All Posts Tagged With: "workforce focus"
Baldrige Model: How do you build an effective and supportive workforce environment?
Item 5.1 in the Baldrige Criteria asks key questions about how you create a supportive work environment. The following processes, best practices, and problem areas look at critical issues in this part of the Baldrige model.
Your organization needs processes for:
- Assessing workforce capability and capacity needs and preparing employees for changing needs
- Recruiting, hiring, placing, and retaining new employees
- Organizing and managing your workforce to accomplish work, capitalize on your core competencies, reinforce a customer and business focus, exceed performance expectations, and address your strategic challenges and action plans
- Managing your workforce to ensure continuity, prepare for growth, and prevent layoffs or minimize their impact if they become necessary
- Creating a healthy, safe, and secure work environment
- Supporting employees through policies, services, and benefits
Best practices to consider:
- The organization has developed a workforce plan that identifies its current capability and capacity and anticipates future needs based on different scenarios.
- The hiring process focuses on choosing people who fit the organization and providing training and support to ensure that they are retained.
- The workforce is organized and managed to benefit from diversity (gender, age, race, etc.).
- Strategic leadership, careful planning, and a commitment to employee well-being enables the organization to ramp up during times of rapid growth and find new opportunities when the market slows without destabilizing the workforce.
- The organization has identified and tracks performance on key measures of workforce health, safety, and security.
- The policies, services, and benefits the organization provides are tailored to the needs…
3 Things Employees Care About Most
“In my experience with managing people all over the world, I have found that most ineffective managers are considered ineffective not because they don’t know how to motivate people, but because they don’t know what motivates their people.”
The observation comes from Rajeev Pershawaria in “The Three Things That Employees Really Care About” (FastCompany, May 12, 2011). He describes an exercise he has facilitated in seminars with hundreds of executives around the world. In the exercise, he poses an imaginary dilemma:
“Imagine you are about to change jobs and have two competing offers. Both jobs pay roughly the same amount of money and are in the same industry. Both are at reputable companies. How will you choose between the two jobs? What factors will you consider while making your decision?”
Think about that for a minute.
What factors topped your list? The nature of your new job? The work culture? Coworkers? Future opportunities?
Pershawaria captures the executives’ responses on three blank flip charts that represent the three things people care about most. He then reveals the hidden titles:
Role
Environment
Development
He observes that “most managers think they know what motivates their direct reports, but when you ask them, they actually list things that motivate them.” To be effective at engaging people, managers need to talk regularly about the three buckets, listen to understand their preferences and aspirations, and label and link their work with their expectations. For example, before giving an assignment to a woman on…
15May2011 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedOne Team’s Systematic Approach to Improvement
A recent case study published by ASQ tells the story of how FirstSource Solutions used tools and processes that are common among Baldrige Award winners to tackle a single problem—reducing the turnaround time (TAT) to approve applications for a retail mortgage client—with impressive results.
The client was in the United Kingdom. Here’s a synopsis of how Firstsource tackled the problem:
- It used data to define the problem: Over a nine-week period, the client offered mortgage loans in 14 days or less 69% of the time, well short of the 75% target.
- A financial benefit estimation exercise determined that improving performance on TAT to 80% would increase revenue by six million pounds annually, create a more efficient process, and provide faster service to applicants.
- Firstsource formed a team to improve TAT. The team received training on the Six Sigma DMAIC methodology and quality tools.
- The team started with a supplier-inputs-process-outputs-customer (SIPOC) exercise to create a high-level process map and identify stakeholders.
- The team produced a three-stage analysis road map to assess the current situation and identify possible root causes and improvement activities. It used the road map to agree on five causes of the longer TAT.
- The team brainstormed possible solutions and then assigned a relative rating for each solution to eliminate half of the original possibilities.
- The team validated the impact of the solutions through a one-week pilot study with a metrics dashboard that was shared with all stakeholders involved in developing solutions.…
How Does Your Workplace Measure Up?
When, over a 20-year period, you work with organizations good enough to win a Baldrige Award, you observe several common attributes. Baldrige core values like visionary leadership and management by fact capture some of them, but there are other, less tangible attributes like treating everyone (customers, employees, suppliers, etc.) with respect, never being happy with “good enough,” and a willingness to share—and learn.
Simma Lieberman has made similar observations about excellent workplaces. She helps organizations create inclusive workplaces where employees love to do their best work and customers love to do business. In “Ten Indicators of Morale Level and Employee Involvement” (FastCompany, January 4, 2011), she lists ten “easy to observe behaviors of employees who feel good about their workplace”:
- “There is visible interaction amongst employees in the office, hallways, and cafeteria. People actually smile and say hello to each other. You may even hear laughter.
- You hear people speaking well of each other and their customers. Employees greet customers and stop what they are doing to provide customer service.
- There is resource sharing across work functions, and work groups are not complaining about other departments, or work levels.
- Employees know what other functions do, on a day-to-day level, and how each function impacts the others.
- Employee kitchens and washrooms are clean with the right provisions.
- There are employee initiated social activities with high levels of participation.
- Employees are comfortable offering suggestions for improvement.
- Employee grievances are either nonexistent, rare, or resolved quickly.
- Employees arrive on…
50,000 Jobs Available
Fortune has published information about nearly 50,000 jobs available at 30 companies on its 2010 Best Companies to Work For list. You can page through the list here.
Ernst & Young tops the list with 10,000 current openings. About half the companies on the list have a thousand openings or less, which is still significant in this economy.
The article highlights the types of openings at each company, what they are looking for, and how to impress their recruiters, and it includes a link to each company’s jobs site.
It’s interesting to read what the companies are seeking. Many are very specific about the jobs they are trying to fill. Others are more open-ended, such as:
- Ernst & Young is looking for people with deep experience in business performance management, among other things. (Baldrige experts would seem to be a good fit.)
- PricewaterhouseCoopers is looking for people who have outside interests and a desire to give back to their communities.
- Nordstrom is looking for people with a strong entrepreneurial spirit—those who’ll approach their jobs as if their names were on the building.
- Cisco is looking for strong collaborators, a track record of continuous learning, and people who have been innovators or even disruptors.
- Google is looking for people who are passionate about solving problems that make an impact at scale. Ideal candidates are well-rounded with interesting and unique accomplishments—in sports, for example, or music, starting a business, writing a book, or other activities.
To read…
10Nov2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedUnderstanding Employee Requirements
When asked to identify their key stakeholders, Baldrige Award winners include employees on the list. In 1997, 2008 Baldrige Award recipient Poudre Valley Health System surveyed its employees and asked:
- What makes you want to jump out of bed and come to work?
- How do we build a culture that supports that?
Two years later, PVHS collaborated with Colorado State University to identify key staff requirements, which became the framework for its semiannual Employee Culture Survey. The requirements are:
- Teamwork and cooperation
- Safety in innovating
- Listening to each other
- Respect and fairness
- Enthusiasm
- Feedback and accountability
- Resources and participation
It’s hard to find anything unusual about this list. What is unusual is the systematic approach PVHS used to identify these requirements and how it has continued to refine the list–and what it means–ever since.
As with customer requirements, it’s easy to assume you know what is required to engage and satisfy your employees. Such assumptions are dangerous. PVHS knows what its employees require and it acts on that knowledge to improve both engagement and satisfaction.
Workforce engagement is a PVHS core competency and is measured on its semiannual survey. In 2007, PVHS was as good as or better than the top 10% nationwide in four survey questions on engagement and in the top 10% on 11 of 16 attitude areas.
Based on results, it’s clear PVHS knows what its employees want.
To find out more about Poudre Valley Health System, read its award application summary.
To read more about employee engagement, click on…
4Nov2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedThe 3 P’s: Starting Points for Integrating Baldrige
Where do you start? You want to make your organization more competitive, better able to meet customer needs, less inclined to mistakes, but you’ve been doing things the same way for years and you’re not sure where to begin.
When I get this question, I suggest starting with one or more of the 3 P’s: processes, people, or planning.
Start with Processes. The Baldrige model is a process model because the work of an organization is done through processes. Organizations that haven’t taken a formal approach to process management usually spend way too much time firefighting because their processes are out of control, or they blame people when their processes fail. Neither is a prescription for long-term success.
You can develop a process orientation by first identifying your key work processes, which Baldrige defines as your most important internal value creation processes. If you’re not sure where to start, look at what products and/or services you provide to your customers and figure out the internal steps that design, produce, and deliver those products and services. Then consider the support processes that make these customer-driven processes possible, such as your key processes in sales, marketing, finance, human resources, IT, etc. Once you’ve identified your value creation processes, assign a process owner responsible for each, usually a senior leader with the authority to allocate resources and remove obstacles. Form process improvement teams to map each process, identify areas to improve, and…
12Oct2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
