Five Organizations Recognized for Next Practices at i4cp's 2017 Conference

Ford, Intel, Cigna, Ingersoll Rand, and BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee recognized with i4cp’s Next Practice Awards

Five leading organizations were recipients of i4cp's 2017 Next Practice Awards in recognition of their implementation of outstanding innovations and achievement in the advancement of people practices.

i4cp's Next Practice Awards celebrate and highlights leading-edge people practices and the organizations implementing them to positively impact the bottom-line. The winners were announced today at the i4cp 2017 Conference: Next Practices Now, in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Ford Motor Company, Intel, Cigna, Ingersoll Rand, and BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee were selected as winners from among 11 semi-finalists for HR initiatives ranging from employee development to team analytics.

Recent research by i4cp has found that effective learning and development techniques and workforce planning are two critical ways to both mitigate talent risk and have positive impact on market performance; many of the submissions by the award recipients centered on initiatives to improve the employee experience and mitigate talent risk.

• Ford Motor Company – as part of the company’s commitment to creating value by extending Ford’s vision of making people’s lives better, the HR leadership team selected seven HR employees from all regions and levels across the organization to create a People Lab to take a customer-centric approach to improving the employee experience. The People Lab produced several key deliverables that are at the core of Ford’s HR transformation efforts, including a new employment value proposition.
• Intel – in an effort to provide managers with research-based knowledge and tools to assess and improve the teams they manage, and to create the most effective teams possible, Intel conducted an in-depth study of both existing third-party research and internal analysis into team effectiveness. The technology firm developed a quantitative team metric that provides clear feedback and ongoing development for team leaders, as well as an assessment that has been administered to 34 teams so far.
• Cigna – to strengthen its commitment to the Cigna brand promise and better meet customers’ needs, Cigna identified a variety of ways to improve its onboarding and ongoing training programs using interpersonal learning techniques to create an overall learner-driven, content-rich experience. One area of focus was the creation of an immersive soft-skills development program called Developing Emotional Connections.
• Ingersoll Rand – the company created a new approach to career development called Career Progress, which combines new career management resources and a more consistent way to organize jobs across the company. Together, these components help employees better understand where their jobs fit in relation to others, and assess and plan short- and long-term development at the company.
• BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee – the non-profit healthcare organization consolidated all of its existing career development events, activities, and learning opportunities together to design careers around experiences, not positions; motivate employees with employability, not title progression; build better awareness for internal opportunities; and create a talent brokerage for managers to share talent, among other programs.

The discovery of next practices—human capital tactics and/or strategies that few companies are employing but that are highly correlated with market performance—is one of the Institute for Corporate Productivity’s (i4cp) primary focuses. To that end, i4cp looks to its network of member organizations to uncover world-class examples of next practices in action. The Next Practice Awards showcase the design, implementation, and measurement of innovative people practices that effectively address current business challenges.

Organizations ranging from established Fortune 500 firms to those going through massive overhauls represented 2017's 11 semi-finalists and included BASF, Booz Allen Hamilton, Prudential, TIAA, Sears, and T-Mobile.

The winners’ submission, as well as those of other semi-finalists, will be featured on the i4cp website starting in mid-April (available exclusively to i4cp member organizations).