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| Volume 8, Issue 2 |
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In This Issue:
 Inspiration, not just perspiration, is what matters
Idea fishing: put dinner on the table
Managers drowning in change
How to kill morale and start an exodus
U.S. workers are more loyal, but only when they're old
 Customer service success
 How recruiters [managers] and HR can work together
 Build a multigenerational performance management strategy
 7 ways to get the most out of Millennial employees
 What seems to be the [customer] problem?
 Scuttling [your] scut work
 Does your company have an attitude problem?
Best jobs for single parents
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Inspiration, not just perspiration, is what matters
Super Tuesday may have left the Democratic race for the White House no less clear, but what has been apparent for some time is that it is the ability of Barak
Obama to inspire the people around him that is key to the excitement surrounding his candidacy, and it is a lesson managers could do well to learn.
Research by British employer accreditation body Best Companies has suggested that to be a great manager you do not just need to be leading your employees, although that evidently helps, but inspiring them, too. Leaders clearly need to be effective,
reliable and trustworthy, but having an extra "wow" factor is a crucial part of the employee engagement mix. What's more, while this inspiration can come from the top echelons of management, being inspired by your immediate manager can prove just as
powerful, UK-based organization behavior change specialists ER Consultants has said. The Best Companies research found employees in the top rated three-star organizations were much more likely to agree with the statement "I have a great deal
of faith in the person leading this organization". In fact more than eight out of 10 employees in three-star organizations said "yes" to this, compared with just over half in non-accredited firms. Similarly, employees in three-star companies were much
more likely to have confidence in the leadership skills of their senior management teams and to agree that "I am inspired by the person leading this organization". Three quarters of three-star organization employees agreed with this sentiment, as
opposed to 47 per cent of unaccredited firms. But while this is all well and good, the difficulty for many employers is how to ensure this inspirational leadership is in place up and down the organization, argued ER Consultants. [The consultancy's
Paolo Moscuzza has identified five key warnings signs for managers to check whether they are sapping the energy of their colleagues or team. These are...]
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Idea fishing: put dinner on the table
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If you are even remotely creative you'll never use all your own ideas. And even if you are very creative you will never create all the ideas that you need. Why?
Because ideas must fit a particular situation – a combination of skills and resources to implement the idea and a market for the resulting implementation.
Ideas cannot stand alone, if you don't have the supporting structures, processes, and the other ideas, techniques, and knowledge they need then the independent idea fails. The result of this truth is that any serious (or semi-serious) attempt to
improve, innovate, or invent – from a back-of-the-napkin session in a restaurant to a multibillion dollar research and development lab – will produce too many good ideas to use and not enough good ideas to meet all your objectives. Traditional
corporate researchers tend to invent and discover for themselves and hope vaguely, if they think of it at all, that their ideas will be developed and commercialised. Meanwhile, traditional corporate development likes to have ideas ready for prime
time – and to favour incremental improvement of existing ideas over radical anything in particular. So ideas tend to be shelved if they aren't a direct fit to existing product plans and roadmaps. Corporate deadlines are demanding enough without
volunteering to take risks on orphan ideas. And yet there are alternatives. You can patent them and then actively market the patents, or actively support the commercialisation of the idea by the originator or another interested part in return
for a share of the value in the new company. Equally, it's possible to seek out the excess ideas of other companies – the stuff they have invented but have no capacity to use –in under-exploited products, patents, or just the heads and hard-drives of
the inventors. Or – at the very least - be open to those ideas when they come to your attention. That's exactly what happened in 1944, when the obscure New York based Haloid Company, a producer of photographic paper, agreed to further develop
the process of electrography which had been invented by Chester Carlson. The idea had been rejected by General Electric, IBM, RCA and the U.S. Army Signal Corps. Haloid renamed it "xerography". In 1948, the Haloid Company announced its
photocopier. But it took a further year to make their first sales of the Haloid Xerox copier and until 1959, having changed its name to Xerox, for it to launch the world's first simple to use, push-button, plain white paper copier, the Xerox 914.
Nevertheless, two years later the company's revenues were $60 million. Four years later they had surpassed $500 million, and by 2006 revenues were over $15.9 billion. Just keep in mind that all this success was based on the exploitation of a single
idea formulated outside and independent of the company. Xerox borrowed an idea which they were able to turn into a global market. Anything you ever do will be based on someone else's insight, idea, or innovation. So why not benefit from all that
investment, go idea fishing, and innovate some new value of your own?. [Read more about some real-world examples...]...
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Managers drowning in change
Just like those annoying colleagues who tag every email as high priority, managers are drowning in a mass of conflicting "top of the in-tray" change projects, with the result that they never get to change anything.
Research by U.S. change leadership consultancy Pivotal Resources has concluded that the reason why many American businesses are so bad at effecting change is because managers have so many "priority" projects on the go at once they can't tell any more
what's important and what's not. While change projects are given a top priority rating by most companies, almost half of the more than 500 managers polled reported that a significant number of such projects failed to meet their stated goals. Nearly
four out of 10 said they juggled as many as five change projects a year, although for some it was a more reasonable one. Yet the top reason reported for failed change efforts was...
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How to kill morale and start an exodus
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Fewer people doing the same amount of work places a lot of stress on everyone" |
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The story you're about to read is true. The names have been changed to protect the innocent. My purpose for writing this is so that by reading it, people might learn what not to do.
Zoe is the departmental director for a 45-person department. Her employees are highly-trained and regulated. Working two different shifts in three locations, they're responsible for making highly-sophisticated components. Although for years
the department was tightly knit with high morale, it wasn't due to Zoe's leadership; she was known as a task master. It was her department supervisors that kept the gears of teamwork well-oiled. Scheduling people to cover two shifts at three
locations is rather tricky. Fortunately, the locations are within fifteen miles of each other, so if one location is short-handed, it's easy for someone else to be
there in just a few minutes. The first crack in Zoe's dam occurred without notice about three years ago...
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U.S. workers are more loyal, but only when they're old
Despite having vastly different working cultures and expectations, workers in Asia and Europe are united in being unhappier with their jobs than American workers, according to a new poll.
Yet American employers cannot afford to rest on their laurels, as a separate survey has shown that younger employees in the U.S. are far less satisfied than the older generation. A survey of nearly 4,500 workers across four continents by workplace consultants BlessingWhite has identified sharp differences in workplace loyalty around the globe. Overall just under six out of 10 workers...
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Customer service success
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Empowering Employees to Deliver Customer Service Excellence
Most businesses spend more time and energy trying to find new customers than they spend retaining the customers they have.
The logic behind customer retention is simple - it costs far less money to keep current customers happy than to spend much more money to recruit new customers. Loyal customers tell their friends about your business and will spend more money
than new customers. But other companies and organizations truly "get" that impeccable, superior customer service is what will win raving fans for the future. Greg Smith (pictured), our guest writer, uses a hotel as an example in his right-on
customer service article. I have written earlier about my experience with the Peabody Hotel in Orlando where employees enter their work area through a portal that states in big letters over the door, "You are now entering the halls of service
excellence." And, every employee passes through that door every time they come to work at The Peabody. (In anticipation of your next question, the answer is "yes." The service was outstanding in almost every instance.) Hotels have been early
adopters of customer service excellence because guests and word-of-mouth are their life blood. So, reminders and artifacts are important in encouraging customer service excellence from front-line staff. Learn about the importance of training and
employee selection and much more to perfect your employee customer service excellence...
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How recruiters [managers] and HR can work together
Human resources and headhunters can be each other's worst obstacles or greatest allies. Management must help facilitate a smooth relationship.
In the business world we have a short list of traditional sources of interdepartmental friction. One of these "hot zones" is the intersection of HR and third-party recruiters, who can easily find themselves at odds. HR departments often
view third-party recruiters as obstacles, while recruiters know that if they can get their best résumés in front of a hiring manager, they've got a shot at making a placement. If recruiters are held up by HR bureaucrats whose own need to control the
candidate flow overshadows their desire to bring talent in the door, headhunters are sunk. As a result, it's common to find tension between internal HR people and
outside recruiters. Is there a path that allows internal HR [hiring Managers] and external recruiters to work together for maximum gain?...
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Build a multigenerational performance management strategy
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Inclusion is the key to performance management success, and today's leading organizations are crafting performance management strategies to meet the needs of an
increasingly diverse workforce and keep all workers engaged, productive and happy long after their first day on the job.
Yet, there is at least one lens through which too few companies look when crafting a comprehensive performance management strategy: generational differences. Currently, there are four generations in the U.S. workforce: traditionalists (1900-1945), baby
boomers (1946-1964), Generation X (1965-1980) and millennials/Generation Y (1981-1999). Workers in each generation not only have widely different values, needs, motivations, career goals and work styles, each also brings drastically
different expectations to the workplace in terms of what is required to keep them motivated, productive and engaged. While most companies readily acknowledge successful management of generational issues in the workplace is essential to their
success, few take anything more than an ad hoc approach to address them. They "shoot from the hip," developing a generational initiative here or a one-off career development program there. To not only address but capitalize on generational
differences in the workplace, talent managers must evaluate performance management strategy through a generational prism and develop a plan to proactively address the expectations and needs of each generation. They also must provide managers with a
clearly defined framework to develop, evaluate, advance and compensate each generation accordingly. What to Offer Internally. Effective performance management begins with effective on-boarding of new hires. Consider tailoring on-boarding
programs to specifically address generational differences. Global accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) revamped its new-hire on-boarding program last year to...
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7 ways to get the most out of Millennial employees
In today’s workplace, many supervisors have to manage people from four different generations, all of which respond to different kinds of carrots, sticks and management styles.
The breakdown: Traditional workers: born before 1946 Baby Boomers: 1946–1964 Generation X:
- Traditional workers: born before 1946
- Baby Boomers: 1946–1964
- Generation X: 1965–1979
- Millennials: 1980–1995
According to anecdotal information and research (see box below), managers in U.S. organizations are having the hardest time managing the newest entrants to the work force. Millennials—also known as Gen Y or the Entitlement Generation—carry the...
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What seems to be the [customer] problem?
Customers may always be right, but they can also be lazy.
Many will never read a manual or take the time to pore over a long frequently-asked-questions page on your website. If they can't find something at first glance, they will shoot an e-mail to customer service or reach for the phone.
Next thing you know, your e-commerce business--the one that was supposed to help you take more orders with less manpower--is receiving up to 10,000 customer service inquiries every month. That's what happened to Carfax, a Centreville, Virginia,
company that sells accident reports on used cars. Its reports, which it offers through its website, help car buyers assure themselves that the used car for sale at the local gas station isn't a lemon. But the company was getting hammered with
customer questions, so many that the cost of answering them all threatened to derail its business plan. Now Carfax is using a new generation of customer support software that serves up detailed, easy-to-find responses to customer questions. That's good
for Carfax customers, who don't want to wait several hours for an e-mail response, and it's saving the company hundreds of thousands of dollars. The switch came in the nick of time. The company was getting ready to launch...
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Scuttling [your] scut work
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How Much Work Can You Off-Load? Pfizer conducted internal studies to find out just how much time its talent was losing on menial tasks and how much of that work it could outsource
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Pfizer devises a new kind of outsourcing--just for the time-wasting parts of your job.
Come 3 p.m. each day, workers staring at computer screens everywhere share the same dream: a magic button that says click here, and someone else will do this annoying project for you.
ps: by 9 a.m. tomorrow.
Starting this month, that button will become a reality for 10,000 Pfizer employees, though their button actually says oof, short for Office of the Future. "Our Harvard MBA staff was spending a lot of time doing 'support' work, not their actual jobs,"
says Jordan Cohen, senior director of organizational effectiveness. "These are people we hired to develop strategies and innovate. Instead, they were Googling and making PowerPoints." Who is at the other end of that magic button? Two outsourcing
companies in India. Their existence is an extension of the booming Indian outsourcing market, which already handles customer-service and computer programming for U.S. companies, as well as concierge services for executives too busy to answer
email and arrange for dry-cleaning. But Pfizer's move is an acknowledgment that companies are wasting resources by saddling their most-prized workers with their own support work. OOF was born of a financial crisis. In 2005, Pfizer announced a $4
billion annual budget cut to counterbalance the expiration of lucrative drug patents. The company later laid off 10% of its workforce. "It was going to be pretty traumatic," Cohen says. "Were we just going to tighten our belts, or work
differently?" At the time, Cohen was reading Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat, which profiles India's virtual-assistant companies. After analyzing the activities
of Pfizer employees, he learned that they spend 20% to 40% of their time on four activities...
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Does your company have an attitude problem?
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You know the type: coworkers who never have anything positive to say, whether at the weekly staff meeting or in the cafeteria line.
They can suck the energy from a brainstorming session with a few choice comments. Their bad mood frequently puts others in one too. Their negativity can contaminate even good news. "We engage in emotional contagion," says Sigal Barsade, a Wharton
management professor who studies the influence of emotions on the workplace. "Emotions travel from person to person like a virus."Barsade is the co-author of a new paper titled, "Why Does Affect Matter in Organizations?" ("Affect" is another
word for "emotion" in organizational behavior studies.) The answer: Employees' moods, emotions and overall dispositions have an impact on job performance, decision making, creativity, turnover, teamwork, negotiations and leadership. "The state of
the literature shows that affect matters because people are not isolated 'emotional islands.' Rather, they bring all of themselves to work, including their traits, moods and emotions, and their affective experiences and expressions influence
others," according to the paper, co-authored by Donald Gibson of Fairfield University's Dolan School of Business. An "affective revolution" has occurred over the last 30 years as academics and managers alike have come to realize that
employees' emotions are integral to what happens in an organization, says Barsade, who has been doing research in the area of emotions and work dynamics for 15 years. "Everybody brings their emotions to work. You bring your brain to work. You bring
your emotions to work. Feelings drive performance. They drive behavior and other feelings. Think of people as emotion conductors."In the paper, Barsade and Gibson consider three different types of feelings...
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Best jobs for single parents
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What are the best industries for offering a combination of flexibility and salary?
When it comes to being a single mother, the two most important characteristics of a job are flexibility and salary. And while those elements are found on a company by company basis, there are certain industries that lend themselves to being more
flexible than others. The most flexible professions include sales, public relations, health care and real estate. As an added bonus, employees who work in those fields have the potential to make decent salaries. Education is also on the list. Although
the hours are set, they're likely to be the same as their school-age children's. Of course not all companies in those professions are ideal for single parents. That's why single moms must do their research to find out how family friendly their
potential employer is. Among the characteristics they should look for (aside from the ability to control their own schedule) are flex time, job sharing and on-site child care. One place to start is...
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