What Do We Include in the Employment Excellence Approach?

When thinking about employment excellence, a good metaphor to use is one where the working parts entwined with each other are working in sync or, if you prefer, in perfect harmony.

When we think about our individual lives we know exactly when we reach that wonderful position of being ‘in flow’. Similarly, organisations can achieve the same position but it won’t surprise us that whilst they strive all the time for that state, they are not always in that position. That’s what makes organisational work so interesting and stimulating for many. In the coming weeks, we are going to talk about a range of components which are going to be highlighted in this piece and which we’ll explore in greater detail in the near future.

The starting place for this requirement is an open and honest relationship between the individual worker, the organisation they work within, the boss they work for and the team they are a part of. This is easy to state but not always as easy to achieve. This objective is predicated on a healthy performance management process. Now, many of us get bored by constant discussion and debate about performance management, but for those of us interested in the human contribution in organisations, this is arguably the engine--the place of the greatest number of moving parts, therefore needing the right lubrication for its climate. This lubrication is an organisation’s commitment to its people. Healthy performance management starts with clarity about objectives and goals. It’s important that each individual employee understands how their contribution fits within the team and its goals and within the widest team of all, which is the organisation and its goals.

The requirement for that alignment between the individual and the company and what the company is trying to achieve cannot be underestimated. I have never come across a situation where any employee within any organisational entity will find it impossible to achieve this alignment.

Being clear about what we’re here for is the predeterminant of a healthy psychological contract. Only if you have that will you have expectations that are matched with no surprises between worker and employer.

In just the same integrated way, supervisors, managers and leaders, at every level, need to commit to and action regular communications and feedback. It should be like breathing. It is the oxygen of the business. If you determine that you will have weekly or monthly team briefings, then they must form a fundamental and not discretionary, part of every organisational level. Similarly, meeting with those you are directly responsible for as a manager is part of the fundamental requirement of being a good boss. Give people the chance to speak; check out how they are in every respect of their wellbeing. It doesn’t require you to be medically trained and carry a stethoscope; it does require you to have an interest in those that you have responsibility for.

If those prevailing conditions and those behaviours are normal, the chances of having fair and reasonable treatment in every aspect of work are good. That includes processes organisations use to reward performance, whether that’s promotion or financial reward. One of the biggest areas of people-related activity in recent times has been engagement; in other words, how companies have endeavoured to have fully engaged employees. Much of what we’ve said already about achieving healthy performance management processes underpins the likelihood of having fully engaged employees. When it comes down to it, what they desire is fairness and honesty, as well as a being listened to and communicated with through regular feedback conversations. They want to be working in an organisation which they perceive to have a value system and a set of ethics that makes them feel good, relevant and where their labour is recognized and rewarded for the value that it brings.

A critical element of how employees feel in terms of engagement is how people are treated when they leave and they will have a lot to say about this issue because it is an underdeveloped element in most organisations. The reason is its relative. It is more immature than some that we will mention.

Employment excellence assumes rigorous resourcing. It’s about thinking through what sort of contract you need to be offering and what type of worker needs to come join the team. When you understand the impact a new employee will make on a team, how are these new people recruited? How sure are you that you’re involving ‘the right people’ in the process? How involved are the teams that they’re joining? One of the really interesting issues is how much you learn from asking the team what is needed and giving them the chance to say where they believe they are strong and where the gaps are, individually and collectively. It’s so easy for any of us managers to want to hire people in the same mode as ourselves and people we think are the best colleagues, whether that may or may not be most appropriate.

How do we assess who’s the best candidate and select them? How wide do we make the recruitment process to allow relevance to all the people involved in that process? Ultimately of course it must be the immediate boss who takes the decision about recruitment but best processes make it more than just about the recruitment agents, HR and the recruiting manager.

Similarly, we’ll want to discuss reward policies and systems and the extent to which they are being used strategically or tactically. Employment excellence is predicated on excellent leaders and a leadership culture that values every contribution within the organisation. The reward for such excellence can be huge, coming in the shape of a catalyst for effective organisational endeavour.  The ability of a company to be seen as excellent is both to do with an internal sense of consistency and with concern regarding the external perception of how people are paid. Certain sectors come to mind more regularly than others.

We will want to discuss the talent agenda. Within the parameters of employment excellence, what does talent mean?  Who does it cover? How objective are our processes of identifying it and how is it nurtured? What lengths of investment have you created for talent pools? Where do you look for—and find--a medium and long term relationship with talent? We will want to discuss the relationship with talent and exception. In other words, if so-and-so leaves immediately or is very ill, what do we do? That is about an immediate plan as a response to immediate need; medium to long term succession planning may well be relevant in such a fast-changing world. Indeed the roles we need to do or are asked to do are not recognizable now because they’ve not been invented.

And where does the role of Learning & Development (L & D) sit within the employment agenda? One simple way of determining this would be to explore what is fundamental for the organisation to invest in and what is discretionary. Where we have employees taking control in their career and taking responsibility for their behaviour, there may well be an argument for them, instead of the organisation, to take responsibility for this. This may well be moving away from the ‘pig and trough’ approach to their learning, which happens to businesses in recessionary times.

And finally, what is the relationship between employees and employers? How can you be an employer of choice? Can you look at your excellence and rate yourself so highly as to say that you’re an example of the employment excellence approach? This is the question facing all organisations in the 21^st century.

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