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When Strategic Focus Goes Wrong

Sun, 19 May 2013 20:44:37 +1000

Ask any teenager today who Eastman Kodak is and it is likely that they will not know. And yet, little over ten years ago Eastman Kodak was riding high with over $10B in sales and with a famed research and development department that invented the first digital camera in 1975, used in commercial sectors such as medical imaging.

Today, Eastman Kodak is still working its way out of bankruptcy protection.

So what went wrong? Why was one of the world’s most respected brands and the inventor of the digital camera so slow to react to the digitisation of taking pictures and the subsequent shift at the low end of the technology spectrum to taking photos with your phone?

A review of the many case studies written on Eastman Kodak reveals that the leadership of Eastman Kodak was well aware of the slowly emerging digital technology influenced business models. However, several decisions were made to not cannibalise the existing business model of selling cheap cameras and making money on film and the processing of film. The world changed quickly for Eastman Kodak and by the time they realised that their business model was being cannibalised by new competitors, it was too late.

Eastman Kodak lost strategic focus. They were so concerned about cannibalising a very successful model that they forgot to really understand emerging markets and the possibility of a disruptive technology breaking that model apart. There was undoubtedly disagreement within Eastman Kodak with regard to the potential of digital technology in the hands of consumers. However, because their strategic focus was on a business model rather than on the long term profitability of the business, the key decision makers opted to protect the model with an insufficiently robust contingency plan if they were wrong.

Unfortunately, losing or not even having, strategic focus is not unusual in organisations or in some cases in whole industries.

Take the records management industry as an example. Records management is the field of management responsible for the efficient and systematic control of the creation, receipt, maintenance, use, and disposal or archiving of records.

The key issues which get aired in conferences as being at the bleeding edge of the industry are what to do with social media and the burgeoning volume of records created. These issues get discussed with the seriousness they deserve, but at the expense of what needs to be the strategic focus of the records management industry: getting executives to focus on records management and the technology that supports it as a business system capable of transforming business outcomes.

By concentrating on issues such as the impact of technology on the number of records created and their nature, the records management industry forces focus on creating rules for social media and development of technology to easily capture it. This replicates the impact on previous foci on things such as compliance where the industry, as a whole, was unable to get the type of executive support necessary to properly implement records management systems. Many electronic records management implementations have failed. Our research suggests the number of absolute failures is 25%. Our qualitative research suggests when the degree to which new practices required for electronic records management are adopted compared with what was desired, the failure rate is at least 50%.

It makes no sense to concentrate on social media and the volume of records when executive support is low and the adoption levels within an organisation are also low. Implementing a system which people do not use makes no impact on the issue of social media.

If however, the records management industry concentrated on the improvements in productivity and risk reduction that a properly functioning records management system delivers to an organisation, there would be a significant change in attitude amongst executives. Make no mistake, a properly functioning records management system does improve productivity and reduce risk; substantially so.

Imagine that we were able to demonstrate that a functioning records management system can reduce costs by $500,000 per annum and improve revenues by $15,000,000 over five years. Or if we could demonstrate that security of extremely sensitive documents could be controlled such that only those who need to see documents actually see them and that an audit trail is continuously maintained such that any unauthorised viewing is obvious. Or if we could demonstrate that the process of monitoring contracts can be streamlined and we can ensure that the latest version of the contract is being used to control the interactions between ourselves and the vendor and in doing so we could save $5,000,000 per annum in uncontrolled contract expenditure.

The fact is that these benefits have been demonstrated. The above examples are real. The change in executives approach to records management in those circumstances has been remarkable. Budgets were increased as was manpower; executive support grew beyond that of merely allocating budget. A real interest grew in what records management entails and what the consequences were of a well-functioning records management system.

In this circumstance, the topic of social media has a context. The question is asked, “What social media records do we need to keep to ensure we reduce risk and improve productivity and how do we capture them?” The question is not about all social media records but the ones that count. In this circumstance we are likely to have a budget and resources. Without the context of increasing productivity and reducing risk, the discussion about social media becomes an interesting discussion without a context and one that an executive has no interest in to drive to find a solution.

Records management tactics will take care of issues such as compliance, social media and the sheer volume of records. The real strategic focus, however, needs to be on getting appropriate budget and getting the kind of support where records and knowledge management are front and centre of each executive team’s agenda.

Strategic focus also goes wrong at all levels of an organisation.

In other articles I have written of the cult of cost cutting where the strategic focus becomes solely fixed on costs rather than on gross or net margin. In one organisation the focus was on cost reduction in operations, which was achieved. However, because there was no focus on net margin, and a peculiarly loose approval process for setting prices, the cost reductions were passed directly on to customers. Because the organisation was the market leader and considered to be the price setter, the result was an entire market losing net margin over more than five years. What was worse was the market was a specialist product market.

In another organisation in the retail market, their strategic focus was on sales and in particular on up-skilling their workforce in closing techniques. This narrow focus was doomed to failure, not least because a much bigger problem was the engagement at the start of the sales process which made closing difficult and reduced the number of people passing through to closing by more than 50%. It was also doomed to failure because of recruitment and performance management issues at sales level and store manager level. The strategic focus needed to be much broader and deeper and about the management of their human capital.

At organisational and industry level, when the strategic focus goes wrong, we ask the wrong questions because we have the wrong context in which to ask questions. As a result we end up with the wrong hierarchy of questions and therefore the wrong hierarchy of strategic choices. We then lose strategic competitiveness.

A good way to overcome this is to always include a blue sky session in each strategic planning session where there are no boundaries and the “What if?” questions are encouraged. Where challenging the status quo is mandatory. Follow that up with a session where reality is allowed to bite, but do not mix the two sessions.

Furthermore, encourage senior and middle managers to always think strategically. Challenge them to frame almost everything they do in the strategic context.

If you lose strategic focus or don’t reframe strategic focus fast enough to counter disruptive changes, your role and your organisation may be relegated to the annals of history too.

Good Ideas Are Not Enough

Sun, 12 May 2013 19:24:36 +1000

“It’s such a pity. He had the talent to play for Australia, but not the application.” How many times have you heard that expression about an individual who seemed to have a natural borne talent that was never fully applied? The raw talent was not enough for the individual and their supporters to avoid the feeling of disappointment that an unfulfilled dream brings.

It’s a very similar story in business. Not so much about unfulfilled dreams of individuals scaling the corporate ladder, but about unfulfilled promises of good ideas.

Governments, think tanks and concerned individuals exhort us, as a nation, to become more productive through innovation. Organisations regularly have brainstorming sessions integrated into their development of strategy. Thinking outside that ubiquitous box is encouraged. Yet, as Cameron England* writes “Have a guess how many of Australia’s top 50 companies have at their very heart a good idea? Not mineral resources, selling other people’s goods or repackaging money in increasingly intricate ways, but an actual good idea which spawned the genesis of a new business. It’s a pretty easy answer - none.”

So where do the good ideas go? Why don’t they see the light of day as much as they should as a country? Perhaps the starting point for contemplating this conundrum is closer to home within our own organisations.

In my experience, good ideas are scattered like seeds on barren ground and expected to flourish with insufficient attention paid to preparing the environment for the ideas to survive the politics of an organisation. To have our ideas survive and flourish, we must:

Think of the idea and be able to communicate it simply;
Plan for its implementation;
Learn from our mistakes and;
Persist in the face of competition for resources.

Think

According to the Organisation for Economic and Cooperative Development (OECD) there are four types of innovation:

Product innovation;
Process innovation;
Marketing innovation and;
Organisational innovation.

Within each of these four types there are three levels of innovation:

Solving an existing problem
- Building a commercially viable rotary compression engine;
Solving an unmet, unstated need
- Text messaging;
Creating a new field of endeavour
- Nanotechnology.

To maximise innovation in an organisation, diversity in the group applying their mind to the generation of the idea(s) is necessary. Increased diversity allows teams to see the whole picture, avoid group think and fulfil teamwork roles with higher skills and more knowledge than is possible with an individual or a small team of like-minded people.

Diversity may need to be evident in many contexts. For example;

Thinking style
Knowledge
Skills
Self-awareness
Self-control
Social skills
Motivation
Empathy

Diversity is required in the different roles of a team whose remit is to generate ideas. There needs to be people who obviously create ideas but there are other roles which are equally important. For example, team composition should comprise people who can sponsor the idea through the organisation, people who can take raw ideas and refine them and people who can facilitate a diverse group of people.

Plan

Ideas often stall even after receiving substantial budget through the efforts of a sponsor, because of the paucity of planning. In the excitement to get an idea developed or executed, people forget to complete one or more of:

Resource planning for the people and equipment required to pilot or fully execute the idea;
Budget planning for the costs and the source of funds;
Milestone planning;
Planning to integrate the new idea with business-as-usual;
Stakeholder management planning;
Risk management planning to eliminate the high consequence, high probability risks and;
Contingency planning for those risks which cannot be eliminated
Change management planning to understand the blockers and motivators to adoption of the new idea

When organisations do plan to implement new ideas, they often lack the specificity to ensure that the plans are implementable with low levels of unintended consequences. Many good new ideas have created problems in other areas of an organisation because they were not thought through well enough.

Learn

All new ideas, despite our best highly specific planning efforts, have some unintended consequences. Some will be good and some bad for our organisation. We have to be prepared, through our contingency planning, to learn about unintended consequences as they occur and adjust our actions to limit the negative consequences and understand and manage the positive consequences.

Further than that, for substantial new ideas, applying continuous improvement approaches such as DMAIC is necessary to fine tune the idea and learn from our mistakes. To apply DAMAIC we must:

Define the new idea, using process maps and procedures
Measure the outcomes of the new idea with defined performance indicators ensuring we use a mix of lead and lag indicators
Analyse the performance indicators and look for unintended consequences
Improve the idea and its outcomes
Control the outcomes by understanding all of the consequences and their cause and measuring the impact on performance indicators

Other continuous improvement process and techniques may be applicable. The point is that we must measure the inputs and outputs of our idea and seek to refine the idea to better control both the use of inputs and the outputs.

Persist

All ideas will meet resistance of one kind or another. It may be political, budgetary, just the ‘not invented here’ variety or based on fears of what individuals may lose in the implementation of idea. There are many opportunities presented for ideas to die quietly or sometimes with a bang. It is the role of the sponsor and to a lesser extent the creator to display the persistence required to see good ideas to fruition.

Having the will to see a new idea through, especially if implementation is over a number of years, is often lacking in organisations with short time frames for strategic planning driven by short term shareholder gains. Often the issue, especially in the third and fourth year of the life of a good idea, is the competition for resources from other new good ideas.

Persistent sponsors continuously communicate the benefits and progress of the implementation of a good idea through case studies on early wins, and gain new supporters through demonstrating future benefits to stakeholders with a high degree of power. They also facilitate the solving of issues created by negative consequences.

A second airport in Sydney, very fast train travel between Sydney and Melbourne, the National Broadband Network and the National Disability Insurance Scheme are a few topical ideas accepted through an individual’s persistence or failed so far for the lack of it.

In conclusion

Good ideas of their own are not valuable. They become valuable when planning, learning and persistence are applied in good measure to create the environment in which the idea can take hold and be improved upon.

*Available at: http://www.thepunch.com/articles/australia-the-not-so-clever-country/. Accessed May 11, 2013.

Five things you need to eliminate from your strategy

Sun, 05 May 2013 20:53:32 +1000

At this time of year, businesses often contemplate what it is they’re doing next. The new financial year provides an opportunity to reflect on the year gone by, learn from twelve months of experience, and formulate new strategies to execute in the coming year.

Devising a strategy is all about making a choice between multiple positive outcomes. But as you contemplate what you’re going to do, why not consider these five things to excise from your strategy.

Item #1: Meaningless Sets of Values

If your business already has a set of values, we suggest you print them off, cover up any identifying logos or references to your business name, and ask a friend if they can identify the company from the set of values. If they can’t, the values are meaningless. Extra points if they sound like something from the inside of a fortune cookie. Double extra points if they include the words ‘integrity’, ‘teamwork’, ‘accountability’, ‘trust’, or ‘honesty’.

Instead of boilerplate, try coming up with the real differentiators for your business: the things that, if they weren’t present, would cause your company to stop being what it is. Consider the things that separate your business from the pack, and write those down. Forget ‘integrity’—that’s just table stakes. It’s hard to imagine a business trumpeting its record of ‘deceit’, isn’t it?

Item #2: Wordsmithing to Oblivion

Back in 1999, Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, dressed up in a moustache and a wig at the invitation of then-Vice-Chairman of Logitech Pierluigi Zappacosta, and in one hour managed to convince the assembled executives of Logitech to change the mission statement of one of their divisions. The new mission statement?

The New Ventures mission is to scout profitable growth opportunities in relationships, both internally and externally, in emerging, mission inclusive markets, and explore new paradigms and then filter and communicate and evangelize the findings.

There’s a fun game of buzzword bingo, right there.

There’s a tendency with modern mission statements, along with other words created for wider consumption, to wring the absolute maximum from every single word on the page—presumably in an effort to achieve that much-vaunted ‘cut-through’.

Most of the time, these efforts are an abject failure and the words become more meaningless than a tangle of alphabet pasta thrown at a wall by a cranky three-year-old.

Instead of trying to make things ‘short’ or ‘punchy’ or ‘tight’ (what is a ‘tight’ word anyway?), why not try to make them unambiguous? Take as many words as you need to mean what you really mean, and make your edits when you’ve taken some time away from the material.

Item #3: Doing the same thing over (and over) again

Especially if your business is successful, it’s very easy to turn to each other in a strategic planning session, and just suggest ploughing on—saying: “well, let’s look at all the things we’re already committed to doing, and then see if there’s room to do something else”.

The problem with this approach is that without starting from (theoretical) scratch each time, your business may find itself either missing out on fantastic opportunities to reinvent itself or change its direction, or alternatively locked into a downward spiral, especially if your business is operating in a mature market.

For a genuine discussion about your business’s future, come to a strategic planning session with nothing more than an agreement on the purpose of your business, and go from there. Think critically about how that purpose fits in with what your business does, how it relates to the market, and whether your current plans are the best way you can bring the two together.

We guarantee you’ll find at least one significant avenue for improvement, every single year.

Item #4: Failure to Plan

It’s really easy to get to the end of a strategic planning session, flushed with the euphoria that comes from finally getting through to a consensus about something of vital significance to the future of your business…and then forget to spend time planning how to make all these great ideas into a reality.

The adage ‘those who fail to plan plan to fail’ applies in spades here. On Monday, everyone will be back at work. Emails will have piled up that require attention, the phone will ring, there’ll be people to see, things to do, and everything will suddenly seem vastly more urgent and important than devising specific steps toward achieving the goals you all spoke about last week.

After all, there were several other people there. Surely one of them will have documented everything and be working toward achieving their bit. Someone will call a meeting to review progress at some point. And besides, the ideas are so great that people will just have to pursue them.

Except they won’t. There’ll be no meeting, no plan, no progress—unless there’s a framework in place before you get back to the daily grind.

To avoid this, plan the execution of a strategy in ninety-day blocks, and ensure someone is made accountable for each strand of the strategy such that their ability to effectively execute their part of the strategy is featured heavily in their performance appraisal.

Item #5: Failure to Communicate

In that grand plan of yours from Item #4, don't forget to include how your strategy will be communicated. Coming up with the strategy is one thing, but it’s of no use to anybody if only the Executive Team knows about it.

To remedy this, ensure that there is responsibility assigned to document the strategy, as well as to develop a plan to disseminate it throughout the organisation. Think about your message, your medium and the frequency of communication. If you want your employees to get on board with your strategy, they need to understand it as well as believe it.

For more tips, see our articles on communicating your strategy and internal branding.

Summary

Make sure your strategic planning is a success beyond the few days that you spend offsite. These are only five tips - but they may be the five that enable your strategy to deliver real value to your organisation.

Hamish’s Top 10 Tips for Communicating During Change

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 19:28:19 +1000

This article is part of a series involving Angela’s son, Hamish. Hamish has Asperger’s Syndrome, an autism spectrum disorder which means that he has particular difficulty dealing with change. Angela has learned many lessons about change from Hamish, and she is sharing them through these articles. See the list at the end of this article for more in the Hamish series.

The following Top 10 Tips for communicating during change have been hard-won lessons learned in the parenting battlefield. These communication tips are equally applicable to you as a leader, in getting your people through business change.

Hamish’s Top 10 Tips for Communicating During Change

1. Get Their Attention. You need to break your audience’s concentration from what they’re already doing, and focus it on your message. You could do this by calling an extra special meeting—holding off-site can be good—where everyone must attend. With Hamish, this means saying his name and getting him to make eye contact, even if it means standing in front of the TV. Another way is to reinforce the message pictorially; pictures can cut through where words can’t.

2. Repeat Your Message. Important news bears repeating. Repetition of your message also increases the chance that it will be heard. Repeat your message at regular intervals, and if you think that you may have said it once too often, repeat it again but in a slightly different way or even through a different medium.

The following sequence is not uncommon in our household in the morning when getting Hamish dressed: I usually start with something like “Hamish, please get dressed”, followed five minutes later by “Hamish, are you dressed?”, then “get dressed now Hamish”, and finally ”put your clothes on Hamish…Yes, undies first”. If none of this works, I show him pictures of what he needs to do.

3. Give Notice. Give your team plenty of notice of the expected change. Don’t leave it to the last minute and expect people to get on board. You have to allow time for the message to sink in, and for people to start processing it. The year before Hamish started school, I started talking to him about what he would be doing the following year.

4. Be Brief. Keep your key message brief and to the point. You can always provide follow-up information for those that need more details. Too much information can mean the take-home message is lost. For Hamish, too much information can be as simple as explaining why I want him to do something. The best chance of getting my message across is to be directive and succinct. The simple phrase “Hamish, get in the car” usually works. The more extended “Hamish, get in the car because we need to hurry up and get to school” is not so successful! Of course, if he does ask, I will explain.

5. Be Clear. Clear, basic language is the best. Don’t use fancy words. Don’t use jargon or descriptive language. A good rule of thumb is to minimise adjectives (words that describe nouns) and cut out anything ending in “ly”. The phrase “stop hitting your brother” is fairly clear. On the other hand, the phrase “stop aggressively and forcefully making injurious contact with your brother” is not so clear.

6. Confirm. You must confirm that your message has been heard. Communication is a two-way process. In a meeting this can be as simple as getting people to ask questions, or even testing understanding by asking questions yourself. I often ask Hamish to repeat something back to me in his own words.

7. Personalise. Tailor messages to help connect to the people they are meant for. One way to do this is to address your audience’s motivations and concerns about the change you are proposing. Another way is to use people’s names, teams, departments, or regions. With Hamish it is to allow him visualise the change, for example showing him pictures of his new school.

8. Schedule. Tell people when things are going to happen and who is going to be involved. Keep the schedule on display. Because Hamish responds better to visuals, we do this for him in pictures.

9. Count down. As time ticks away and milestones come and go, tell people. One of the worst things we can do with Hamish is to not remind him that a change is getting closer; it always seems to come as a terrible shock! The times that we have not counted down a change have resulted in tears, tantrums and a point-blank refusal to co-operate.

10. Prepare. Be ready to act when said you would. Not keeping to your schedule is inefficient and creates anxiety in those that are relying on you to implement the change. Are you going to go ahead? Aren’t you? What’s happening? People will fill a vacuum in action or communication with their own thoughts. With Hamish, if we aren’t prepared to go ahead he will throw a wobbly and then won’t listen the next time.

Like any young boy, Hamish doesn’t always listen to his mum and doesn’t always do what I want. But by following the top 10 tips above I can at least give it my best shot, and so can you.

Other articles in this series:

• Hamish Goes to School – Transitioning Through Change

The Folly of Organisational Restructures

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 06:26:16 +1000

Deckchairs and Titanic are the two words that come to my mind when I hear that a struggling company is about to undergo an organisational restructure. The thoughts are borne of watching organisations restructure over the last thirty years with only rare instances where organisations benefit from realigning their organisational structure. Not only do I observe that a large majority of organisational restructures are failures, but that the first reorganisation is only a precursor to other reorganisations, as the proffered benefits of the J-curve of the restructure fail to materialise.

A range of studies support my observations.

A 2006 study by McKinsey (Fraser & Strickland, 2006), themselves a consultancy firm of note when it came to restructures, found that companies whose performance averaged -21.5% below industry norms in terms of total return to shareholders and which underwent restructure outperformed the industry norm by 17% two years after the restructure. However, a control group which underperformed the industry by -17.5% outperformed the industry by 22.1 % two years after the restructure.

Research by Towers Watson (Luss, 2010) found that, in restructured firms, high performers are:

Fifty percent less likely to be highly engaged
Twice as likely to have low engagement
Twice as likely to be among the employees most at risk for voluntary turnover

A recent survey conducted by The Boston Consulting Group (Toma, Roghé, Noakes, Strack, Kilmann, & Dicke, 2012) of 1,600 executives in 35 countries found that over 90 percent of companies with more than 1,000 employees had recently changed their organisation structure. Less than half of the reorganisations were considered to be successful by the executives.

In in all three studies, there was clear evidence that restructures materially benefit organisations in a minority of cases. Yet, organisations commit themselves to restructures one after another like the lemmings in the Walt Disney movie, Wild Wilderness, plunging over the cliff.

Organisations centralise and decentralise their support functions such as human resources, information technology, and financial management seemingly on a seven to ten year cycle. They centralise to gain the apparent benefits of reduced duplication and costs and then decentralise to gain the benefits of closer alignment of corporate strategy and that pursued by the function. They buy their distributors to maximise the share of the profit margin available and get synergies in marketing, sales and transport costs. They sell the distributors to maximise sales though local network development and take working capital off their balance sheet. The cycle is unrelated to external economic cycles, but is related to the cycle of management turnover in organisations.

Why restructures fail

The lack of a powerful reason
They don’t have a powerful reason to reorganise and therefore the purpose of the reorganisation is unclear in people’s minds. It is difficult to communicate, in a way that is easy to understand and believe, the answer to the question, “Why are we doing this?” Without a self-evident and powerful rationale for people to change their behaviours to adopt the change in structure and processes and adapt to the change in relationships, people will resist the change, often unreasonably so. The “vision thing” needs to be alive and well in employee’s minds to get them engaged and committed to making the required changes to make the reorganisation a success.

Internal focus
Most reorganisations are entirely internally focused and have little impact on the externally driven indicators such as sales or customer satisfaction. For example, organisations restructure along product/geographic/function (take your pick) lines, cut out layers of management and or outsource operations to cut costs claiming that the actions they are taking are designed to turn around a deficient sales outcome.

Reorganisations need to be focused on delivering to whoever the customer is, be it a consumer, other businesses, government departments or the general public. They must also be focused on delivering against the long-term goal of the organisation.

Nothing really changes
Organisations change their structure but not their business model, strategy, key performance indicators, rewards and recognition schemes or culture. The reporting lines change, the cost centres change but nothing else does. Business goes on underperforming as it was before the restructure but probably more so as a result of the reduction in employee engagement as a result of the restructure.

When should an organisation restructure?

There are many reasons given as the reasons for undertaking a restructure. They include, but are not limited to:

Merger or acquisition
New leaders
New strategy
New business model
Realigning the business
Improve communication
Improved decision making
Expansion
Improved execution
Downsizing (reduced costs)
Improve innovation

All of these reasons, to my mind, miss the point. An organisation is structured in the first place to group together people who are working within like processes and have like competence sets. Hence, we rarely see a group of scientists working on research and development in the same organisation groups as Legal. We can see, however, in some organisations Marketing and Sales cohabiting within the same organisational grouping.

Two parameters impact on the design of organisations other than around like processes and like competencies. They are geography and size, although the influence of the former has declined as high speed high bandwidth communication has become more the norm.

Geography and language that often goes with geography has an impact on the communication effectiveness of an organisation and often it may be better to organise within a geographic boundary rather than across it.

Size has the simple impact of making it more sensible to split the organisation as it grows along more specific process and competency aggregates. For example, as an organisation grows it may split Sales and Marketing. While it is small, it generally makes sense to keep them together as there may only be one or two marketing resources.

The key reason to reorganise then is not the event itself as depicted by the list above, but to redress issues where the event has led to process changes that have meant that the current structure now groups unlike processes and unlike competencies. A subsidiary but important additional reason is when there is a need, in response to an event, to lift the profile of a function and to shorten the decision making process for the function by elevating it within the structure. For example, making the Health, Safety and Environment function report directly to the CEO instead of reporting to Operations.

What is the alternative to reorganising?

Instead of reorganising, organisations are better on most occasions to focus on their vision, mission and strategy, communicating clear goal and objectives, making roles and responsibilities clear with single point accountability for processes, creating a culture sympathetic to their vision and mission, managing people’s performance addressing both willingness and ability and providing rewards and recognition that supports their goal and objectives.

Bibliography
Fraser, C. H., & Strickland, W. L. (2006, February). McKinsey Quarterly. Retrieved April 21, 2013, from www.McKinseyQuarterly.com: https://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/ghost.aspx?ID=/When_organization_isnt_enough_1719

Luss, R. (2010). Towers Watson. Retrieved April 21, 2013, from www.watsonwyatt.com: http://www.watsonwyatt.com/render.asp?id=20510

Toma, A., Roghé, F., Noakes, B., Strack, R., Kilmann, J., & Dicke, R. (2012, April). Organization Design Publications. Retrieved April 21, 2013, from Boston Consulting Group: http://www.bcg.com/expertise_impact/capabilities/people_organization/organization_design/publicationdetails.aspx?id=tcm:12-104544&mid=tcm:12-104312

Choosing Organisational Surveys

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 19:29:53 +1000

Organisational surveys are a simple and economical way to understand what perceptions individuals in a workplace hold and how that may impact their behaviours. Despite their simplicity, it is easy to get it wrong when choosing survey types and creating survey questions. There is a high risk of time spent in developing and implementing a survey without getting the right feedback to make the changes in the workplace that are desired or necessary.

This article discusses the issues prevalent in choosing the right organisational survey for your workplace, selecting the right type of external survey company to gain maximum benefits for your people and ways to evaluate the quality of the survey. This article is the first of three in a series of articles about organisational surveys.

Organisations can choose the wrong survey for number of reasons. These may include but are not limited to:

Not knowing the difference between different survey types and their purpose, for example, an engagement surveys, cultural surveys and satisfaction survey,
Being misled by external or internal consultants
Not accurately understanding the overall environment of the organisation

Here are some tips on how to choose the right survey.

1. Understand the differences between various organisational surveys

When deciding to implement a survey, before calling in the experts, conduct an environmental evaluation within your organisation. It is important to understand the issues that may be facing your organisation, business unit or team. Randomly picking any type of survey can result in inappropriate feedback and in employees thinking they wasted their time filling out the survey.

Organisational surveys cover many areas of working in an organisation, including:

Expected behaviour within the organisation
Values
Intention to stay
Satisfaction with pay

Ensure you have some general areas that you would like measured, such as lack of communication, retention or team relationships. This will help determine the type of survey you want to use.

Below are three commonly used surveys which measure in different levels of complexity and cost how employees perceive working in an organisation. They are listed in order of complexity and cost, and describe the areas they measure and what outcomes you may expect to influence through undertaking an analysis of the survey results and taking action:

Type of Survey	Complexity/cost	What it Measures	Outcomes
Satisfaction Survey	Low	Employee satisfaction surveys measure a number of areas, but not in depth. These include motivation, engagement, intention to stay and general satisfaction with the work conditions.	Satisfaction surveys are good to get a snapshot view of employees’ perceptions about the workplace, including: Relationships with colleagues Training needs Perceptions about pay and working conditions
Engagement Survey	Medium	The degree to which the individuals in an organisation are involved, committed and psychologically invested in their work, their job, and their organization (Denison Consulting) Looks at the individuals’ perception of their work and how they feel within the organisation	Taking action on the results of an engagement survey will have an impact on: Retaining valued employees Allowing you to recruit from a wider pool of good candidates by having staff act as unofficial spokespeople for the organisation Enabling employees to understand the vision and strategy of the organisation and empowering them to play their role in executing the strategy
Cultural Survey	High	Culture measures behavioural norms and expectations that have a well-documented impact (positive and negative) on performance (Human Synergistic)	The actions which can be taken as a result of critical analysis of a culture survey are very broad and include but are not limited to: Create and monitor organisational development programs to improve performance Design supporting programs to enhance strategy implementation, employee engagement, organisational learning, quality and reliability, or customer service Facilitate mergers, acquisitions and strategic alliances and achieve the desired synergies Enhance managers' understanding of culture and sustainability and thereby their ability to lead and manage their teams Manage diversity and corporate responsibility

2. Determining the best survey for your organisation

Organisational surveys garner varying amounts of interest from employees. To get the broadest level of support through participation from employees, follow the “What’s in it for me maxim”. Choosing a complex survey (cultural survey) over a simple survey (satisfaction) with no increase in potential outcomes for the employees drives participation rates down. Have discussions with internal stakeholders about what it is that they want to measure and what they hope to do with the information that will benefit employees directly or indirectly.

Factors from the discussion which influence the choice of survey include but are not limited to:

The problem they are trying to understand
Possible actions they may take
Budget availability
Desired duration of survey
Desired duration of action planning
The number of responses needed to get the level of data required to inform the level of analysis required
Level of impact desired from actions
- Organisation-wide
- Business unit level.

For example, imagine your organisation is having issues with internal communication between leaders as well as the lower ranks of the employees. Imagine this is significantly affecting internal customer service and thus affecting clients and the execution of strategy.

A cultural survey would be ideal in this case to investigate the issues that are being faced as it will measure why people behave in this way, the organisation’s expected behavioural norms from leaders and employees, and the impact it would have on the organisation’s performance levels (internal customer service as well as external customer service).

3. Do it yourself or hire a consultant

There are two main ways to conduct surveys. The first is to develop your own survey and distribute it to the organisation. Developing your own survey, whilst popular with the advent of free online survey instruments, is generally not recommended unless you have staff who are skilled at designing questions and question sequencing to avoid bias and in selecting samples which give a true reflection of the population as a whole..

People who do not have the skills to create robust surveys and sample design can learn the skills. This is something which usually happens over several years and therefore several renditions of the survey. Different renditions of surveys created as people learn and try to improve the quality of their questioning techniques has a major impact on the quality of benchmarking information the organisation receives for following surveys. Organisations then find it difficult to determine what real impact their actions from previous surveys are having on the problems they wanted to solve.

The second option is to secure an external survey consultancy. It is obviously more expensive, but there are benefits:

Professional design of survey questions and selection of samples to avoid bias
Professional design of questions to maximise engagement of employees
Benchmark data from like companies in like industries
Analytical capability to evaluate the responses
Hosting capacity
Multi-channel capacity for distribution including face-to-face, electronic, mobile, paper

If you are dealing with a survey company, it is important that there is someone you can speak with face-to-face or on the phone perhaps as much as 3-5 times during the survey creation and evaluation processes. This is to ensure the consultant has a holistic overview of the organisation; the challenges faced and are able to recommend the best survey design and implementation.

A final piece of advice; many survey companies display well-known organisations as their clients, but the important area to focus on is those clients’ results, action planning and subsequent improvements. When a survey company talks to you about their services and clients, always ask how they helped post-results in the improvement of an organisation to ensure they can support you post-implementation.

Do your customers ‘Like’ you? The relationship between social media and customer service

Sun, 07 Apr 2013 22:31:00 +1000

I will happily admit that I was sceptical about how social media could benefit organisations, but having now done some ‘research’ through observation (aka going on Facebook during work hours), I believe that it is worthwhile for every organisation, big or small, to at least consider a social media plan—even if that plan becomes to ignore it.

Like it or loathe it, social media is here to stay. All of the little icons that surround you on the Web and even in ‘real life’, asking you to ‘Like’, ‘Follow’, ‘Find’ or even ‘Friend’ them herald new ways of connecting to customers, engaging with them, and fostering their loyalty.

If your brand has consumers who are active online, you can’t afford not to have a social media strategy. Imagine what would happen to your brand if your organisation was being heavily criticised in social media and you were completely oblivious to it. Worse still, imagine the media caught wind of it, and the first you heard about it was a call from a journalist asking you for comment.

You can have all the centrally controlled brand guidelines you like, and even a robust communications plan, but with the interconnectedness of the Internet, control of a brand’s image lies squarely in the hands (or more specifically, at the fingertips) of the consumer.

Still, even if this makes it sound like you should be all over social media yesterday, it’s not a decision that should be made lightly; your personal Facebook page might get scant attention, but you can’t afford to go into social media less than wholeheartedly. Here are a few of the good, the bad, and the downright ugly things about having a social media presence that you need to take into account when making your decision.

Negative word of mouth can spread like a virus

It used to be that if we had a bad experience with a company, we’d make a phone call to complain, or go into a store and ask to ‘speak to the manager’, or write a letter of complaint. Customer service was semi-private. It was a 1:1 interaction between the customer and the company.

Nowadays, a complaint online can spread like a virus, through the network of friends, and friends of friends.

On Facebook recently, a friend of mine commented on a post made by another woman—a complaint directed to the page of a national baby retail chain, outlining her dissatisfaction at the service that she received at a particular store. The owner of the original post had 120 Facebook friends, all of whom had an opportunity to see her complaint. My friend, having commented on her post, has now shared it with her network of 525 Facebook friends, which spurred their contributions. The reach of this post grows exponentially with each share. By the time a representative from the baby store had seen this post, there were countless accounts of poor service and dissatisfaction—both at the same store, as well as others around the country—and the group had unanimously decided to boycott their stores—to vote with their wallets, as one person described it. Whether they follow through or not is almost irrelevant; the ability to control the situation and provide any level of damage control and customer service has passed. The meek reply of “please call us to discuss further” just added fuel to the fire, and the barrage of replies is not pretty.

It may just break you

Social media is not just for big companies and big brands. Local businesses can also harness the power of social media. Many hairdressers, electricians or cafés can be found on Facebook, helping people to find and connect with them. However, the downsides associated with social media apply as equally to them as to the big players, if not more so.

On a community discussion board a few months ago, there was much anticipation around the grand opening of the new local pizza shop. The first review that was posted after its opening was not flattering. In that week, another 4 people visited, and their negative reviews shared. With no one from the store present on the forum to respond, I wasn’t surprised to hear that the store may not exist for much longer. In this instance, it’s hard to deliver on any form of customer service if you aren’t aware that there is an issue.

You need to be there when your customers need you

For some, the traditional Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm business hours just don’t work. Using social media, service can be provided at the time of need. Having had no luck trawling through a supplier’s ‘Help’ pages on a software issue, one of our staff took to Twitter late one night to contact the company, who replied within the hour with an answer. This turned a potentially frustrating situation into one that was resolved quickly. Our staff member’s smiley-face-filled thank you Tweet was visible to all and sundry.

Of course, this can have a downside too—it means you need to be unfailing in monitoring your account. As mentioned before, social media is not something that you can just jump straight into and expect to be easy.

Be strategic about how you build your community of brand advocates

Building and maintaining a relationship with like-minded people who are supporters of your brand is invaluable—but you need to know how you’re going to do it. Some organisations are great at creating this space using sites such as Pinterest, providing a rich source of curated information and inspiration for their consumers who have similar tastes and interests.

Other organisations have done this well on Facebook, using it as a voice for their brand. The most popular Facebook page for a brand is that for Bubble O’ Bill—an ice cream!—with over 1.2 million ‘Likes’. The page features quirky provides updates from Bill, and fans send in pictures of themselves with their ice creams. Maybe that won’t work for your organisation—but it’s certainly working for Bill!

Set objectives for your social media interactions

What do you want to achieve by engaging your customers through social media channels? Brand awareness? Lead generation? Sales? Knowing what you want out of it will help you to work out how to get there—and maybe even adapt your Sales model to fit.

This week, I will be involved in my first online demo being run through Facebook. I was invited by a friend to join the event, which will involve a sales rep for an eco home products brand to demonstrate the benefits of the products in a conversational and personal way. I find this approach interesting as I trust my friend and share similar values to her, so am more receptive to what this company has to say. Until last night, I had no idea the company even existed—or that I had a need for eco products around my home! If nothing else, it will be an interesting social media experiment for me.

Should I get social?

Before you decide you’re going to be social, do some homework or ask an expert. Some thought starters:

How does social media fit within your overall brand strategy? Your corporate strategy?
Is there a fit with the product or service you are selling?
Will it work for the type of customer you attract? What about for the customers you aspire to attract?
Which sites will you use? How will you use them? Will you only promote your brand? Will you link to other sites?
Who will be responsible for checking the account/s? How often?
What protocols will you set for how to reply to queries, particularly how to deal with complaints? Will you need to set standards for how quickly to reply to queries?

Summary

Your customers may already be leveraging social media. You need to choose whether to join them.

The savvy will recognise the growing trend in this communication and networking phenomenon and find ways that suit their organisation, to deliver the best levels of service to their customers, and foster the best relationships with their brand.

Developing strategies and tactics to increase employee retention

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 19:53:28 +1100

Popular employee retention tactics

Employee retention has been a hot topic in human resource management channels of communication for the past ten years or so. Much has been written in those ten years about strategies for increasing employee retention. Typical advice, based on research, is to provide employees with:

A sense of purpose: People need to feel that their work, in their own opinion, is worthwhile. People with work that gives them a sense of purpose are more likely to stay.
A sense of direction: Allied to a sense of individual purpose is the need for people to perceive that the organisation has a sense of purpose.
Access to information: People need to have access to information they need to make decisions and the authority to make those decisions.
Clear organisational values: There needs to be congruence, or at least the absence of a conflict between their values and that of the organisation. It is also necessary for people to believe that there is congruence between the stated and observed values of the organisation for people to clearly want to stay.
Feedback: Positive feedback is a precursor to the feeling of recognition and acts as a spur for people to repeat the behaviour which generated the feedback. Positive feedback creates a positive reinforcing cycle that makes it attractive to come to work each day. Positive feedback adds also to the sense of individual purpose. Constructive feedback may have a positive impact on some people who have performed poorly, however, it almost always has a positive impact on those who perform well to know that there is differentiation between good and poor performance.
Development and growth: Research has indicated that development and growth by way of training, more challenging roles, clear levels of decision making authority and opportunities to test themselves in team environments has a positive impact on retention rates - especially when there are a high proportion of younger managers.
Good working conditions: General working conditions, if poor in terms of health and safety, do drive people to exit organisations and industries earlier than they would have if conditions were better. Research on the impact on retention of positive working conditions beyond what might be considered the norm is limited.

Advice like this appears quite sound, providing a good basis for developing tactics for employee retention.

Despite the HR fraternity regularly communicating and sharing this good advice over the last ten years, nothing much has changed in 20 years. Australian Bureau of Statistics data indicates that whilst there has been a decrease the percentage of people staying in their jobs for 2-5 years (28% to 24.5%) and an increase of the percentage of people staying in jobs for 20 years or more (8% to 10%), there has been no seismic shift (see Graph 1*).

Industry employee turnover rates

So what has been missing? If the advice is good, why have we not witnessed the average tenure increase more markedly over twenty years?

Some further research statistics are instructive.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics data on average employee turnover demonstrates the large differences in industry tenure rates (Table 1) ranging from 10.6% in Electricity, waste and water services to 40.3% in Accommodation and food services.

The implication of the divergent levels of turnover is that there are issues regarding employee retention that are common to an industry, but are not common across industries.

A known example is that in the accommodation segment of the accommodation and food services sector, there are a significant proportion of the businesses that have a seasonal business. Holiday destinations tend to have hotels which have high occupancy in summer and during school holidays and lower occupancy rates in winter and non-holiday times. These businesses adapt to the seasonal nature of their sales income by using a high proportion of casuals. Typical employment pools for casuals in the accommodation industry come from tertiary institutions. The high proportion of casuals (40-60%) and the pool from which they seek those casuals, means that it is almost inevitable that the segment has a low retention rate. At the other end of the scale, electricity, waste and water services employ a high proportion (as much as 40%) of engineers who may spend ten years becoming knowledgeable and therefore valuable to the industry. By the time that has occurred, a sense of loyalty, obligation and familiarity is created, further reducing the propensity to move on to a new organisation or a new industry.

An obvious implication from these two examples is that the retention targets and the retention strategy need to be different for different industries. This means that our good advice at the start of this article may not be good for all industries.

Further, a 2008 HR Pulse study by the Australian Human Resources Institute (AHRI) revealed that while 76% of respondents wanted to reduce turnover, only 23% of respondents had individual performance targets linked to levels of turnover or staff and only 37% had a plan to reduce turnover. In addition, only 17% of organisations had a budget for retention.

Retention as a part of HR strategy aligned to corporate strategy

The AHRI study also reveals that that there is a divergence of opinion in who is responsible for retention (Graph 2). When there is such a wide divergence as to who is responsible, it means in my experience, that no-one is in fact responsible.

It is my view that for a retention strategy and accompanying tactics to be successful, it is necessary for the retention strategy to be part of an overall HR strategy that is aligned to the corporate strategy (read our related article: Creating A Human Resources Strategy for the Employee Lifecycle).

My rationale for this is best explained by example.

In 1999, whilst living in the UK, Easyjet was a fledgling company. The founder, Stelios Haji-Ioannou, was often quizzed about his human resource management practices, particularly in Easyjet’s call centres. In the call centres, most people were paid piece rates based on selling airline seats. This was considered poor form and would lead inevitably to high rates of turnover. His response in an interview was something like, “Of course. I don’t want people working there who can’t or don’t want to sell. People who can sell quickly will make very good money, those who can’t I don’t want working there as I won’t be able to sell tickets cheaply.” It struck me then as it does now that there is no “Good” advice for retention, there are only appropriate tactics to support the HR strategy to support the corporate strategy.

Measurement and Performance Management

To effectively implement any strategy or set of tactics, both the results of the implementation and key milestones of the implementation must be measured. This is so for retention strategies too. Yet, the AHRI HR Pulse study showed that only 18% of respondents believed that the effectiveness of retention strategies was being measured. In addition, only 22.6% believed that their performance was evaluated against staff engagement or turnover targets.

The study further revealed that employee surveys (65%) and exit interviews (59%) are used to determine the reasons why people leave and only in general and unspecific ways.

Summary

Retention is a hot topic and much advice is published in HR communication channels on how to improve retention. However, the advice is generic and may not be suitable for specific organisations in specific industries.

To improve retention it is necessary to:

Develop a HR strategy which is aligned to the corporate strategy through the employee lifecycle
Develop a retention strategy and set of tactics which supports the HR strategy
Ensure your retention strategy:
- Has targets which are aligned to the corporate strategy, not popular HR norms
- Allocates responsibility for the targets to senior managers or HR dependent on the role of HR in the organisation
- Allocates individual responsibility through the performance management system
- Measures retention levels against the targets
- Allocates a budget for executing the retention strategy and tactics
- Effectively measures specific reasons why people leave
- Feeds back the reason why people leave into a review of the retention strategy

Source:
* RBA: Bulletin December Quarter 2012-Labour Market Turnover and Mobility. 2013. RBA: Bulletin December Quarter 2012-Labour Market Turnover and Mobility. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.rba.gov.au/publications/bulletin/2012/dec/1.html [Accessed 30 March 2013].

Using branding to communicate internal change

Sat, 23 Mar 2013 21:14:14 +1100

Building awareness and getting the sort of engagement in a change programme that results in high levels of individual adoption of the change can be challenging. Most organisations have a myriad of messages being communicated through a variety of channels each and every day. This corporate chatter can cause the audience to tune out, especially if all messages are delivered via set templates and in predictable formats.

Creating an internal brand enables you to cut through the corporate noise and help staff see and hear your change message. Presenting a visual identity for the change makes it easier for staff to connect and relate to it.

Marketing and Communications managers usually have fixed views on how the organisation should communicate internally. Often, this relates to the strict use of corporate templates that incorporate the company logo, correct typeface, colours, imagery and even language. The premise is that the brand – what we stand for and who we are – is experienced the same way for both external and internal audiences. Therefore, communications should be executed in the same manner. External marketing, to your clients and the markets in which you operate, is best governed by a well thought out brand strategy and set of brand guidelines. However, the tone of voice for internal communications often needs to be different from the external brand – preaching to the converted rarely inspires behavioural change.

Case Studies

On two recent engagements, we have used internal branding to help successfully communicate change.

Example 1: Using a character and tagline to establish a project identity

The first was an EDRMS (Electronic Document and Records Management System) rollout that required 4,000 people in a utility company to better use their records management system. The project manager had already sensed the need for communications that captured people’s attention and emphasized the importance of the project, and was receptive to creating a project identity that staff could recognise and relate to. Records management, compliance and filing structures are not the most exciting topics, even when the risks of non-compliant records management are high.

A name, tagline and logo were designed to create a character called ‘REX’ to identify the project. The ‘REX’ name was short and catchy, and the tagline related to records management and the chosen software. The logo was consistently applied to user guides, posters, videos, intranet banners, training materials, e-Learning and giveaways used as rewards during training. The logo gave the project high visual recognition and – eventually – an engaging brand personality. Employee surveys completed as the project was implemented over two years confirmed the high awareness of the project and the high engagement in the brand and the positive values attributed to the brand.

The ‘REX’ training programme was positive for users of the EDRMS and reinforced the project as fun, worthwhile and easy to get involved with. Having a clear and relatable internal brand for the project helped increase EDRMS user adoption. Ongoing training and engagement after project completion remains high and it has been decided to retain the REX brand as an identifier for the EDRMS system and records management principles and processes.

Example 2: Linking an internal project brand to the corporate brand

The second example of using internal branding to communicate change involved a personal leadership program Change Factory developed for a Pacific Island petroleum company. The program was called iLead® and set out to align personal, individual goals with community and company goals. A logo was developed to provide identity for the program of individual change. Limited colours were chosen to provide a visual link with the company logo and ensure communications were easily recognised.

The internal branding was not just about the logo and visual elements. The language used in iLead communications and training material was positive, simple and reinforced the messages of positive consequences of personal change. Communicating to staff what we did not want them to do was less effective in this instance. Personal posters identifying interests, goals and actions were created for every person in the organisation to take home, as well as for the workplace. This enabled staff to share aspirations and gave a clear sense of individual ownership to the brand – iLead became personal. This in turn created belief, which motivated changes in behaviour. This level of engagement could not have been achieved if the communications were done on company letterhead or through use of a corporate Powerpoint template.

Matching the communication components to the change message

Understanding the communication channels is important when creating an internal brand. A logo design may need to work across a variety of applications such as t-shirts, website, posters or videos. A one or two colour version of the logo may also be required. Typography needs to be legible at small sizes and colours should be consistent across print and digital mediums.

Choice and application of imagery needs to reinforce the change message and visual tone of the internal brand. If it is revolutionary change, use bold images. When using stock photo images, keep the imagery real, relatable, and avoid clichés and clip art. Be prepared to invest in good quality imagery to support your message.

Seven tips for using internal branding

In summary, here are seven tips to help communicate change using internal branding.

Ensure the project/program manager and sponsor understand the importance of a communication strategy to the success of the change.
Create a simple project name that staff understand and relate to.
Design a logo that creates visual cut through.
Use a limited colour palette to support the logo.
Choose images that visually support the change messages.
Use positive language that addresses ‘What’s in it for me?’
Design the logo to work across all communication channels.

Brand consultant Marty Neumeier wrote ‘A brand is a person’s gut feeling about a product, service or organization.’ The same can be said for internal brands, which are most effective when the visual and verbal tone of the communications align with the change. If it feels real to your audience, you will achieve the necessary cut through and ultimately the communication goals of the project.

Tolerating Variation, and Other Lessons from the Australian Cricket Team

Sun, 17 Mar 2013 20:28:16 +1100

Last week, four top-tier players were dropped from the Australian cricket team. They didn’t stay out late, or drink alcohol, or cause criminal damage. They failed to provide their coach with three dot points about how the team could improve after their disastrous defeat in Hyderabad, on tour in India.

The reaction in Australia and internationally was electric. Former luminaries of Australian cricket called it a joke, suggesting that winning cricket matches wasn’t about doing ‘homework’. As an Aussie cricket fan, I’m less concerned about whether the punishment was appropriate than I am about how it came to this in the first place.

The performance of the Australian cricket team has been in decline for years. We lost the Ashes in 2005, and have only won them back once since (after winning the series eight times straight before 2005). Our Test team has crashed from number one in the world to third, and likely to slide further if performances keep going the way they are.

One of the causes of the decay has been the retirement of a crop of extraordinary players, which suggests succession planning hasn’t been great in the team. But let’s move past that, to the situation the team faces now: poor performance, over a lengthy period, to the point where a line had to be drawn in the sand over the submission of some dot points to the coach about how the team could improve. So: how did it come to this?

To my mind, it speaks of a failure of team management to be insistent, consistent and persistent. Had team management been insistent, consistent and persistent, they would have found it unnecessary to enforce such drastic punishment for failing to complete what everyone admits is a fairly trivial task that has more to do with the attitude of the team members than it does with their performance on the field. It’s about being tolerant of variation, and inconsistent in addressing it.

Here are a few pressure points you might like to consider in your own business, when deciding how tolerant you will be of variation, and how consistent you will be in dealing with it when it occurs. For each pressure point, I’ve included an example I’ve come across in my career—if you hear something similar in your own organisation, I suggest you jump on it and remedy it as soon as possible.

Recruitment and Selection

Even when an organisation has a formal selection policy and/or a competency development framework, it’s all too easy for the selection process to be built upon totally different principles. Instead of doing the hard work of building an effective behavioural event interview questionnaire, selection comes down to opinion and speculation. In such a situation, “I think she’d be great in the role” trumps “she was able to clearly demonstrate how she met our specific requirements for this role”.

At one organisation I worked for, the informal graduate intake selection criteria were summed up quite succinctly by the interviewer as we had a chat at lunch. “They need to be able to think—but not too much. We can’t have people who think independently or we might start getting ideas floating around about how we could do things differently. That would be a disaster. What we need is people who just do as they’re told.”

Induction

Induction programmes are meant to build a shared sense of purpose—a shared understanding of how things are done in an organisation. They are also critical in teaching new hires how to do their job, especially when their role is technical in nature or involves performing tasks to specification.

It is an induction that sets the very first standard of expected behaviour for new employees. On my first day in a new job, the IT Manager came over to give me a copy of the company IT policy to sign. It ran to twenty pages. “It’s a lot to read, but frankly, you don’t need to bother,” he said. “We never check anything, and probably never will.”

Probation

Lots of businesses use a probation programme which starts with induction and which, theoretically, ends with the business making a decision about whether the new hire is the right fit for the organisation. Often, this is merely a formality, and few, if any employees, are let go at the end of their probation period.

A business unit manager once confided in me that most of his hires were young, in their late teens or early twenties, and that he couldn’t bring himself to fire any of them at the end of probation. “Whatever they don’t learn in the first three months, they’ll pick up on the job eventually,” he said.

Coaching and Counselling

When poor performance or poor behaviour occurs, by far the easiest and most effective way to correct it is to start early and honestly:

Educate those learning a new skill.
Encourage people responding to a setback.
Sponsor high performers in danger of becoming bored.
Counsel people with poor performance who have not yet had an opportunity to address it.
Confront poor performers who have had an opportunity to remedy their performance and failed.

At one organisation where I worked, a highly-skilled but temperamental engineer would regularly badmouth other employees and management, and then refuse to work on things he thought beneath him. When he quit in a huff over being asked to do something he regarded as menial, it was only two weeks before he was hired back on a 20% pay rise—because there was nobody else who could do the same work.

The Consequences

Tolerating variation in recruitment and selection means you will hire a lot of staff whose skills, attitudes and behavioural traits don’t match those required for the job. Even if they are able to adapt, it will be an expensive, time-consuming process.

Tolerating variation in induction leads to new hires being trained in a variety of different ways, and probably to a variety of different standards. That variation will make it much harder to maintain any targeted level of service later on.

Tolerating variation in probation means you will end up with dud employees on the books—the ones who suck up time and money without delivering anything of value to your organisation. And once you’ve got them, it can be difficult to justify getting rid of them.

Tolerating variation in the coaching and counselling of your employees will lead to variable performance. It will also lead to a race to the lowest common denominator, as poor behaviour becomes accepted and those that engage in poor behaviour are not counselled or confronted.

The consequences of tolerating variation are far-reaching, and the effects on your organisation will be chronic. So next time you see that variation occurring in your business, ask yourself—can you afford to let it slide? Whether they recognise it or not, the Australian cricket team has been doing it for the last few years, and you can see where it’s got them.