The Performance Improvement Blog

How to Manage Temporary Employees

2013-05-17T14:41:15-04:00

Temps, independent contractors, contingent workers, and free-lancers have become the norm, not the exception. As I wrote in a post in March 2010:

Unlike previous recession recoveries, this one will not re-employ large numbers of laid off workers. Because of technology, operational efficiencies, a project focus, and out-sourcing, many companies are finding that they can be more productive with fewer employees. And because of uncertainty about the post-recession economy, they are reluctant to make new hires permanent. Employers have found that they can get the job done by supplementing their regular employees with temps. This gives companies the freedom to increase and decrease their workforce depending on what is needed at the time.

The May 10 issue of Crain’s Detroit Business confirms this prediction. The author writes:

Increased consumer demand, a greater need for flexibility and new health-care requirements are prompting businesses from Dearborn-based Ford Motor Co. to the PeaceHealth health-care system in Washington state to turn to staffing firms…The U.S. has added 913,200 temporary workers since the end of the recession in June 2009 – about 19 percent of all new jobs. Their number rose to 2.66 million in April, about 11,300 shy of the April 2000 record, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics figures released May 3.

Labor economists are predicting that the number of temporary workers will set a new record in the very near future. And this is without including all of the contracted services such as legal, PR, accounting, Web support, employee training, and management consulting.

Are business leaders prepared for this change in the workforce? How will managers help temporary workers maximize their contribution to the organization?

BusinessWeek labeled them the “disposable worker”, a pejorative term but symptomatic of the way many managers view this segment of employees. This view is based on at least three misconceptions: 1) temporary workers are not committed to the work, they just want a paycheck; 2) temporary workers are not critical to the success of the organization; and 3) it’s not worth investing time, energy, and money in the development of temporary workers.

The truth is that most temporary workers want to do a good job and care deeply about the quality of their work. The work they do is often critical to the success of the organization. And if they are customer-facing, then they are shaping customer attitudes toward the company.

As far as investing in temporary workers, that time, energy, and money will have immediate payoff and, because you never know how long that person will work for the organization or how many times they will come back to the company in the future, it is worth the risk to train and develop that person. When they go elsewhere, they take the goodwill and learning with them which is good for the community and good for the reputation of the organization.

Regardless of how long temporary workers have been with your organization, they should be treated as important contributors to your success. Applying the 5As Framework, here are five things you should keep in mind when supervising these employees:

1) Make sure that they understand how their jobs are aligned with the success of the organization. They should know how what they are being asked to do contributes to achieving business goals.

2) Let them know that you anticipate that they will have a positive experience and that their work is significant. Communicate high expectations for their performance.

3) Form an alliance with them for the purpose of their learning and success. Give them informal and formal feedback on how they are doing and how they can improve.

4) Create opportunities and give encouragement to apply what they know and what they are learning to their jobs. Being temporary means that it is all that much more urgent to provide these opportunities.

5) Measure their success and hold them accountable for doing a good job. This means being clear with them about the indicators of success and how you will help them achieve those outcomes.

It is easy to make the mistake of assuming that temporary workers are not the real workforce and do not deserve our full attention. That is, in effect, discarding a large and growing portion of the workers who can make our organizations successful. We need to embrace this segment and apply the same good practices to them that we use to develop any high performing and engaged workforce.

Evaluation Is Not Complicated

2013-05-10T08:50:15-04:00

In his blog post, “Stop Evaluating Training!”, Amit Garg summarizes a presentation that Robert O. Brinkerhoff gave at the Australian Institute of Training and Development conference in April. Garg relates Brinkerhoff’s comments to the challenges of measuring the effectiveness of elearning programs. Garg writes:

So how do you evaluate the success of eLearning that you create?" As a learning solutions vendor, I’ve been asked this question countless times and have also encountered it in many an RFP. Proving the effectiveness of training and showing ROI is no walk in the park and still keeps L&D up at night.

Maybe evaluation of the impact of training is not a “walk in the park”, but it is not “rocket science” either. As Brinkerhoff explains in The Success Case Method, there is a simple logic to assessing impact. First we have to understand the alignment between a learning intervention, whether that’s classroom-based, elearning, coaching, on-the-job structured experiences, or something else, and the intended impact (e.g., customer retention, production, sales, revenue, market share). Then it’s a matter of identifying and interviewing learners who are contributing to that impact and those that are not contributing. The purpose of these interviews is to understand the nature of the impact and why it’s happening or not happening.

Three immutable laws drive this method of evaluation. One is the law of learning as a process not an event. This law holds that learning is a process that starts before an instructional event and continues after the event. To study the event only is to fail to include key aspects of what is facilitating learning and what are barriers to learning.

Another is the law of unintended consequences which holds that when there is change there are always outcomes that weren’t anticipated. A useful evaluation of training will examine these unintended consequences (positive and negative) as well as achievement of objectives of the intervention.

And the third law holds that significant, lasting change in complex organizations is always the result of many factors, some that are not in the control of trainers and learners. For example, effectiveness of leaders, change in strategic direction, and the economy could have a profound influence on the impact that learners have on their organizations.

It’s not complicated. Understand how the learning intervention is intended to help the organization achieve its goals. Identify employees who are and are not applying what they learned. Interview these employees to find out what they did or did not do, how that affected the organization, what other factors were intervening in that impact, and what can be done to increase learner impact in the future.

Leadership Hustle

2013-05-03T09:21:35-04:00

In his column for Forbes.com, John Baldoni writes about how Rick Pitino, coach of the 2013 NCAA national champion Louisville Cardinals basketball team, would keep track of his players’ deflections during their games. He wanted to measure “hustle” and a count of deflections was his best indicator. A deflection in basketball is anything that a defender does to “redirect the intended flight of the ball.” Depending on who is counting, this could include blocked shots, tipped balls, kicked balls, steals, taking a charge, and touched passes. You might hear about blocked shots and steals, but the other kinds of deflections are rarely mentioned. Each of these actions on the part of a defender usually requires concentrated, determined effort at disrupting the play of the offense. Do this enough and at the right times and it can be the difference between winning and losing a game.

If you've read my previous posts, you know that I think we overuse sports analogies in our understanding of organizations. However, I wonder if we can use organizational deflections to measure leadership hustle? We could count the number of times a leader proposes a change in the strategic direction of the organization, asks an insightful question about current policies, challenges a bad decision, gets a co-worker to think about a situation in a new way, suggests new positioning for a product or service that is not doing well, uses own initiative to solve a problem for a customer, has a difficult conversation with a direct report, or embraces change. In each instance, the leader is deflecting the organization from its current path.

Top level leaders do not necessarily have to hustle to keep their jobs and advance their careers. In fact, deflection is the kind of behavior often avoided by leaders because they fear the risk and consequences. To them, it is safer to continue doing what they've been doing then to change direction, even if things are going badly. They stay the course at all costs.

Leaders that hustle are open to opportunities for deflection. They are always questioning the status quo. They ask themselves and others if they are doing something simply because they can or because it’s the right thing to do. They ask, "Is this what is best for our customers, our employees, and the community? Is there a better way?"

What actions indicate leadership hustle to you?

Agile Learner; Agile Leader

2013-04-26T10:49:19-04:00

I have to admit that prior to hearing Elliott Masie talk about “learning agility” last week at the virtual Human Captial Media Symposium for CLOs, the concept was not on my radar. However, aspiring to be agile myself (mentally and physically), I’m willing to learn something new and, maybe, discard some old notions about human development and leadership.

It appears that there are at least three definitions of learning agility being used in the field. Each is worth considering. One has to do with openness to experience, another has to do with adaptability to change, and a third has to do with the range of methods one uses to acquire new information and abilities.

In Learning About Learning Agility, a white paper from researchers at Teachers College, Columbia University and the Center for Creative Leadership, the authors argue that agile learners are effective leaders because they are life-long learners about leadership. They write that agile learners…

…show the willingness and ability to learn throughout their careers, if not their entire lives…Learning-agile individuals seek opportunities for growth and are able to process these opportunities in order to learn. They are open to new experiences, seek challenges, and are willing to introduce new ideas and question “norms”. Moreover, they are able to remain present in challenging situations, performing and adapting “on the fly”. Finally, learning-agile individuals understand that experience alone does not guarantee learning; they take time to reflect, seeking to understand why things happen, in addition to what happened.

The authors make the point that we usually judge people based on what they have done and what they already know when another, maybe better indicator of leadership success is how well they learn. This is a profound observation because it flies in the face of standard recruiting and selection practices. Do we throw out the resume and observe how people behave in novel situations instead?

Vicki Swisher, with Korn Ferry International, in a webcast says that organizations with learning-agile leaders succeed more than other organizations. These leaders adapt their leadership style and actions to the changing internal and external environments of their organizations. Agility, according to Swisher is about having the flexibility to change given the circumstances.

I would say that this kind of learning agility is most needed when leaders are under pressure to respond quickly and decisively. We know that when people are under stress they become less mindful, their perception of options becomes restricted, and they often make the most expedient and safest, rather than best, choice. Agile leaders are able to step back from these pressure situations, engage with others in a way that helps them see the range of possibilities, and make choices that are best for the organization.

Masie’s comments suggest a third definition of learning agility. This is the ability of leaders to find the information they need when they need it, to use a wide range of methods of learning (technology, social, practice, etc.), and turn that information into the knowledge and skills they need to be effective leaders in the situation. Being an agile learner by this definition means being able to sift through all of the sources of information that we have at our fingertips (literally), evaluate what is useful and what is not, and apply that information to solving problems and improving the performance of employees and our organizations.

Future of Employee Learning

2013-04-18T11:42:59-04:00

“if anybody says to you here’s where learning will be in five years, run in the other direction.” This is what Elliott Masie, Founder & President of The MASIE Center, said this week at the beginning of his Keynote session at the Human Capital Media Symposium for Chief Learning Officer. Masie went on to talk about trends that have the potential for changing the field dramatically. I want to expand on the three trends that have the most salience for me.

One is personalization of learning. We have the technology now to individualize both the push and pull of information. Courses, books, articles, videos, and online practice groups can be accessed according to the learning needs of each employee. If a manager wants to know how to conduct a performance review session with a low-performing worker shortly before it is scheduled to happen, she can view or download instructional material that will help her with that session. If a manager wants to help a direct-report learn the new safety standards, he can send a video on the subject to the employees smartphone. Traditional, classroom-based, mass instruction is moving into the background as just one of many options for helping employees develop the knowledge and skills they need to be successful.

Another major trend is mobile learning. Devices such as laptops, tablets, and smartphones are making learning possible any where at any time and with any one. Some learning is best done in a social,
collaborative environment and in-action. For example, learning how to solve a product marketing problem with a creative and innovative solution, is best done with co-workers (located, possibly, at sites around the world) and in an online environment in which participants can share and explore ideas with each other. To maximize learning, this global team should reflect on their experiences and archive what they learned and how that learning could be applied to similar situations in the future.

A third major trend identified by Masie is learning agility. This is the ability to find and acquire the knowledge you need as you need it. It’s not about memorizing facts and figures or methods and procedures any longer. We need employees who know how to search, locate, evaluate, select, and apply information. We need employees who can take information from a wide variety of sources, not only from trainers and educators, and translate that information into knowledge and wisdom. Employees need to learn how to be curators of information.

What other major trends do you see that will shape the future of employee learning?

The Next Big Thing: Big Data

2013-04-12T07:00:00-04:00

Everybody’s talking about “Big Data” these days. But as with any fast moving bandwagon, it’s good to get off once in a while and take stock of the direction in which you are going. So let’s take a look at the pluses and minuses of Big Data. We now have the technology to collect enormous amounts of information about people and to analyze huge datasets that have implications for the economy, education, health care, and social services, as well as enterprises such as agriculture, manufacturing, retail, and much more. Having data is not the problem; the problem is using it effectively and responsibly.

Wally Bock, referring to Johannes Kepler and his discovery of a third law of planetary motion, writes:

Most Big Data operations are the same kind of brute force computation that Kepler did, only much faster. Big Data is the new panacea. It will do just about everything, we're told. But before we start planning for the era of universal peace and an end to disease and hunger which will surely come, it's worth pondering that the computation is only the middle part of the process.

Kepler was using the Big Data of his day, but he had to know what he was looking for. He had to use good, accurate data. And he had to have some idea of how he could use it when he found it. That hasn't changed simply because we can calculate faster.

Making good use of large datasets takes preparation and follow-through. Take health care, for example. Even when findings from Big Data have obvious disease prevention implications, people do not do what is suggested by the findings. Michael Hickins writes in CIO Journal that Aetna is using Big Data to predict which of its members is likely to develop cardiovascular disease. But even with this information, there is relatively low compliance with the regimen that will likely prevent heart disease. It’s not sufficient to have data. What's important is what we do with that data to change behavior of individuals, teams, organizations, and communities.

Darin McKeever, Deputy Director at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, in a post titled "Moving From Big Data to Big Wisdom", makes the point that Big Data does not necessarily mean that people have the wisdom to improve organizations and society. That data must be turned into something meaningful. Data must become useful information. Useful information must become new knowledge. And it is that new knowledge that becomes the wisdom to bring needed change in new situations.

Getting to wisdom starts before data mining begins. It starts with key stakeholders coming together to decide what questions they want to answer, how the data will be collected and analyzed, what information can be gleaned from the data, and how individual privacy can be protected. It continues with learning from the analysis (knowledge) followed by generating the insights and wisdom needed to sustain change. Big Data, by itself, is not the solution. It’s what people do with that data and how it is turned into wisdom that makes the difference.

Survey of Organization Performance Challenges

2013-04-04T07:00:00-04:00

Leaders today face many challenges in facilitating organization performance improvement. Fifteen of these problems are listed in a survey of organizational performance challenges. The link to this survey follows this paragraph. Please click on the link and take a few minutes now to rank order the items on the list. I think you will find the exercise to be enlightening. If I receive a sufficient number of responses, I will report the results in a future post.

Survey of Organization Performance Challenges

What would you add to this list?

If you wish to find resources that can help you with any of the challenges listed in the survey, go to Learning to be Great.

Culture vs. Control

2013-03-29T10:32:58-04:00

The dust has settled a bit on the working-from-home issue which was stirred up about a month ago when Yahoo's 11,500 employees received an email from the HR department putting an end to “work-from-home arrangements” throughout the company. Apparently, Marissa Mayer, the new CEO of Yahoo, is trying to change a culture that had lost the nimbleness and creativity that it needs in order to compete in the world today. Whether you agree with this action or not, it is clear that she needed to do something about Yahoo’s workplace culture and reign in the behavior of some folks who were taking advantage of Yahoo’s work-at-home policy.

Unfortunately, the media debate quickly focused on the future of telecommuting and the plight of working-mothers rather than on the real issue which is creating a culture in which everyone is focused on innovation and results. Sometimes, to change culture, especially in a large, complex, global organization in a fast-changing industry, one has to exert greater control in the short-term to create a culture in which collaboration and teamwork will be how work is done in the long-term.

In a results oriented culture, how one works is determined by what one needs to achieve. If that goal can be achieved by working from home, then that could be an option. If achieving a particular performance goal is best done by face-to-face contact with other employees, then being in the office is probably the answer.

For example, if my work objective is to write code for a particular Web site transaction and I can write that code from home just as well as I can from the office, then maybe working from home is a good option for me. If my goal is to create a new look and feel for an online news service, and I need the creativity that comes from give and take with other employees, then I should be in the office.

The problem is not with working from home per se; the problem is how to achieve the intended results. To start with location without consideration for the performance goal is to put the proverbial cart before the horse.

If a CEO is concerned with how employees are using their time, then she needs to talk with her managers about helping these employees set goals and be accountable for achieving results. Often, employees are not clear about what is expected of them. In the absence of this specificity, they (like all of us) fill the void with their own ideas of what they should do and how they should do it (within a general policy). When their actions come into conflict with the goals of the organization, then leaders may have to institute controls on behavior until managers can shape the expectations of employees and create a culture that is aligned with intended outcomes.

Culture Change is More Than Skin Deep

2013-03-20T14:15:33-04:00

The new Pope appears to have made culture change top on his list of priorities. He has shown surprising humility in his words and actions, riding the bus with his Cardinals, rejecting wearing some of the elaborate vestments worn by past popes, and stepping out of his car and engaging with the crowds. These are signs that Pope Francis is taking steps to change a historically secretive institution; one that has recently suffered from leaked internal documents that imply palace intrigue.

Marissa Mayer, new CEO of Yahoo, received notoriety recently when she instituted a new policy that ended employees working from home. The media were abuzz with debate about her actions which, on the surface, appeared to be swimming against the tide of flexible work hours and locations. However, the action may have been part of Mayer’s plan to change the culture of a company that was losing market share and stock value.

Bob Flexon, Dynergy CEO since July 2011, has instituted many new policies to change the culture of this $1.3 billion electric power producer that has only recently emerged from bankruptcy. He has eliminated some of the expensive trappings of executives, moved managers out of private offices and into an open work space, and re-instituted annual performance reviews. Using Dynergy as an example, Joann S. Lublin writes in WJS:

Increasingly, leaders of troubled businesses try to fix the company's culture along with its bottom line. Since the financial crisis struck in 2008, CEOs have sought to improve collaboration and decision making, recognizing that a strong culture is "a critical component of their long-term success," says Nick Neuhausel, a partner at consulting firm Senn Delaney, which advised Dynegy.

While each of these leaders, from the Vatican to Yahoo to Dynergy, recognizes that culture change is
essential to the future success of their organizations, they would be well served to recognize also the complexity of organizational culture and the necessity of going beyond symbols and artifacts. For lasting organizational change they must confront underlying beliefs, assumptions, and values of employees .

Dan Denison, CEO of Denison Consulting and co-author of the new book, Leading Culture Change in Global Organizations, writes that culture should be examined at the three levels identified by Edgar Schein:

(1) the deep underlying beliefs and assumptions that are often difficult for insiders to articulate

(2) the values and principles that structure action

(3) the symbols and artifacts that are visible on the surface for all to see

People act on the basis of tacit knowledge but they are often not aware of how daily behavior is shaped by this knowledge. It’s simply “how we do things here.” Underlying beliefs, assumptions, and values become routines that, over time, go unchallenged. Those routines may or may not serve the best interests of the organization and its customers. Culture change must confront the link between the thinking that drives behavior and the effects of that behavior on organizational success.

Are Classrooms Obsolete?

2013-03-12T10:54:49-04:00

Sugata Mitra, winner of the 2013 TED prize, says, “Schools as we know them are obsolete.” His conclusion is based on his research with very poor children in India who, when given unfettered access to a computer, learned English, math, and science without being in school. Mitra calls this SOLE – a self-organizing learning environment. You might conclude that although SOLE is the future for poor kids in India, it is not the future for kids in urban centers in the West. I think that would be a naïve assumption. Development of the hundreds of millions of children who live at the bottom of the pyramid will have a profound effect on the rest of the globe. How they learn and how they learn to learn will shape the cultures of all global organizations.

And the challenge to traditional classroom-based education is not coming only from K-12 educators. Educational leaders, parents, policy makers, and students themselves are demanding results from their investment in colleges and universities. Computer technology is beginning to provide a solution and it is not in the classroom.

Tom Friedman, in a column for the New York Times, writes:

Institutions of higher learning must move, as the historian Walter Russell Mead puts it, from a model of “time served” to a model of “stuff learned.” Because increasingly the world does not care what you know. Everything is on Google. The world only cares, and will only pay for, what you can do with what you know. And therefore it will not pay for a C+ in chemistry, just because your state college considers that a passing grade and was willing to give you a diploma that says so. We’re moving to a more competency-based world where there will be less interest in how you acquired the competency — in an online course, at a four-year-college or in a company-administered class — and more demand to prove that you mastered the competency.

Online course (free!) providers, such as Coursera, are starting to offer options for measuring competency and thus recognize “stuff learned” and not just “time served”.

The training and development industry needs to change also. The method of training is still based predominately on a centuries-old model of teacher-centered, classroom instruction while most of what employees need to learn would be learned more effectively if it was a combination of “elearning” and on-the-job coaching. It might be, as Mitra suggests, that even “knowing” is obsolete because anything we need to know can be found in the cloud within a few minutes.

I say all of this with a strong caveat. Some knowledge and skills are best developed, or at least supported, in a structured classroom environment, such as much of the social sciences and literature, subjects in which a facilitated discussion is essential to learning. So I think the classroom, whether in a school, college, or business, still has a place. However, currently we rely much too heavily on this method of developing young people and employees. As I wrote in a previous blog post, “Throw out the course catalog.”