Read an interesting post today from Bruce Kasanoff recommending we step away from the old adage of “teaching people to fish” when they are truly hungry.
He points out that when people are truly hungry they need nourishment, not wisdom.
That really shouldn’t be news to any of us since Maslow created his hierarchy of needs decades ago, but it seems like we still struggle with it on both sides of the employment equation.
I am a really big fan of employee engagement. I believe, and the statistics bear me out, that organizations with high employee engagement outperform their lesser engaged counterparts in every key performance category.
So you might ask - Why wouldn’t every organization be investing in employee engagement strategies?
Continue Reading...
I just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book, David and Goliath. Like all of his books that preceded it I enjoyed it a great deal. I see Gladwell as kind of a social facilitator and observer. He doesn’t try to present himself as a behavioral scientist with countless reams of data to support his conclusions, he makes comments and observations. The reader has the choice to accept or reject them.
While I enjoyed the entire book the part that most spoke to me was Gladwell’s discussion of legitimacy.
According to Gladwell legitimacy occurs when three elements are present -
- Those who are governed have a voice in the process; their input is sought and heard.
- There is a dimension of predictability and consistency in the application of the law or standards.
- The application of the law or standard has to be administered fairly and objectively, you can’t have disparate treatment without a clear and compelling reason.
The reason I find this discussion about legitimacy so interesting is in its application to the work environment.
I think that most organizations today recognize that beyond their product or service brand intentionally or unintentionally they have also created and promulgate an employment brand.
Your organizations employment brand is the perception by current and future employees of what working in your organization is like.
Some organizations enjoy a very strong employment brand. I would include Google, Starbucks, Accenture, and Zappo’s in this arena. People have a pretty clear perspective about what these organizations value and the profile they seek.
Other organizations fairly or unfairly occupy the opposite end of the spectrum. I would put Walmart and currently McDonalds in this area.
We live in an environment where the competition for experienced talent is becoming more and more pronounced and a recent survey pointed out that the rate of voluntary turnover; employees electing to leave their job, increased by 45% between 2012 and 2013.
I had a chance to read an article in the September 2014 edition of the Harvard Business Review that I found alarming and disappointing. The author talked about the fact that in a ten year period from 2002 to 2012 members of the S & P 500 had reinvested close to 60% of the profits they made in re-purchasing their own stock and close to another 30% in dividends to shareholders.
His point is this is why we are seeing a “jobless” recovery. Rather than investing in growth or compensation for the average employee we see distribution of the fruits of increased performance going to very few- the shareholder versus stakeholder mentality.
This is I suspect a large part of why we see that employee engagement has pegged at about 30% and remained there for years. We still don’t look at employees and their appropriate recruitment and retention as a strategic initiative.
There is quite a bit of buzz these days as to whether or not the traditional human resources function should be disbanded or minimally separated into two distinct components; an administrative function responsible for compliance, payroll, benefits administration, etc. and and function which is responsible for talent acquisition, training and development, succession planning, and other strategic components.
Continued Reading...
Over the weekend I had occasion to purchase and read Strengths Finder 2.0. If you are not familiar with it, Strengths Finders is the assessment tool first developed in 2001 by the Gallup organization.
The essential concept behind it is that people who are given the opportunity to focus in the areas where their talents are most pronounced are much more likely to be engaged and have much higher levels of productivity.
A lot of these concepts were discussed in detail by Marcus Buckingham in his series of books and it isn’t my intent to go into them in detail, but there were some things that I feel are worth mentioning and reinforcing again.
The first is data collected by Gallup indicating that individuals who feel that like their work is aligned with their talents are six times as likely to describe themselves as highly engaged at work and three times as likely to describe their overall quality of life as excellent.
Continued Reading...
Over 100 years ago Frederick W. Taylor introduced the concept of scientific management to the world and unfortunately to a large extent his theories are still the foundation that much of the relationship between employer and employed are based upon.
Taylor’s position is that the world is divided into two kinds of people, managers and labor. Managers think and labor does. This is also where the concept of white collar versus blue collar originated.
I would tell you that much of our failure to evolve our management and leadership theories go back to this premise. Even today most managers and supervisors are promoted based on their technical capabilities rather than their abilities to select, train, develop, and deploy talent. We still buy into the concept of human capital.
When scientific management really caught on we wrote a new social contract-rather than individuals learning a skill and negotiating the value of that skill the model promoted breaking tasks down into simple, easily repeatable steps that were easy to train and could be monitored for consistency. By breaking the skills down and removing the thinking part, you also lessened the value of the activity being performed.
Continue Reading...
A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.”
–Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com
A brand is a living entity and is enriched or undermined cumulatively over time, the product of a thousand small gestures.”
-Michael Eisner, Former CEO, Walt Disney
These two business greats do a brilliant job of describing that ethereal concept we call a brand.
If you ask the average person about brand they will describe it as a logo or some other marketing oriented concept, but in the age of social media and instant gratification branding has taken on new dimension and meaning.
We live in an environment where the competition for experienced talent is becoming more and more pronounced and a recent survey pointed out that the rate of voluntary turnover; employees electing to leave their job, increased by 45% between 2012 and 2013.
So we had a pretty gnarly snow and ice storm this last week in the PNW so I had time for a lot of contemplation and catching up on my reading.
As per usual, topics that speak to the concepts behind employee engagement continue to attract my attention and focus.
I will be honest; I am perplexed with why more organizations don’t invest in a strategy that clearly leads to significantly improved performance in every conceivable key performance indicator. Especially today, when studies are recoding that voluntary turnover was up by almost 50% between 2012 and 2013 and the cost of a new hire is up 15% for the same period.
When you add those statistics to the fact that on average engaged employees contribute almost 50% more per capita and you have to ask – “what’s up”?
Engagement has taken a pretty good pounding because a lot of people still see it as some kind of a motivation tool or a survey to be conducted by the HR organization. Others see it as soft science.
Continued Reading...
My colleague Michael Beck posted a great piece the other day on why the majority of employers worldwide are doing the engagement thing wrong, addressing it reactively rather than proactively and I couldn’t agree more. Much better to build engagement into the fabric of your organization through appropriate selection and hiring, but it doesn’t stop there.
He pointed out that the latest Gallup poll provided some pretty eye opening statistics, including the fact organizations with high employee engagement saw a 147% advantage in earnings per share over non highly engaged organizations in 2011 and 2012 and the fact that the Department of Labor estimates that disengagement costs the U.S. economy between $450 and $550 billion dollars annually and for me at least that garners some attention.
Add to that recent studies indicating that voluntary turnover was up 45% year to year from and cost per hire is up 15% for the same period and you might think that more organizations would be examining their strategies and taking action. The interesting thing is that we have seen at best incremental improvement over the last five years.
I think there are a number of issues surrounding organizations inability or unwillingness to address this issue. I include the idea we really don’t understand it, we don’t make it a core strategy, the fact that most human resources practitioners are still in the compliance business, and that engagement is a relationship issue rather than a technological process improvement among my big hitters.
Continue Reading
Most of us have longer reading lists than available time. There are traditional hard cover books, PDFs and books saved onto our tablets, case studies our bosses have asked us to read and summarize, trade publications that continue to arrive when we least expect them via snail mail, and e-zines that appear in our email boxes in a never-ending stream. But when it comes to leadership strategies, corporate culture, and leadership development, there are never too many perspectives or books to read. Here are five books I highly recommend you add to your early 2014 reading list.