All articles written by John Howard, Ph.D., except where noted.

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To Improve Corporate Performance, Look Beyond the Process
From Jim Sirbasku’s Desk

Although many companies are focused on improving corporate performance, they may be using the wrong measurements to keep score of how they’re doing. The CFO, for example, might be using the yardsticks of revenue growth, cost of goods sold, days in inventory and DSO, or days sales outstanding. His attention may be glued to hot new developments in business process improvement and using software to automate processes.

Software and technology are great, but whoa! Let’s look at more than process improvement to better our key financial measures. Although seeing the needle rise on financial performance is crucial to all organizations, getting it into the stratosphere requires improvement in more than just the process area. It requires that leaders take a broad view of the company and look at the combination of everything – process, systems and people – and envision them all clicking together.

This is not to accuse leaders of ignoring poor performance. But many do fail to see the big role that people play in processes. We can automate process and measure process and monitor systems, but the area with the highest degree of variability is the one which people occupy.

How do you measure the effectiveness of people? That’s a very good question. One way to do it is to measure employee engagement, a seemingly fleeting quality in our organizations. If you doubt this, just follow the numbers to their sad conclusion. Surveys show that less than a third of workers describe themselves as engaged in their work. Engaged employees are the ones who care about the job enough to perform at the highest levels. Another 10 to 18 percent, are deeply disengaged, and are even looking elsewhere for employment. The rest, about 60 percent, fall somewhere in the middle.

But instead of looking at employee performance when financial numbers are weak, top managers often look at the business process to see where the errors are.

We all must understand that we cannot remove the employee from the process. People play a critical role in processes, most significantly when something outside the norm of the process happens – a glitch in the software, if you will. Perhaps a customer heats up the phone lines with a billing discrepancy. Only people can figure out the problem and find a solution in which both the customer and the company win. It is people who must perform superbly to solve the problem, and that means an engaged employee, one who understands the problem and cares enough to see it through to a solution.

Until top managers realize that employee engagement plays a key role in driving financial and operational performance, and put engagementfriendly programs in place, they will not achieve the level of performance they desire. Employee engagement is not only about turnover or worker satisfaction; the boredom or indifference of an unengaged employee touches everything, including financial and operational statistics.

For example, an accounts receivable problem might really be a “people problem,” and it might ripple across the whole company. Although the CFO turns to the accounting department when he sees a money problem, the real weakness could be:

• A problem in customer service that creates unhappy customers who are paying slowly

• A problem in sales that is turning customers against the company, causing slow payment

With all of the potential places that irritating problems can hide, don’t you want more than a third of your employees trying to ferret them out and eradicate them?

The unengaged workforce is a tough problem – otherwise it would not stick to us so stubbornly – but we can make headway in addressing it. We can do it by:

• Making sure we have the right person in the right job from the very start

• Providing training that ensures employees have the skills to do their jobs

• Putting in place managers who understand what their employees need and show them how to get it.

We have to address the issue of workforce engagement on several fronts, just as we do any dug-in problem. Only then will we begin to see that small percentage of engaged employees creep up, maybe to 35 percent, 50 percent, or even higher. Only then will other significant numbers begin to rise as well. The sky’s the limit.

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BOOK REVIEW: Getting Engaged at Work (It’s Not What You Think)

If the turnover in your office is too high, if your teams pull in opposite directions, if people don’t seem all that enthusiastic about their work, this would be a good time to take a couple afternoons off and read WORKFORCE ENGAGEMENT: Strategies to Attract, Motivate and Retain Talent. With real-life case studies and fresh statistics about the engagement, or lack thereof among today’s workers, WORKFORCE ENGAGEMENT provides decision-makers with information they need to create an environment that employees not only can relate to, but one they care about deeply.

So, what exactly is workforce engagement? Simply, engagement at work is a strong belief in what you do and identifying with the work and workplace so passionately that leaving would be painful. Sadly, not that many employees feel this way about the places in which they are spending hundreds of hours of their life. Less than one-third of them feel engaged, according to polls that also show that about a fifth of employees are hunting for new jobs, either aggressively or passively. And while about 20 percent of your employees are job-hunting, what are they doing for you? Most likely not very much.

The three authors of WORKFORCE ENGAGEMENT are frequent speakers and teachers, and have amassed a dizzying amount of research to provide readers with evidence to enhance understanding of the importance of an engaged workforce and how worker engagement affects both individuals and organizations. They’ve also created a framework for understanding workforce engagement as part of a broader total rewards strategy.

The book has five parts:

• Understanding Workforce Engagement

• Strategic Issues in Workforce Engagement

• Core HR Processes in Workforce Engagement

• Operational Components in Workforce

Engagement

• Enhancing Workforce Engagement

Each chapter contains statistics from two national benchmark studies on workforce engagement from the Performance Assessment Network. These studies present findings and implications for employers from a nationally representative sample of employees, so it’s easy to imagine your employees as part of the research. And they well might be: case studies are reported under pseudonyms or composites drawn from real organizations. Employers can use these actual studies in management development training programs or other courses.

Even organizations which already place a high priority on an engaged workforce should find this book handy, as employee engagement is an ongoing project, not just a once-and-done deal. The book’s statistics and case studies provide proof that what these companies are doing is correct, and offer new ideas. For companies that haven’t given much thought to engaging workers, WORKFORCE ENGAGMENT will help set priorities, providing a road map for the journey.

The authors include Stephen P. Hundley, associate professor of organizational leadership at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis; Frederic Jacobs, a professor in the School of Education, Teaching and Health at American University in Washington, D.C.; and Marc Drizin, founder of Employee Hold Em, a consulting company that helps organizations attract and retain top talent.

ABOUT THE BOOK
WORKFORCE ENGAGEMENT: Strategies to Attract, Motivate and Retain Talent.
Authors: Stephen P. Hundley; Frederic Jacobs; Marc Drizin
300 pages
ISBN 978-1-579-63166-6 Publisher: World at Work

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STRATEGIES FOR WINNING: How to Become an Employer of Choice*

Attracting and Retaining the Very Best People While many employers complain about the difficulty of attracting and retaining quality people, other employers seem never to have this problem. What’s their secret?

It’s not really a secret. Employers of Choice simply know what’s important to their employees. Before you can consider the challenge of attracting and retaining people, you must look at the dark side. What drives people from their jobs? Profiles International recently completed a survey to explore this. Here are the five main reasons people change jobs:

1. Boredom
2. Inadequate salary and benefits
3. Limited opportunities for advancement
4. No recognition
5. Unhappy with management and the way they were managed

Consider which of the five reasons you would address first, second, and so on, if you wanted to improve your company’s reputation as an Employer of Choice. After ranking the reasons, read the boxed material titled “HOW DID YOU DO?” and see how you fared. Then continue reading here.

* * * *

Were you surprised with the rankings? Most employers are. The message is simple – if you want to attract and retain top people, these are the key items for consideration.

Follow these six steps and you are likely to become an Employer of Choice:

1. Evaluate Your Managers
People leave people, not jobs. Look at the results – 30 percent of people didn’t leave their jobs; they left their managers. Poor managers can cancel out all of the other good things you do to attract and retain the right people. Your human resources people sweat blood to bring in a sufficient number of the right people and, in 30 percent of cases, poor managers shred them and send them away before you’ve even recovered the cost of hiring them.

So what do you do? First, start measuring your staff turnover by manager. It will frighten but enlighten you. Until you know which managers are losing their people, you can’t do anything about it.

After you identify the managers who need help, help them! Review all of your managers in terms of their leadership and management skills. That’s how you will discover what these managers are doing to drive away good people. Profiles International’s CheckPoint360°™ gives managers, their superiors, their direct reports and their fellow managers an opportunity to provide feedback about what they are doing well and what they could do better. Provide training, coaching and support to struggling managers in a way that encourages productivity and retention. Good management is key to good retention.

2. Create a Recognition Culture
Insufficient recognition for their contributions is why 25 percent of all people leave their jobs. Fix this or learn to live with the attrition. Give managers the responsibility for seeking out the ways in which their people perform above and beyond. Have them consciously seek out opportunities for positive recognition. Create awards for exemplary performance and give everyone an opportunity to bask in the glow of positive recognition for a job well done. But be aware that a recognition culture cannot be created from nothing. It requires a healthy working environment to thrive.

3. Create a Healthy Work Environment
To encourage development of a genuine recognition culture, you’ll need to create a healthy work environment, one where providing recognition for exemplary performance seems normal. There are several key elements to achieving this.

First: Open Communications. In the old economy, scarcity was the driving force – information was power, and those with information hoarded it. That way, they amassed power, privilege and wealth. The world has changed dramatically. Our modern economy is based on abundance. Those who prosper share information. Any environment where the workforce has not tapped into all that’s going on in their organization is toxic. Suspicion, mistrust and resentment grow – and key people go.

Let all of your people know where the organization is going, how it plans to get there, how their jobs play a part, and why they are key to your success. Give your people an I’m on the inside! feeling. It’s hard to leave something when you’re an insider.

Next, Develop an Attitude of Cooperation. Be prepared to consider anything that makes it easier and more practical to work for you than for anyone else. Look at flexible hours, compassionate leave, sabbaticals, teleworking, child care facilities – anything you can afford to do to meet your people halfway (or more) in balancing their work/personal life commitments.

Finally, Develop an Atmosphere of Trust. If you want people to trust you, then you have to trust them. Create an atmosphere where management automatically expects the best. Give people a good reputation to live up to. No one is more flattered than when they are trusted implicitly.

4. Create an Atmosphere of Continual Self- Improvement
Of the people who leave their jobs, 20 percent do so because they feel that they’re not getting sufficient advancement. Not surprising, really. Flat-structured organizations don’t have the dizzying promotional heights that previous generations of workers could aspire to. So, there’s really nothing we can do unless we still have an old-fashioned multi-layer hierarchical organization, right?

No! That thinking is about as wrong as you can get. Today’s job-seekers want the opportunity to develop themselves to be all that they can be, so that their potential market value continually rises. And if they can do this without the uncertainty of job-hopping, then so much the better. You don’t necessarily have to have multiple promotional opportunities to meet this demand. What you need is a clear, ongoing development path, a way that each and every one of your people can advance their skills and value so that they become all that they can be. This means heavy investment in training and development.

Create an atmosphere of continual selfdevelopment. Give everyone access to any training that will enhance their skills, their value, and their self-esteem. Don’t be boxed in to limiting the training available to those skills specific to an individual’s current job. Remember that you are not simply training for job-effectiveness but are also offering your people the development opportunities that make them feel good enough about the pace of their personal advancement that they don’t feel the need to seek greener grass elsewhere. Engage them in their own ongoing, longer-term development. Show them how they can get all of this development from within your organization. This creates truly compelling and self-serving reasons to stay.

5. Put Your Best Foot Forward
What about the 15 percent who leave for more money? Will more recognition, better management, and opportunities for continual self-development retain them? In many cases, yes. But you still have to pay the market rate or better to stay in the game. However, it’s critical that you know when and how you pay this level.

When it comes to remuneration, put your best foot forward immediately. Pay your people as much salary, give them as many benefits, as you can afford. Do it from day one. Abandon the “What can I get her for?” thinking in favor of “How much is this position worth to me, and what can I afford to pay?” Then pay it. Let your people know that this is what you’re doing, and that you need their support and effort to help you to maintain a situation where you can continue to do this in the long term – that you need them to engage with you in making the organization successful. Put your best foot forward, and let everyone know that you are paying as much as you can and that, to continue to do so, everyone will have to pull together as a team to generate the productivity necessary for the organization’s success. We all respond to fair treatment.

Now, don’t misunderstand the advice. Pay as much as you can, not more than you can. Our advice: Know what each job is worth, and pay it early.

6. Match People to Jobs
Having followed 360,000 people through their careers during a period of 20 years, a major study published by Harvard Business Review demonstrated that a key ingredient in retaining people is ensuring that they are matched to their jobs in terms of their abilities, interests, and personalities. The study found that when you put people in jobs where the demands of the job matched their own abilities, where the stimulation offered by the job matched their particular interests, and where the cultural demands of the position matched their personalities, staff turnover decreased dramatically, and productivity increased dramatically.

*From the book 40 STRATEGIES FOR WINNING IN BUSINESS by Bud Haney and Jim Sirbasku. © S&H Publishing Co., 5205 Lake Shore Drive, Waco, Texas 76710-1732. All rights reserved. Contact S&H Publishing Co., (254) 751-1644, for reprint permission.

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PRODUCT FOCUS: Paving the Way for a Happy Marriage

In many ways, a work-to-worker relationship resembles a marriage. The organization is attracted to the worker and/or vice versa. The two connect, commit with an engagement, and decide to unite. With good planning, hard work and a bit of luck, the relationship will be a healthy one that grows and flourishes.

Just like a marriage, the work relationship will experience bumps along the way and the “couple” may need professional help. Profiles International’s family of products can help this union stick together instead of growing apart, starting at the very beginning. So, from the getting-to-know-you stage, or courtship, here goes:

The employee wants to be wooed, and the organization wants to make sure its potential mate is truly what he or she says and appears to be. Profiles’ Step One Survey II™ focuses on the trust issues essential to a healthy work relationship: integrity, substance abuse, reliability and work ethic. SOSII™ is scientifically designed to evaluate applicants and avoid unpleasant surprises later in the relationship. The process is structured to do three things: objectively obtain better information, identify the best candidates, and conduct better interviews.

The easy-to-understand report in the SOSII tells the employerpartner everything he or she needs to know, and promotes positive behaviors on the job, including good attitudes about work in general, as well as promptness, confidentiality, dependability and loyalty. This sets the tone for the employee.

Everyone wants to feel understood, and this is just as important on the job as it is in a household. The Profiles Performance Indicator™ measures the behavior factors that help a leader understand, motivate and manage his employees, helping to reduce conflicts that could become obstacles to solving problems.

In a detailed report, the manager learns how best to motivate the employee, and whether he is internally or externally motivated; his behavioral tendencies in key competencies; and how he responds to stress, frustration and conflict. A second report for the worker provides ideas about professional growth and communication skills.

The versatility of ProfileXT™ means that we can use it at almost every stage of the employee lifecycle. Let’s say we are trying to fill an important job from within the company and wonder how several key employees would fit there. Job Match Patterns provided by ProfileXT are effective because they compare the qualities of our job candidates to the attributes of the most productive employees already in the job. The patterns tell us whether candidates are similar or different from our top performers. Job Match more accurately predicts job success than any of the commonly accepted factors, such as education, experience, or job training, according to a study by the Harvard Business Review. And when people fit their work, the result is like a good marriage: they are more satisfied and productive, with less stress, tension, conflict, miscommunication, and costly divorce, or employee turnover.

Organizations are using ProfileXT for placement, promotion, self-improvement, coaching, succession planning, and job description development, and clients say it is three to five times more effective than any other assessment they have tried.

Healthy feedback is crucial to any relationship, and Profiles’ CheckPoint360°™ Competency Feedback System gives a manager the opportunity to receive an evaluation of his or her job performance from all around -- bosses, peers, and direct reports. CheckPoint360° can fortify an employee’s perceptions about his strengths if they are accurate, and offer insight into other areas where he may need to improve. It examines a manager in the crucial areas of communication, leadership, adaptability, task management and development of others. The feedback allows for comparison of the opinions of others with a manager’s own perceptions for an easy and accurate look at strength and weaknesses.

With less than one-third of employees truly engaged in their work, there’s ample room for improvement in the job climate. Profiles’ assessments are a proven method of helping an organization unite with the right employee in the first place, and keep the marriage on track throughout its lifetime. Need counseling? Call us at (254) 751-1644.

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SUCCESS STORY: Engaging Workers at Alternative Risk Services

EDITOR’S NOTE: Mary Ellen Price, office manager and director of human resources for Alternative Risk Services, a risk management and third-party administrator for worker’s compensation claims, uses WorkForce Analysis Profile™ as well as other assessments to help ensure employee engagement.

Q. Why did Alternative Risk Services begin using Profiles assessments?
A. Lanny Cowell, president and CEO, is working on a succession plan to ensure that he has the right people in the right place as he retires. He wants to feel comfortable knowing the people he has in place can run the company by making smart decisions. He had the management team take the ProfileXT™, which shed light on our strengths and areas that we needed to improve.

Q. Which Profiles assessments has your organization used?
A. We have used the ProfileXT, Customer Service Profile™, Step One Survey II™ and WorkForce Analysis Profile.

Q. What benefits have you derived from the WorkForce Analysis Profile™?
A. Since this is a confidential survey, it gave the associates a chance to tell us their feelings about the company. It helps us see the areas that we need to focus on to make the work atmosphere more enjoyable, and ask ourselves what we can do as managers to make the office a more pleasant place to come each day. The WorkForce Analysis Profile showed us that we had a small number of associates who were not engaged. Now we can focus on this area to find out why they feel this way, and help turn them around and be more focused on their work so they enjoy what they are doing on a daily basis.

Q. What specific things have you done for employees?
A. We have put in place a monthly raffle for the associates. So far we have raffled off Royals baseball tickets, an MP3 player, a cooler and lunch set and movie videos. This year we had the annual company picnic at Lanny’s ranch. It featured pony rides and a large water slide. We are gearing up for our annual Christmas holiday luncheon at a local country club, giving associates a chance to mingle with each other in a non-work setting.

Q. What is the major benefit your company gets from the assessments?
A. Profiles assessments have helped us hire new associates for our administrative unit. The assessments give us more clarity on whether candidates will fit that specific job. The assessments are also helping us grow the company. For the most part, employee retention is not a problem. But as we look to hire more people, assessments will be a big part of our hiring decisions. We want to hire the right person for the job and we feel that by using Profiles, we can get this accomplished.

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