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.

Can Governments Spend Their Way Out of the Economic Crisis

Of course, what to do about the current economic situation, is perplexing many Governments. It a bit like the fish after its been hooked, thrashing about as it’s reeled in to a certain death…But maybe if it can just twist and squirm it will slip off the hook to live another day…

In most countries, Governments have a few big macro bulldozers to push around such as flood money into the market and lower interest rates (which might take some subtle conniving with so called independent central bank – but whose taking orders from who anyway).  The problem wit the bulldozer strategies is you don’t have much control.  Lower interest rates are OK if it turns into lower credit and stimulates a bit of business activity.  But when there’s such an imbalance between haves and have’s not’s, its hard to point it in th right direction.  (I doubt anyone’s got the courage to set up business in Detroit at the moment.)

Then there are micro economic activities which generally no one wants to talk about when growth is strong but everyone justifies during the hard times – industry protection and subsidy policies which keep farm and motor vehicle companies going in most modern economies.  (The exception of course is in the US where the cars are clearly made to cross-subsidise the local oil industry – why else?).

But the popular one is infra-structure development because a government has some control over how the money is spent.  It sounds good.  Spend it on education roads and highways, health and the like.  Sure if a government can operate efficiently enough to find and approve expenditure strategies it employs lots of people.  This is the difference between just giving a tax cut because people might save it rather than buy something.  Even if they buy something it will probably be from  Asia, so won’t appeal to the western markets.  At least if you build a road, you employee locals even if they save some of their pay, after they’ve paid the rent or mortgage and bought the food.

I’m not sure why government spending plans should be any more successful than private sector.  If they ever get it off the ground then I hope its worthwhile – its my (or my kids) taxes they’ll be spending.  Worst case is it  just means a lot of employment for do nothing public servants but that’s definitely not the intention.  There aren’t to many desk jobs for bricklayers down at Council…

Here’s hoping.

Ooops …. They’ve made a mistake (Okay – NOT)

The BBC Business Daily Report of 5 January 2009 suggests its not okay to make the mistakes in business.  Their on the mark. The old chestnut ‘ if your going to try new things in business be prepared to make mistakes and learn’ has got to be one of the biggest of the many furphies to come out of popular management theory in the last 20 years.   Over the past year we have seen what happens if you make big enough mistakes….  it’s all over (for some at least).   Furthermore, make a big mistake, or enough little mistakes and you won’t get a chance to see if you’ve learnt anything.

The idea that selling lots of sub-prime loans to lots of people who couldn’t afford them constitutes lots of mistakes and not much learning, is pretty tempting.  Lots of people in lots of businesses down the supply chain, being careless, with insufficient knowledge, evaluating things wrongly – making mistakes.

If making mistakes isn’t actually a good thing then what is the solution?  Maybe it’s about thinking things out before you make the decision.  Disciplined planning and analysis, careful thinking and review and questioning  – all the hard things.  Its also about having a culture which supports honest and free speech – which not only encourages (and enforces) disciplined analysis but reinforces the exercise and debate of considered opinions.   The latter in my experience can be difficult  to achieve – as challenging as good analysis in the first place.

Does this mean you don’t take risks or fail on occasions?   Many decisions or plans have a risk (be it a known risk, a known unknown risk or an unknown unknown etc.) and even the most detailed decisions/plans have an element of judgement initially and along the way.  You don’t always fail because you made a mistake.  You can fail for any number of reasons beyond your control, but you need to hunt them down and pull the plug straight away.   A mistake occurs if you don’t look for problems and find them and then act on  them.

I know – sometimes there isn’t the time or money to do the analysis required.  This can lead to all sots of trouble – be it on your own head.   Its your call but maybe its better not to go into the jungle in bare feet.

The idea that we don’t learn from mistakes has interesting consequences for senior management and Boards.  If the solution to a mistake is to implement stronger regulation then why should those responsible for the mistake continue to hold responsibility in the aftermath?  Why should we think they have learnt the skills necessary not to make the same mistakes again, let alone other is a new environment?

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.