Shifted HR » Business Realities

How is the feedback culture in your organisation?

Allison Denny-Collins — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 12:35:57 +0000

I was initially going to give this post the title Performance Management, but then I had a vision in my head of people putting their hands to their faces yelling, "NO! NO! NO! Not another HR person telling us how to complete a performance appraisal form."

I read an article once, years ago, that highlighted an executive from the United States said that if they had a choice between performance review and a paper cut they would opt for the paper cut every time. I think this sums the process up for the majority of people.

What I really want to discuss is whether you think your organisation has a culture of giving feedback. By this, I don't mean once or twice a year. I mean on a day to day basis.

So, what I want you to do at the moment is to forget about the six-monthly or yearly performance review and close your eyes and imagine the following. Imagine that your employees:

understand what type of behaviour is expected in the workplace;
understand how the work they do impacts organisational performance;
understand what is to be delivered;
understand when it has to be delivered;
understand the quality the work is to be delivered in;
are comfortable in going to managers to discuss issues knowing that they will be supported;
know they will be recognised for their achievements;
can discuss career aspirations and what support can be given to help;
are spoken to about their strengths and how these strengths can be used more;
are spoken to about where they may need to develop further;
are spoken to about the work that they like to do or would like to do; and
are able to provide upward feedback to help managers strengthen or develop their leadership skills.

Imagine what type of organisation you could have if the above happened as a matter of business-as-usual? You would hope it would be an organisation that is achieving its business goals.

Really, when you think about giving feedback, it is about good continuous communication.

Maybe my next article should be about why people dislike giving feedback?

Tags: appraisal, communication, culture, feedback, leadership, organisation

What is staff turnover costing your organisation?

Allison Denny-Collins — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 09:53:32 +0000

The March 2008 Australian Human Resources Institute magazine, HR Monthly, cover story entitled Going concerns: the true cost of staff turnover (membership required to read online text) highlights the increasing cost of staff turnover. It states that:

...staff turnover in Australia has increased by more than five per cent as the continuing skills shortage and the aging population puts people management practices under pressure.

The cost to Australian organisations of the increased turnover has been estimated at $20 billion.

This figure is based on Australian Bureau of Statistics data. That data puts the average Australian salary at $55,660.80 pa, the workforce of 10.6 million, assumes the cost of replacing an employee is 75 per cent of the role's salary and puts turnover rate at an average of 18.5 per cent across all organisations.

When I read this article I started to think of what might happen in the future... is the skills shortage going to become worse due to the increase in the aging workforce, fewer people coming into the workforce, people currently in the workforce looking for work overseas and of course, developing countries such as China and India draining resources for their own burgeoning workforce needs?

Organisations focus on their employer brand and on attracting people to come and work for them. It is now time to start to look at how to retain people.

But you do not want to retain just anybody.

Organisations need to start to think about what their core business is and what type of person they need to help them deliver their business. What skills, capability and attitude can an organisation not afford to lose?

So here are some questions to get you thinking:

Does your organisation monitor how much staff turnover is costing?
Does your organisation have the tools to identify employees who have the right skills mix to deliver the business?
Would your organisation know what skills will be required in the future and where to find these skills?
Does your organisation have retention strategies?
Does your organisation conduct exit interviews to gain intelligence of why employees leave?

Tags: Australia, capability, retention, staff

What ideas do you have?

Allison Denny-Collins — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 04:37:20 +0000

I am currently studying Managing Innovation and Continuous Improvement. When some people think of innovation they think about new technological advances. For organisations to survive in today's fast changing world, innovation should exist at the strategic, tactical and operational levels.

To create a culture of innovation you need to foster an environment where employees are encouraged to explore, to learn, to extend themselves, to fail and to be able to suggest ideas without the fear of being judged. This sounds so simple but in reality it just does not happen!

Think of a time when you have been in a meeting where a suggestion has been made and instead of the group extending on the idea, somebody shoots it down in flames. Or a suggestion is made to management but no feedback is given... it somehow got lost in that management black hole. Depending on how resilient the person is, they may make a few more suggestions, but in the end people eventually stop trying to suggest ideas, become unmotivated and may even start looking for work elsewhere. In the end this is not good for business. Your organisation may even have innovation as one of its values, but if employees are experiencing the things I discussed, then innovation will not grow.

Innovation and Imagination at Work by the Australian Institute of Management states seven barriers to delivering innovation and ten factors for success.

Seven barriers to delivering innovation:

Underestimating what is required

Inadequate formal systems

Inadequate resources for the change process

Insufficient front-line input

Lack of knowledge management

Inadequate governance

Inadequate strategic planning

Ten success factors for building an innovative environment:

Ensuring commitment of the leadership team

Ensuring adequate management capability

Incorporating systematic innovation

Identifying key skills gaps

Using the front-line as a business driver

Building adequate infrastructure

Implementing formal structures and systems

Developing capabilities

Developing accountability

Ensuring organisational continuity

Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to encourage the team you are in to look at the work they do, how it impacts the business and to make suggestions on improvements. Give employees time to research and explore what other organisations are doing. Encourage them to network outside of the team. This could be with other people within the organisation, with clients and with other people outside of the organisation in similar professions. This will help them expand their knowledge and encourage different thinking.

What difference are you making?

Allison Denny-Collins — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 07:35:57 +0000

A few years ago I attended an AHRI conference where I listened to a speaker talk about Australian Social Policy and how there were over 600,000 children in Australia who lived in a household with no employed parent and on welfare. The speaker then went on to speak about the impact of this to the child and the Australian economy. This presentation affected me in a couple of ways.

The first was that I wanted to personally try to make a difference; even if it was a small one, to show a child that life can be better and that they can choose how they can live their life. When I came home from the conference I spoke to my family about what we could do to make a difference in at least one child's life. We set on the path of becoming respite foster carers and for the last two and a half years have cared for two children for three days every month. This for us is very rewarding as we have seen the changes in behaviour and growth of these two children.

The second was a comment from another person in the crowd when we were walking out of the room which was, "What did this have to do with HR?" You may be thinking the same thing. Let me give you my perspective on why this has everything to do with HR and the organisation you are working for.

Research on welfare dependency in families shows there is an increased probability that children from homes receiving welfare will also be dependent on welfare. That means that these children are likely to become unemployed or work in unskilled jobs. These are children that if they had the right type of influences during their schooling years may become one of your prospective employees.

I find that when it comes to recruitment and talking to managers they are focussed on the people they want now and not in the future years. With shortages in the labour market, arising from demographic shifts and from a lack of people with the skills required for available jobs, HR has to start influencing management that they should also be thinking and influencing their prospective employees coming into the Market in the next five to ten years and beyond.

My thought is that organisations should start influencing from the early years of school. This could be achieved by providing a framework for the current employees to volunteer to mentor, tutor, talk to children about the work they do and the choices they made and basically becoming part of the school community. Organisations could provide scholarships for children or they could partner with not-for-profit organisations such as The Beacon Foundation, Barnardos or The Smith Family. There can be positive outcomes for organisations engaging in Corporate Social Responsibility programs particularly in increasing the Employer Brand. There would also be positives for the community and the economy such as having children leave high school with the confidence to make decisions regarding their future; either in further education, training or employment.

If you are interested in further reading on this subject, you might find the following material useful:

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What is your balance?

Allison Denny-Collins — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 12:22:28 +0000

In an earlier post Murph commented regarding confidence to ask for flexibility of working hours. She has seen too many part timers stall their careers as it is assumed that if you only want to work four days per week, you are not committed to the job.

Work/life balance is becoming increasingly important to employees; their reasons for this are dependent on what is happening in their life. For example, you could have someone who wishes to care for their aging parents, a divorced parent wanting to spend quality time with their children, someone who wants to study or even somebody who loves to go surfing when the surf is good. Each particular example would require a different flexible working approach.

With a growing skills shortage and the aging workforce, organisations are starting to see flexible working practices as a way to attract and retain their employees. Organisations are finding that introducing flexible working options provide the following advantages:

Becoming an employer of choice and realising the employee value proposition
Reduced absenteeism
Reduced attrition
Improved productivity
Reduced stress levels and improved morale and commitment
Potential for improved occupational health and safety records

These days flexible working practices are not only about part-time work. Organisations are offering various flexible working practices such as:

Compressed working week
Flexitime
Job sharing
Telework or home based work
Rostered days off
Shorter work days
Phased retirement
Paid maternity, paternity, grandparents, carers, volunteering, cultural, study and bereavement leave
On site or near site childcare (I have been lucky to experience this and I visited my daughter during breaks)
Sabbaticals

However, I have found that creating policies on flexible working practices is not enough. You need to also have a culture and systems which support flexible working practices. For example, there is no use having a home telecommuting policy if your IT systems do not support it.

Another issue is the unwritten ground rules, i.e. even though there is a policy on flexible working practices there is the culture of "that is not how things are done around here". I call this unwritten rule the 'presenteeism culture', i.e. managers and colleagues who believe they need to see you to believe you are working. For me this also highlights that there is very little trust within a team. Managers and colleagues should be focusing on performance and actually empowering their staff, not focusing on attendance and supervision.

Some sites you may find useful are:

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Leading Change

Allison Denny-Collins — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 12:10:48 +0000

John P. Kotter is currently touring Australia talking about leadership and how to successfully manage change. I was lucky enough to attend his seminar this week in Canberra. His seminar was different to others that I have attended, in that he actually engaged the audience in his discussions rather than delivering a lecture. He did this by showing short video clips of leaders in organisations in different situations and then asked the audience for their input.

John Kotter has studied many organisations and the people who run them, particularly with respect to change management initiatives. He says that the organisations he has found that are successful in managing change initiatives have used the following eight steps:

Establishing a sense of urgency

Forming a powerful guiding coalition

Creating a vision

Communicating vision

Empowering others to act

Planning for and creating short term wins

Consolidating improvements and producing still more change

Institutionalizing new approaches

While at this seminar I bought a couple of books - Our Iceberg is Melting and The Heart of Change Field Guide.

Our Iceberg is Melting is a fable about a penguin colony in Antarctica. A group penguins have lived on an iceberg for many years. Then one day one of the penguins discovers their home is threatened and almost no one listens to him. It goes into resistance to change and the type of leadership required to encourage change; particularly behavioural change. This book is full of colourful pictures of penguins (I like it already) and is easy and simple to read (it takes less than an hour) but carries a very strong message on change and what is required to ensure change occurs. You can find out more about this book at its website.

The Heart of Change Field Guide is a guide to assist people in developing questions, diagnostics and frameworks to planning change initiatives. It has a particular focus on using the eight steps listed above. You can find more about this book at the Heart of Change website.

I not only took away these books, but walked away convinced that for any change to happen successfully in an organisation you need the hearts of your employees. If you don't then you are doomed from the beginning and no great change management planning system is going to help you.

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TRUST!

Allison Denny-Collins — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 06:46:14 +0000

In the papers a few days ago there was the announcement that a government department sacked 11 staff for looking at pornography on their work computers and another 14 had resigned for abusing the department's internet use policy. The Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) also noted that all staff were now banned from storing non-work-related photos and videos on their work computers. This department has just over 4000 employees and because less than half a per cent were stupid (and rightly deserved to be sacked) the remaining employees now also have to suffer.

If SMH are correct in the finding that all non-work related photos and videos on computers are banned, then I find this approach paternalistic. I wonder what impact this is having on those remaining employees who have been doing the right thing? In the places I have worked, some of my colleagues have screen savers which were pictures of their family, pets, favourite car, etc. This creates a personalised space for them in their work environment.

All Government Departments have acceptable use policies in place, as they should - use of these things at work should have appropriate limits. All Australian Public Service employees are bound by the APS Code of Conduct and the APS Values so they are aware of what they can and cannot do. I agree on the sacking and I think that is enough to send a message that the behaviour of abusing the department's resources is not acceptable; particularly in the case of pornography.

However I think the message to the rest of the honest remaining employees should have been one of thanking them for not abusing the system and that the organisation still trusts them. By banning the use of all non-work related photos, etc. it sends a message of mistrust. DDI has a whitepaper on Trust in the Workplace and how trust or lack of it can impact on business results.

If this happened in your organisation what do you think would occur?

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Assholes in the workplace (or bullying for the conservatives out there)

Allison Denny-Collins — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 12:08:58 +0000

I have got this book on order from Amazon and cannot wait to read it - The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't by Bob Sutton. This book was published in February this year. It is about creating an environment where no assholes should be allowed in the workplace or allowed to flourish in the workplace and provides some tips for victims of workplace assholes. If you go to Bob Sutton's blog there is also an Asshole Rating Self Exam (ARSE).

Bob has also blogged about interviewing Adam Penenberg who is writing a story for the American Association of Retired Persons. Adam is looking for stories from people who have faced workplace bullying, how this has affected the person and their family and how they fought back. He also wants to take this a further step and if possible have people name names; that is the name of the person who bullied and the organisation where it happened.

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Employees Market

Allison Denny-Collins — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 11:30:29 +0000

The Olivier Internet Job Index June 2007 has been released. The Olivier IJI provides information to employers, recruiters and job seekers on what is happening in the Australian labour market by analysing Internet job ads. They break this information further into different employment sectors and for each State and Territory. There were 330,438 job ads counted in June on the three major job boards. The Australian Bureau of Statistics May 2007 labour force figures indicate that the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate is 4.2%.

So, with the trend of jobs ads increasing and the unemployment rate moving lower, my question to you is what are you doing as a HR professional to work with your organisation on:

workforce planning
identifying the knowledge and skills required for current work as well as any future work
knowing the critical roles in your organisation, what capabilities are required for these roles and whether the people in these roles are looking to retire or move on
having succession plans in place to ensure there is somebody ready to step into the critical roles with the right capabilities
designing attraction and retention strategies so people stay with you just that little bit longer
knowing the demographic of your workforce

If people in your organisation have not thought about this or are not interested then show them some statistics. Provide them with information from the ABS and the Olivier Job Index, give them figures on how much attrition and recruitment plus onboarding costs the organisation.

In such an employees' market can you afford not to?

Tags: human-resources

Not your business - I don’t think so!

Allison Denny-Collins — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 13:07:05 +0000

As HR professionals we should know our organisation's business. If we do not, then we are most likely designing HR strategies for "HR's sake" and not adding any real value. HR processes and strategies should be designed to help the overall organisational goals and to give a competitive advantage. The only way to do this is to get to know the organisation - inside and out. So how do we do this?

Read your organisation's strategic plan and other strategic documents. If it doesn't have one, ask why not. Suggest that HR be part of the planning process
If you do not have strong financial skills build a relationship with the finance people and have them explain the financial side of the business to you. You could also use this relationship to enable you to have some costings done on recruitment, attrition, absenteeism, OH&S, etc.
Build your knowledge on the internal and external environmental factors so you are able to detect potential opportunities or problems
Talk to managers, employees, customers, investors and anyone you think might have something to contribute

A model I use when conducting an environmental analysis is from Human Resource Management: Transforming Theory into Innovative Practice [1]:

When analysing the internal environment you should consider the:

ownership of the organisation, i.e. is it public, private or something else?

organisation's size

organisation's strategy (theres that strategy word again!)

oganisation's structure (bureaucratic, centralised etc)

organisational culture (not only what the organisation espouses its culture to be, but also the unwritten culture

organisational history

resources available

When analysing the external environment you should consider the:

environmental factors

technological factors

economic factors

labour market

international factors

industrial relations

political factors

legal factors

social factors (i.e corporate social responsibility)

demographic factors

industry trends

cultural factors

For the external environment you could use the information provided by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. The Department of Defence has released the Defence Personnel Environment Scan 202 5 which has a whole chapter on Australia and the global context, see part 3. The Committee for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA) would also be a good resource.

So what are you waiting for, go out and learn your business!

Hartel, C., Fujimoto, Y., Strybosch, V., Fitzpatrick, K. (2007) Human Resource Management: Transforming Theory into Innovative Practice, Pearson Education Australia, NSW.

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Shifted HR » Business Realities

How is the feedback culture in your organisation?

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What is staff turnover costing your organisation?

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What ideas do you have?

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What difference are you making?

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What is your balance?

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Leading Change

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TRUST!

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Assholes in the workplace (or bullying for the conservatives out there)

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Employees Market

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Not your business - I don’t think so!

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