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5 | Workforce

Best-in-Class Workforce Planning

In January, the Aberdeen Group published a report on Strategic Workforce Planning. Their conclusions sound like responses to Baldrige Criteria questions.

The group surveyed 240 organizations and differentiated best-in-class (BIC) performers from those in the middle and the laggards. They found that:

  • The BIC performers saw a 13% decrease in key talent turnover in the past 12 months compared to a 13% increase for the laggards.
  • The BIC performers have at least one “ready and willing” successor for 53% of their key positions compared to just 15% for the laggards.
  • The BIC performers have workforce plans in place in 90% of their divisions compared to 13% for the laggards.

The group concluded that BIC performers share common characteristics:

  • Involvement of senior leaders with workforce planning initiatives
  • Ability to define and screen against competencies required for future business success
  • Tools to integrate employee data with financial, customer, and other data to create a comprehensive view of the workforce.

If you integrate the Baldrige model, you will improve your performance in each of these areas by improving your performance on these related Baldrige Criteria questions:

  • How do senior leaders participate in organizational learning, succession planning, and in the development of future organizational leaders?
  • How do you assess your workforce capability and capacity needs, including skills, competencies, and staffing levels?
  • How do you relate your workforce engagement assessment findings to key business results to identify opportunities for improvement in both workforce engagement and business results?

You…

3Mar2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued

This Year’s Best Employer

According to Fortune magazine, SAS is the best company to work for. Here’s why:

  • A 300-acre campus near Raleigh, North Carolina for 4,200 employees
  • Average tenure for employees of ten years with annual turnover at 2%
  • Typical work week is 35 hours with many employees setting their own schedules
  • No sick day policy: If an employee is sick, he or she decides whether to stay home (the average taken annually is two days)
  • A healthcare center with a staff of 56 including four physicians—and services are free to employees (last year 90% of employees and their families made 40,000 visits)
  • An on-site 66,000-square-foot recreation and fitness center with gym, weight room, billiards hall, sauna, hair salon, manicurist, Olympic-size pool, and massage
  • On-site workday sports leagues
  • Two subsidized daycare centers for 600 children
  • Dry cleaning, car detailing, a book exchange, a meditation garden, an in-season tax-prep vendor, and an orthotics store
  • Three subsidized cafeterias (and they provide takeout for family dinners)
  • Off-campus SAS family nights
  • Two paid artists-in-residence
  • Free M&Ms—22.5 tons a year or 11 pounds per employee

CEO Jim Goodnight explains the SAS approach this way: “My chief assets drive out the gate every day. My job is to make sure they come back.” (“SAS: A new no. 1 best employer,” David A. Kaplan, January 22, 2010)

SAS is the world’s largest privately-held software business with revenues of $2.3 billion. It has been on Fortune’s list of Best Companies to Work For for 13 straight years.

Companies make…

1Feb2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued

Paying Disengaged Employees

The Workforce Focus category in the Baldrige Criteria is organized into two Items, the first of which explores how you engage your workforce to achieve organizational and personal success. I’ve written before about the Bottom-Line Value of Employee Engagement, which Gallup states can be as much as a 70% boost in bottom-line results, and Employee Engagement and the Bottom Line, which looked at the financial performance at Best Buy and J.C. Penney.

Fraser Longden is the head of talent and engagement at Kingfisher PLC, the parent company for B&Q, the UK’s equivalent of Home Depot or Lowe’s. In an interview in the Gallup Management Journal (“Do-It-Yourself Engagement,” January 12, 2010), Longden offers an interesting perspective on the flip side of increasing the bottom line: the cost of disengaged employees.

“The harsh reality is that in 2005, 29% of our workforce was actively disengaged,” he says, “and we were spending £120 million a year just on wages of these individuals. So, from a cost perspective, we were spending a whole lot of money on people who didn’t want to be there. In the last survey, that figure has dropped to £31 million, which is a massive turnaround.”

Longden calls it a tug of war, the actively disengaged pulling against the engaged. “The only way you’re going to move forward is by having a lot more people on the engaged end.”

He describes the steps B&Q took…

26Jan2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued

Increasing Employee Satisfaction in a Time of Decline

Employee satisfaction appears on a lot of companies’ balanced scorecards. Most of the ones I’ve seen have annual goals to increase this number by one percent or less, which doesn’t seem like much of a challenge until you realize that employee satisfaction in the U.S. has been spiraling downward for twenty years.

The Conference Board released a report today on a survey of 5,000 U.S. households conducted by TNS. Only 45% of those surveyed say they are satisfied with their jobs, down from 61.1% in 1987. You can read a summary of the report here.

According to the summary, “no age or income group is immune. In fact, the youngest cohort of employees (those currently under age 25) expresses the highest level of dissatisfaction ever recorded by the survey for that age group” (64%). Only 51% find their jobs interesting, 43% feel secure in their jobs, and 51% are satisfied with their boss.

Why is this important? Lynn Franco, one of the report’s authors, says, “What’s really disturbing about growing job dissatisfaction is the way it can play into the competitive nature of the U.S. workforce down the road and on the growth of the U.S. economy—all in a negative way.” (“Don’t love your job? You’re not alone,” Jeannine Aversa, Associated Press, January 5, 2010)

Jobs are tight, pay is stagnant, out-of-pocket healthcare costs are skyrocketing, and fewer and fewer workers consider their jobs…

5Jan2010 | Steve George | 1 comment | Continued

What Matters Now

Author and blogger Seth Godin got 70 big thinkers to share an idea to consider in the year ahead. Each contributor chose a word and then described why it is important. Godin compiled them in a free e-book called What Matters Now, available here.

My favorite Baldrige-related words, with excerpts from their explanations, are:

  • Vision. “Vision is the lifeblood of any organization. It is what keeps it moving forward.” Michael Hyatt, CEO, Thomas Nelson Publishers
  • Excellence. Tom Peters lists the 19 E’s of Excellence including execution, empowerment, engaged, and encompassing.
  • Unsustainability. “We really need to focus on raising the costs of the unsustainable systems that represent the unsustainable status quo” like failed educational systems, obesity-producing systems, energy systems, transportation systems, and health care systems. Alan M. Webber, co-founding editor of Fast Company magazine
  • Autonomy. “If we want engagement, and the mediocrity-busting results it produces, we have to make sure people have autonomy over the four most important aspects of their work” – task, time, technique, and team. Daniel H. Pink, author of A Whole New Mind.
  • Power. “Stop waiting around for bosses and companies to get better and complaining about how you are treated,” wrote Jeffrey Pfeffer, professor at Stanford Business School. “Build the skills—and use them—that will permit you to create the environment in which you want to live.”
  • Productivity. “Don’t worry too much about getting things done. Make things happen.” Gina Trapani blogs at Smarterware

And the…

24Dec2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued

Best and Worst for Employees

Glassdoor.com just announced its second annual Employees’ Choice Awards for best—and worst—places to work. Nearly 100,000 employees completed a 20-question survey on the site in 2009. Survey questions addressed employee attitudes about career opportunities, communication, compensation and benefits, employee morale, recognition and feedback, senior leadership, work/life balance, and fairness and respect. Once the overall ratings are calculated, Glassdoor.com may exclude a company from the list for detrimental acts by management or other negative company events.

This list is obviously not scientific but it does provide a general sense of who does well or poorly on employee engagement. At the Glassdoor.com Web site, you can click on a company in the list or search by company name and get more details about how many people rated it and their pros, cons, and advice to senior management.

The top 25 best places to work are:

  1. Southwest Airlines
  2. General Mills
  3. Slalom Consulting
  4. Bain & Company
  5. McKinsey & Company
  6. MITRE
  7. Boston Consulting
  8. Continental Airlines
  9. Procter & Gamble
  10. Juniper Networks
  11. Northwestern Mutual
  12. Kraft Foods
  13. National Instruments
  14. Google
  15. NetApp
  16. Goldman Sachs
  17. FactSet
  18. Medtronic
  19. Publix
  20. Chevron
  21. FedEx
  22. Apple
  23. Edelman
  24. Edward Jones
  25. QUALCOMM

Companies in the next 25 included Caterpillar (#35), Turner Broadcasting (#36), Intel (#41), Best Buy (#45), and Whole Foods (#48).

The 10 worst companies to work for, according to Glassdoor.com, are:

  1. Gibson Guitar
  2. United Airlines
  3. Spherion
  4. AutoZone
  5. Rain Bird
  6. DHL Express (USA)
  7. Level 3 Communications
  8. Dominion Enterprises
  9. Hertz
  10. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

To learn more about employee satisfaction, read:

…

22Dec2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued

Succession Planning at P&G

Procter & Gamble is a role model for succession planning. In an article in Fortune (November 20, 2009), Jennifer Reingold quotes Moheet Nagrath, P&G’s global human resources officer, who said, “Today I could show you the next generation of successors to current leaders, the generation after that, and the generation after that.”

The successors are listed in the company’s Talent Portfolio, a binder containing the names of P&G’s leaders compared to one another over six years on financial performance and the ability to lead and help others lead. Approximately 120 of P&G’s 135,000 employees reach general manager status and become part of the Talent Portfolio. They are evaluated every six months by their bosses, lateral managers who have worked with them, and their direct reports on a GM Performance Scorecard, which has one page of financial measures and another page assessing leadership and team-building abilities. There are at least three possible candidates for each major job, including CEO.

Although this formal process has been in place since 2001, P&G’s emphasis on hiring and retaining the right people can be traced to 1947 when CEO Richard “Red” Deupree said, “If you leave us our buildings and our brands but take away our people, the company will fail.”

The Baldrige Criteria ask how you accomplish effective succession planning for management and leadership positions. P&G has an effective, systematic response. The Criteria also ask how senior leaders…

16Dec2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
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