Lemonade out of Budgetary Lemons: Multiplying the Effect of Doing Things In-House - Development Week

Greg Holsworth, Manager, Talent Management at Inter Pipeline

Budgetary pressures are a constant in Human Resources. Even though most (maybe all) HR professionals would argue that the “spend” in HR designed programming is in fact an investment in people that will pay dividends, we also recognize that the payback for those investments is usually measured in years, not quarters or months.

The means and ways some organizations have addressed the on-going concerns over employee development varies from industry and organization.  Depending on size, prevailing philosophies of those managing the budgets, and other considerations, sometimes I’ve had very large budgets to spend on employee development, and other times, none at all.

I used to feel very frustrated by those instances where there were zero dollars to be spent on the investments I knew would eventually pay-back a return. So, what to do?

I learned how to combine two lessons I had learned:

1. Use and follow the 70/ 20/10 development philosophy. Look for and leverage the 70 percent of all development opportunities one might have through one’s own work (trust me, they are there).

2. Remind myself of a TED Talk quote I can still recall nearly 20 years after I first heard it: “Creativity begins when you take a zero away from your proposed budget.”

“Creativity begins when you take a zero away from your proposed budget.”

Here is what I did with it: Development Week

Let me explain. A few years ago, with the above two points resonating in my head, I was presented with the challenge of coming up with a development plan for the employees at the organization I worked for at the time. The prices of the commodities that organization sold had plummeted 80 percent over a six-month period, and every month, (nearly every week really), we had to reforecast our budgets downwards, to the point of cancelling all planned spending. That was the “budgetary lemons”. So, how did we make the lemonade? We combined a few things. Firstly, we knew that we had employees who didn’t understand that organization’s main function and how they made money. We had employees who didn’t know the industry well, or the organization broadly outside of their own team or department. We also knew we had employees who were deep experts in their fields who had knowledge to share, but (importantly) struggled to communicate and relate to others outside their working team. We had executives who were mostly unknown to those outside of their circles.  We had zero funding. Crucially though, we also had a sense of fun and were willing to try new ideas.

The talent management team (called “Employee Experience” there) asked ourselves what we could do. And we came up with the idea of hosting a week-long development experience, all in-house. We asked people who were experts in their fields if they would be willing to host an introductory presentation on what they did (geology of oil and gas; market fundamentals; how hedging works; neuroscience basics, etc.). A few readily jumped on board with us, others took more convincing. We added some productivity topics (how to use your smart phone smartly, for example). We used games where its application would add to the experience (for example, Executive Jeopardy). And we created strong visuals (posters featuring our employees, who would be hosting, recreating famous movie posters) to catch the attention of employees and draw them in to attending. Over the course of one week, we offered 10 different topics, a networking lunch, a tour of a nearby field facility, and convinced our CEO and CFO to compete head-to-head in a fun game of Jeopardy, which they ended up greatly enjoying. We had nearly 400 people register and attend at least one of the sessions (out of an organizational headcount of 1000). Most attended more than one. All it cost us was some audio-visual rentals and a networking lunch.

The benefits? Each presenter was coached for two months ahead of Development Week on how to present with impact, and how to use simple graphics. They gained confidence in public speaking and how to use PowerPoint for large audiences. Each participant learned something about the industry, the organization, how they money, and why their executives cared about the things they cared about.

That was (and still is) my formula for making development lemonade out of budgetary lemons.