Extra productivity How much extra productivity, what gain in performance and what happens to profits are all good questions that I’ll point the way to answering here. The amount of extra productivity, performance and profit depends on where you are now. My experience is most commercial organizations can expect to double their profit over a few years. The behaviour change that delivers the benefits, drives the speed and scale of the outcome. Continuous improvement If you are too timid in your employee directed continuous improvement then you will achieve very little.
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Change Leader – will you lead the change or be changed?
My definition of leadership is that which delivers better results than is normal or could be expected. This is the definition of the Alpha of investments – the degree with which they outperform the rest. This is a good definition for the Chief Executive’s or Managing Director’s role. Unless you are delivering a better than expected performance, a better return on investment (ROI), you are not doing your job. How many leaders do you know who found a formula for success and stuck to it, even though the circumstances, and the results, stopped flowing? Being the leader is being prepared to change, to drive your organisation to change. The Shareholders are not patient when the Alpha, the ROI, loses its sparkle. If the leader doesn’t drive change, the shareholders change the leader for one that will. Yes, it is tough at the top, why did you think you got the big pay packet? Most leaders ensure that their organisation has all the resources, the training and staffing that is required. Often, after all this investment, the sparkle is still absent. When you ask yourself, or Google, “What on Earth do I do next?” you know you’re in trouble. Over the […]
Continue readingDo you thank the vending machine?
People management skills It might be helpful to say that my people management skills came about through picking up a glowing meteorite. That would have been easier for sure. Rather, any ability I may have developed is the result of many attempts to get it right, or better at least, with many failures along the way: a lot of experiments, testing hypotheses and checking ‘facts’.
Continue readingManaging Your First Employee
Are you a natural born leader? Perhaps as a child you were the one that organized all the games? Naturally as you grew people just expected you to be in charge? You might even regard yourself as a ‘very stable genius’? Of course, this means you have never needed to think how you relate to people, and more importantly, how they relate to you. But you won’t be reading anything to do with self-development so this is not for you. But this article is for the rest of us. We who worried about, or still worry, how to relate to our first employee, our first direct report.
Continue readingYour Path To High Competitive Advantage
It’s a reasonable question to ask – where are we on the performance curve? You can read some indicators, symptoms and causes of your progress to genuine competitive advantage below. There is nothing more complex than a human, except a group of us, and this model is a brief distillation of my 40 years experimenting on people at work. Let’s examine the performance curve from the viewpoint of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.
Continue readingFirst Steps To Engaging Your People
What’s your job title? Supervisor, Manager or Director perhaps? What is it that you Supervise, Manage or Direct? It’s people, your team, the staff or the employees. If you don’t have a job that has a people responsibility then you are an Administrator. Otherwise, you are a People Manager. As you are responsible for people, and the work they do, what is your job? What it isn’t is doing the job of your people – your job is to get your people to do the job! I’m sure you have stuff to do, paperwork, emails, meetings, all loosely involved with your people but actually just administration. That is not what you are paid to do. You are paid to get your people to do their job.
Continue readingThe Hidden Power Of Employee Engagement
Following on from the previous post, “Is Employee Engagement just a good thing” and as much use as a one-handed clap, let’s see how to boost profit and pay by using the ‘other hand’. We can all agree that employee engagement is a measure of people’s involvement in their work and their employer’s goals. That’s all good, of course, but how does that make a difference to the employer? What do these engaged employees do differently? Smile more? Come to work on time? When your people are involved with the employer’s goals, why not ask them to improve the process? They are the process experts, in fact, because they operate the process 37 hours a week. Don’t expect them to revolutionise the process but rather to incrementally evolve slightly better ways day after day. It amazed me that when I tried to start this, everybody said, “it’s not my/their job!” The bigger resistance coming from the support staff who saw it as their job alone. When an operator improves the process they use day after day, and somebody says thank you, they feel valued. I have seen lots of attempts at Continuous Improvement where a manager calls in the operators and tells […]
Continue readingIs Employee Engagement just a ‘good thing’?
Showaddywaddy had a Top Ten song in the Singles Chart in 1978. As a young Engineer, I had just seen work colleagues upset that I’d made their job easier. The pay and conditions were unchanged, but they were upset. Showwaddywaddy’s “I wonder why?” summed up my surprise. Thus began 25 years of experiment, research and academics into employee engagement, or morale as we called it then. During this time, I was The Operations Guy, with increasing seniority. The Ops Guy’s life is simple: reduce costs, increase productivity, deliver what the Customer wants and achieve monthly invoicing. How hard can that be?
Continue readingProductivity and Management
Q1: Are you responsible for getting people to work? Perhaps you have the title Director, Manager, Supervisor, Team Leader…..? Q2: Have you had any training in people management? Q3: Have you heard of Elton Mayo and the Hawthorne Experiment? If you answered yes to Q1 and no to either Q2 or Q3 then you are missing skills! Mayo concluded after the experiment “The only experimental intervention that clearly showed good results was the managers showing an honest interest in working with the people to find better ways of doing their work.” This page on this website has the story and more. https://motivationmatters.co.uk/elton-mayo-and-the-hawthorne-experiment/
Continue readingSame Old Employee Engagement Survey Results?
Do you have a standard Performance Improvement Process? When someone is identified as a low performer they are put into a process of training, (hopefully), and support to improve their performance. Usually there is a time limit of three or six months to show the necessary level of performance. If acceptable performance isn’t attained then you may move on to dismissal. Does that sound familiar? Have you been doing regular Employee Engagement surveys for years?
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