| How Do We Measure Potential When Making Promotions? | |
| We base all our job promotion decisions on past performance and recommendations of the immediate superior. We know this is not a reliable method, since past performance in one job is not necessarily a good predictor to future performance, especially when a person assumes a higher position. The question is, without going to a full-blown assessment center, what tools can we use to measure a person's potential to find out if they are suitable for a higher position? --Eager to Know, manufacturing, Pahang, Malaysia | |
| The good news is that you have a lot of available options. You are correct that full-blown assessment centers are a useful but expensive way to evaluate performance. They are almost always reserved for managerial positions because of the time and expense they require.
There are two related options to consider in your situation. The first is to employ some form of simple assessment measure to help you systematically evaluate your candidates for internal promotion. It is hard to determine exactly which type of assessment may be best for your situation without understanding more about the jobs you are trying to fill. However, tons of really good assessments are on the market to help hiring managers clearly understand an individual's capabilities. It is important to note that I am not recommending these assessments be used as the sole criterion for making hiring decisions. Rather, they should be viewed as a useful supplement to other information, including supervisory ratings and recommendations.
Your second option actually is a bigger-picture strategy that leverages both the tactics you already use along with additional assessment tools. This involves using your performance management program as a strategic element of your internal hiring initiative. Again, it is hard to make specific recommendations without knowing more details, but in general data collected as part of a formal performance evaluation yields lots of valuable information to aid internal promotion decisions.
Assessments can play a key role in this strategy, since many organizations use assessment tools as part of the process for evaluating performance and for performance planning, coaching, etc. In fact, many organizations are using data collected from pre-employment assessments as a baseline from which performance planning and evaluation can begin. Again, it is important to point out that these assessments should never be the only source of information used to evaluate a candidate. In your situation, supervisors should be actively managing the performance of employees and should be aware of assessment results as part of this process.
I believe your current strategy--leveraging the experience and knowledge of supervisors--should continue to be a key part of your future strategy. The most important thing is to create a process whereby these individuals are able to consistently obtain quality information to help them understand their employees better and thus make better promotional decisions.
One final note: Promotional decisions tend to attract much more litigation than initial employment decisions do. For this reason it is important that you create a structured process for internal promotions that will allow you to document the key criteria used when making promotional decisions. The strategy outlined should help. | |
Monday, March 7, 2011
How Do We Measure Potential When Making Promotions?
How Do We Change From Informal to Formal Performance Management?
| How Do We Change From Informal to Formal Performance Management? | |
| Our technology firm anticipates rapid growth this year. Presently we conduct annual performance reviews that are rather informal. This method is manageable now, but as the company grows how could we introduce structured performance management for employees of various occupations? --Evolving, software and services, Toronto | |
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| Rapid growth is a double-edged sword. On one side it implies increased business opportunities, rising market share and enhanced competitive advantage. On the other side, it can put a strain on your organization to achieve more goals. This strain can put pressure on internal initiatives including training, reward and recognition programs, and the performance management system.
Introducing a formal performance management system can be challenging, especially if your employees are used to a more informal system. People resist change unless they can see its benefit to them, and especially if they haven't assisted in developing the new initiative. The more ownership people have of a system, the more of an impact it will have on goal attainment. Consider using the IMPACT acronym when establishing performance management:
A performance management system focuses light on the most important behaviors and results your organization wants achieve. When a company is growing rapidly, it is important to take a step back to ensure that internal initiatives match your business goals.
SOURCE: Dana Jarvis, human resources director, Snavely Forest Products , Pittsburgh, March 6, 2006. Jarvis also is an adjunct professor at Duquesne University. | |
How Do We Muzzle an Office Tattletale?
| How Do We Muzzle an Office Tattletale? | |
| Our HRIS manager frequently tattles on her peers to our boss, who is vice president of human resources. In fact, the only employee upon whom she does not tattle is her only subordinate. She is really wrecking morale, teamwork and communications in our office. Why does she do this? What are the ramifications? And what might cause her to change her behavior? —Beleaguered in Banking, Central California | |
| This scenario seems to come straight out of a family script or elementary school situation. The HRIS manager is telling "Daddy" about how naughty her siblings have been; she comes across as wanting to be "teacher's pet." Alas, she's more pest than pet. Even if the HRIS manager has very high work standards that she feels others are not meeting, the boss is the real problem. Regarding your first question--why she persists in this behavior–I suspect there are some immature needs calling for attention or approval. Maybe some buried sibling rivalry is being played out. Unfortunately, your boss is enabling this dysfunction. His motivation is another unanswered question. Perhaps his action stems from a need to be a father figure, or a need to enhance his sense of power and control, or even possibly a desire to pursue a romantic dalliance. In addition to fostering a climate of unfairness and favoritism, this tattling certainly will stir resentment and evoke jealousy. Let's concentrate on some specific issues and strategies.
1. Talk to the Boss. Even if you think this will go nowhere, you should register your concern for the record. Even better would be having two or three employees approach your boss to detail the negative impact of your HRIS manager's behavior. If you do this, be prepared with documentation of her behavior and observable consequences--e.g., time spent by team members venting at lunch, any verbal blowups or testiness, etc. If the boss reacts favorably to having a set of eyes and ears on the work floor, propose a team meeting to discuss concerns about individual or departmental performance or team cooperation. I suspect that if both the boss and the HRIS manager knew how to run effective team meetings, much of the problems you report would disappear. Nonetheless, if he dismisses this suggestion or chalks up your complaints to jealousy, it will be time for other intervention options.
Talk to the EAP. If your company has an employee assistance program, make time to share your concerns with a professional counselor. Counselors may be able to get your boss' attention and facilitate team meetings to clear the air. Finally, the EAP counselor can go over your boss' head and hopefully get someone of higher authority to deal with your boss' behavior.
Talk to a Colleague of Your Boss. If you want to try an informal intervention before using the EAP option, try to enlist the support of an executive colleague or friend of your boss. This person should have your boss' welfare in mind and not be afraid to talk straight with your boss. Of course, don't trash your boss; mainly express your desire to stop the damage to morale and rebuild team cooperation. SOURCE: Mark Gorkin, LICSW, the Stress Doc , Washington, D.C., February 27, 2006. | |
How Do I Describe the Different Evaluation Methods to Management?
| How Do I Describe the Different Evaluation Methods to Management? | |
| I have been using various appraisal tools, including management by objectives, 360-degree feedback and comparative performance appraisal methods. These give me choices when carrying out performance appraisals. However, management is questioning whether these tools are useful in our organization. How could I give a synopsis of the pros and cons of each method? --Overcome by Choices, manufacturing, Singapore | |
| Making sure employees' work activities support corporate strategies is critical to reaching your business goals. It allows you to make appropriate compensation and promotion decisions and to encourage and develop the talent your company needs to meet new demands and challenges. Regular performance appraisals enable individual employees to enhance their skills that lead to personal and professional growth. The result is a workforce that shows greater motivation and commitment.
Various techniques and formats exist to measure performance, as well as spinoffs on traditional models.
Self-appraisals
Cons:
360-degree feedback
Cons:
Management by objectives
Cons:
A complete performance management program would consist of many of the above techniques in a frequent cycle. Continually reviewing an employee's performance tends to increase accountability and organizational commitment while providing the chance to demonstrate productive behaviors to employees (not to mention aid their personal development). Continuous feedback gives you a chance to take corrective action on a more immediate basis.
Before implementing any of these evaluation methods, it's imperative that you consider your company's culture and business drivers, and determine which performance tools are suitable based on your business processes and technology infrastructure. SOURCE: Tracy Martin, Knowledge Infusion , San Ramon, California, March 6, 2006. | |
How Do We Improve Retention of Remote Workers?
| How Do We Improve Retention of Remote Workers? | |
| How do we develop a set of best practices to target retention issues associated with managing a geographically dispersed workforce? | |
| Retaining good workers is always a challenge in today's competitive environment, but keeping workers who are geographically dispersed adds even more complexity. You should consider this three-step approach: 1. Make direct supervisors responsible for achieving retention goals. Smart organizations are shifting retention responsibility to leaders. Numerous pieces of research tell us that employees join for reasons of pay, benefits, duties or schedules. But how long they stay with a company most often is directly tied to relationships with their immediate supervisors. These organizations set retention goals with supervisors, track retention at the supervisor level, and then provide rewards and/or consequences to supervisors based on goal achievement. For example, tying 30 percent of a performance bonus to retention tends to motivate supervisors to work harder at keeping key people. 2. Provide supervisors with retention training and coaching so they can achieve their retention goals. What is the No. 1 quality that employees want in their leaders--the quality that will cause them to remain with your organization longer? The answer: They want a supervisor they trust. Building and maintaining trust with remote workers can be especially difficult because of the absence of daily personal contact. As a result, organizations must be especially keen to hire and promote "trust-builders" to supervisory positions. Then they must provide training to help them meet commitments, tell the truth, share credit but not blame, apologize and admit mistakes, and conduct other trust-building behaviors. 3. Ensure leaders on all levels have retention discussions with remote employees. Traditional supervisory updates are about production and other job tasks. Organizations can improve retention with remote employees by teaching leaders to initiate specific retention discussions, such as:
Make your leaders/supervisors accountable for retention and equip them with the skills or training they'll need. It is the best strategy for retaining a geographically dispersed workforce. SOURCE: Dick Finnegan, TalentKeepers, Maitland, Florida, March 29, 2006. | |
How Do We Know When It's Time to Add a Full-time HR Department?
| How Do We Know When It's Time to Add a Full-time HR Department? | |
| What criteria would help us determine if our company needs a human resources department? Currently, our accounting department handles such HR functions as filing workers' comp and unemployment claims, as well as some personnel issues. Our individual supervisors are responsible for recruiting, hiring/firing, training, retention and other functions. We are trying to figure out whether it is time to consolidate these various duties into a single HR department. Nothing glaring is prompting our discussion, but we are trying to weigh the virtue of consolidating against the decentralized practices we have in place. —Accountant Doubling as HR, manufacturing, Broussard, Louisiana | |
| Consider yourself fortunate that nothing glaring has yet forced you to consolidate HR activities in one place. Organizations adhering to the decentralized approach you describe risk confronting expensive compliance liabilities while missing critical opportunities to gain a competitive edge through their people. So the short answer is: Yes, it is time for you to consolidate. Here's why:
Avoid Compliance Risk. Note that all organizations (particularly those with more than 50 people) are subject to many federal (not to mention state) regulations pertaining to leave, compliance reporting, discrimination, work hours, benefit coverage and so on. The bigger the company, and the more locations in which it operates, the more complex these compliance issues become.
Is your accounting department truly capable of keeping up with all of these issues? What about the individual supervisors who are recruiting, hiring and firing people--are they all briefed, for example, on questions that are off limits in job interviews? Are they properly documenting, in a consistent manner, the terminations that they handle?
The best way to assess your degree of exposure is to conduct a comprehensive compliance audit of all of your HR practices. The results will help you determine whether compliance issues alone demand a quick transition to a formal HR function.
Build a Framework for Growth. Smaller organizations, particularly those with fewer than 50 employees, typically have enough shared knowledge and practice to meet essential human resources needs.
Growth, whether organic or through mergers and acquisitions, will put a dramatic strain on the organization if an HR framework is not in place. This framework would include a reasonable policy and procedure structure, investment in key resources and capability to support the business through recruiting, onboarding, setting expectations and doing performance management. The framework allows growth to take place without distracting management from its business focus. The alternative often is chaos.
Make the Most of Your Talent. There is a third and enormously compelling reason to establish a dedicated HR function. Professionally run HR departments will add tremendous value to your company by ensuring that you hire--and keep--the best talent to drive your business forward.
HR can do this by advising on a myriad of issues, from determining whether your company has the right people in the right roles to providing managers with training they need to lead the organization. How well your company deals with these broader issues and presents itself to employees and prospective employees constitutes your company's branding. A scattershot approach to HR, such as you have now, is limited in the impact it has on your brand. A well-managed professional HR function, however, adds tremendous value and gives you a competitive edge in attracting and retaining superior talent. [SOURCE: Jud DeCew, Capital H Group , Boston, February 10, 2006.] | |
Three Myths of Management
The catalogue of poor decision practices is immense, but we focus here on three of the most common and, in our experience, most harmful to companies.
Casual benchmarking
There is nothing wrong with learning from others' experience—vicarious learning, as contrasted with direct experience, is an important way for both people and organizations to learn how to navigate a path through the world. After all, it is a lot cheaper and easier to learn from the mistakes, setbacks, and successes of others than to treat every management challenge as something no organization has ever faced before. So benchmarking—using other companies' performance and experience to set standards for your own company—makes a lot of sense. In the end, good or bad performance is defined and measured largely in relation to what others are doing.
The problem lies with the way that benchmarking is usually practiced: It is far too "casual." The logic behind what works at top performers, why it works, and what will work elsewhere is barely unraveled, resulting in mindless imitation. Consider a pair of quick examples. When United Airlines decided in 1994 to compete with Southwest in the intra-California marketplace, the company tried to imitate Southwest. United put its gate staff and flight attendants in casual clothes; it flew only Boeing 737s; it gave the service a different name, "Shuttle by United," and used separate planes and crews; it stopped serving food; it increased the frequency of its flights and reduced the scheduled time planes spent on the ground, copying Southwest's legendary quick turnarounds. Southwest, however, wound up with a higher market share in California than it had before United launched its imitation. The Shuttle failed and is now shuttered.
When U.S. automobile companies decided to embrace total quality management and emulate Toyota, the world leader in automobile manufacturing, many copied its factory floor practices. They installed pull-cords that stopped the assembly line if defects were noticed, just-in-time inventory systems, and statistical process control charts. Yet even today, decades later, U.S. automakers for the most part still lag behind Toyota in productivity—the hours required to assemble a car—and many trail in quality and design features as well. Similar failures have plagued retailers' efforts to copy Nordstrom's sales commission system to achieve higher service levels, and the numerous organizations that attempted to mimic General Electric's forced-curve performance-ranking system.
In these and scores of other examples, a pair of fundamental problems render casual benchmarking ineffective. The first is that people copy the most visible, obvious, and frequently least important practices. Southwest's success is based on its culture and management philosophy, the priority it places on its employees (Southwest did not lay off one person following the September 11 meltdown in the aviation industry), not on how it dresses its gate agents and flight attendants, which planes it flies, or how it schedules them. Similarly, the secret to Toyota's success is not a set of techniques but its philosophy—the mindset of total quality management and continuous improvement it has embraced—and the company's relationship with workers that has enabled it to tap their deep knowledge. As a wise executive in one of our classes said about imitating others, "We have been benchmarking the wrong things. Instead of copying what others do, we ought to copy how they think."
This executive was partly right but did not go far enough. The second problem is that companies often have different strategies, different competitive environments, and different business models—all of which make what they need to do to be successful different from what others are doing. Something that helps one organization can damage another. This is true particularly for companies that borrow practices from other industries, but often is true for organizations even within the same industry.
The fundamental problem is that few companies, in their urge to copy—an urge often stimulated by consultants who, much as bees spread pollen across flowers, take ideas from one place to the next—ever ask the basic question of why something might enhance performance. Before you run off to benchmark mindlessly, spending effort and money that results in no payoff, or worse yet, in problems that you never had before, ask yourself:
- Is the success you observe by the benchmarking target because of the practice you seek to emulate? Southwest Airlines is the most successful airline in the history of that industry. Herb Kelleher served as CEO during most of Southwest's history and remains the chairman to this day. Kelleher drinks a lot of Wild Turkey bourbon. So does that mean that if your CEO starts drinking as much Wild Turkey as Kelleher, your company will dominate its industry? Get the point?
- Why is a particular practice linked to performance improvement—what is the logic? If you can't explain the underlying logic or theory of why something should enhance performance, you are likely engaging in superstitious learning and may be copying something that is irrelevant or even damaging.
- What are the downsides and disadvantages to implementing the practice, even if it is a good idea? Are there ways of mitigating these problems, perhaps ways your target uses that you aren't seeing?
Doing what (seems to have) worked in the past
Suppose you went to a doctor who said, "I'm going to do an appendectomy on you." When you asked why, the doctor answered, "because I did one on my last patient and it made him better." We suspect you would hightail it out of that office, because you know that the treatment ought to fit the disease, regardless of whether or not the treatment helped the previous patient. Strangely enough, that logical thought process happens less than we might care to admit in most companies.
Consider a couple of industry examples. In a compensation committee meeting of a small software company that we worked with, the committee chair, a successful and smart executive, recommended the compensation policies he had employed at his last firm. He even suggested that his former head of human resources call the head of HR at this company to facilitate precise imitation. The fact that the two companies were of dramatically different sizes, used different distribution methods, and sold to different markets and customers somehow didn't faze him or many fellow committee members. This company isn't alone: How many of you are using performance appraisal forms that your executives brought with them from another company? And then there is the case of the same strategy and approach being used regardless of the situation. Al Dunlap—the notorious Chainsaw Al—did layoffs (and it turns out, accounting fraud) in all of his companies, including Scott Paper and Sunbeam. Similarly, executives who believe that any unit that isn't ranked number one or two in its market needs to be sold typically carry that approach to new jobs. The aphorism that nothing predicts future behavior better than past behavior is especially true for executives who develop a template and use it again and again in every situation.
There is nothing wrong with learning from experience and developing proficiency at certain strategies and tactics. We ought to learn from experience—and use that experience to get better at what we do and develop specialties and talents that we can execute with consummate skill. The problems come when the new situation is different from the past and when what we "learned" was right in the past may have been wrong, or incomplete, in the first place.
In the software company example, the chair's recommended system—individual incentive pay with big rewards for making sales—would have undermined the consultative sales process that was essential for selling this company's particular product. The layoffs used routinely by Al Dunlap and so many other executives often don't work. Blindly copying the same approach without considering the underlying business problems is just plain dumb. And lots of companies have gotten into trouble by importing, without sufficient thought, performance management and other measurement practices from past experience at other companies.
As in benchmarking, asking some simple questions and acting on their answers can help avoid the bad results that come from mindlessly repeating the past:
- Are you sure that the practice that you are about to repeat is associated with the past success? Be careful to not confuse success that has occurred in spite of some policy or action with success that has occurred because of that action.
- Is the new situation—the business, the technology, the customers, the business model, the competitive environment—so similar to past situations that what worked in the past will work in the new setting?
- Why do you think the past practice you intend to use again has been effective? If you cannot unpack the logic of why things have worked, it is unlikely you will be able to determine whether or not they will work this time.
Following deeply held yet unexamined ideologies
The third flawed and widespread basis for decisions often does the most damage because it is the most difficult to change. It happens when people are overly influenced by deeply held ideologies or beliefs—causing their organization to adopt some management practice not because it is based on sound logic or hard facts but because managers "believe" it works, or it matches their (sometimes flawed) assumptions about what propels people and organizations to be successful.
The use and defense of stock options as a compensation strategy is a great example of belief trumping evidence, to the detriment of organizations. In the early years of the new millennium, there was an unprecedented wave of corporate bankruptcies and financial scandals. Senior executives lied about their company's performance, even as they sold stock and left pension funds and other investors holding worthless paper. Experts and evidence now place a large part of the blame for financial scandals on the excessive use of stock options and stock-based compensation.
Carol Bowie, director of governance research services at the Investor Responsibility Research Center, concluded, "At the very least, options tended to promote a short-term focus . . . and at worst they promoted fraudulent activity to manipulate earnings." Roy Satterthwaite, a beneficiary of the options craze while a vice president at Commerce One, noted that options not only fueled long work weeks but they skewed people's decision priorities, leading to an excessive focus on cutting deals and growing revenues, the numbers the market seemed to focus on. Satterthwaite confessed that options "motivated us to a selfish, short-term view" and did not create long-term value. Nor is the evidence about stock options and their effects just anecdotal. One study comparing 435 companies that had to restate their financial statements with companies that did not found that the higher the proportion of the senior executives' pay in stock options, the more likely the company was to have restated its earnings. A study by Moody's, the bond rating service, concluded that incentive pay packages can "create an environment that ultimately leads to fraud."
Even the logic behind the use of options as managerial incentive is flawed once you consider what behaviors are actually rewarded. Roger Martin, Dean of the University of Toronto's business school and one of the co-founders of the strategy consulting firm Monitor, noted the problems of mixing the measuring and rewarding of performance in an expectations market—the stock market—with the measuring and rewarding of performance in the real market of sales, earnings, and productivity. As he noted, in the National Football League, players would never be permitted to profit from beating the point spread—the expectations market—because it would encourage all kinds of nefarious activity. Martin argued that, "stock-based compensation is an incentive to increase expectations, not performance. The easiest way to do that is to hype the stock."
There is, in fact, little evidence that equity incentives of any kind, including stock options, enhance organizational performance. One review of more than 220 studies concluded that equity ownership had no consistent effects on financial performance. Another massive study and review of research on executive compensation published by the National Bureau of Economic Research reported that most schemes designed to align managerial and shareholder interests failed to do so; instead, executive compensation practices just operated as devices to enrich senior managers, who usually received most of the stock options.
Yet executives, particularly those in high technology, remain uninterested in and unconvinced by the logic and the evidence, waging political battles to avoid expensing stock options on their income statements and maintaining that stock options are not only helpful but essential for building their companies. The evidence notwithstanding, many executives maintain that options create an ownership culture that encourages eighty-hour workweeks, frugality with the company's money, and a host of personal sacrifices designed to make the options more valuable. T. J. Rodgers, Chief Executive of Cypress Semiconductor, is typical. He has maintained that without options, "I would no longer have employee shareholders, I would just have employees."
Stock options are more crucial to success, and perhaps less likely to produce false hype, in small, privately held start-up companies. The entrepreneurship fueled by options helps new companies get off the ground. Cash is at a premium in most start-ups, and the chance to strike it rich attracts talent that otherwise would remain out of reach. Yet, despite such virtues, unwavering belief in stock options that is so pervasive among the leaders of high technology companies is not based on sound evidence or logic.
And stock options are just one case where vehement beliefs rather than logic and evidence guide management ideas and actions. A series of studies demonstrates that people, especially those who write for and read the business press, believe in the first-mover advantage—that the first company to enter an industry or market will have an edge over competitors. Existing empirical evidence is actually mixed and unclear as to whether such an advantage exists, and many of the "success stories" purported to support the first-mover advantage turn out to be false—Amazon.com, for example, was not the first company to start selling books on the Web. The more that people read the business press, the more strongly they believe in first-mover advantage. But nonbusinesspeople usually believe in it as well, apparently because of cultural beliefs that favor being first, and giving either group—experienced or naïve—contradictory evidence does not cause them to lose their faith in the first-mover advantage. Beliefs rooted in ideology or in cultural values are quite "sticky"—they resist disconfirming evidence and persist in affecting judgments and choice, regardless of whether or not they are true.
To avoid succumbing to using belief or ideology over evidence, ask yourself:
- Is my preference for a particular management practice solely or mostly because it fits with my intuitions about people and organizations?
- Am I requiring the same level of proof and the same amount of data regardless of whether or not the issue is one I believe in?
- And, most important, are my colleagues and I allowing our beliefs to cloud our willingness to gather and consider data that may be pertinent to our choices?
[Jeffrey Pfeffer is a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford's Graduate School of Business.
Robert I. Sutton is a professor of management science and engineering at Stanford. He and Jeffrey Pfeffer coauthored The Knowing-Doing Gap (HBS Press, 2000).]
Is Your Team In V-Formation? Focus On Teamwork
Geese fly in V-formation for aerodynamic efficiency. Is management and staff focused on reaching a common goal through teamwork? Employee satisfaction surveys can help in making sure teams stay focused and fly in V-formation to customer satisfaction.
In nature, teams work together to more easily achieve common goals. Wolves hunt together in packs, forming a formidable force to be reckoned with when they surround and in unison, move in on their prey. They are much more efficient in a pack than is the proverbial lone wolf. Geese work together when in flight, taking turns as the leader when forming the familiar V-formation that aerodynamically cuts the air for more efficient flying. Even ants find better results through teamwork, whether in building nests or in finding the shortest route to food as they leave pheromones behind as they walk. As a result, ants that have found the shortest route to food leave behind more pheromones than those that have taken a longer route, effectively helping all of the following ants to take the shorter route.
In all cases, there is a certain built-in sense of urgency to get results—to obtain food, to get to warmer weather or to find the shortest route. Clear roles and responsibilities are set for each team member in building a strong team. Usually this entails finding individual strengths that compliment one another and then using those strengths to remove obstacles or challenges. In short, each team member is used effectively to reach their cumulative goal.
The same should be said for your property. Every employee should be focused on reaching a common goal through teamwork. They should have clearly defined responsibilities that management supports by identifying strengths of each team member. Team members should be selected to compliment one another by utilizing their differing skills and experiences.
During the team building process, associates' feedback, concerns and ideas are all important towards developing the team into a well-oiled machine. Semi-annual and/or annual employee satisfaction surveys can offer a wealth of knowledge and insight into these areas. Because the responses and resulting data are kept in strict confidence, the responses are therefore truthful and informative. HVS/The Ference Group and The Center For Survey Research has been providing the hotel industry with custom, detailed reports that have been data-mined from these surveys for over 20 years.
The latest example of the benefit in utilizing a Team Member Satisfaction Survey is Station Casinos in Las Vegas. Having been recently named to Fortune Magazine's "100 Best Companies To Work For," this prestigious award can be traced back to corporate "drivers" that are measured in the survey. When organizational dimensions such as "Job Satisfaction and Morale" reach over 87% (an Excellent rating) you can be sure that management and team members are communicating and supporting each other. Additionally, almost 86% of respondents indicated that their managers created good team efforts for their property. Over 88% indicated that they were not afraid to ask for help it they did not know how to do something, thereby encouraging support towards each other to do their very best work and to help in solving job-related problems. Associates that network and perform as a team in order to respond to guest's needs allow managers more time to continue to upgrade the working environment and help celebrate successes.
Managers that communicate their approval and let their team members know of the great job they are doing inspire their team to even greater heights. Developing their team through education and allowing them time to problem solve is an investment that pays dividends for both the individuals as well as the property. Making sure that recognition is fairly distributed and that the team is appreciated can be an extremely beneficial tool.
Teams that have fun and enjoy their work will focus on yet higher goals and be more willing to get the job done, as opposed to employees that commit only to a humdrum existence of working their shift each day with no incentives in sight. If at all possible, throw a party, have an outing or invite your team for an informal get-together after work. Even if you can celebrate a team's success with pizza for lunch or a cake during a break, it is another positive reinforcement of the team effort and a building block to future successes.
Once again, whether or not employees are recognized for the contributions they are able to make to the success of the property is a measurable survey question that can aid in furthering recognition and promoting teamwork. It is extremely important to find out what the team's perception of their efforts are and not rely only on what management thinks or looks at. Realizing the shortfalls as well as the successes of the teams can initiate new and improved avenues of attack to acquiring a more satisfied and loyal guest.
In a time when every customer is precious, when every hotel and casino is seeking a bigger piece of the pie, and when each property is looking to gain more loyalty in guests returning time and time again, the road to success may lie in the focus on teamwork. Individuals must work together within their department to wow the customer. Teams must work together between departments to present a seamless experience for each guest as well.
Management must focus on supporting, improving, recognizing and rewarding excellence in teamwork. Line staff must focus on using their strengths and developing a close-knit team that effectively takes care of each guests' needs. Both management and staff need to focus on celebrating success and having fun while reaching team goals.
As in nature, when teams come together, they can offer a formidable force to be reckoned with. Finding that "V-formation" that cuts through to service excellence and discovering the shortest route to your goals can provide limitless success to both individuals and to teams, and ensure that each property will not only survive in these challenging times, but prosper and grow.
Station Casinos has become increasingly proficient in flying in "V-formation" to consistently increase team member satisfaction over the last decade. Now it's up to you to either get in formation or lag behind the leaders. With its recent Quality Award of Fortune 100's Best Companies, Station Casinos is one of the companies leading the pack. Will you be able to run with that pack, or merely be left to howl at the moon?
How Do We Build a Culture of Customer Service?
| How Do We Build a Culture of Customer Service? | |
| We are a diversified organization with 11 companies (all in retail merchandising). What are the steps we should take to build a corporate culture oriented around customer service? What are the critical variables to consider in creating an incentive scheme? Can you share some customer service measuring tools? —Keeping Everyone Happy, retail, Mandaluyong City, Philippines | |
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| Building a customer-service-oriented culture can be a huge challenge for an organization of any size or complexity. However, it can be done and done well. Just look at Southwest Airlines, Ritz-Carlton Hotels, Nordstrom and Whole Foods Market as some examples of companies renowned for providing world-class service. There are four steps to building a customer-service-oriented culture: Gain commitment from the top Most of us at one time or another have heard a CEO proclaim, "We are a customer-focused company." But when you look behind the curtain, you still see long lines, extended wait times, poorly trained staff, inadequate responses and dissatisfied customers. Develop a comprehensive plan Some companies develop their customer service plans internally using an in-house project manager. Still others hire consultants. Regardless of the option you choose, the planning team should involve employees at all levels. Soliciting employee opinions helps identify and resolve potential issues before they become major roadblocks to cultural change. Many companies conduct employee-satisfaction surveys to benchmark the current culture, and also to establish a baseline for measuring employee satisfaction in the future. Satisfied employees deliver satisfied customers, so measuring customer satisfaction should be an integral part of your plan. Implement the plan It is critical to frequently reinforce the goals and successes of your program. This can be accomplished with refresher sessions and reports of progress publicized via companywide meetings, newsletters, staff e-mails, other internal news media and external media outlets. Measure success | |
Balancing Priorities on Schedule
We get pulled in many directions during the day—unexpected interruptions, phone calls, e-mails. It's time to get control of your schedule.
Wayne Curtis, vice president of partnership investments at Fannie Mae (Washington, D.C.), had to fundamentally rethink his approach to work when the company's public finance business was added to his portfolio this past spring. Before, an agreement to extend a line of credit to a state or local authority for a fifty-unit housing project might crystallize over a two-month period. But now on top of this responsibility was the fast-paced work involved in evaluating multibillion-dollar bond purchases.
"Suddenly, my business volume had increased by a factor of 10," he says, "and the rhythm of the new work was very different from the work I had been doing. I was really grappling with how to stay focused on long-term priorities."
An additional challenge was one faced by many professionals when they become managers: the expectation that they'll continue to perform as technical experts even though their primary duties are now managerial and strategic. This creates the tendency to hold on to tasks that subordinates could handle.
Dilemmas like these highlight the way that the pace and pressure of work crowd out what author Thomas Hylland Eriksen calls "slow time." Being able to work faster and to take on more work is jeopardizing our high performance. Increasingly, he explains in Tyranny of the Moment (Pluto Press, 2001), we find ourselves with little, if any, of the kind of time ideally suited for the detailed, focused, and unhurried intellectual and interpersonal work upon which high performance depends.
How do you make the most of this precious commodity? For some time, management experts have advised that you develop an understanding of the interplay between importance and urgency in the tasks you face. More recent thinking, however, underscores the importance of recognizing the rhythm associated with a given task.
Triaging the tasks you face
To maximize your slow time, you have to be clear about your purpose, says Washington, D.C.-based executive coach David Coleman. "Key things you want to accomplish go into your schedule first, so that everything else falls in line."
Using a technique from the classic time-management book First Things First, by Stephen A. Covey et al. (Simon & Schuster, 1994), Coleman has his clients imagine that they have rocks, gravel, and sand with which to fill a bowl. The rocks represent the most strategically significant tasks; the gravel, the work that has the next highest priority; and the sand, the least important activities. Starting with the sand and gravel leaves no room for the rocks. But by working backward—starting with rocks first, then putting in the gravel, and finally adding the sand—clients find that there's plenty of room for everything. The highest-priority goals get first crack at a client's time, and the other tasks get accomplished in descending order of importance.
Suddenly the to-do list, once overwhelming, seems very doable.
Many management experts suggest using a simple two-by-two matrix to identify your highest-priority tasks. First Things First defines the four quadrants in such a matrix as:
1. Urgent and important tasks (Quadrant I). For example, dealing with a product recall or completing due diligence before an acquisition can be approved.
2. Not urgent but important tasks (Quadrant II). Examples here include developing key business relationships and drafting a plan for how your company will respond to the changes you foresee taking place in your industry 18 months down the road.
3. Urgent but not important tasks (Quadrant III). Examples of these tasks are taking impromptu phone calls from sales reps or fielding a request from a subordinate to help make arrangements for next week's unit party.
4. Not urgent and not important tasks (Quadrant IV). For instance, surfing the Internet or gossiping around the water cooler.
For this discussion, Quadrant II is the most significant because it represents the activities that call for slow time.
Bethesda, Maryland-based executive coach Catherine Fitzgerald says that when her clients use this two-by-two matrix, "it's like a light bulb going off." They see that valuable time is being wasted on urgent but not important tasks instead of being spent on those that are important. Fitzgerald advises her clients to block out time every day for the important but not urgent work. One focus of this time should be coaching subordinates to take on responsibilities that are not essential for you to do yourself but that you often hang on to out of a sense of duty.
"You can easily free up at least 5 percent of your most valuable time by handing off things," she says. "And those tasks often prove to be interesting to a direct report or an assistant."
Identifying the rhythms
The more time you devote to important but not urgent work, the more control you have over your schedule. In particular, the less likely it is that your time will be consumed by putting out fires. This comes as no big surprise—so why is it, then, that people have so much difficulty reducing the time they spend on urgent but unimportant tasks? Stephan Rechtschaffen, author of Timeshifting (Broadway Books, 1996), believes the answer has to do with a process known as entrainment, in which a person becomes almost psychologically addicted to the rhythm of the particular task he's performing.
When you get to tasks that are not urgent and not important, something really interesting happens," Rechtschaffen observes. "The ambient rhythm in modern life is so fast that even in our leisure time, instead of relaxing, we tend to take on activities that keep us in this fast rhythm." Thus, typical Quadrant IV recreational activities tend to be things like watching television (with its fast cuts and high-energy commercials) or playing video games (in which the action moves very rapidly).
"Once you're in a rhythm, the tendency is to stay in synchronization with that rhythm," says Rechtschaffen. The result is that "in modern life, Quadrant I, III, and IV activities are all happening at high frequencies. Even though the way to reduce the number of Quadrant I crises in your life is to spend more time in Quadrant II, people resist going there because its rhythm is so different."
To be able to concentrate on work that is important but not urgent, you have to learn how to gear down. Rechtschaffen recommends scheduling specific times for such tasks. "I set aside time for doing my writing. The ground rule is that although I don't actually have to be writing during this time, I can't do anything else. What I've found, as I'm sitting there not writing, is that guilt feelings or feelings of inadequacy as a writer come up.
"I think this happens to many people who are attempting to do important but not urgent work: They're reluctant to face the feelings that surface when they slow down. The feelings hijack us; they act as perpetual motion machines, preventing us from comfortably entering into the activity. So instead of sitting with the feelings of guilt or inadequacy, we flee into high-frequency tasks."
The only way out of this trap, says Rechtschaffen, is to acknowledge the feelings that come up when you try to slow down—to let them "rise and then fall like a wave." Pausing after you finish a high-frequency task and before you begin Quadrant II work can help you consciously shift gears, he points out, as can putting on slow, classical music or doing a few minutes of breathing exercises designed to promote mindfulness.
"It's not so much the outer management of time that's important as it is the inner management," says Rechtschaffen. "The fundamental error lies in getting so entrained to a particular rhythm that you can't engage in the task at hand, whether it's a fast-paced activity or a slow-paced one, in a fully present way."
Lynda Cardwell is a marketing writer and publicist based in Birmingham, Alabama.
Losing Loyalty, Losing Employees
| How Do We Earn Employee Loyalty When More Money Isn't Enough? | |
| How do we earn our employees' loyalty--and more importantly, preserve it? Our bank has lost a number of key employees to competitors during the past five months. We were prepared to match the departing employees' competing salary offers, to no avail. We want to stem the tide, but we aren't sure if these defections are based in a lack of company loyalty, or if we're losing out because our competitors offer better jobs, better opportunities for advancement or a better working environment. —Hate Losing Them, finance/insurance/real estate, Muscat, Oman | |
| No. 1: You cannot buy loyalty, so forget matching competing offers. Once an employee has decided to leave, the emotional bond is broken. Your first step is to begin the diagnosis. Are you conducting exit interviews? If not, consider hiring an outside service--professionals, not telemarketers--to ask questions that will yield honest, candid answers about why people are leaving. Step two involves conducting a survey of remaining employees. Again, it's better to hire professionals from outside the firm. Don't try to do this in-house, as employees may not feel the level of trust required to give you meaningful feedback. Although you may be in a highly competitive market, you need to understand how employees perceive the experience of working for your company. Is it something they value? This knowledge should provide a clearer picture of how your work environment is creating conditions that prompt--perhaps even encourage--people to leave for other jobs. Your job: Develop strategies that strengthen your defenses and make deliberate improvements to become a less toxic, more attractive employer. Bonus hint: Employee retention is a management responsibility , not a human resources responsibility. Do your managers understand their retention role? Are they trained and equipped to perform it? You'll need to get at the root of these questions too. SOURCE: Roger E. Herman, the Herman Group , author of Keeping Good People, Greensboro, North Carolina, January 22, 2006. | |
Knowledge from Retirees
| | Our organization would like to implement cross-training in light of a large number of seasoned employees who are approaching retirement. How could we go about keeping these experienced folks on as consultants after they retire? What is the key to making this solution work? —Training and Retaining, services, Colton, California |
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| | You are on the right track. It would be a lost opportunity for all if company knowledge left your organization without being passed on. First, consider gathering all, or at least a representative sample, of these "seasoned employees" into a focus group. Ask them how you can tap their company knowledge once they retire. You will want to learn their opinions regarding schedules, compensation, duties and other conditions that are important to them. Also, this discussion sends a clear signal that continuing to employ these people in consulting roles, even after they retire, is of such importance that your organization will adjust to their needs as best it can. One outcome of the focus group might be to establish a mentoring program in which veteran employees (retirees) serve as coaches to new hires. Retirees might even be able to mentor several new people simultaneously. This gives structure to their roles. While your primary goal is to have retirees pass along important job information to their successors, the company also will want this information to share in perpetuity. Human resources ought to interview each of the retirees before they formally leave the organization. This information, which is different from a more traditional exit interview, then could be passed on to the appropriate functional leaders for their use. Questions should be as specific as possible to reveal hidden secrets for getting the work done. For example:
The national talent shortage is requiring companies to take extra steps to retain their talent for as long as possible and to share that knowledge throughout the organization. Calling on your loyal retirees is a great way to start. SOURCE: Dick Finnegan, chief client services officer, TalentKeepers, January 23, 2006. |
Job Descriptions and Business Strategy
| How Do We Link Job Descriptions With Our Business Strategy? | |
| What best practices could we follow when developing and linking job descriptions to our organizational strategy? —Making HR Count, finance/insurance/real estate, Harleysville, Pennsylvania | |
| Given the turbulent market conditions facing modern companies, including frequent reorganizations and changes in business strategy, preparing job descriptions that withstand the test of time is especially challenging. Nevertheless, the steps below offer some practical approaches that should help you. 1. Be clear about the purpose your job descriptions will serve. For example: When preparing job descriptions for purposes of compensation, companies tend to use phrases that convey "compensable factors" that enable categories of responsibilities to be compared and contrasted across different jobs. But these factors may not align well with the content of your business strategy. Job descriptions aimed at selection or performance management, on the other hand, tend to align more closely with strategic objectives but must be frequently revised lest they become outdated. 2. Verify that a logical linkage exists between each job accountability and your business goals and strategies. 3. Make sure you pay adequate attention to defining logically linked competencies and skills related to each job. 4. Anticipate a short life expectancy for job descriptions. Given the rapid rate of change of high-tech companies, for example, job descriptions for research, engineering and information technology will need to be revised far more frequently than those for finance, legal or human resources. 5. Recognize that performance management is a natural complement to job descriptions. When effective, performance management emphasizes short-term outcomes (about one year) that are within the "line of sight" of your organization's more long-range goals. In fast-moving professional services and high-tech firms, traditional job descriptions are practically obsolete. Instead, these companies rely on individual performance plans to define work objectives, performance standards, competencies and needed areas of development. The goal is the same: to motivate employees in ways that sustain their organizations' performance. SOURCE: John Furcon, Central region leader, human resources management practice, Buck Consultants , Chicago, January 26, 2006. | |