40 posts from 2008

Tough times invariably cause businesses to review how productive and efficient their staff and processes are. But since the mid eighties, many businesses have had rounds of process improvement programmes and efficiency drives, so can the orange really be squeezed to get more out, or is there simply no juice left?

A report launched this week by the Management Consultancies Association (MCA) suggests that there’s still plenty of juice left in UK businesses. It claims that UK productivity could increase by up to a fifth if businesses change their approach to planning and measuring performance.

The MCA report, entitled ‘Getting more from the same – Delivering sustainable productivity improvement’, was sponsored by consultants Trinity House and surveyed top leaders across a range of public and private and organisations. The research identified that the key to productivity improvement was to engage and motivate employees, and that there were six critical success factors in achieving this.

Get sponsorship at a senior level
Leaders need to ensure that the business case for change and the performance objectives are clear and understood. This provides employees with the essential ‘why we are doing this’.

Involve the front line managers
The people with the most knowledge and understanding about the business are invariably the front and second line managers and therefore need to be consulted on all aspects of the change and performance improvement.

Measure the right things
Rather than having a plethora of performance measures it is more effective to choose a small number of relevant performance measures.

Communicate the business case and metrics –
It is vital that all employees understand the reasons for the change and that business measures are translated into meaningful objectives for each part of the business, team and individual. Managers and staff should be made accountable and rewarded for their contribution to productivity improvement.

Give managers the tools and skills they need for performance mangement.
Help the front line managers to be active managers, coaching and floor-walking rather than answering emails, doing admin and fire-fighting. Support them with appropriate management training and development.

Give it time and make it part of business as usual
Don’t expect instant results and manage expectations so employees don’t become de-motivated or disheartened. Performance improvement should be incorporated into job descriptions, business processes and reward mechanisms. Performance management should be viewed as part of day to day business and not as a one off initiative.

These findings add real weight to what many management consultants intuitively know about performance improvement. To read more about the MCA report go to http://www.mca.org.uk/mca/

All businesses need to allocate a good deal of resources to market their products and services if they are to be successful. It will not be self evident to the average purchaser that you provide the best management training, IT equipment or conservatories! Potential customers need to be told.

However, successful marketing is not simply about buying a few branded pens and paperweights and investing in an advertising campaign. It is about getting the fundamentals right in the first place.

The first “fundamental” activity is to deliver a quality product, service or experience in the first place. Investing in management training can help to ensure that all staff are motivated, capable and committed to this goal. Happy customers will naturally recommend your products or services to others without any prompting from you. Conversely, if staff are not committed to delivering a quality experience, no amount of promotions or advertising will change this.

Secondly, be clear about what is unique about your product or service that will enable your business to stand out from the crowd. For example, if you offer management training and development services what will set your business apart from the plethora of other training providers? Is it your approach, intellectual property or combined experiences?

Thirdly, proactively work with your existing customers. This may be in the form of promoting a wider range of products/services to them or alternatively using them as a route to winning new customers. For example, retailers use reward schemes that encourage and reward their customers for spending more money with them. Other examples include health or golf clubs who reward their members for recruiting their friends, family and work colleagues.

Finally, utilise your staff. Employees who are motivated, committed and happy will talk to their family and friends about what a fantastic place their work is and how their products/services are better than anyone else’s. It is therefore vital that managers are trained appropriately to get the most out of their staff.

Successful marketing is not just about advertising and promotion, it is also about getting the “fundamentals” right and appropriate investment in management training will help the business to get these in place. Once complete, the business is then in a position to invest in the more “traditional” aspects of marketing.

In a previous article we considered the rationale and benefits of empowering staff. However, it’s important to recognise that successful empowerment, requires careful preparation and planning, it not simply a case of giving someone a series of tasks and letting them get on with it. So what do we need to consider?

Use the following guidelines to help you plan your approach to empowerment.

Challenge yourself. The biggest barrier to successful empowerment is your own personal assumptions. For example, many managers do not empower their staff because they wrongly believe that they are not capable of taking on the responsibility, or because they personally will do a better job. In the short term these assumptions may be correct, what if you provided appropriate team training and support and enabled them to gain the skills and experience they need?

Be clear about what you expect. Remember, you are empowering your staff to deliver results not tasks. Therefore it is important to be clear what the desired results will be. In other words, what you will expect from them in terms of quality and quantity, budget, timing etc. Recognise that you will hold them accountable for the results and let the individual determine most appropriate means of how to achieve this.

Identify the guidelines that need to be set. People work best when they understand the boundaries that they have. Therefore what policies, principles, and procedures are considered essential to get the desired results? What do you expect them not to do? Also what levels of authority are you willing you empower the individual with?

Ensure that resources will be available. Clearly giving responsibility to your staff for specific outcomes without giving them the resources to achieve them is setting them up to fail. Therefore what financial, human, technical resources are available to them to deliver? What skills do they need? What other support is available to them?

Hold staff accountable for results. If you empower your staff, how will you hold them accountable? For example, what are the standards of acceptable performance? How will results/performance be measured and evaluated? How will progress reports be made and accountability sessions held?

Consider consequences. If you are going to hold people accountable, you must also consider what will happen when the desired results are achieved or not achieved. For example, positive consequences could include financial, recognition, appreciation, advancement, new assignments, enlarged responsibilities, and possibly promotion. Negative consequences could range from reprimand to retraining or termination of employment.

Empowerment is all about gain. It is about the gain of your time and improving your impact. It is also about gaining access to the skills, knowledge and initiative of your staff. However, it’s important to recognise that successful empowerment, requires careful preparation and planning, it not simply a case of giving someone a series of tasks and letting them get on with it. Doing this will only end in failure and disappointment.

So what is empowerment about and what are the benefits? Empowerment is quite simply a highly practical and productive way of getting the best form yourself and your staff. It involves not simply the delegation of tasks but decision making and full responsibility to.
Empowerment is one of the high leverage activities that a manager should engage in. Using Pareto’s 80:20 rule, empowerment is one of the 20% tasks that gives you 80% of the results you seek.
Why is this? Quite simply it is because it encourages staff to use their initiative. For example, there are a number of levels of initiative that a manager can encourage their staff to demonstrate. From the lowest to the highest they are:

1) Wait until told.
2) Ask what to do.
3) Recommend and then take action
4) Act, and advise immediately.
5) Act and advise routinely.

If a manager behaves in a ‘do what you are told’ way towards their staff, they simply encourage their staff to come to them with all their issues. A manager who engages in this type of behaviour will have little time to work on their important tasks as they will spend most of their time resolving staff related issues.
However a manager who encourages their staff to demonstrate high levels of initiative (ie levels 4 and 5 above), is effectively saying to their staff, ‘I trust you, you are responsible go and sort it!’. This therefore leaves the management more time to concentrate on their important, high impact tasks
However, empowerment often worries managers because they are afraid of losing control. Losing control of their staff, of budgets, customer service, ideas or standards. The idea of empowerment worries them because it seems to entail the loss of all that carefully planned control. However, empowerment is not about losing control – it is about giving it away.
There’s a big difference between losing control and giving it up. Giving up control, in other words empowerment, requires careful preparation and planning, it is not simply a case of giving someone a series of tasks and letting them get on with it. We will consider preparing for empowerment in the next article.
So, empowerment is not about loss of control In fact it’s about gain, gain of time, impact, commitment, and ideas. Most of all it is about gaining access to the skills, knowledge and initiative of your staff. Why wouldn’t you want to empower them?

By the end of the feedback process to the participants in a Development Centre you should have both individual data specific to each person and also group data relating to the cohorts of managers who have gone through the process.

This data will cover the strengths, weaknesses and potential development areas & solutions for each individual as well as for the larger group. It will have been further informed by the input of the line managers when they have been involved in the feedback discussions with their participants and any development needs related to the needs of the current and future jobs.

The Organisation clearly has a responsibility to make productive use of this data for the direct benefit of the participants especially and also for the Organisation as a whole.
In addition you may also have some additional data about the future potential of the participants and their suitability or unsuitability for other roles in the future.

This data can further inform career development and succession plans for this group of managers.
Hopefully each participant would leave the development centre with a greater sense of their strengths and a personal development plan that they can follow. The Organisation should support this by providing resource, funding and access to any suitable training courses, development events, projects or individual coaching and mentoring initiatives to help the participants to grow and develop their competencies and performance.

There a number of factors to considered when making this decision.
The timing of the feedback is important – it should be given as close to the Development Centre event itself, so as to be fresh & relevant in the eyes of the participant and also to be fresh and clear for the observer who has been allocated this role.

It is also important not to let a participant “stew” for a long time and to become stressed, fearing the worst, whilst waiting for the feedback.
I am presuming here that the person giving the feedback would always be one of the observers present at this subject’s specific Centre. This is important for the participant to allow them to ask questions of the observer and of course to be given credible answers and feedback from a person who directly observed their performance and who made any judgements about their effectiveness and competency.

It also needs to involve the participant’s line manager in order for the feedback to be considered in conjunction with the employee's day to day work and in the context of the ongoing and future personal development planning for each individual. This is crucial given the line manager’s overall responsibility for the personal performance and team development of their employees. This can be done but does not need to take place at the same time as the initial individual Centre feedback outlined above. However it should be done within 2 – 4 weeks of the Development Centre event or it can lose its impact and relevance.

My ideal model is to give the participant’s more or less immediate feedback about how they have done, their strengths, development areas and any potential solutions on the last afternoon of a two day Development Centre process and then to follow this feedback report up with both them and their managers within two weeks of the event.

Over the next few months, many organisations may face difficult times, but as a leader within your organisation what can you do to ensure your firm remains successful? The following are a number of tips that will help.

1. Don’t be fearful. To often individuals and organisations become paralysed by merchants of “gloom and doom”. However, the reality is that life still goes on; people and businesses still have needs. So its time to focus on your organisations uniqueness and adapt your offering to outsmart your competitors.

2. Focus on cash flow. The liquidity crisis has highlighted the importance of cash – if you have it you won’t go bust, so as a leader it’s vital that you are really on top of your cash position.

3. Avoid simply slashing costs. While it is prudent to review costs during difficult times, indiscriminate cutting of costs across the business are more likely to damage customer relationships and ultimately damage the business in the long term.

4. Don’t become internally focussed. As a leader it is easy to become distracted by internal issues such as restructuring, reorganisations and cost reductions. However, it is vital that you also give time to your key customers, their needs and generating as much revenue as possible.

5. Remember – you need people! Try to avoid making redundant people that are vital to the future success of your organisation. In addition, simply putting a freeze on all recruitment can lead to a shortage of good people in the future.

6. Keep people motivated. While employees are less likely to leave their jobs during difficult times, it doesn’t mean that they will be any more motivated. Identify ways that your staff can be more empowered, take greater responsibility and use their initiative more.

7. Support your customers. Understand what difficulties your customers may have. How can you help them? For example, what innovative pricing or payment terms can you agree on? Support will breed customer loyalty for the future.

Finally, it is also important to recognise that not all areas of the economy will be hit in the same way. Clearly anything related to domestic property and banking have been hit hard, but there will be other areas in both private and public sectors that will not be affected in the same way.

Too frequently managers find themselves dealing with their team’s problems rather than encouraging them to solve their problems themselves.

Consider the following exchange, between a manager and their supervisor:

“Hi John, I wonder if you can have a word with Fred. I have spoken to him a number of times about wearing his safety goggles in the lab and he still doesn’t wear them. I thought if you had a word with him he might take it more seriously from you?”

What happens if John accepts this problem from his supervisor? He will become burdened with a task that’s not his and undermine the authority of his supervisor because next time, Fred will not do anything until his bosses boss tells him to.

So what should a manager do?

The following is paraphrased from Orcken and Wass’ article in the Harvard Business Review (January 1990) and sums the issue up nicely.

‘At no time while you help someone with their problem must you let it become your problem. The instant their problem becomes yours, they will no longer have a problem and you will have one more than you had before. If you have 10 staff and you let them each give you a new problem to resolve every week, then in three months you will have over 100!’

To minimise “problem collection” managers should follow some simple guidelines:

1. Don’t accept responsibility for your people’s problems. This doesn’t mean that you won’t help them, it just means that the responsibility for the problem stays with them.

2. Meet with them to discuss the issue, preferably at the appointed time and to agree any resulting action.

3. Help them to deal with the problem, so that they can resolve it themselves.

4. Agree what action they will take and when you will review it with them. Follow up is vital to ensure that the problem is resolved satisfactorily.

It is also important to ensure that the individual understands the level of initiative they are expected to use. For example, the issue may be serious enough to warrant a “please look into it and come back with your recommendation before taking action”. Alternatively, the issue may warrant the following response “act on your own and tell me when it has been resolved”.

To prevent managers from being overworked and their staff becoming paralysed due to indecision, managers must ensure that they don’t become burdened with problems that aren’t theirs.

     Most organisations endeavour to attract and retain the highest calibre of employees, but what formal processes can managers use to improve their chances of selecting the right person?

Clearly all potential employees must be selected for roles on the basis of merit, i.e. their capability to fulfil the job role requirements. However, it is also important to ensure that potential employees are provided with the necessary information to enable them to make appropriate decisions.

Firstly, all vacant roles should have a job description, and essential minimum selection criteria associated with it. The criteria should include qualifications, experience, key skills, capabilities and appropriate behaviours.

To ensure consistency, it is best if applicants are asked to complete a standard application form to enable an initial assessment of their capabilities against the job role’s essential minimum criteria.

In addition, applicants should be provided with information such as: job description, terms and conditions, brief history of the organisation, key strategic objectives, and a brief on how the role holder is expected to contribute to the business. In this way they can understand what is potentially required of them which will help them to make appropriate decisions.

When it comes to selection, ultimately, the job role should dictate the selection process being used, with a fairly simple process for junior employees, to more complex selection methods for senior employees. For example a simple process might include the following:

1. Initial screening – A standard application form to initially assess a candidate’s suitability, accompanied by proof of relevant qualifications.

2. Initial interview - A competency based interview with HR., including relevant skills and/or aptitude tests relating to the job role.

3. Final interview – A formal interview with HR and the Line Manager, with the final decision being made jointly between the Line Manger and HR.

For more senior managers, the process might include:

1. Initial screening – A standard application form, personality test, verbal, numerical and critical thinking tests, proof of relevant qualifications and a written submission to a business problem.

2. Interview and meeting - A competency based interview HR and the Line Manager, followed by a meeting with peers to determine fit with organisation’s direction and culture.

3. Final interview and presentation – A final interview with the Line Manager, HR, and other Senior Managers at which the candidate(s) deliver a presentation which demonstrates their capability for the role and a plan for what they will do in their first 6-12 months. The final decision being made jointly by those present.

It should be noted that all methods of selection must be reliable, objective and guard against bias.

Finally, it is good practice (and for some roles a legal requirement) that checks are undertaken before a final offer is made to any candidate. For example these might include: proof of identity, criminal record, qualifications, references, state of health, and driving license.

Most organisations wish to attract the highest calibre of employees, as the right person can have a considerable impact on an organisation’s success. However, by inference the opposite must also be true, that selecting the wrong person could potentially be disastrous. This is why it is important to not simply hire on a hunch or gut feeling, it makes much more sense to invest in a formal process or recruitment advice

How do you find someone that is ‘right’ for your organisation? How quickly will a potential recruit make a positive contribution? How will they fit with the existing team? Will they be committed to the organisation for a number of years or will they quickly move on in search of more money?

These questions are in the mind of many managers when they recruit a new person but how can they be answered?

Too many managers see a candidate and make a judgement on gut instinct. They are easily persuaded (or not!) by the first impressions a candidate makes. However, if the right person can have a considerable impact on an organisation’s success, (and by inference the wrong person could be disastrous!), why would you hire on a hunch? Surely it makes more sense to invest in a formal process. In addition, one has to question why a candidate would want to take job on the basis of an informal chat, the best candidates know that it is important that they understand the role, what will be expected of them and that the organisation they plan to work for has a professional approach in everything they do. These things would not be demonstrated by a cosy chat in a restaurant.

However, that doesn’t mean that gut feeling and instinct should be totally excluded from the process. For example, if an organisation advertises a position, there are a number of hurdles that have to be first overcome before an interview can even take place. For example:

· The right person or persons need to see the advert.

· The advert needs to excite them enough for them to want to respond.

· They then have to respond in a manner that ensures the HR department or recruitment consultants shortlist them.

So how can managers use their instinct to improve the recruitment process? Essentially, managers should always be on the lookout for potential new recruits. As people we are always meeting others either informally (on planes, trains, social events), or formally at business meetings and networking events. It is during these interactions that gut feel and instinct can work best.

By meeting potential candidates outside of a formal process, you can really get a feel for what motivates them and what makes them tick, and make an initial judgement about whether or not they are the right sort of person for your organisation. Once they become interested in what you have to offer, then a more formal ‘assessment’ process can be engaged. For more in depth advice on your recruitment processes and how to improve them why not look at developingpeople.co.uk