Strategic Human Capital Insights

Are you ready to take an organizational Quality Assurance diagnostic?

As organizations move through continual change, the need to stay up-to-date and relevant is now a strategic imperative.  Nowhere in the organization is this more relevant than to a Quality Assurance Department whose function it is to maintain quality, always, despite the change swirling around it.  The challenge for managing quality assurance in a changing workplace is analogous to changing the tires on a car while the car is traveling at 60 miles per hour.  As difficult as it may seem, the goal is to always maintain Quality Assurance.

The employee handbook may be underestimated, but it is certainly strategic!

This question predictably comes up when I speak with company management, often because the Employee Handbook is seen as moderately useful but not on the top of management’s priority list. Why is that? Because often the Employee Handbook:

• Isn’t current
• Doesn’t cover the full range of issues
• Isn’t specific enough to be meaningful
• Isn’t given to new employees
• Isn’t used by management

However, one thing is for certain, when something goes wrong in an organization, the following happens:

• From the manager’s perspective: Managers look to the Employee Handbook for guidance and protection from liability.
  
  
• From the employee's perspective: Employees look to the Employee Handbook for guidance, protection from liability or loopholes created by omission or ambiguity.

Take the Job Description, Performance Review and Development Plan Challenge

It’s Performance Review time for many organizations. However, with the rate of change accelerating and the rate of skills / knowledge obsolescence increasing faster than ever, can you really only review performance once or twice per year?  As managers, how can you even justify that ancient practice?  Today, continuous performance improvement has replaced the time-honored, annual Performance Review process so employees continue to be appreciating human assets that are always aligned with corporate strategy and goals.  It may seem like an onerous, time-consuming process, but is it really?  When viewed through the lens of great management best practices, let’s shift the performance review paradigm to a continuous improvement paradigm where we treat our employees, our human assets, the same way we look at continuous improvement for processes.  Why would we continuously improve processes and not continuously improve people? 

Both employee and manager loyalty has always been considered a good thing. So what’s changed? When does being loyal long-term, at all costs, go from a virtue to a liability?

The concept of "change" has changed everything. When companies grew at normal rates, and change was incremental and predictable, manager and employee loyalty could keep pace with each other and with the direction of the organization. Now, however, when organizations are growing fast and adapting to new technology, new processes and methods, increased customer demands, and additional new employees, the predictable static environment that many employees are comfortable with, have morphed into chaotic, change-driven, unpredictable frontiers where the old rules and controls have evaporated. Increasing, the latter describes today’s work reality. 

Here are some important questions to consider when thinking about manager loyalty:

• What does it mean for the employee who is attached to the old rules and controls and is having real issues adapting to the new work reality? 

• What does it mean for new employees who don’t know the old rules and controls and don’t really need to work under those constraints since that work environment has shifted?

• What does it mean for the manager who must manage these two conflicting and competing employee needs?

Take Up the Job Description Challenge
Can a simple and often overlooked job description really ‘bullet proof’ your organization? If job descriptions are used strategically to align the organizational goals and results with the individual efforts of the employees, they should. In order to do this, you need to review the following Job Description Checklist to assess:

Job Description Checklist

• Are your current job descriptions really as robust and strategically focused as they need to be?
• Do your employees and you have a clear understanding of their jobs and their accountability at a detailed level?
• Does your organization have a robust and honest employee assessment process driven by the detailed job description? The assessment process should be completely aligned to the job description and used accordingly.  If not, what are you assessing employees against?
• Is your organization committed to manage and monitor the job description, assessment and employee development process to ensure all efforts are aligned, optimal and focused on strategic initiatives?

As managers, facing the vacation season always proves challenging. When the first person approaches you with the request to take off a day or two for a long weekend, or another employee is planning a one or two-week family vacation, the stress of ‘how is the work going to get done’ begins. 

Have you ever asked yourself one or more of the following questions:

• How did the plan you had to provide backup for everyone on your team not get executed?  Where did the time go?
• How are you going to get the right people trained up with the right set of skills and competencies to get the job done right? 
• How can you tell some employees that they will need to reschedule their vacations due to a lack of backup? 
• What is going to happen to employee morale? 
• What is your boss going to think of your planning skills? 
• How did this happen again? 

A critical question for today’s leadership: Are your employees appreciating in value, maintaining their value, or declining in value?

Businesses consistently refer to employees as “their most valuable assets”. However, when we look at the way organizations view employees, many fail to deliver on that mantra. Employee management continues to be based on models developed in the late 20th century. Along with outdated employee management models, we see Human Resources struggle to transition from an organizational operations, support and compliance role to a true strategic partner role.

In that role, Human Resources must drive Human Asset Management Strategy (HAMS) to encourage leaders to shift their approach to the key element of success - employees.

Are We Appreciating All Our Assets?

Any organization today will say that their employees are the most valuable asset to the organization. As new process applications, automation, and artificial intelligence continue to make their presence felt in the workplace, it is still employees who keep things running, provide the critical customer interface, and discover the opportunities to leverage technology. When we step back and look at organizations, we tend to find that leadership does not put the same emphasis on their human assets as they would on a physical asset they are acquiring or optimizing. I'm not implying we should treat people like equipment, however, as our most valuable asset, we need to put the same effort into ensuring employees can be most productive while providing an environment where they increase in value to both themselves and the organization. Our employees, our human assets, have one key advantage that physical assets do not - they can increase in value over time.

Job descriptions are the unsung hero driving the Performance Management process. If the performance management process is fundamental to your Human Asset Management Strategy (HAMS), then job descriptions are the mighty little, obscure engine driving the whole process.

How important are job descriptions in HAMS, and how can those often forgotten job descriptions be so important? Because if they are only used as HR tools for job branding and compensation, then they are misnamed. If that’s the case, they should be called job categories. Here’s what job descriptions should really be doing for your organization.

First, determine the function in your organization that is responsible for utilizing job descriptions.

What is the real, dynamic driving force behind our friend, the job description? To analyze this, we start with where job descriptions are parked. Job descriptions can live in HR, but that should only be their part-time home. Job descriptions should and be relevant to every functional group in every organization and be used by the functional group, full time! ! Job descriptions are the foundation to determine what a job does, how an organization works, how it grows, if it can grow / compete, and / or if it will stagnate. Most importantly, job descriptions must not only live in the operating functions, job descriptions need to be relevant and referenced continuously. As a consultant, I have frequently heard these answers to the question, “Can I see your job descriptions?”:

The Statement: “That’s Just Bob Being Bob."

Have you ever heard this statement before, or worse yet, have you ever said those words yourself? I know I have certainly heard those words in every scenario from work to athletics to family, and my emotional response to those words have ranged from frustration, consternation, disgust to despair. 

What does this have to do with Performance Review? Since many of you are in performance review season, consider if you have an employee that you can associate with this statement, “That’s just Bob being Bob”. The situation that causes this statement doesn’t live in organizational isolation. Let’s take a serious look at the negative organizational impacts in the workplace of this statement and the underlying situation.

Here’s a recent and very real situation I witnessed in a store that provides a customer-related service.  I’m sure we have all experienced a situation like this in the workplace. As you read through this situation, think about all possible resulting organizational impacts. As a manager, if you have one of these employees / situations, the performance review process is the perfect time to identify this person and set up a development plan to correct the situation, one way or another!