The Business Beach Bum

Archive for the ‘HR’ Category

Early identification of disengagement among employees is a critical skill for managers. Engagement drives both rational and emotional commitment to an organisation, which are precursors to both discretionary effort and retention. Studies have shown that highly engaged employees perform 20% better and are 87% less likely to leave an organisation.

There are seven key areas of employee engagement, which should be assessed from time to time through general conversation or by more formal assessments using surveys.

1. Career
When employees join an organisation, they usually have a career goal in mind when they join or shortly thereafter. It is important to check for frustration over their progress or that their career objectives become less ambitious over time. Also check that they are clear on how to progress their career objectives in the organisation. If employees are hesitant to discuss the topic, it is likely to mean that they are reluctant to sound negative and there may still be an issue that needs pursuing.

2. Rewards and recognition
Employees respond to rewards and recognition when they believe the system is fair, the rewards and recognition are meaningful to them and are communicated in a way that suits their personality. Watch for sarcasm or frustration towards the idea that the organisation rewards and recognises its employees for excellence. At the individual level, people need to perceive that they have been rewarded or recognised. It is insufficient to believe that you have rewarded or recognised them. Check that they feel that way too.

3. Leadership
Employees need to feel that their leaders, including their one-up manager, are open to new ideas whilst also clearly articulating the vision and gaols of the organisation. From their one-up manager they expect responsibility to be taken for failures as well as successes. They do look for inspiration, but not necessarily from their oratory. Inspiration can come from many sources, including but not limited to selfless behaviour, courage under fire from more senior managers, capacity to think and problem solve and ability to adapt. Completing a 360 degree assessment of the leadership team is a good way of understanding what impact leadership is having on the engagement of employees.

4. Organisational Culture
Employees remain engaged when working in a culture which is forward looking and customer focused. Cultures which stultify innovation and enshrine inflexibility drive employees to disengage. To understand your culture, a good model to use is Johnson and Scholes Cultural Web.

5. Congruence between roles and strategy
Employees need to feel that their roles have a concrete influence on the execution of strategy. They need to know how what they do contributes to something which is worthwhile in the future, not just the transactional issues of each day. Can your employees describe how what they do contributes to the execution of strategy to achieve the vision of the organisation? Do you have a formal link between vision, mission, governance (policies), strategy, processes and procedures and KPIs such that individuals can see how their leadership in their role contributes to the greater good? When thisline of sight is weak, employees become disengaged.

6. Personal Development
Employees who do not have career progression as such, but feel they are experiencing personal development, are more likely to remain engaged. Personal development is in the eye of the beholder. People have to be asked about their personal development in conversation rather than be directly told about it. This may take some time and effort because the individual may not see that they have developed, having undergone that development small step by small step. To outside observers they may have developed a lot and whilst it’s good that they receive that feedback, they may need coaxing by their one-up manager to come to the same conclusion.

7. Work Life Balance
Work life balance is in the eye of the beholder too. What looks like balance to one person is unbalanced to another. Some people work to live while others live to work. At times, despite our best efforts, employees mimic the work behaviour of their leaders, thinking that they have to work long hours if their leader does. This may be the furthest thing from the leaders’ minds, as their view of work life balance is different from their followers. It is important to communicate expectations clearly in terms of work life balance to ensure that people do not have false expectations one way or another.

Forbes have written an excellent article on building business culture, which can be seen in full here.

Building a culture in your business is very important.  Over the years I have started up business, units within business and acquired businesses.  Each of these offer diffierent challenges as either the people who start with you, or the businesses you acquire, bring their own culture values to bear.  As a leader I’ve learnt some key lessons;

• Your values lead the business, but let your teams build a culture based on their values, using the common ground of corporate goals to bring people together.
• Just because you like Pub Fridays, Betting Mondays, Greyhound Racing Thursdsays etc…, not everyone does….be inclusive.
• Be proud of your culture, but let it change as your business changes.
• Embrace news ideas, again with the caveat that they help the business achieve its financial objectives.

The Forbes article offers advice under the following headings;

• Communicate your dream
• Be clear about what you stand for, inside and outside your company
• Design your organization for what it needs to win
• Get your team right and do it quickly
• Champion innovation of all kinds
• Set your standards very high
• Train all the time
• Do a few symbolic things to create excitement about what is important
• Think like a winner, act like a winner
• Live your desired legacy.

I’m off now to do some email from the Beach Bar!

TTFN!

Performance management processes constitute:

• planning—deliberation of what to do and setting expectations;
• monitoring—continually checking on performance;
• developing—improving the capacity to perform;
• rating—periodically scaling performance in a summary fashion; and
• rewarding—compensating good performance.

I’ve introduced these key processes below, and a sample Annual Objectives Template you can build from to record objectives.

The first process, planning, means structuring mindsets of your managers on how performance should be channelled to achieve objectives that build towards the goals of the organisation. By involving employees in this process, there is improved buy in and comprehension on the goals of the organisation, what needs to be done, why it needs to be done, and the standards expected.

Employee performance plans should include establishment of elements and standards to be used for regular performance appraisals. It should be versatile, making adjustments in program objectives and work requirements easy.

The second process in performance management is monitoring. Your teams deserve a consistent assessment of performance and providing ongoing remarks to employees and work groups praising those helping the business in progressing in attaining its goals and making it clear to those who are not succeeding that their performance is not good enough and must improve or they will enter a performance improvement programme.  Employees’ evaluation enables the supervisor to see if employees are meeting predetermined standards, to make revisions to problematic standards.

Developing, the third process can be defined as increasing the capacity to perform. This can be staged through training, seminars, and assigning projects that would introduce new skills or higher levels of responsibility, and improve work processes or methods. These developmental activities pave way to encourage good performance, strengthen job-related skills and competencies, and help employees keep up with changes in the workplace, such as the introduction of new technology.

From time to time, organisations find it useful to summarise employee performance. This requires the fourth process of performance management, rating. This enables comparison among a set of employees or individual conduct or productivity over a period of appraisal. The rating of record has a bearing on various other personnel actions, such as granting within-grade pay increases, and promoting or determining additional retention service credit in a reduction in force.

In a productive organisation, rewards are used frequently and profitably. Rewarding, the fifth process of performance management comprises this. It means acknowledging employees’ contributions to the agency’s mission as an individual or a team player through granting of awards, merits, benefits or bonuses. A basic principle of effective management is that all conduct is influenced by its consequences. This applies, whether the deed is positive or negative.

All five components or processes triumphantly result to a natural and effective performance management. Each key process should be executed in such a way that there exists coordination and support from these processes, to the supervisors, and to the subordinates. Practicing this should include setting goals; planning work routinely; measuring progress toward those goals and giving and accepting feedbacks to and from employees. High standards should be set but taking care to develop the skills required to reach goals and acknowledging productive deeds should never be disregarded.

All the best

The BBB

Reproduced from Forbes.com

The only three true job interview questions are:

1. Can you do the job?
2. Will you love the job?
3. Can we tolerate working with you?

That’s it. Those three. Think back, every question you’ve ever posed to others or had asked of you in a job interview is a subset of a deeper in-depth follow-up to one of these three key questions. Each question potentially may be asked using different words, but every question, however it is phrased, is just a variation on one of these topics: Strengths, Motivation, and Fit.

The full article can be found at http://www.forbes.com/sites/georgebradt/2011/04/27/top-executive-recruiters-agree-there-are-only-three-key-job-interview-questions/