New product offers diagnosis to companies' HR problems

Information is power. Knowing why it is losing people can give a company or organisation a diagnosis of what's wrong and what needs to be done.

Do people walk because they don't feel that their work is recognised? Is communication deficient? Or are relationships or the emotional climate in the workplace unhealthy?

Irish company Graphite Human Resources Management believes one of its products - ODP (Organisational Diagnostic Profiler) - will provide HR managers with a fast and accurate diagnostic survey of anything that is amiss in an organisation. Browser-based for use on a corporate intranet or network, it gives "immediate results in multi-format graphics" and uses a "standard model for analysis based on proven organisational theory". It aims to "capture quickly and efficiently core information on the people dimension of a business".

Mr David O'Reilly of Graphite HRM told The Irish Times: "It's not a happy survey. This is diagnostic. It goes to the bones of the organisation. It gets feedback from the most important people in the organisation - that's everybody."

ODP provides information under the headings of goals, structure, relationships, climate, leaders and process. There are three criteria under each heading. For instance, goals are analysed under goal clarity, goal agreement and goal fit (i.e., do the goals fit the organisation?).

It shows the mean and the spread under each subheading. For instance, although most people might agree there is goal agreement, it can point out that a significant number of people strongly disagree with this in a particular department. ["]So HR department knows what it has to set out to try to do,["] he says.

An analysis can be done for the whole organisation or for individual departments or according to employee position, length of time in the organisation or educational qualifications. This enables, for instance, outcomes from senior management to be compared with the organisation as a whole. Analyses can also be compared with previous surveys.

"It's totally confidential . . . You can't track anybody," he says, adding: "It's not a witch hunt. It's a system with a chance for companies to look into their organisation deeply. The most important parts of their organisation are the people . . . This will blow up issues within the organisation which could be easily solved and possibly will lead to retention rates increasing."

Rather than being a threat to workers, the survey provides "a great opportunity for workers to put across their points of view within a company", he says. Organisations can buy the system, in which case Graphite trains HR managers in its use during a five-day course. Smaller companies employing about 100 workers can save the expense of buying the software and training workers by engaging Graphite to install the system on the client's server and analyse the survey off-site.

Graphite conducts the survey within its own workforce of 15 every quarter. In a company of this size, anonymity is not an issue so the survey is used as an open forum. "Then we can have a sit-down and discuss the results."

ODP varies in price depending on the number of users. The software costs £3,000 (€3,809) per user, i.e., the people who are going to do the analysis, usually HR personnel. So if three people do the analysis, it costs £9,000. On top of that, there's an annual licence fee of 18 per cent of the software cost. Training costs about £2,000 per person for a week's training. And then the company buys units.

"If they've got 50 employees, they'll have to buy 50 units at £10 per unit. So that's £500. So, year two, all it costs them is £500," he says.

While the American spelling and jargon such as "commonality" in publicity materials can irritate, the product itself seems impressive. And fast. A limitation is its cost, pitching the product, at least for now, at larger organisations rather than small and medium-sized enterprises.

A demonstration of the ODP software can be downloaded at www.graphitehrm.ie jmarms@irish-times.ie