U.S. Companies are driven to become more competitive and productive and this is behind many of the reorganizations, mergers, downsizings, and other actions reported in the past two years, as reported by Watson Wyatt as a result of their global management study. Sixty seven percent of the respondents report that their companies have undergone a recent reorganization with an eye toward improving performance. These changes along with mergers or acquisitions, staff reductions and outsourcing of administrative functions has effected organizational change both positively and negatively. While restructuring has led to gains in productivity, employees’ workloads have increased and employee morale has declined. Competition for skilled workers is intense and retention has become a key concern. The "strong growth cycle" in which many businesses find themselves, require a combination of the right organizational structure and astute leadership to succeed.
I Examine the Elements of Your Work Environment. Consequently, this can best be achieved by:
A. Organizational climate or culture.
1. Organizational culture is comprised of three components; values and beliefs, technical culture, and political culture.
a. Values and beliefs. Some employers are explicit in identifying their values and beliefs and build programs and expectations around them.
b. Technical culture. This relates to the employer’s vision, mission, and strategic goals.
c. Political culture. The political culture relates to the "power" relationships that exist in an organization. Generally power is either shared throughout all levels of the workforce, or held at the top in a command and control manner.
2. To use culture or climate as a motivational tool, companies need to show employees how their actions and strategic plans affect the overall health of the company.
3. How do you compare to other companies? Fortune Magazine’s 100 Best Companies to Work For points to the companies that align their reward strategy to their business strategy have superior results.
B. Performance management. Employers need to recognize in employees a demand for feedback;
1. Employees usually want to know how they are doing and appreciate learning opportunities.
2. Instead of forcing training and blunt evaluations, encourage employees by asking more constructive questions, make them aware of available learning tools, and helping them understand the general business process. For example, if an employee is having problems in problem solving or judgment, you might ask the following question; "Tell me about a problem you’ve recently been asked to solve for your department. What did you do, and what alternatives did you consider?"
C. Competitive Compensation and benefits packages.
1. Viewed by 90% of the respondents in Watson Wyatt’s survey as crucial to retaining high-performing employees and attracting superior job applicants.
2. Employers should be "mass-customizing" their plans recommending small workgroup incentives and bonuses as opposed to mass-producing profit sharing plans that are worthless motivators when every worker and group receives the same plan.
II. Look closely at how your jobs are designed. The work itself is the most important motivator, but jobs are seldom structured with the satisfaction of an employee in mind:
A. Narrowly defined jobs and specialization deny workers the freedom they usually crave and hamper their ability to adapt to a rapidly changing economy.
1. Employees enjoy working in smaller groups and prefer taking on challenges to simply performing tasks.
2. Match employees interests and work styles to their jobs to increase the likelihood of job satisfaction.
a. Identify every employee’s interests, abilities, and aspirations and match each individual to the most appropriate, best available job.
b. Design jobs as to offer employees opportunities to excel and challenge them to acquire and apply skills valued by the organization.
B. Job redesign is one way to make a position more challenging and increase job satisfaction. To ensure a fit between work, people, information, and technology consider the following guidelines:
1. A job can be redesigned to:
a. Increase the variety of tasks and skills required. Raise the level of value to the organization.
b. Consider giving employees the opportunity to redesign their own jobs under management’s guidance. This is one way to increase accountability for performance, and link each individual’s need for job satisfaction with the organization’s mission and objectives.
c. Improve efficiency by instituting changes in work processes.
d. Encourage multi-skilled and multi-functional employees by building continual learning into existing jobs.
e. Make use of diversity of race, gender and ideas to greater competitive advantage.
2. Steps you can take to undertake job design/redesign:
a. Analyze all jobs in the organization for motivational possibilities.
Those jobs that cannot be enriched, should be eliminated or redesigned.
b. Work on specific jobs or group of jobs where there is a lack of morale, productivity or efficiency.
c. Start with a pilot study in a problem area. Test your techniques in this small segment of the workforce.
d. Assess employee motivation and needs. Have employees identify their preferred work roles.
e. Communicate the process with employees. This will eliminate resistance to change. Without adequate communication, any changes may be viewed as threatening.
f. Gain your supervisors’ support and train them to accept the changes.
g. Offer plenty of feedback to measure performance progress. Lack of opportunity to exercise independent judgment and responsibility can erode self-esteem. Successful redesign efforts will focus on ways to increase employees’ ability to manage themselves and their output.
III. Look for New Employees in All the Right Places. With unemployment hovering near 30-year lows, companies are doing everything they can to attract and keep good workers at all levels:
A. Cybercruiting . Embrace Internet Technology, it’s here to stay! The Internet is redefining the way HR departments are finding qualified job candidates. Because of its ease and less-intrusive style, Internet recruiting is booming.
1. A 1998 American Management Association Survey of HR professionals reported that although online recruiting accounted for only 13% of their efforts for the years prior to 1997, the increase in growth has mushroomed 353% for the 1997-1998 years. Fifty- nine percent of responding companies use this type of recruiting and another 13% plan to implement it sometime this year.
a. The Internet has provided HR Professionals with the ability to advertise available jobs with extraordinarily far-reaching results.
b. Employment Marketing. Websites allow HR personnel to post open positions and receive incoming resumes at unprecedented speed.
c. Industry Analysis. You can actively search for talent on industry- specific sites. Reaching out to passive job-seekers, choice candidates who may be receptive to the right job offer but who are not currently looking for a job.
d. Cost-effective alternative to newspaper ads and other means of recruiting. Even traditional employment agencies are making use of the Internet in searches for candidates for their client companies.
e. Management of recruitment process. In-house interactive recruiting specialists are dedicated to specifically managing online recruiting efforts. Smaller companies might forgo managing their own recruiting Website and opt to outsource. No matter what the size of your company, outsourcing can present a cost-effective alternative to newspaper ads or other means of recruitment.
B. As reported in Fortune Magazine’s 100 Best Companies to Work For, there are plenty of good places to work; but the best are taking a differentiation tack. The result is that standards are rising across the board. Programs used by the 100 best to attract and retain workers include:
1. Compensation still high on the list.
2. An environment characterized by trust, pride, and camaraderie that employees share with management and their peers. Make sure your company has practices in place to support those values.
3. Stock Options. Of the 66 publicly traded 100 Best Companies, 28 offer stock options to every category of employee.
4. Job Security. Three of the 100 Best have formal no-layoff policies, another thirty-seven informally maintain such policies, seventy- four have never had a mass lay-off.
5. Training and development. Extensive training and development is emerging as important because it offers valuable benefits to both employer and worker.
6. Soft benefits. Comforts promoting the elusive work/life balance. According to Human Resources surveys, these are every bit as important to hard-working employees as the nature of the job itself.
IV. Make Sure Your Candidates Share Your Cultural Values.
A. A corporate culture of mutual respect also provides a competitive advantage. Employers are so interested in the link between rewards and performance that Watson Wyatt is designing a "human capital index" to tease out how much of a company’s returns derive from its ability to attract, engage, and reward the right employees. To assure best efforts in finding and keeping good employees, make sure that your hiring and retention practices are aligned with your organization’s core culture.
1. According to Jim Harris and Joan Brannick, co-authors of the book Finding and Keeping Great Employees, a core culture is an ideology that should drive a company’s long-term strategy.
a. Once you have identified your firm’s core culture, then let that culture guide the firm’s staffing practices by developing a profile of the types of values and behavioral competencies your employees need to demonstrate in the course of their work.
b. Give applicants a realistic view of what working at the organization is like.
c. Make sure the organization’s public image reflects its desired core culture.
2. Practice Behavioral Interviewing and Targeted Selection. Behavioral competencies determine the manner by which an individual influences the workplace. Using behavior to predict behavior is one of the foundations of Targeted Selection and a key to its effectiveness. Among its benefits, it:
a. Eliminates misunderstandings about a candidate’s past experiences.
b. Prevents personal impressions from affecting your evaluation.
c. Limits candidates’ use of vague generalizations, opinions or theoretical or future-oriented statements and focuses their comments and responses on facts.
3. Elements of a STAR (Targeted Selection). STAR is an acronym for the components required for a complete behavioral example.
a. The Situation or Task facing the candidate. Ask why?
b. The Actions the candidate took. What was done and how was it done?
c. The Results or changes caused by these actions. What was the effect of the action?
Disclaimer:
The ideas presented in these materials are general in nature and not intended to be construed as legal advice and cannot be relied on by any person or entity as legal advice pertaining to any specific situation.