LEADING THOUGHTS

Let’s pump up employees and stoke their competitive juices by ranking them against their peers. Better yet, let’s throw cold water on them. Comparing workers to their peers is usually a lousy idea, and here’s why. Go to article

The organization is flying through the turbulence of change. What does it do? Throw gobs of money at senior execs and “star” performers to induce them to stay on board? There is a more shrewd and less costly solution. Go to article (requires registration)

The issue: When selecting a new leadership team, should CEOs use a scientific approach that is fact-based and analytical? Or should they emphasize subjective factors such as personality, loyalty, motivation, politics, and team chemistry? Let the debate begin. Go to article

Change can be stressful, no doubt. But not all employees experience change in a similar way, say researchers Loretto (U Edinburgh), Platt (U Edinburgh), and Popham (U St. Andrews). Downsizing, for example, could have a positive effect on mental health, they write in the British Journal of Management, if they lead to clearer roles and responsibilities for employees and increasing worker participation.

FACTOID: Employers in the UK are under legal obligation to prevent and control factors leading to stress in their workforce.

To fill in the research gap, Loretto et al set out to devise a comprehensive measure of organizational change (based on self-report questionnaires) and then to use that tool to explore the effects of change on employee mental health (using the well-validated General Health Questionnaire). Their study focused on nearly 5,400 employees in the National Health Service in the UK.

The study did show that the prospect of changing employers and terms and conditions of employment are likely to have detrimental effects on staff health and well-being.

But the researchers’ findings also challenge the assumption that change necessarily has an adverse effect on health. “Our findings indicate areas, such as promotion and development, where a positive impact can be anticipated.” They speculate that training and promotion may reduce employees’ uncertainty by increasing their control over their future.

Loretto, W., Platt, S., & Popham, F. (2009). Workplace Change and Employee Mental Health: Results from a Longitudinal Study British Journal of Management DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8551.2009.00658.x

Organizational development and change management more than ever before are being linked to learning and talent development, according to a report recently published by the UK-based CIPD.

“It is clear that organizational development and design will become increasingly important as organizations seek to change, innovate and to link learning to organizational goals,” according to CIPD’s 2010 Learning and Talent Development survey report. But the report also noted that “practitioners are less involved in discussing the design, delivery and impact of learning with other managers. This alignment issue is a key one as L&TD seeks to build its reputation and impact.”

The survey found that for 46 percent of respondents, the major organizational change affecting learning and talent development in the next five years will be a greater integration between coaching, organizational development, and performance management to drive change. For 37 percent, it will be greater responsibility devolved to line managers.

Other findings from the CIPD survey:

• As a result of the economic downturn, learning and talent development is becoming more focused on value and impact; in other words, doing more with less. “It will be particularly important for professionals to ensure that their L&TD activities are even more closely aligned with business strategy and to be able to assess the return on investment generated.”
• Almost 60 percent of organizations undertake talent management activities. Among these, half rate such activities as “effective” and only 3 percent consider them “very effective.” The three most effective activities to manage talent are coaching (39 percent), in-house development programmes (32 percent), and high-potential development schemes (31 percent).
• The three most common ways to evaluate talent management activities: feedback from line managers (42 percent); rretention of those identified as high-potential (35 percent); and  anecdotal observation of change (35 percent).
• In terms of leadership skills, the main gaps identified by employers were performance management (setting standards for performance and dealing with under-performance) and leading and managing change.
• Internships are growing in popularity, partly because employers want to provide a lifeline for talented young people. The results are encouraging. “The fact that a third of firms report higher productivity as a result of their internships is particularly encouraging, given that many interns are new to the workplace and are still in the process of learning new skills.”

About 86 percent of responding organizations (623) had headquarters in the UK and the remainder (101) were based outside the UK.

photo credit: Limmud

The March/April 2010 issue of Communication World includes an article on how to communicate a changed employee value proposition to a skeptical audience. I was less interested in that storyline than in a set of statistics cited from the Towers Watson’s 2009/2010 Communication ROI Study. Here’s the noteworthy finding.

Phase at which communication function became involved in the change process:

• Identifying the problem > 8%
• Identifying possible approaches to resolve the issue > 23%
• Implementing the change > 27%
• Selecting the approach to resolve the issue > 11%
• Planning the implementation > 31%

Frankly, I’m surprised that almost one-third of the organizations surveyed involve their comm people only when they are planning how their change project will be implemented. I would have figured that communications is more embedded in change management than that. Could that be why so many change projects rot on the vine?

The Towers Watson survey involved 328 companies and 5 million employees.

Sweeping changes in the labour market over the past four decades have triggered “the disappearance of ‘workers’ as a political and industrial force, as a social and cultural category and as the concept that organizes our thinking about labour law and policy,” says Harry Arthurs, one of Canada’s leading labour law scholars.

In a recent speech to St. John’s College at University of Oxford, Arthurs listed a litany of tectonic forces: technological change, the shift in employment from manufacturing to the service economy, the “flexibilization” of the workforce, demographic trends, and globalization.

These developments have made employment more precarious, created conflicts or magnified differences among workers, undercut labour solidarity, and shifted the balance of power to employers.

As a result, people no longer define themselves as “workers” or as members of the “working class.” If they experience unfairness, Arthurs says, it is not as “workers” but as members of a disenfranchised group. “The common experience, the solidarity-building experience, of workers — in mines and sweatshops and dark satanic mills— is gone,” Arthurs says. “Gone too is the culture that reinforced that solidarity.”

The transformation of work has also rendered machinery of labour market regulation obsolete. Arthurs offers a number of examples.

“The shift from manufacturing to service jobs has revealed that laws premised on one sort of employment relationship do not necessarily produce the desired results when transplanted onto another.” Implication: Should labour legislation be drafted to take account of sectoral differences?

“Technology enables employers to respond to their customers around the clock, and globalization requires that they do so. But for employers to respond, employees must be available on at least a standby basis.” Implication: Should laws fixing maximum hours of work and requiring premium pay for overtime be changed to accommodate the employer’s business needs, or the employee’s needs for even greater protection against intrusion on his or her free time?

Arthurs says Western economies have three choices:

1. Adopt the perspective of human rights and the principles of freedom, dignity, and equality. “These principles ought to apply to people at work, no less than people at other moments in their lives,” he says.

2. See what can be done to bring more equity into the labour market within the limits of neo-liberal capitalism.

3. Try to resuscitate the labour movement or reinvent the labour movement.

Which one would you vote for?

If you’d like a copy of Harry Arthurs’s presentation, send me an email at Alan [at] AlanMorantz [dot] com

photo credit: Mohammad A. Hamama – A Socialist Blogger

Researchers at the Centre for Performance-Led HR (Lancaster U Management School) argue that organizational design is fast becoming a strategic capability, particularly for those organizations undergoing business model change. And where should that strategic capability reside? “For HR to be truly strategic,” they write in a white paper, “the function needs to develop the capability of influencing business model design at each level of analysis (industry value web, organisation value proposition, and component structure).”

In this video, the researchers make their case.

At the 0:38 mark, Paul Sparrow discusses what organizational design capabilities involve, and makes the distinction between org design and organizational development. He says HR is in the perfect position to marry the two.

At the 1:10 mark, Craig Marsh offers a series of questions that HR directors should ask of themselves around the need for leading the charge in org design.

At the 3:00 mark, he says HR directors need to think bigger, more broadly, and in a more integrated fashion.

Download the CPHR white paper, Integrated Organisation Design: The New Strategic Priority for HR Directors, here or send me an email at Alan [at] AlanMorantz [dot] com.

In the journal Global Business and Organizational Excellence, Stephen Wehrenberg offers an insider perspective on an enterprise change management initiative at the U.S. Coast Guard.

The Coast Guard provides an interesting case study. It is admirably flexible when facing operational issues; leaders have to adapt to changing situations. But the Coast Guard is as rigid as they come when non-operational changes are needed.

Wehrenberg, director of HR strategy and executive development for the Coast Guard, offers a number of reasons for resistance to change: autonomy at low levels; accountability for results with less attention to process; high degree of leader turnover; and a feeling of “change saturation.”

Wehrenberg and his team designed a “stealth” strategy to build local participation and earn some wins in order to gain broad adoption at the unit level. They also adopted a portfolio change management approach to help senior leaders prioritize initiatives. And they employed the Project Change Triangle Assessment to evaluate strength in three areas critical to change: executive sponsorship, project management discipline, and change management discipline.

The change management process at the Coast Guard is ongoing so there is more to this case study that needs to be written. But it is still a worthwhile read for those planning change in large, culturally complex organizations.

“The Coast Guard Charts a Course for Enterprise Change Management,” by Stephen Wehrenberg; Global Business and Organizational Excellence (pp. 17-31, November/December 2009)

If you cannot find this journal is your local library, email me for a copy of the article at Alan [at] AlanMorantz.com

photo credit: KyleZOA

Here is a nice six-minute story from Fabienne Munch, Director of Ideation at Herman Miller, about how she transformed and energized her 15-member team in the space of five months.

Stealing an idea from Google’s playbook, Munch gave members of her team $5,000 each to pursue an idea of their choice. There were three conditions: the project had to relate to Herman Miller’s mission; the staffers had to invite an outsider to participate; and they had to be open to the idea of pooling resources with their colleagues. At the five-minute mark, Munch talks about what happened next.

In the final two minutes, Munch talks about workplace trends that are informing how Herman Miller is designing work spaces.