OK, I missed a couple of days.  Honestly, I thought this was Wednesday, but my friend and colleague asked me if I was OK this morning since I hadn’t done any blogging this week.

That’s what going through 900 focus group verbatim comments will do to you:

I’m a survivalist!

A recent article in LiveScience  explains that sarcasm and the ability to respond have evolved as survival skills.  The article states: People with dementia, or head injuries in that area, often lose the ability to pick up on sarcasm, and so they don’t respond in a socially appropriate ways.  The article goes on to talk about sarcasm being a “verbal hammer” for both good and bad.

Even better to think that the folks that don’t appreciate my snarkiness are “demented”… at least that is how I read the article.

Managing HR From the Outside

A recent Wall Street Journal article showed that a number of large companies have hired managers from outside human resources to run their department, since boards, CEO’s and shareholders want leaders with an understanding of business and financial.  The article goes on to indicate “Recruiting, retaining, and grooming employees are too important to be left in the hands of HR professionals who may get hung up in the process and forget what the goal of business is“.

Now that is a hell of an indictment on our industry.

Let’s get this straight.  What is the goal of business?  TO SURVIVE.

What is the role of HR?  To take care of the human resources, the assets with feet who make the decision every day to come back to work. 

As I tell the professionals who attend my 3 hour workshops, H.R. has be as comfortable talking about EBITDA as we are talking about turnover.  We have to understand Customer Satisfaction as much as we know salary and benefits.  We have to be able to explain a P&L as easily as we can describe the cost of replacing a worker.

Otherwise, all the HR jobs will wind up going to “business-people” who couldn’t care less about the process.

Co-Dependants or Co-Departments… The Choice is Yours, and So Are the Consequences

Human resource practitioners and researchers agree with company managers on a simple truth:  Too many departments in an organization continue to operate as silos, more interested in their own well-being than the departments they work with to help ensure customer delight.  Too few departments are willing to dramatically change their processes to facilitate improvement in another area of the company.  Too many managers attempt to retain their best employees by refusing to let them transfer to a better job in another department or division. 

According to the 2008-9 Employee Hold’em National Benchmark on Workforce Engagement, the situation has improved little in the last five years and in some cases has gotten worse.  An examination of two departments from the national benchmark indicates how far today’s businesses have a long way to go.

Only 43% of today’s employees are fully engaged; ready to go the extra mile for customers and willing to stick with their organization even when offered a little more money to go somewhere else.  In a review of six departments, Engineering has the highest levels of engagement (54% Fully Engaged), while Operations engagement is weakest (41%).  The reasons are simple.  Engineering employees have the most favorable opinion of their relationship with their supervisor, company communications, and fairness at work while employees in Operations are least favorable.  The story gets more compelling…

In seven of the eight areas employees were asked to compare their job to employees with similar jobs in other companies, Operational employees scored lowest.  Only in the area of compensation did employees in other departments (Administration and Finance) provide lower ratings than Operations.  Conversely, Engineering was rated highest in five of the eight areas.

As in the two previous national benchmarks conducted in 2004-5 and 2006-7, Effective Senior Leadership is a critical component of workforce engagement, and subsequently the desire of employees to work hard on behalf of their department and organization.  The more effective the employees perceive their senior leadership, the stronger their engagement to their organization.  Senior leaders need to better understand the importance of:

• Appropriately valuing and rewarding employing loyalty
• Presenting a clear vision for the future of the company
• Providing a strategic direction that is satisfying to the organization

In each of these areas, Engineering employees rate their senior leaders most positively, and Operations rate senior leaders most negatively.

Finally, an often overlooked area related to engagement and ultimately the likelihood of employees to work hard with other groups to meet and exceed customer expectations is the area of workforce selection.  Critical to workforce engagement is the area of Recruiting:  Finding the Right Talent for the Right Job at the Right Time.  Employees in Operations were least positive in their assessments in all areas of selection, from having a job that provides the right amount of challenge to their belief in whether their organization is interested in hiring a diverse workforce.  Operations employees are also least likely to believe their organization hires employees who hit the ground running and are good hiring decision.

In many cases, “department dysfunction” is a result of a lack of workforce engagement among some or all of the employees.  When companies concentrate on the areas most critical to the engagement of their employees, and more importantly take concrete steps to improve them, employees will in fact stay longer and work harder on behalf of customers.

Congrats to Joshie-Boy

Yes, my freshly-minted addition to the national workforce has scored a job in Rawlins, Wyoming.  Josh will be spending the next five months doing stuff with plants, leaves, and seeds.  Funny, I think I had the same job in high school…  OMG, a drug reference.  I am cracking myself up!