Thought Leadership: Employment Excellence

What does ‘employment excellence’ mean? It means the whole employment experience can be excellent. But we at Position Ignition believe that it’s not at the moment. The reason is that changes in demographic, legislation and the way people work are often so big and so fast and so uncontrollable for employers that the impact for employees actually creates a lot of fear and uncertainty in terms of organisational and job stability. Position Ignition is about individuals being awakened to the fact that if they know this stuff they can prepare for when a move does come along.

Relationships between organisations and individuals can be compared to our life cycles. When we are born there is great expectation and great celebration. This is the case in every culture. In our culture especially, there’s a sense of euphoria for the pregnant woman, her mum, siblings and family and hopefully for the dad and his family too. But then 9 months later when you have this whole new life, there’s a huge amount of care by the system--making sure the woman is sleeping well, eating well and so on. There is a huge amount of maturity and sophistication in the whole process of birthing, just as there is when the baby arrives, then grows to be fully functioning, then enters education and hopefully grows to be an economic worker. That process of education is to enable them to go along and be whatever they choose to be.

This is all very different to the way that we in our culture deal with death. When we transpose this into the sphere of organisations and work, death is end of contract, the termination of the relationship. The way we manage this process of death is very different to the process of birth. We don’t talk about it, don’t prepare for it and when it happens it is a shock even if it is the result of a long-term illness. In some cultures death is cause for celebration of the deceased’s life and legacy, but for our culture it takes a lot of time for us to deal with the grieving. The level of maturity around the departure is actually pretty immature.

In between birth and death, are of course common life milestones such as getting married. If we now transpose the concept of marriage into organisational speak, companies tend to have varying degrees of sophistication around their branding, their marketing and how they attract people to work with them. They find new employees by executing a selection process, maybe consisting of fancy tests, interviews and/or assessment centres. In that process what is happening is that the potential employee is being courted—it’s like the build-up to a marriage proposal. The job candidate is being courted and enticed until they fall in love and are happy to engage with the employer.

We, as individuals, then ‘get married’ to the organisation by signing a contract of employment that says we’ll turn up at work when we’re meant to, work a certain amount of hours each day, be present for a set amount of days per week and so on—all in exchange for a prearranged level of compensation. The contract offers a degree of familiarity, a degree of structure.

Then comes the in-between bit, which is a period of you getting used to the stability of your job and getting used to the work. If you are lucky, you get the choice of doing different things, taking on more responsibility and getting bigger roles. In terms of development and learning, the employer will, for its purpose, send you on courses, ranging from mandatory programmes such as safety training to things like PRINCE2, which is not mandatory but will develop your project management skills, for example. We throw a lot of time and money and energy and investment at systems and processes which help the development and recruitment of our employees.

But what about when the relationship comes to an end? It used to come to an end when people, once they reached a set age, retired on a set date in their diary; that was easy. But we know that this is now changing due to longer life expectancy, the removal of the Default Retirement Age and changes in the way we work. Apart from retirement, whether at the traditional age or not, how else does it come to an end nowadays?

One way might be through resignation. Someone chooses to leave the organisation to go through the same cycle of courting and marriage with a different company, rather like divorce and remarriage. Or it could be the employer wants to divorce you because it thinks you’re not of value to it anymore. It may be that the employer has to respond to something much bigger than itself such as the market, legislation or the consequence of globalisation. The organisation therefore needs to downsize or restructure, in which case there is not enough room for you anymore. These seem to be the standard three outcomes. In the first scenario, it is the individual who takes control and resigns. In the second, the individual’s performance is no longer of a high enough standard for the employer. The third is a case of being made redundant.

In each of these cases, there are some interesting undertones. When the employee resigns, for example, more often than not the reasons for doing so include boredom, new bosses and/or the fact that other good colleagues have moved on. The individual thinks to themselves, ‘I’m not as interested in the work I’m doing as I once was’. Quite often the resigning employee is actually really pleased to go and there is almost glee on their part when they hand their resignation in. Sometimes it’s not like that—they’ve had a great time but they know they need to move on. The organisation takes an interesting view of individuals who resign. It is almost like switching off a light. Colleagues are more curious about where you’re going and what you’re going to do, but to the employer you are a commodity and you’re simply going. You may as well go on the spot as far as they are concerned. They are hoping that you go and go soon and good riddance to you. And imagine how it feels for the individual who is made redundant or sacked. There is not a lot of room for love. It’s pretty tough, difficult and challenging and it isn’t easy for anyone.

What we’re asking of employment excellence here is to actually create a culture different to the current one and its assumption that when you sign up to an employer you are going to work there forever. The assumption is that this is what people aspire to—but that’s not really appropriate because that’s not the way the world is. Yet employment contracts are still all about stability, about structure and about just never ending. The employer assumes that the individual wants such a contract. If this isn’t so and you, the individual, choose not to work forever for the same company, you are a bad person. How dare you choose to leave? Employment excellence is about reframing this whole process of the psychological contract between employer and employee.

Author:

Simon North, co-founder of Position Ignition, a leading career consulting and career management business for individuals and organisations

www.positionignition.com