Double Down to Develop People, Processes
by Phil Ayres | Talent Management
When making investments in business improvement, there are two common strategies organizations use: they employ leadership and organizational development to get the best out of people, or they refine and automate business processes to achieve efficiency and quality with the skills available.
Most organizations know that focusing on one approach or the other can help them meet many customer service, product quality or efficiency goals. However, rarely do companies take a chance and double down when investing in business improvement, though the payback can be enormous. Unlike in blackjack, where the double-down term originates, the overall risk of failure for the organization is actually reduced.
No More Touchy-Feely HR
Talent leaders often rely on employee development programs when striving to deliver specific business goals. A widely reported example of a company that does this well is FedEx. The company has detailed development plans and certifications for every employee and strong leadership development options to match. Companies like FedEx invest deeply in proven employee engagement methodologies, consisting of components such as:
a) Individual certifications to identify areas for personal improvement.
b) Employee surveys to identify issues that need to be addressed at an organizational level.
c) Development and training to improve employees' performance in their current roles.
d) Leadership development to help managers work better with their peers and direct reports.
Organizational development relies on rigorous methodologies, organizational psychology and an almost scientific approach to measurement and action, making it hard to argue with the results. Development programs are tied back to business metrics, such as improved employee engagement, customer service quality and overall company performance.
Streamline What's Done
The second approach to business improvement, directly modifying business processes, is the approach manufacturing production lines worldwide have taken. When they use proven methodologies such as Six Sigma and lean production, process improvement programs guide companies to:
a) Run streamlined processes that weed out wasteful activities.
b) Reduce the time lag between activities.
c) Use employees for activities where they offer the most value and automate the rest.
d) Implement changes that reduce errors to prevent rework.
e) Measure process performance to know what is really going on.
The same mindset can be applied outside of manufacturing. In an office or services environment, a business process is typically the flow of activities that must be performed to service a transaction or customer request or to create some other work product. To take the place of the manufacturing production line, a streamlined process in an office environment is often guided by business process management or workflow software tools. These tools guide the minute-by-minute flow of work between employees while making the operations paperless.
The Team Players
Talent leaders already have a good idea about the type of organization that benefits most from leadership and organizational development. These types of organizations typically are:
a) Services or product organizations.
b) Those that have regular communications with customers through delivery, sales or customer services channels.
c) Those where a level of engagement, innovation and intelligence is required by employees.
d) Those where activities performed are core to the company's business.
e) Those where operations cannot be automated or outsourced while retaining the expected level of quality or customer service.
The aforementioned FedEx is a good example of this type of organization. Other good fits are research companies, such as 3M, Procter & Gamble and W.L. Gore, since employee engagement is core to their product innovation. Then there are the companies renowned for top customer service, such as Four Seasons Hotels and Southwest Airlines. These names resonate as excelling at what they do for a reason. The collective opinions of these companies would probably be quite different if their employee development followed more of a "hire and hope" strategy.
Ticking Like Clockwork
It is easy to identify manufacturing companies that have achieved process excellence. Names such as Motorola, GE and Toyota spring to mind. Good examples outside of manufacturing also exist: Amazon.com, for the level of automation it takes to actually accept and fulfill orders across so many suppliers; Bank of America, which in the financial services space does a better job than many at applying business process technology to common process problems; Toyota, again, since it applies the extremely lean and efficient Toyota production system to everything it does, not just the production line.
Process improvement is not a new concept, although in office environments it has only recently been applied in a consistent enough manner to be broadly recognized.
What if the Company Doesn't Double Down?
There is nothing to ensure that investing only in process improvement or only in employee development will lead a company to lose. Following the double-down analogy in blackjack, a win with a simple bet is still a win, just not with the same potential return. But addressing both approaches simultaneously may actually reduce the risk of losing if talent leaders:
1. Train for a new way of working.
Training people to work in a new business process alongside a broad employee development plan can avoid trying to force old, unproductive work habits into a new process.
2. Manage change holistically to reduce risk.
Only addressing one side of a business improvement program leaves the possibility of issues due to an unforeseen roadblock on the side that was ignored. Taking a holistic approach allows a greater likelihood of success.
3. Improve efficiency, but not at the cost of thinking.
Poster child Toyota has shown that despite efficient processes, the intelligent handling of complex situations requires different employee skills. Not developing employees to think outside the production line can lead to occasional, extremely costly mistakes.
To ensure an organization does not fail into these traps, talent leaders should work with business managers on new projects, reinforcing the need for employee development and business process improvement to go hand in hand.
A Proven System, When Done Right
Despite recent issues, the Toyota production system (TPS) is a strong example of process improvement and people improvement working together. The TPS not only requires continuous process improvement; it also reinforces the concept that an organization adds value by developing its people. The TPS says:
1. Grow leaders who thoroughly understand the work, live the philosophy and teach it to others.
2. Develop exceptional people and teams who follow the company's philosophy.
3. Respect the extended network of partners and suppliers by challenging them and helping them improve.
Toyota believes that work team supervisors who work directly with production workers are important to continuous business improvement; since they are so directly attached to the operations, they constantly influence quality, cost, productivity and team morale. Developing these people is therefore core to the success of any Toyota process improvement project. As the company has demonstrated, when leadership development away from the production line is missed, problems growing in the business can be handled inappropriately, leading to huge, costly issues.
Great examples of doubling down done right can be found in companies that claim they can run a client's processes better and more cost-effectively than the client, or business process outsourcing (BPO) providers.
One example to support this is Bangalore-based BPO firm Wipro. The firm's long-standing implementation of Six Sigma for process improvement is well-known, and its standing as an excellent place to work supports the claim of great employee development programs. In fact, any credible outsourcing company will highlight a range of quality and development certifications that typically come from employee education in procedures and methodologies appropriate to its industry. Companies don't have to outsource to perform better, just copy what outsourcers do best and focus on people and processes simultaneously.
No Gambling, Just Strategy
When starting out, a pragmatic, lightweight approach to business improvement is essential, since only through experience can an organization see if an approach will work for its specific circumstances. Investing heavily upfront in one methodology or another can lead some companies to get stuck in an expensive cycle because it can be emotionally and politically hard to back away from a large investment if it proves ineffective.
Despite this, businesses should consider the impact of trying to do everything in-house in order to keep the investment and risk low. It is hard for most employees with a lengthy tenure to keep an open mind and look objectively at what does and doesn't work in the organization. Working with external consultants can give a valuable outside-in perspective while bringing in experience from other organizations with similar business problems.
Finally, after seeing success from a business improvement project, organizations should take a step back and assess where the new issues and opportunities for improvement lie. Removing a pain point in one area could highlight an issue in another area completely, making it important to be ready to mix strategies.
By doubling down when it makes sense, process improvement alongside leadership and organizational development can produce a winning hand every time.
[About the Author: Phil Ayres is founder of Consected LLC, a boutique provider of business process improvement solutions.]
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Sunday, February 12, 2012
Double Down to Develop People, Processes
Pros and Cons of 360 Feedback
What Should We Consider Before Implementing a System of Multirater Feedback?
[Workforce Management | October 21, 2010]
Caution is wise, but even in a slow-to-change environment 360-degree feedback can be highly effective for developing leaders. The key: careful planning and execution with the right goals and systems in place.
Q: Our organization is considering implementation of a multirater feedback 360-degree system. We are concerned.
- Resistant to Change, employee and organizational consultant, government, Washington
A: You are right to be cautious. The profession is littered with failure stories of ill-conceived 360-degree feedback. Lack of clarity of purpose, too little planning, too much data entry, too little focus on organizational change and communication - these are the common pitfalls that will sink a 360 initiative. These risks are especially high in a culture of traditionalism that is averse to change.
But when carefully planned and executed, and with the right goals and systems in place, 360-degree feedback can be highly effective in your leadership development process - even in a slow-to-change environment. The following is a summary of leading practices that can serve as a guide:
1. Link your 360-degree strategy and process to corporate strategy and goals.
Understand which corporate-level measures you hope to affect in rolling out the new process. Is it to increase innovation? Drive growth in new markets? Is is to expand and better manage the leadership pipeline to increase internal promotions or drive growth from within? Communicate the initiative in a way that ties the process to corporate goals and strategies. Traditionalist culture is best transformed when business impact is clearly articulated.
2. Determine whether the 360-degree process is a developmental or a performance measurement process.
Do not try to have it be both. You cannot accomplish both in one process. More and more companies are moving toward viewing 360-degree feedback as a purely developmental process. Development-focused reviews yield better, more honest feedback and reduce the level of fear and resistance to the process.
3. Position it as part of a broader leadership planning and performance management process.
It is one element of many that enable the organization to manage its talent pipeline.
4. Don't view 360-degree feedback as a panacea to measuring leadership performance.
It can be a crucial element, but it won't suffice on its own. Consider implementing a talent assessment process in conjunction with a development-focused 360-degree process. Many organizations today find that the performance management process doesn't provide the information they need about leaders (or any critical role for that matter) to properly develop and plan for the future. To address this, they are putting into place content-rich assessments designed specifically for critical talent. Talent assessment processes include information such as leadership behaviors/competencies, learning agility, risk of turnover, readiness for next position and so on.
5. If the primary goal is to gather feedback to build individual development plans, think about who you want to include:
Matrix reporting relationships, team/project members and customers/partners are often the most insightful raters in a 360 initiative.
6. Leverage technology.
The sheer number of people involved and volume of documents to be combined and reconciled makes an automated system a necessity.
[Source: Heidi Spirgi, president, Knowledge Infusion, Danville, California]
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Coaching Poor Performers
How Do We Truly Persuade Poor Performers to Change Behavior?
[Workforce Management | November 04, 2010]
Focus on the coaching aspects of performance improvement. It positions you to address the root causes of performance difficulties and inspires employees to take ownership of the issues.
Q: When counseling poor performers, what steps could we take to persuade them to adopt new ways of doing things that will improve their on-the-job performance?
- Salvage Job, manager, finance/insurance/real estate, Lagos, Nigeria
A: Most organizations have a process called "corrective action" that guides managers on the proper steps to take when addressing an employee's poor performance. To persuade the employee to improve, however, focus on the coaching aspects of performance improvement. It positions you to address the root causes of performance difficulties and inspires employees to take ownership of the issues.
Coaching is designed to improve the work of the employee, the team and departments. The idea is to engage employees to take accountability for improved performance, relying on your support to make it happen. Persuasion is about getting people to want to do what you want them to do. It's how you tap into their values and needs, and link your goals to the realization of their dreams.
To be persuasive, three key ingredients must be mixed in the proper proportions:
1. Trust.
People trust you when they can rely on you. They may grant you a certain level of trust because of your position, your credentials or your reputation. But trust is built through relationship consistency. Trust in oneself is also an important ingredient in persuasion. Self-doubt can undermine employee achievement. You reduce employees doubt by building their confidence through consistent, achievable successes.
2. Logic.
To persuade someone to adopt your goal, it must pass the test of reason. If a goal does not make sense, you'll have a hard time persuading the employee to take it on. So be reasonable in your expectations.
3. Emotion.
Your goal must appeal to the employee's imagination and sense of purpose. By understanding the employee's interests and needs for success, you'll go a long way in persuading the employee to take on the goal. By treating your employee as someone who wants to achieve extraordinary results, you show good faith and respect. To understand what it is that individual employees need and care about, listen to their words and observe their body language and emotional expression.
See how the Chatfield Group's 7-Step Coaching Process fits with your leadership style:
1. Engage the employee.
Express confidence in the employee's ability and willingness to solve the problem. Ask the employee for help in solving the problem.
2. Get clear about the problem.
Describe the performance challenge as you see it, and ask the employee to help clarify relevant issues. Use effective questioning skills to get the employee to provide specific examples and describe the desired outcome. Help the employee estimate what the problem is costing him or her.
3. Identify the barriers to performance.
Listen carefully to determine if the problem is because of a lack of skills and ability or a lack of interest and motivation. Typical barriers to high performance are time, tools, training and temperament. Check with the employee to determine what is getting in the way of top performance. With the employee's involvement, determine how to remove or sidestepperformance barriers.
4. Create an action plan.
Agree on a plan for improving the situation. Put the plan in writing and share it with the employee. Remember, work performance should never be a mystery, so make the plan a working document and be sure it reflects the employee's input.
a) What will you do to help the employee accomplish goals within desired time frames?
b) What will the employee do to facilitate improvements?
c) Are these items reasonable and achievable?
5. Inspire success.
Create a picture of what success looks like that captures the employee's emotion. Coaching is about helping to unlock the employee's true potential by encouraging creativity and ensuring development.
6. Follow up frequently.
Don't wait too long. Check on progress to be sure necessary improvements are taking hold. Offer your help when it's needed.
7. Celebrate success.
Offer encouragement and positive feedback when things go well. Support the employee's can-do attitude and express appreciation for the employee's contribution.
[Source: Patsy Svare, managing director, The Chatfield Group, Northbrook, Illinois]
Competencies and Promotions
During Promotion and Raises, How Do We Assess People of Similar Yet Differing Competencies?
[Workforce Management | November 18, 2010]
Some mechanism needs to be in place or promotions will have too much of 'chance' element.
Q: We are an animation company and work on multiple projects of varied complexities. The individual performance evaluation is done based on similar KSAs (knowledge, skills and abilities) defined for specific roles. Our challenge: how to normalize the performance across different projects for individuals with same ratings when evaluating pay hikes/promotions. We will not be able to consider them at the same competency level because their work is of varied complexities.
- Uniformity Won't Work, senior HR manager, software/services, Bangalore, India
A: To answer that, you may need to consider how the KSAs of your employees are being utilized.
How are people assigned to different projects? What determines if comparable team members are put on more difficult projects?
In other words, is project work being allocated based on KSAs? Or are people put on projects more so by availability? If the rotating start and completion of different projects determines who is asked to do what, then you need to acknowledge that and try to improve how you optimize the use of staff resources.
For example, a lot of work may be routine. But the steady stream of routine projects often pays the bills. Though they may not be technically challenging, the projects may be on tight schedules or for clients who are difficult to please. How employees perform in these other areas should be taken into account when assessing performance.
If team members are at comparable levels, do they have an opportunity to work on different levels of projects over time? Some mechanism needs to be in place for this, or promotion can have too much of an element of chance to it, based on what the next open project holds. The responsibility falls to your management to provide the opportunity, as well as the tools, to succeed.
Another avenue to accomplish this is through subject-matter experts, or SMEs, who take on this role in addition to core project-team roles (e.g., project manager, designer, and production). Have SMEs float between projects to tackle technical complexity and smooth out learning curves. Ultimately, the challenge in normalizing performance evaluations is in understanding the bottom-line value to the organization of work being done. If your organization is project-based, then you need to understand how you account for employees' work and correlate it to your projects.
Whether your organization bills clients directly for employee hours worked or submits flat-fee bids, you should still have a sense of the cost of work. Tying this work(in terms of hours) to the value of elements of individual projects can help quantify different contributions across a variety of projects. To create continuous improvement, use this information to refine the estimating, bidding and resource allocation on future projects.
[Source: Scott Weston, author, HR Excellence: Improving Service Quality and Return on Investment in Human Resources]
Assessing Team Members
How Do We Assess the Performance of Individual Employees Who Work on Teams?
[Workforce Management | December 2, 2010]
If you haven't fully migrated to an integrated team structure, focus on changing the culture first before addressing rewards.
Q: How do we assess the performance of individual employees who mostly work on teams? While designing our performance management system, the goal is to link each employee's individual performance with his or her annual reward. But we're having trouble applying a useful measure to determine an individual's contributions.
- No "I" in Team, HR executive, software/systems, Bangalore, India
A: "Team" is one of the most widely misused and misunderstood terms in business. Some people use it to describe a tightly integrated group of people who are self-motivated and self-led. If your team is organized in this manner, presumably it's because the work of its members is highly interdependent, thus making it impractical for members to operate independently.
Others use the term to refer to any group of people working in a common function or department. If individuals do not depend on one another totally, they probably should not be regarded as a team. If, however, they indeed function as interdependent members of a group, evaluate them as such and reward them according to the success of the whole group.
What do you do if you wish to reward one or more exceptional members? Some team-based organizations find it effective to allow the members themselves to determine how much of a reward should be distributed to exceptional teammates. These rewards should be considerably less than those distributed to the team as a whole to avoid undermining the team structure. To assist team members in the reward-allocation process, you might help them develop meaningful criteria and parameters, such as the following:
a) Individual rewards, if any, are determined only after team rewards have been established.
b) No equal distribution of funds to all team members. Each team member evaluates fellow team members' contributions according to established and agreed-upon factors, such as superior effort, drive and results, breakthrough thinking, leadership and collaboration.
c) Team members must all agree on how much and to whom individual rewards are distributed - no agreement equals no reward. If no single team member's contributions stand out above that of other members, no individual reward should be distributed.
If you haven't fully migrated to an integrated team structure, focus on changing the culture first, then address the reward system. Absent a team culture, problems associated with your reward system likely will become an unnecessary distraction, if not an outright nuisance. This is easily avoided with a supportive culture.
[Source: Kevin Herring, Ascent Management Consulting, Oro Valley, Arizona]
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Preparing Managers for Productive Communication About Pay
Preparing Managers for Productive Communication About Pay
Mercer's Human Capital Perspective | Volume 4, Issue 4 - 2010
For many managers, communicating about compensation is an uncomfortable part of the job, and today's austere budgets aren't making the task any easier. Debra Besch, a Principal in Mercer's Workforce Communication and Change consulting business, discusses difficulties inherent in the situation, challenges posed by today's compensation budgets and steps organizations can take to prepare managers for positive, productive communication about pay.
Q: What is the landscape today around communicating with employees about compensation? Why is it so difficult for managers to have these discussions?
Debra Besch: Communicating about compensation has always been challenging. It requires specific skills and knowledge to make good compensation decisions and then to effectively convey those decisions to employees. This difficulty has been exacerbated by the recent economic downturn and its impact on compensation - from low to no salary increases and diminished short-term and long-term incentives. No one likes to deliver hard messages about pay, but in the past few years, a lot of managers have had to do it. With an increasing emphasis on performance differentiation and linked rewards, combined with continued pressures on compensation budgets, these kinds of discussions are likely to continue.
Q: How are expectations changing for different stakeholders - the organization itself, HR, line managers and employees - around communicating compensation?
DB: The key change for the organization is recognizing that compensation communication cannot be left to chance. It is a managerial capability that must be deliberately developed and reinforced over time. This means laying a foundation that will enable HR to do a better job of supporting managers and will help managers do a better job of both making compensation decisions and communicating those decisions to employees clearly and honestly.
Organizations also need to help employees understand the fundamental concepts about how pay in general and their pay specifically is determined. This is important because there is significant research that correlates employees' understanding how pay is determined with their satisfaction with the amount of pay.
HR's role in compensation communication is also changing. Rather than having responsibility for policing compensation decisions, HR is increasingly expected to serve as a consultant to leaders and managers struggling to make difficult decisions or improve communication techniques.
For line managers, the expectation that they, rather than HR, will take the lead role in - and accountability for - making compensation decisions and communicating those decisions to employees is greater than ever. To effectively manage performance and rewards, today's manager needs to be able to say to employees, "I understand your performance, I've communicated your performance, and this is the increase you're getting based on these criteria." Further, a manager needs to be able to take on the difficult conversations, address employees' concerns about their compensation and be able to credibly discuss rewards in the context of the total employment value. This is still a major shift in many organizations where managers have traditionally taken a more passive role, falling back on explanations like, "I would have given you more, but HR wouldn't let me."
Finally, employee expectations need to be managed so that employees are more prepared for and receptive to pay messages. In general, organizations continue to raise the bar on employee performance without necessarily offering a commensurate increase in rewards. Employees need to be educated so they can understand this reality across organizations and know what level of performance will result in increased compensation.
Q: What steps can each of these populations take to make these changes happen?
DB: Organizations can start by conducting some baseline research to identify what HR, managers and employees currently understand about compensation, both in terms of the concepts of market competitiveness and equity and also in terms of the processes, tools and resources that exist in the organization. This research will provide guidance about the types of training and education that may be required for different populations within the organization.
Next, the organization can develop a formal compensation communication and training strategy. This strategy should specify how transparent the organization wants to be about compensation. For example, does the organization simply want to communicate key compensation concepts to employees, or does it want to reveal the entire salary structure? And over what time period?
The strategy should also delineate how HR and line managers will be trained to perform their responsibilities. After all, neither HR generalists nor HR business partners are necessarily compensation experts, while most line managers come into their roles without being taught how to make or communicate compensation decisions. Both HR and managers will need to be educated about fundamentals such as the company's compensation philosophy and the mechanics of compensation programs. In addition, HR will need training on effectively supporting managers through providing market data or good evidence supporting the equity and competitiveness of compensation. Meanwhile, line managers will need specific training on what content to include in their conversations with employees, the degree of transparency expected and how to talk about compensation without using confusing jargon.
Third, the strategy should specify the kinds of communications and training that will be provided directly to employees. For example, the organization might want to present employees with simplified "Compensation 101" courses that cover key concepts about how pay is determined and how the incentive plan works. Our experience has shown that this type of direct-to-employee communication is an important adjunct to information from managers and helps employees hear the messages from their manager in context.
Finally, leaders have to model good compensation communication for the rest of the organization. They need to have the right kind of conversations year-round with their own direct reports, who can then cascade that positive behavior throughout the organization.
HR leaders can also take steps to enhance compensation communication by embracing their new role and becoming more consultative and supportive of line managers. HR must be willing to help managers make difficult decisions and provide them with reinforcing coaching. In order to do all this, HR must take advantage of all the training and resources the organization makes available.
Q: With all their new responsibilities, what else can front-line managers do to make discussions more fruitful?
DB: One thing they can do is ensure that they're accessing all the available resources on compensation. This may include consulting with their HR partners or with other managers to think through decisions and determine the best way to handle difficult conversations, such as talking with a high performer who is getting a low increase. In addition, managers should take the time to anticipate the kinds of concerns that may come up in compensation discussions with employees and prepare accordingly.
Some organizations have created online sites where managers can access information and salary planning tools and can exchange ideas, questions and best practices with other managers. Another thing we see emerging is the use of peer-to-peer communication, where role-model managers are recruited to help educate their peers.
It's also important that managers communicate with employees year- round rather than waiting until the end of the year. By keeping an eye on the organization's performance and the implications for compensation well in advance of year-end decision making, managers can help employees develop realistic expectations and avoid major surprises.
Finally, managers can make compensation communication more productive by exploring what other kinds of rewards are valuable to employees. While all employees want to be paid what they think they're worth, individuals also value other forms of rewards, such as recognition or the opportunity to be exposed to other parts of the business. When managers think broadly about rewards and research what employees want, they can help employees decouple their perception of their self-worth from their pay and improve compensation discussions.
Driving High Performance
Driving High Performance
by Harold D. Stolovitch, Ph.D | Talent Management
Several precious workdays of not being very productive despite lots of activity left me in a foul mood. Dissatisfied with my poor performance, I decided to do some digging to determine if it was just me or, as I suspected, a more generalized issue.
Let me share with you the discoveries I made concerning what interferes with meeting our important performance goals and what we can do once enlightened. I began with Gaylan Nielson and Brent Peterson's book Fake Work: Why People Are Working Harder Than Ever Before but Accomplishing Less, and How to Fix the Problem. Having surveyed more than 100,000 employees in 300-plus organizations, they found that a whopping 90 percent reported being unsatisfied with their work results. Two-thirds disclosed that they often duplicated others' work due to lack of coordination.
They determined many causes. Among them were unclear, long-winded and vague organizational objectives that confuse employees about where to focus and what to do; meaningless meetings dwelling on past issues rather than future needs; pointless paperwork, from filling out senseless forms and writing unread reports to deciphering meaning from meandering memos that devour time better applied to useful ends.
Moving on, I encountered numerous attacks on e-mail. Designed to improve communication, e-mail often overwhelms workers - too frequent, too many, too long, too irrelevant. The general consensus is that while enthusiastic technophiles praise technology's potential, the humble worker is being buried under increasing avalanches of indigestible information.
Paradoxically, people at work also turn to technology for distraction and relief. Leslie Taylor, in a 2006 Inc.magazine article, reported that workers spend 1.86 hours per day on tasks unrelated to their jobs, the most frequent being surfing the Net for personal needs. In 2007, Tom Pisello of the National Association of Professional Organizers calculated that organizations lose about $1,250 per worker annually on reading and deleting spam and $1,800 on scanning and responding to unnecessary e-mails.
Now there is social media. In a 2009 survey of 1,460 office workers, British group Morse IT found that respondents self-reported spending 40 minutes per week during work on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and the like for personal reasons. The same respondents estimated that their colleagues spent closer to 60 minutes. Morse IT concluded that U.K. organizations lose $225 billion annually on non-job-related social media use. RescueTime, a firm that analyzes computer habits, studied 40,000 computer workers and found they check e-mails more than 50 times a day and use instant messaging 77 times daily.
The more I delved into the writings and studies on this theme, the more the list of unproductive performance causes grew. Here is an abbreviated list: trivial but mandatory tasks that when examined contribute little to priority performance requirements; unnecessary training, often imposed without determining whether or not attendees will ever be able to use what is taught; oversocializing with co-workers; performing outside errands; poor written and oral communication that creates ambiguity, confusion or even fear; and work-related stresses caused by thoughtless management.
I was taken aback when I examined U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data showing how productivity had grown between 2007 and 2009 - more than 6 percent annually compared with 2.6 percent from 1995 to 2006. Were my complaints and those of others unfounded? However, probing further, I encountered Dennis Lockhart, CEO and president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, who explained in a June 2010 speech, "... Short-term productivity gains [have resulted from] squeezing more and more from a diminished ... workforce and may not be sustainable." Already this year, first quarter productivity declined to 2.8 percent; second quarter productivity actually decreased 1.8 percent. The dramatic effect of paid hours falling faster than output these past few years has ended. The need is for real productive performance.
In my case, unnecessary distractions, inefficient use of time, too much electronic communication and responding to low-priority demands have decreased my productive performance. I have learned a lot from this exercise. What about you?
[About the Author: Harold D. Stolovitch, Ph.D., CPT is a principal of HSA Learning & Performance Solutions LLC and is emeritus professor of instructional and performancetechnology at the Universite de Montreal.]
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New Year, New Measurement Challenges
New Year, New Measurement Challenges
by Mary Ann Downey | Talent Management
The definition of talent management has become a bit like Justice Potter Stewart's definition of pornography: "I know it when I see it." While reasonable minds can disagree on subtleties, at the core, talent management is about the attraction, retention and development of employees. Measuring talent management effectiveness requires knowing the answer to questions such as "Is the organization attracting better quality applicants?" or "Is the organization retaining its most productive employees?"
With this general talent management definition in mind, the Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp) launched a study in April 2010 to understand how organizations were measuring the effectiveness of their talent management efforts. More than 400 business and HR professionals participated in the Talent Management Measurement survey, which yielded a dreary snapshot of the current state of the field.
A Sad State of Measurement Affairs
There is an obvious disconnect within organizations between awareness of the need for good talent management measurements and the willingness to invest what is needed to create actionable measurements. As an example, while 75 percent of respondents reported to a high extent that they should use quality of hire measures to manage talent better, only 16 percent actually do. Looking at high- and low-performing organizations does not change the picture substantively. Seventy-nine percent of high-performing organizations believe they should use quality of hire measures, but only 22 percent are in fact using these measures to a great extent.
Examining the retention measurement results reveals a similar picture. Only 27.5 percent of survey participants measure high-performing employee separation rates, while nearly 60 percent believe they should be measuring the rate at which high-performing employees are leaving the organization.
On the investment side of the equation, just 26 percent of survey respondents believe their organizations has enough personnel dedicated to the measurement of talent outcomes. Roughly 21 percent of participants feel their organizations have adequate infrastructure, technology, budget and time devoted to measure talent management effectiveness.
These survey results might not feel like news; organizations have struggled to successfully measure their people resources for more than 40 years. With so few organizations actually measuring the effectiveness of talent management, a fair question might be "Why bother?"
While it is true that relatively few organizations are measuring the effectiveness of talent management, there are positive correlations between high-performing organizations, specific measures and measurement practices. While correlation does not mean causation, it does mean there is a significant relationship between these measures and high marketperformance.
In addition to specific measures, the study revealed two "next" practices. A next practice is defined by i4cp as something few organizations do, but something that has a high correlation or can predict market success.
First, only 20 percent of respondents reported that their organizations had a workforce management strategy, but it is correlated to high market performance. Second, 37 percent of organizations gauge the success of their talent management processes by monitoring leadership success, but regression analysis revealed this practice is predictive of high marketperformance.
Surprisingly, some often heavily debated measurement practices such as frequency, the technology solution used and who calculates the measures were not statistically different, meaning there is no right answer to the question "Should our organization report monthly or quarterly?" or "Should HR or the business be responsible for calculating the results?"
The Talent Management Measurement Conundrum
HR leaders understand the need to share talent management success stories with their organizations. The most effective evidence when building the story is data. The conundrum is that to secure resources to measure talent management effectiveness, talent managers need evidence that talent management positively impacts the organization, but gaining this evidence requires dedicated resources.
Other factors compound the conundrum. First, it is intuitively challenging to directly make the link between talent management activities and bottom-line impact. There is an extended time delay between talent management activity and people investments and when an organization will reap the benefits. In some cases, it can take years to develop a leadership bench or to see the impact of a new strategy. Second, it is during this time delay that many intervening events take place that make proving causation almost impossible.
Organizations are not likely to run their employees through investigate trials to obtain scientific evidence that one talent management practice is better than another or doing nothing at all. Even the rare organization that might consider such an activity would struggle to apply the results because the business environment is so dynamic. Can a talent manager say a practice that worked three years before the financial crisis will have the same impact in today's "new normal"?
Solving the Measurement Challenge
Organizations that believe they can gain a competitive advantage through their talent are not staying idle waiting for a solution to appear. Interviewing dozens of companies, i4cp identified three techniques organizations are using to answer the question "How is our talent management doing?"
1. Define the organization's criteria for talent management success.
At first blush, defining a quality hire seems obvious, but for different roles or the same role in a different organization there can be vastly different answers. This is a major reason benchmarks on talent management effectiveness are uncommon.
For example, an organization that invests heavily in assessment tools or other selection devices will expect the retention and productivity of hires to be much higher than an organization that hires for culture fit and expects employees to wash out in the first 90 days. These differences in approach make benchmarking nearly impossible.
Even within an organization, expectations for roles such as clerical staff, engineers and executives are quite different, from cost to recruit to time to full productivity.
2. Segment talent management effectiveness measures.
The most successful organization provides a macro-statistic for comparative purposes as a guide to understand how segmented measures contrast to overall results, or it does not provide a macro-result at all. There are three advantages to the former approach.
First, it is easier to measure a segment of the workforce. In many cases, no expensive technology is required; all that is needed is a spreadsheet. Defining and isolating the segment can be a challenge, but once the population is understood, the calculations are relatively straightforward.
Second, as Einstein is often quoted, "Not everything that can be measured counts." Many organizations conserve their limited resources by identifying the employee populations where a clear success criterion has been identified. Management prefers a prioritized view over a phone book of statistics.
Third, to get to the heart of measuring talent management outcomes, detailed and qualitative data is needed. Data that is not collected for all employees or that would be overwhelming to assemble broadly is not a requirement. By segmenting the employee population and limiting measurement to those groups with clear outcomes, manually adding additional data elements is no longer an overwhelming prospect.
3. Regularly and routinely review talent management effectiveness measures.
The organizations that can answer the question "How is our talent management doing?" regularly produce a workforce report and share the data with the executive team and the entire HR function. The April 2010 i4cp study showed a positive correlation between market performance and organizations that distribute workforce data to the executive team. Only 26 percent of survey respondents share workforce data with all of HR, but sharing this data is a step toward achieving integrated talent management.
As organizations look forward to 2011 with a clean slate, this is the year to develop a workforce measurement strategy with an empowered owner. The owner can be a champion from the business, a talent manager or a steering committee. For example, at Liberty Mutual Group, the executive team acts as the owner and approves any changes to the data dictionary, which limits the number of changes.
The who is not as important as the what. A talent measurement strategy needs to articulate the organizational philosophy and objectives and have the endorsement of the leadership team. This is the year to identify the employee segments the organization will concentrate on with agreed and customized success criteria that is reviewed regularly. If small steps are taken today, by the end of the year an organization should know the answer to how its talent management is doing.
[About the Author: Mary Ann Downey is research director at the Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp).]
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Hard Goals Feel Good
Hard Goals Feel Good
by Mark Murphy | Talent Management
HR leaders and CEOs alike shudder at the thought of employees perfunctorily dusting off last year's ignored, abandoned or failed goals to keep their boss happy. There are reasons these goals crashed and burned, if they ever even got started. And until those issues are recognized and addressed, the pattern of underachievement likely will stay the same or plummet even further.
A growing number of talent management executives realize that just having employees set goals is not the same as getting them to care about those goals. In fact, many leaders have come to the conclusion that goal setting might be a pointless exercise if employees don't take ownership of their goals and have a vested interest in their outcomes. Thus, talent managers are looking for new ways to maximize the likelihood of goal success.
Leadership training and workforce research firm Leadership IQ conducted several goal studies throughout 2010 as part of its new book, HARD Goals: The Secret to Getting From Where You Are to Where You Want to Be. These studies, including "Are SMART Goals Dumb?" and "Difficult Goals Drive Engagement," found that two specific ideas have been capturing top executives' attention as they search for ways to get employees to care about their goals: visualizing goals and increasing goal difficulty.
Visualizing Goals
Humans are visual creatures. We respond to imagery, which means if we can imagine it, see it or picture it, we're a lot more likely to process, understand and embrace it. The technical term from cognitive psychology is "pictorial superiority effect." It expresses the idea that concepts are better remembered if presented as pictures rather than as words. In his book Brain Rules, molecular biologist John Medina tells us that when we only hear information, our total recall is about 10 percent when tested 72 hours later. But add a picture and that number shoots up to 65 percent. That's a substantial difference.
Every goal an employee considers is competing for finite resources such as time, energy, attention and memory. Plus, people can only pursue so many goals at one time. Some will be chosen and pursued while others are abandoned. One of the key determinants of whether or not a goal is pursued is how clearly and vividly someone can picture that goal in his or her mind.
Waste removal company 1-800-Got Junk uses goal visualization well. CEO Brian Scudamore said, "If you can't see your vision come true, you'll never have enough faith in it to achieve it." He built a vision wall easily viewable by employees and crowned it with a sign that reads: "Can You Imagine?" It's here that company goals become so animated that employees feel like they already happened. A 2006 Harvard MBA case study of Scudamore's vision wall suggested people can achieve what they conceive and believe. The wall included mocked-up pictures and images of 1-800-Got Junk appearing on "The Oprah Winfrey Show," the company brand name appearing on Starbucks to-go cups and the company having a specific number of franchises. The company achieved each of those goals. To top off this visualization success, in the first five years of business, 1-800-Got-Junk's revenue grew from more than $200,000 to more than $8 million.
Making Goals More Difficult
Another trend Leadership IQ tracked is employees' and leaders' growing skepticism about SMART goals' effectiveness. While every company has set its share of specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound - or SMART - goals, a Leadership IQ survey of 4,182 workers in March 2010 discovered that there was no meaningful correlation between employees' use of SMART goals and their belief that their goals would help them achieve great things.
Too often SMART goals act as impediments to, not enablers of, bold action. Yes, they have enabled us to conveniently whittle down our goals to what is almost a science. We fill out the proper forms, calculate the proper numbers and meet the critical keywords, such as specific, achievable and realistic. But in the midst of all this paperwork and parsing, we've dumbed the challenge right out of our goals.
We've been creating goals that tell everyone, "Don't push beyond your resources or bite off more than you can chew. Play it safe and stay within your limitations." But our best people don't want to come to work to baby step through their days. They want a challenge; they want to do their time in the lion's den and come out victorious, to feel that what they do at work has a real bearing on the big picture.
The same study also uncovered that only 15 percent of employees believe their goals for the year will help them achieve great things, and only 13 percent of employees think their goals will help them maximize their full potential. That's more than 75 percent of the workforce telling us that their goals aren't challenging enough.
Doing Better Than Your Best
The direct correlation between goal difficulty and performance was first discovered some 40 years ago by psychologists Edwin Locke and Gary Latham. Thanks to them - and the legions of researchers they inspired - there is conclusive validation that people who set or are given difficult, specific goals achieve much greater performance levels than people who are given or set weaker goals that send a message of "just do your best."
In one of Latham's experiments, drawn from his work in the 1970s with forestry, wood and paper company Weyerhaeuser, the research team studied how difficult goals could improve the performance of logging truck drivers. To run efficiently, logging trucks need to be filled as close as possible to their maximum legal weight, otherwise multiple runs are required, costing additional time, fuel and labor. But this is not an easy task: Giant logs are all different sizes, weights need to be accurate, workers need good spatial orientation and so on.
For the experiment, it was determined that a load that was 94 percent of the maximum legal net weight would be difficult, but not impossible, to achieve. When workers were given a "do your best" goal, they loaded the trucks to somewhere around 60 percent of the maximum legal weight, equaling a lot of wasted space. But when they were given the significantly more difficult goal of loading the trucks to 94 percent of their maximum legal weight, that's exactly what happened. This one simple experiment saved the company around $250,000 in nine months.
Difficult goals work because they force us to pay attention. It may be that they command our attention because they're a little scary, they're really exciting or they're simply a departure from our normal daily routine. Whatever the reason, our brains become engaged, and that inspires motivation.
Brain Rules tells us that "the more the brain pays attention to a given stimulus, the more elaborately the information will be encoded - and retained." This is important given the number of stimuli constantly competing for the brain's precious attention resources. It's like running too many applications on a computer; they consume limited resources and the system starts to slow down. But when a difficult goal is set, it consumes so much of the brain's resources that it crowds out a lot of other, less important goals. It's like shutting down some of those background computer applications. And with that extra brainpower comes better performance.
Hard Goals Feel Good
It's not just the brain's resources that are affected; feelings get involved as well. Leadership IQ conducted a study in June 2009 to see how being assigned a difficult goal at work made people feel. The study asked more than 4,000 people to rate a series of survey questions, such as: "I will have to exert extra effort to achieve my assigned goals for this year," and "I will have to learn new skills to achieve my assigned goals for this year."
The first thing researchers discovered was that when people gave high scores on those questions, they also tended to give high scores on some of the other survey questions, such as: "I consider myself a high performer," and "The work I do makes a difference in people's lives."
When people are given goals that require extra learning and effort, they are more likely to consider themselves high performers and also to believe that the work they do is important. Why? First, difficult goals instill confidence. Nobody is going to give big challenges to a numskull. The boss would only assign difficult goals to someone who has a real shot at hitting them. So, by extension, if a boss gives an employee a hard goal, he or she must believe the individual can achieve that goal. It's another way of the boss saying, "I believe in you. You're the right person for this job." The second reason difficult goals work so well is that they convey the message that the work is important. Nobody would spend the time or energy creating tough goals for work that was unnecessary or wasteful.
There was one other noteworthy finding from this study. Employees who had bosses who set more difficult goals were far more likely to give high scores to these questions: "I recommend this company to others as a great place for people to work," and "I recommend my boss to others as a great person to work for."
This makes good intuitive sense. If a boss really thinks through what kinds of goals are going to elicit employees' best performance and if he or she sits down with those individuals to design optimally difficult goals, it's a clear indication that the boss cares about them. That level of caring can buy a lot of heartfelt employee loyalty, not to mention a great deal of extra effort.
[About the Author: Mark Murphy is the CEO of Leadership IQ and author of the just-released book HARD Goals: The Secret to Getting From Where You Are to Where You Want to Be.]
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Checking in With the Next Generation
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