In our work life, we have also managed to replicate this general social disposition where trust is being eroded and in its place tons and tons of documentation stored on hard-copy or in high priced data centers.

For trust to be evident in our organizations, we should have some commonly held ethical beliefs, mutual shared obligations, goals and objectives with internalized values and norms. How often do we hear words like “I can rely on Tom”, I can depend on Mary”? Reliability and dependability are the results of trust. How often do you hear, “Send me an email first”?  Our personal experiences with our colleagues help build our relationships and these increases our sense of trust. What does our trust assessment show when we test our own organizations?

Trust building is an intangible concept that does result in tangible outcomes. A significant amount of activity is undertaken by groups rather than individuals. Growth and wealth creation comes from diverse groups of people working together, sharing resources and developing the capacity to create the kind of associations they mutually desire. The ability of people to work together for a mutual benefit with a high quality of social interaction and trust is a business asset.

In high-trust work communities, because actions and expectations are based on shared common values and principles, the cost of doing business is lower. We would not need a long paper trail, and would not delay actions waiting for written sign off because a verbal indication is not good enough.

In the July-August 2009 Harvard Business Review, Beinhocker, Davis and Mendonca in an article entitled “The 10 trends you have to watch” noted that loss of trust for a individual company “leads to higher transaction costs, lower brand value and greater difficulty in attracting, retaining and managing talent”. At the extreme end, it means “boycotts, negative publicity and unwanted regulation”.

In our own backyard, the Trinidad Guardian reported on the 13th May 2009 that CLICO (Colonial Life Insurance Company) received one billion dollars out of an expected total of five billion from the Trinidad and Tobago Central Bank to meet its financial commitments on maturing products. I suppose this may at least qualify as a concern to the trust relationship between CLICO and its policy holders and this may even spill over to the rest of the insurance industry.

Compliance and regulations move to the spot light in cases where the state must spend money to set up and run complex rules-based systems to monitor these organizations. There may be an inverse relationship with internalization of norms and values and the need for rules. The less we hold common norms and values, the more we need rules to govern us.

Trust has been absent without leave for some time now and the current economic situation does not seem to signal its return at least not in the near future. I am seeing more documentation, more rules, more archived email folders and more time is being spent on covering one’s derriere.

What happened?

Denise Ali
Note: There is an email link embedded within this post, please visit this post to email it.

His website describes the work he does with companies, as well as his book:  Building the Dream Workforce.  Click here to be taken to Mark’s website: markmayberry.com

Length of time:  24 minutes

I recently interviewed him for our series on podcasts after he visited Jamaica to present at the local Jamaica Employer’s Federation Convention. To hear the 34 minute recording, simply click on the Podcast link at the top, or visit CaribHRForum’s podcast page.

Tom will be on the discussion list through July 6th, and has already gotten off to a rousing start!

Francis

The pull factor refers to the softening of the labour market within certain staff categories and industries with redundancies, resulting in less demand for staffing by other companies. The push factor refers to the times when employers are pushing their employees out the door for all the reasons employees cite for resigning.

Janice Andrews from the Nevada Business reported on the 10th February 2009 that Watson Wyatt, a leading consulting firm in their 2008/2009 WorkUSA Report found that companies benefit from a 26% higher employee productivity, lower turnover risk, and are more likely to attract top talent when their employees are engaged. The survey found that highly engaged employees are twice as likely to be top performers with 20% less absent days when compared to the less engaged employee population.

The term “engageable moments” was noted from the report recommendations and I absolutely love it. How do we identify an “engageable moment”? I often see many of these moments but line managers are sometimes so caught up in day to day operations, that these high return moments are not identified much less capitalized on. It is about seeing beyond our nose, fighting myopia and seeing the next couple of chess moves that may take place if we make a certain decision.

The survey data shows that engagement starts off high with new employees but often decreases by over 9% within the first year of employment. Hence, there are numerous opportunities in the first year to counteract that decline. It is important to note as well that at the interviewing stage, the interviewer should not paint an unrealistic picture of the job or the company, since this image may soon be thwarted based on the new recruit’s real experience. Honesty is the best policy?.

The organization is encouraged to have a comprehensive on boarding and orientation programme with specific on the job training and not rely on training by osmosis. The new recruit should be fully aware of their scorecards or deliverables and be given frequent feedback on their progress. Apart from the policies, procedures, work deliverables, the new recruit also needs to get a feel for the company’s cultures with the norms and values. This may include simple bits of advice like where to park, where to eat lunch, always say “good morning or good afternoon”, or always acknowledge someone when passing them in the corridor or in the washroom etc. These bits of advice are necessary when working with multiple generations. A buddy system might be a good idea to assist in the cultural immersion that comes from passing ideas on to new employees.

Employees always appreciate involvement and meaningful communication. It is advisable in a downturn, to explain the company’s plan, direction and to seek ideas from the staff using a bottom up approach. Crises provide the leadership with unique opportunities to assert themselves and further build their brand equity thereby increasing the commitment from the workforce.

The company may also seek to provide un-intimidating ways to solicit feedback from staff on burning issues, questions, assumptions and or complaints with the intention of responding and dispelling conspiracy theories and setting records straight.

If an organization experienced redundancies, there might be a great deal of survivor’s guilt to address. In the absence of redundancies, some companies would have implemented a recruitment freeze; this may increase the workloads of the existing staff. An idea maybe to offer time off during non-peak periods to those employees who have increased work loads. Companies should explore leveraging workplace flexibility options as a non-cash way to illustrate staff appreciation.

As minimal as it may be, reserve funds to serve as bonuses and or incentives or personalized gifts for innovative type rewards. A programme may also be developed to solicit ides on cost savings and or income generating from staff and reward them for implemented ideas. This is a time where business maybe a bit slow so organizations should use the down time to re-group, re-tool and or re-train.

When implementing programmes aimed at building employee engagement, we should focus our efforts on the tier of employees below the fully engaged tier. The fully engaged ones are already working to their maximum capacity, we need to concentrate on gently nudging the fence sitters. Partially engaged and disengaged employees are always a threat to the fully engaged ones in terms of limiting top performance. An organization works as a team, with interdependencies built into it, hence poor or mediocre performance flows through the channels.

Janice Andrews from the Nevada Business Magazine quoted Ilene Gochman at Watson Wyatt as saying: “Improving employee engagement will help drive business results in the long run by improving commitment to corporate goals and generating exceptional individual performance and productivity”.

Employee engagement is such a compound concept and the prescription to achieve it is different for different companies, but I contend that the bones of an engagement strategy are built on common values / ideas of equity, honesty, openness, transparency, integrity, growth, development, respect, recognition, appreciation, involvement and communication. The company can then dissect their organization into various relevant demographics to help craft the prescription that will yield positive engagement results.

Denise Ali
Note: There is an email link embedded within this post, please visit this post to email it.

Length of time:  34 minutes

WHY LEADERSHIP?

A good executive can precisely diagnose the needs of an organization. Whatever the diagnosis, the solution universally requires leadership. It demands that a critical mass of the organization think and act as leaders do. Leadership is the principal action tool for implementing organizational objectives.

One can ask a company, “What is your problem?” One gets many answers, many different diagnoses, many different problems. Everyone — individuals as well as organizations — has reasons: the need for more decentralization, for flatter organizations, for more product and service quality, for higher productivity, for greater speed and quality decision making. Other reasons: the shifting markets, international competition; the need for continuous innovation, for more creativity, for more personal responsibility, for individual autonomy, for more teamwork, for better strategy, and the wish to correct sluggish profits and planning errors and to temper excessive politics. The concerns are multiple, but the solution is always the same: release, among the members of your team, the power for leadership and creativity, for courage and character.

To teach leadership greatness is to help others learn how to think and act as leaders do. It means to challenge their will, to release people’s latent greatness and to empower teams for extraordinary accomplishments.

His website can be found by clicking here: Philosophy in Business.

Francis
Note: There is an email link embedded within this post, please visit this post to email it.

I’d like to invite you to complete the following survey to help the planners and decision-makers decide whether or not a virtual conference would be something valuable to offer in 2009.

The survey includes 6 questions, all related to a new technology that is allowing conferences and their content to be offered remotely via the internet. At the end of the survey, you’ll find a link to an interesting example of a conference that is being offered not only live, but over the internet in stored audios and video.

I believe that offering virtual conferences are the only way for us in the region to overcome the obstacle of US$500+ fares. Not only are they a way for us to stay connected, but they are also a good alternative in these recessionary times.

This survey is only about regional HR conferences – please bear that in mind.

Incidentally, there are three regional HR conferences planned for the fall of 2009 – a first.

Click here to be taken to the survey:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=4ixiZhjAo3HpYK2VYBCKEA_3d_3d

Francis

We have also adopted this term at Guardian Holdings and we would like to think
it is more than just a name change to us.  The catalyst for this change began
with senior management asking the question of how best we can re-structure HR to
ensure it delivers maximum value to the business. If HR were to answer this value,
we would have to assume we know what the business thinks “maximum value” looks like.

We embarked on engaging an external third party to conduct some
interviews with the businesses that HR supports to determine, what they want
from HR, what HR is good at and what HR can improve upon in a nutshell. The
third party was a necessary part of this process to improve the honesty of the
feedback as much as possible as compared to if HR asked the questions about
HR.

We analyzed all the feedback and proceeded to engage in a marathon of
discussions about a range of issues. We know from all our research on HR
Business partnering about having a centre of expertise (a la David Ulrich,) but we had to
ask if we really needed that high level centre of expertise based on our size
and current requirements to justify the salaries and benefits it would take to house
specialist skills internally on a day to day basis.

We decided to adopt a developmental approach to this idea of specialist
skills. We have not recruited any high level expert skill, but we are building
the skills of our current team members across functional HR areas. Our HR
Officers are on a long term rotation programme to build and assess skills across
Performance Management, Learning and Development and Employee Relations.

The organization will not be highly dependent on one person for service and
guidance, hence decreasing the company’s vulnerability should retention be less
than perfect. In effect, we are developing our HR expertise parallel to the
organization’s need for it on a continuous basis. For the spurts of expert
advice requests, we can always seek the same at critical times.

Another key area we reviewed was our Shared Service Function, we asked what
else can we hive off from the Business Unit HR team and move to the Shared
Services area. This was a critical component aimed at providing more time for
the HR Officers at the Business Unit to engage in more value adding work as
compared to spending large chunks of time on transactional routine work.

We reviewed a number of processes and moved a range of activities to the Shared
Service, ensuring all the way that the process was seamless and all involved
the same understanding.  However, having said that, this continues to be a
work in progress. It is amazing how things get confused along the way where
steps in a process take on a life of their own and don’t even resemble the steps
in the detailed documentation. The lesson here is “maintenance is critical”
while we look for improvements.

The support from the line on this “Business Partnering” concept has been crucial. The
mere fact that we started the process by asking the line for input and advice
augured well for us at the implementation stage. When it comes to the line
accepting responsibility for making people decisions that in the past rested
withHR is another matter. We constantly re-iterated our goal, which was to better
enable the line to manage their people and by extension the company. We emphasized that “HR is not the uniform police or the manager of time off, HR is about supporting the line and the business in managing and optimizing the human capital.”

A huge change is required by the line, a change that surrounds how they perceive
their job and their role in people management. In the distant past, all people
management issues were referred to HR, hence people issues were not seen as part
of the line’s role.

The integration of this role in the manager’s role now has had its challenges. In our experience, the line refers to HR or not refers to HR when it
is convenient for them to do so. It is if “bad” news for the employee, the
line may say, “HR said so!”, when really the line receives advice from HR
clearly outlining consequences of different decisions but the final decision if
for the line to make.

We have lots of work to do where this is concerned. HR needs the constant
support the senior management team on reinforcing and driving this new
accountability for people management. We have included people management metrics
on the line’s scorecard as a systematic way to hold them accountable for
these issues.

Our current challenge is having the line sign any disciplinary
correspondence to the employee. The line wants performance to improve but not in
a hurry to communicate the challenging areas and areas on poor performance to
the employee especially in writing. In conclusion, this is another area that is
considered work in progress that requires much care and attention.

We discussed:
•    deciding to let our internal potential HR specialists go through their own
metamorphosis parallel to the organization’s need for expert skills with an
emphasis on retention,
•    refining the role of the Business Unit HR team members and transferring
transactional work to our Shared Service ensuring a seamless relationship
•    the need to have support from the line on embracing their people
management role.
Consistent with all the points noted, is the importance of role clarification and
understanding of duties, deliverables and expectations from all
stakeholders.

I trust the above simplified highlights which marks our journey along the HR
Business Partnering path was useful.

Denise Ali
Note: There is an email link embedded within this post, please visit this post to email it.

As a child developing in an academic environment, you are always asked “What do you want to be when you grow up?” The unsuspecting child does not even realize how loaded that question is especially if asked by a parent who missed out on opportunities in their own life.

These children grow up and find themselves in professions or jobs that they believe are positively perceived by society as “respectable” with a supposed high income potential. They have been advised on their careers based on society’s idea of respectable and the expectation of significant earnings. These children have heard stories told to their families and friends, “My son, he wants to be a doctor / lawyer / accountant /engineer”. Over time, the children believe this as well without any significant thought to what they want to do.

Often time, the process to decide what we want our kids to become or what we wanted to do as adults is flawed. We start with the end in mind first and work in reverse. We shortlist jobs/professions that we think will yield the big bucks and or command an air of admiration by others. Then we convince ourselves that we always wanted to be, say an “Actuary”. When and if that day comes that we earn the right of the Actuary title, we then assess ourselves and say “this is the most boring job ever made”. No offence to Actuaries…

As adults, we find ourselves in jobs and professions that bring us stress. We feel overworked, we get easily irritated, we can’t sleep, we may suffer with migraine headaches, we feel drained and it becomes quite challenging to go to work every day.

If you feel like this, there are a number of reasons that can contribute to these feelings. One of which is that maybe you are in the wrong profession. Maybe you should explore those activities that you engage in where you don’t even realize that a whole day has passed quite opposite to the way you count down the hours in your work day. Employers also want to decrease the probability of placing square pegs in round holes.

When we find that special something that ignites our fire, the enthusiasm that flows from our core is unending. Our passion drives us to exceed expectations. Every day that passes that we don’t capitalize on our natural talents and passion, we rob ourselves of the returns that we could be enjoying.

It is never too late to consider a change but sometimes we do have constraints that may not allows us to be flexible to take risks on our sources on income. For the ones who can brave it, go strong?. To our empty nesters, you now have a second chance.

There are many stories where professionals left their jobs to do interior decorating, carpentry, designing, to become a chef, to do landscaping, floral arrangements, to be a personal physical fitness trainer, to work with abused and abandoned children, customize cars, start a daycare and the list goes on and on. Your passion, natural drive and motivation will ensure that whatever you choose to do, you will do it exceptionally well. If you do what you love, you never work a day in your life and you are never in waiting for any thing, the journey is the happiness.

Don’t be that parent who missed out on opportunities in your life to do what you really wanted to do!

Denise Ali

This term has gained in popularity over the years. In 1990, Rosabeth Moss Kanter discussed the need for intrapreneurial development as a key factor in ensuring company survival in her book, “When Giants Learn to Dance”.  In 1992, The American Heritage Dictionary included the term to its dictionary, defining it as “a person within a large corporation who takes direct responsibility for turning an idea into a profitable finished product through assertive risk-taking and innovation”.

Intrapreneurship is a strategy for stimulating innovation by leveraging off corporate entrepreneurial talent. As Human Resource Professionals, what can we do to support this strategy, should it be adopted by our respective businesses?

This strategy requires empowered employees who are comfortable with being change agents, suggesting new ideas and promoting their execution. The environment must be encouraging with a degree of freedom to innovate.

A key element of intrapreneurship is the ability of the company to support, with financial and technical resources with expedited decision-making processes. The company should be comfortable to break with tradition to re-invent itself if necessary. The leadership must also demonstrate an appreciation for this strategy and really actively listen to the various ideas that surface. Constructive failure and big victories should both be embraced. The company should cut the red tape and bureaucracy and hasten the process from idea to execution. Louis V. Gerstner, Jr. talked about this in his book “Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance”, which described an IBM that can also be agile and reactive to change even though it was large company.

These tough economic times force us to be inventive. We must create a culture that supports innovation and takes calculated risks.  We must listen, allow failures, reward successes, share credit, be willing to break tradition and precedents and be ready for a renaissance if necessary.

According to Gifford Pinchot’s out-of-print book “Intrapreneuring, Why You Don’t Have to Leave the Corporation to Become and Entrepreneur:”
1.    Do any job to make your project work regardless of job description
2.    Share credit wisely
3.    It is easier to ask for forgiveness than permission
4.    Come to work each day willing to be fired
5.    Ask for advice before asking for resources
6.    Follow intuition, build a team with best people
7.    Build quiet support for the idea
8.    Never bet on a race unless you are running in it
9.    Be true to your goals but realistic about ways to achieve them
10.    Honour your sponsors.

Some of the above may have you wondering about this concept. “Come to work each day willing to be fired”, not sure if my heart can take this emotional roller coaster of highs and lows?.

If this intrapreneurship concept is successful in your company, how do you compensate the person or people behind it and then how to retain them? Depending on the success of this, the employee/s may just form their own company and then transition to being entrepreneurs.

This requires a sound, transparent incentive system.

EVA™ maybe a consideration as a way to reward employees. EVA™ is a measure of a company’s financial performance based on residual wealth calculated by deducting the cost of capital from its operating profit.

Steve Jobs, C.E.O of Apple has described the development of the Macintosh computer as an intrapreneurial venture within Apple.

3M has reaped the rewards of intrapreneurism. They have a standard policy that allows all employees to work on developing their own business ideas at least 15% of the time they are at work. 3M’s post it notes and its entry into the health care industry are results of pursuing intrapreneurism.

It is most often the case, only when we are faced with adversity, then we are forced into greatness.  This applies to companies and to individuals. Successful entrepreneurs have said that the day they got fired was the main turning point in their lives, but they probably would have still been in the “rat race” if they were not forced to seek alternative sources of income.

Denise Ali
Note: There is an email link embedded within this post, please visit this post to email it.