used for analytics that inform enhanced operations. This processing may include a mash up with data from other sources, such as energy meters. KPI metrics and Building ReTuning, an on going commissioning process, are suggested as important ways to guide operators in training and subsequent understanding and use of data intensive tools. Short case studies of work in progress on two CUNY campuses are provided

The Impact of the COVID-19 Crisis on Executive Succession: Results of the 2020 HR@Moore Survey of Chief HR Officers

The COVID crisis impacted just about every aspect of how firms do business. We have explored through Zoom meetings and a survey of Chief HR Officers how the crisis has impacted a variety of components of executive succession. We find that the crisis caused many firms to develop business continuity plans separate from their ongoing and emergency succession plans. Going through this process may encourage firms to look more broadly and deeply into the people and roles in their ongoing succession processes. The crisis also revealed more positive than negative characteristics in their leaders. CHROs noted that the crisis has increased the use of virtual technologies for both initial interviews of ELT candidate, and for the entire hiring process, and the vast majority suggested that the use of technology throughout the hiring process will continue to see substantial increases after the crisis ends. Finally, the crisis required board meetings to be held virtually. While CHROs do not expect this to be predominant in the future, they did indicate that approximately one quarter of board meetings will be held virtually after the crisis has passed. We discuss the implications of these findings

The CHRO and the Board: Results of the 2018 HR@Moore Survey of Chief HR Officers

With every round of corporate scandals, Boards of Directors (BOD’s) seemingly take on new roles with regard to the governance of the corporation. Some of the accounting scandals at companies like Enron and Tyco focused BOD’s on recognizing the potential for certain executive pay designs to encourage CEOs to misreport aspects of their accounting numbers. High visibility failures of CEOs at companies such as HP drove BOD’s attention toward their need to exhibit more due diligence in CEO succession. The collapse of the financial industry, driving the “Great Recession” of 2007-09, increasingly drew their attention both to risk and to those leaders who might have positioned their firms with risky portfolios. These developments have brought boards into the realm of human capital management. CEO pay, CEO succession, and the war for talent have moved to the top of the board agenda, and consequently, increased the visibility and importance of the Chief HR Officer (CHRO) to the board. This report, based on the HR@Moore Survey responses of 131 CHROs, reports the current state of how CHROs interface with the BOD

The Chief Human Resource Officer: Exploring the Counselor, Confidante, and Coach Role

The 2018 HR@Moore Survey of Chief HR Officers again tracked how CHROs spend their time in seven roles identified when the survey was first developed. The results indicate minor changes, with CHROs spending more time with boards of directors and slightly less time as counselor/confidante/coach. In terms of the Chief Executive Officer’s agenda for HR, talent still tops the list by a significant margin. However, for the first time in the survey’s history, culture has risen to the second most popular agenda items, indicating a qualitative change in the requirements of CHROs. While quantitative data suggests that executive leadership team members (ELT) work effectively with one another, the qualitative data on how CHROs coach ELT members suggests that this is not accidental. They describe the ways in which they work to help ELT members to build relationships, they facilitate the flow of information from the CEO to the ELT and vice versa, they promote organizational effectiveness both for the corporation and for each ELT’s business, and they conduct personal coaching with ELT members. CHROs report that CEOs engage in relatively healthy decision making processes, but then also describe how they help to facilitate this. CHROs work to ensure that CEOs have all the relevant information in front of them, try to make sure CEOs hear the viewpoints of the right people, and help them to recognize unintended consequences of their decisions, particularly on stakeholders such as employees and customers. Finally, consistent with past survey results, CHRO roles continue to be filled predominantly with outside hires rather than internal promotions

Building Diversity Into the Talent Pipeline for Senior Operating Roles: Results of the 2020 HR@Moore Survey of Chief HR Officers

Organizations seek to build diverse pipelines of talent comprised of individuals who can rise to attain senior operating roles (i.e., positions running large businesses within the corporation.) The 2020 HR@Moore Survey of Chief HR Officers sought to assess the level of diversity in terms of women and racial minorities in these pipelines, identify the obstacles to increasing the number of diverse candidates and strategies for successfully building diversity in these pipelines. Our results show a lack of diversity in these pipelines with 60% white males, 22% white females and no more than 5% in any other sex/race categories. CHROs primarily pointed to supply problems as the biggest obstacles to increasing the number of women and racial minorities, but they also noted significant internal obstacles such as insufficient attention to developing these talent pools and bias in hiring and promotion decisions. They proposed focusing more on intentionally developing candidates internally and exerting meaningful effort to hire externally as the most effective strategies to increasing the numbers of diverse candidates in these pools. Based on all of the responses, we focus recommendations on six areas: Setting the tone from the top to manage and measure the pipeline, building the pipeline through broader recruiting sources, using development to refine/expand the pipeline, managing promotion processes to ensure flow through the pipeline, leveraging external recruitment to fill the pipeline, and using retention strategies to prevent leakage in the pipeline

The Impact of CEO and Board HR Expertise: Results of the 2018 HR@Moore CHRO Survey

As aspects of a firm’s human capital, such as talent, executive compensation, executive succession, and culture, become more prominent on the radar screens of Boards of Directors (BODs), the role of the Chief Human Resource Officer (CHRO) has grown in importance. Correspondingly, in recent years boards have been increasing the number of CHROs who serve as directors to ensure that at least one human capital expert is part of the board mix. This report attempts to determine the extent to which some HR expertise exists with either the CEO or the board, and if so, the extent to which it might be associated with positive outcomes. One of this report’s authors, Frank Mullins, conducted a study examining the impact of HR expertise within BODs on firms’ engagement in a broad range of diversity management activities, including hiring CEOs and managers from underrepresented groups and creating inclusive workforce policies regarding people with disabilities and sexual orientation. HR expertise was determined by manually reviewing the background of each board member to identify whether they had any professional experiences in HR. He found that firms with HR expertise on their boards were 8 percent more likely to engage in these diversity-related activities.1 The 2018 HR@Moore Survey of CHROs attempted to go beyond the original work by providing a more detailed assessment of the HR expertise that exists on the BOD, as well as the extent of the CEO’s HR expertise and support for HR. The survey was sent in April of 2018 to 326 CHROs, and the results presented in this report are based on 116 who completed this section of the survey. We matched the survey responses to whether or not companies appeared on one of the many employer reputational lists in 2018 such as Fortune Magazine’s Best Companies to Work For, Forbes’ America’s Best Employers, and GlassDoor’s Best Places to Work. The first section of this report describes the relationship between the CEO’s HR expertise and support for HR, as well as the level of HR expertise and support among board members. The second section of the report addresses the extent to which those measures are related to the company’s inclusion on employer reputational indices

The CHRO and Culture: Results of the 2019 HR@Moore Survey of Chief HR Officers

Given the rash of scandals (Wells Fargo, Uber, etc.) that cast negative light on culture and the recent positive emphasis (e.g., Larry Fink’s letters to BlackRock shareholders), part of the 2019 HR@Moore Survey of examined CHRO perceptions of how the board of directors (BOD) and CEO view culture. This report presents these results. Quantitative results from the CHRO survey indicate that knowledge of culture and its impact on organizational outcomes is highest for CHROs, followed by CEOs and board members. All three groups recognize that culture has a strong impact on engaging and retaining employees, driving performance, branding the organization, aligning organizational members, implementing strategic initiatives, and avoiding enterprise risks. The major difference among these three groups is that CHROs perceive that board members believe leveraging culture to avoid enterprise risks is its second most important effect, whereas CHROs and CEOs were perceived to rate this benefit least important. Qualitative results indicate that CHROs help the Board of Directors with understanding the organization’s culture largely by sharing data and metrics through presentations. In contrast, CHROs tend to help CEOs understand the organization’s culture more in one-on-one settings, and discussions and brainstorming sessions regarding how to best manage the culture. CHROs reported that many BODs and CEOs have been consistently focused on culture, but a large number also noted that both groups are increasingly focused on it, usually due to their increasing recognition of culture’s impact on firm outcomes such as performance, engagement, diversity & inclusion (D&I), and merger and acquisition (M&A) success. Finally, CHROs described their role in culture in ways that are helpful, specific, and to some extent, confusing. They describe some very clear ways that they help manage culture, but these descriptions vary greatly, indicating that little consensus seems to exist regarding the best or most important roles that CHROs play in building, transforming, and maintaining culture

Building the Executive Leadership Team: Results of the 2019 HR@Moore Survey of Chief HR Officers

The 2019 HR@Moore Survey of Chief HR Officers examined a number of aspects of executive leadership teams (ELTs), including team composition, the frequency with which CEOs meet with the whole team and individual members, team cohesion, and how the CHRO assesses problems that might exist within these teams. In terms of composition, our results showed that the average ELT size was 10.6 members, with 75% of ELT members being male, and only 16% of members from underrepresented groups. Just under half of CEOs tend to meet with the entire ELT on a weekly basis, with 25% meeting every two weeks and 24% meeting every month. CEOs formally meet with CFOs, COOs, and CHROs the most frequently, with over half meeting daily or weekly. CEOs meet informally with CFOs (75%), COOs (63%), and CHROs (60%) far more frequently than the formal meetings. In terms of ELT cohesion, our results indicate that most teams seem to get along professionally, but that they generally do not seem to form more personal bonds. Specific conclusions about how teams are building cohesion are inconclusive. Finally, CHROs tend to work with the CEO to assess the ELT’s effectiveness as well as to diagnose the potential causes of a lack of high performance. The causes tend to be a lack of alignment, poor communication, or a lack of trust among ELT members. Solving these problems tends to be accomplished through more clearly communicating goals and agreeing on basic principles for how the ELT should operate

Building the High-Performing Executive Leadership Team: Results of the 2020 HR@Moore Survey of Chief Human Resources Officers

Over the past two years researchers in the Center for Executive Succession have conducted interviews with CEOs, former CEOs, board members, and CHROs regarding how they build their executive leadership teams (ELT) and accelerate those teams to become high-performing. In addition, the 2020 HR@Moore Survey of CHROs assessed a number of relevant characteristics of the CEO and the ELT. This report provides a summary of this multi-method research stream. First, the interviews reveal that CEOs must first build a team whose skill sets match the needs of the strategy and whose motivations prioritize the outcomes of the organization and the team over their own. Once in place, CEOs can accelerate the team’s performance by articulating a broader purpose than just financial returns and working to create a culture and values that engage the team and the organization. They also must articulate a clear strategy and the values that will guide decision-making by team members, drive alignment to the strategy and values among the team members, and ensure that incentives promote behaviors that foster alignment and drive support for the strategy. The CEO must also constantly evolve the team as the strategy changes, and listen to the advice and counsel provided by board members. Second, the 2020 survey assessed a relatively new characteristic known as CEO Generativity, a characteristic described as a focus on developing and enhancing the vitality of the next generation and a desire to leave one’s own contributions in capable hands. We found that high Generativity CEOs had more diverse, cohesive and inclusive ELTs. They also were more engaged in the CEO succession process and had driven more diverse talent pipelines for senior operating roles

The Chief Diversity Equity and Inclusion Office: Results of the 2021 HR@Moore Survey of CHROs

In response to the racial unrest and increased focus on social justice, organizations increased their emphasis on diversity issues in 2020. To understand one way in which organizations responded to this focus, we explored how the Chief Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Officer (CDO) role changed and the background characteristics of those in the role. The results indicate that the role increased in both internal and external visibility during this time, and that a large percentage of companies elevated the talent in the role. A majority of respondents indicated that the CDO role has become more influential and visible. In addition, about one-third of respondents indicated that they had upgraded the talent in the role, divided almost equally between internal promotions and external hires. Almost 3/4s of CDOs report to the CHRO. The vast majority of those in the role have at least 3 years experience in diversity related roles, and a majority have at least 3 years experience in HR. Given what appeared to be significant changes in the role of the Chief Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Officer (or Chief Diversity Officer; CDO) and the characteristics of the people who occupy the position, the 2021 HR@Moore Survey of Chief Human Resource Officers (CHROs) sought to explore these changes. We surveyed approximately 375 CHROs and 151 of them completed the survey for a 40% response rate