Get Your Employees Participating to Help Steer the Business Through the Tough Times

Employee participation is a tried and true path to enhancing productivity. All (and I mean all) staff have ideas about their job. OK, so some of them might not be so good but others are good and some might be fantastic. Chances are they will also have ideas about how other staff in the business can contribute more effectively, and probably about how the managers could get on with it.

In my experience, there’s buckets of value in staff ideas. The challenge is getting the constructive ones out in the open. It’s not just a matter of putting a suggestion box on the wall prefaced with a big announcement. You actually have to work hard to get valuable ideas.

Fundamentally, there needs to be a culture which supports participation. People need to know that their ideas are important, and that their ideas MUST be important.

And important contributions must be valued by the company .  When found they must be moulded into concrete outcomes – processes, actions and behaviours which change the way work is done.

Sometimes managers are afraid that encouraging employees to contribute ideas about work will undermine their own status.  These managers are control freaks who want to be seen as the sole responsible driver of their business outcomes.  They put themselves under a lot of pressure to all the decisions without real coal face knowledge.  If your a control freaks are often perceived as arrogant when they really lack perspective and confidence.   And in the end they lose control.  When staff learn that their manager is a control freak they start side-stepping him/her to get the things done vital to their job.   

The best managers in my experience searched their staff for issues and ideas, recognised the good ones and set about moulding them into concrete action.  They quizzed and prodded staff with problems, what ifs and vital outcomes.  Sometimes things would get pungent as staff argued the pros and cons of every detail.  The great manager kept them on track, sometimes road blocked stupidity and enforced rigorous goal directed thought.  In the end they always gave credit to the staff who divined and nurtured the idea.  Idea ownership was a secondary issue for them.  Their ego and survival depended on outcomes.

Most importantly, the staff loved making a contribution – it gave them purpose, made them feel valued – that they belonged.

So if the your business is finding tough, reach in and share it with everyone.  Get them to take responsibility for coming up with the solutions and coach their participation to success.

Does the Economic Crash Really Spell the End of Staff Satisfaction and Engagement? (Nothing’s Changed You Idiot)

I recently came across an article interviewing several human capital specialists about the implications of the economic crash for employee management. The gist of their collective views was that the power balance had shifted from employees to employers. Apparently – according to these wise consultant folk – employers no longer need to worry about wether their employees are satisfied and engaged. In these dire economic times, they should just be grateful to have a job.    

 

It goes something like this.  IQ has replaced EQ as the key employee management strategy so employees ‘… just sit down shut up and get on with it’.  Generation Y – you’re in for the shock of your life.  The days of picking and choosing are over.  Don’t expect you’re employer to care about you’re training and development.  Forget coaching and participating – just behoove to your authoritarian masters and be thankful they put the pittance in your bank account each month.  Don’t ruminate about the latest i-thing you can’t afford as you sweat it out in some back room for the man…  (OK – a little bit exaggerated but you get the drift..)

 

I never know how this sort of tripe gets into the pages of my daily city news paper.   As I see it, the balance has changed for those who have lost their job – no question.  But for those still in the job the balance has just become a bit misshapen – contorted.  This is because when after an employer   has decided who to keep and gone through the harrowing process of “disengaging” (i.e. sacking) the unfortunate employees no longer required (who were most likely employed as a result of poor decisions anyway – but that’s another story),  the employer is probably left with less staff to do more work. Now to get these now stressed and torn people to work more productively than ever, the last thing you want to do is reduce their engagement and  satisfaction levels. 

 

The ability to harness employee motivation and creativity  will more than likely be the differentiating factor which separates the winners from the losers in the current economic environment.  Getting your people to work harder at being more efficient, solving more problems and creating new solutions is a recipe for opportunity. growth and prosperity – just the same as it always has been, but even more so right now.  And if you can’t pay them for it properly at the moment, link their efforts to the company’s future prosperity at least so that when it all pays off they will get some reward. 

 

So if you think that getting tough on your staff is just natural and justifiable reaction to an economic downturn – let me tell you – your lawyers won’t care when you’re down at the insolvency court.

What Sort of Training Should You Give Your Employees?

When it gets down to training your staff you can waste a lot of money if your don’t think it through carefully. More than once I would overhear my staff complaining over the time consumed in training whcih took them away from their day to day tasks. Often they would come out of a training session questioning the purpose, quietly ridiculing – even despising – the program. (I know this because even as the manager, I was well wired in to the sub-cultures). No matter how good the intentions of the management and HR strategy, staff will judge it harshly. If the training helps them get through their job more effectively they’ll participate with enthusiasm. If isn’t meaningful in the context of day to day activities then it could be doing more harm than good to productivity.

At one company I was working with not long ago, they were sending all the staff through a training program to improve teamwork and cooperation. Some nutter manager had convinced the CEO that this was going to add value and everyone was being force fed through the arduous four hour program. Though it was supposed to be exciting and invigorating you couldn’t help notice the constant reference to watches as participants tried to hurry the time passing and get back to their customers. Whats more, when we surveyed the staff, their real concern was the absence of a quality induction program. They thought their teams were working fine.

There is an opportunity cost to training. If you take staff out of their job to train them, that’s time they could be doing something else – their work or some other type of training or productive activity. With any training strategy, you should ask the question – is this time and money that could be better spent on some other activity? Only proceed if the answer is no.

There are a a number of types of training. ‘Hard skills’ training focuses on skills which are required to conduct specific tasks required to do the job. Hard skills are the basic building blocks of productivity. One class of hard skills concern technical knowledge about the job – computer programming knowledge, engineering skills etc.. Most often you hire staff on the basis of their the hard skills unless they have been promoted to a new position or are trainees where they may need some training. The second class of hard skills concern those required to operate within the company – administrative processes and procedures etc.. Everyone needs to be trained in these – preferably through an induction program at the time they start with a company. At times you need to conduct training to implement new procedures, but only for those who are impacted by them. Also, refresher courses may be necessary, especially for procedures which have legal consequences ( eg. health and safety, privacy etc.).

‘Soft skills’ training concerns training which impacts on the behaviour and beliefs of staff to effect culture and attitudes. Soft skills training involves areas such as teamwork, leadership, customer service, and problem solving which can have a critical impact on performance and productivity. But beware – it can go awfully wrong and as I suggested earlier – if conducted poorly or innapropriately, can be more detrimental than positive. Again a critical condition for success is wether there is staff perceive a need for the training and whether they believe that the training will add value (solve a perceived problem). To find this out you need to ask them – through a survey or focus group perhaps.

Generally it needs to be consultative and participative ensuring that as far as possible it addresses the issues percieved by all staff. Reaching a shared understanding about the nature of the problem or goal and what everyone can do about it is a pre-condition to action. In most cases its not about a top-down command or instruction (which merely precipitates inaudible mutters and anguish).

In some instances, soft skills are better disseminated through examplary behaviour by those in leadership positions. For example, by encouraging participation and consultation in meetings , or informally through modelling behaviour or reiforcement by the manager. In this case formal training must be directed at the manager responsible for the culture and behaviour of their staff.

Training is an important component for a productive company but you should think carefully about what your trying to achieve. The aim is to improve performance but its easy to miss the mark with the wrong strategy.

Celebrate diversity – Leverage the unique aspects of your employees.

I live in a densely multicultural city.  The benefits are too numerous – wonderful varieties of restaurants and food shops, people from different cultures norms, different ways of doing things, different religions.  It makes for a rich existence.  I can go down to my local shops and buy any herb, spice or specialty from just about anywhere in the world – Africa, Asia, India, Germany, Italy, Vietnam, the middle East, Greece or South Africa – you name it.   I feel spoiled and indulge in the wonders of the world outside may front door.  I seek recipes and talk to shop keepers to learn how to use the different ingredients and create the unique and create magnificent dishes. I go to different restaurants and marvel at the diversity.

In my  time as a manager, I could never get over the differences in the values, behaviours and attitudes of my staff.   Companies can be like little  microcosms of the wider world.  People  never seem to do what you might expect – to assimilate information, or react to situations, to understand  or see the world as you might anticipate.  It is the bane of the young manager – the multi-value workforce.  They will consistently surprise you with their human-ness, their capacity to perceive and deal with the world in a unique way.

So many young and inexperienced managers are hell-bent on achieving their goals that they  often try and prize people into conforming to rigid behaviours.  Try and enforce values on them – and if they don’t think or appreciate circumstances to their expectations, they cast them aside – start pushing them into corners where the only escape is to seek alternative employment.  So rather than letting them create a curry or masala – they force them to make steak and chips and then complain that it tastes bad.

Of course, the objective is to be well fed, and whether you achieve this by eating steak and chips or a sumptuous curry doesn’t matter.  As you mature as a manager, you learn that you can leverage the different approaches of your staff to create a more diverse competitive approach to getting the job done.

The greatest success I have had in business was founded on bringing together teams with diverse skills and perceptions about a problem.  In many cases, they were more able than I at their specialty and used different recipes – but the banquet was magnificent.

Understanding the individual value of your employees can be create enormous competitive advantages.   If you try and push them all into the same deep-fryer, your’ll be eating soggy fish and chips instead of a delicious bulgogi.