One of the problems that come up from time to time in a business context is that the standard of what a “reasonably prudent person” would believe is not a universal constant. In civil litigation, the standard used to judge someone’s actions is what a reasonable person would expect in those circumstances, which leaves room for things that you wouldn’t expect, could not be expected to anticipate, couldn’t imagine actually happening, and so on. What makes this a problem is that even if all but one of the 310 million people in the U.S. think something is unreasonable, the one person remaining may not; and if that person is the owner of the company you work for, he or she may do something so completely outrageous (and outstandingly stupid) that even sarcastic bloggers like me can only read the story about it in open-mouthed amazement…
Take, for example, the case of a woman from Salt Lake City who has filed suit against her former employer citing sexual harassment. According to the complaint, her former employer gave her a schedule that included "Mini-skirt Monday," "Tube-top Tuesday," "Wet T-shirt Wednesday," "No bra Thursday" and "Bikini top Friday," along with a wide variety of verbal, physical and occasionally graphic vulgarities far too disgusting to enumerate here. These culminated in a document “authorizing” her boss to sexually harass her, which the plaintiff was given the choice of signing or being terminated. As truly staggering as these behaviors are, I can’t help thinking that the most mind-blowing aspect of the story is that the employer actually put all of these demands in writing – and that the plaintiff has been able to produce them as part of the court documents…
My point in calling this to your attention isn’t that I’m worried about any of my readers (assuming I have readers) doing anything this mindlessly idiotic; the details in this story would have been exceptional even fifty years ago, and are national-news headlines today. My point is that somebody out there – someone who was able to launch and operate his own business, in fact – thought that these behaviors were completely reasonable. He may be the only person in North America who would think so (although I would hesitate to bet money on that), but for the purposes of this one business relationship, that does not matter; his treatment of this employee is so outrageously bad that even a prime-time sitcom would hesitate to portray any character that delusional. Assuming the facts of the case are as stated, this individual is truly doing things that would make you doubt his sanity in a business context. The problem is, he’s not the only one…
The fact is that most people have some irrational belief, bias or blind spot which can affect their behavior. For most of us it’s something harmless, like the belief that the Los Angeles Dodgers are the greatest baseball team ever (they are), that cats are better than dogs as family pets (they absolutely are), or that broccoli is evil (just take my word for it, all right?), but you can never assume that any given person is going to behave in a fashion that you would consider reasonable, just because state and federal law require them to do so. And if you do make that assumption, it is entirely possible that strange, unpredictable and outrageous things will happen to your business, as well – and that you won’t be ready for them…
Showing posts with label Employee Retention. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Employee Retention. Show all posts
Thursday, September 22, 2011
Monday, September 7, 2009
It Could Be Worse…
It seems appropriate that this post will run on Labor Day 2009, given the subject matter. Of course, since this is a web log and not a newspaper column, I can make anything run any day I want it to, which makes it easier for me to time this sort of thing than it would be for a real columnist. But it still seems appropriate to have a column about miserable working conditions pop onto your web browser on Labor Day, so for the next few hundred words, if you’d care to imagine me as a crabby, middle-aged man with a bad complexion and a beer gut wearing a fedora with a “Press” ID stuck in the hatband, crouching over an ancient manual typewriter and grumbling quietly as I slam out this story, please feel free. I’d still be doing better than the poor bastards who appear in the news account I’m going to hot-link in a minute…
People who believe that being a commercial pilot must be exciting, glamorous, or at least nice work if you can get it may want to skip the rest of this post and wait for the next Grad School Diaries installment on Saturday. As noted in this story from the The Associated Press quoted by SF Gate online, 62 pilots and flight engineers from a Florida-based air freight company went on strike last week protesting the fact that their employers do not provide restrooms for them onboard their aircraft. It seems that these old 727 cargo conversions had everything stripped out of the original cabin, including the lavatories, leaving the crews with nothing but plastic zip-lock bags to relieve themselves in. And you thought your office restroom stank…
Now, in fairness, relief bags of this type (usually with a small sponge in the bottom to help with containment) are commonly used by military pilots assigned to make long flights in aircraft without restrooms, but it should be noted that many military aircraft have no where to put a restroom in the first place. These old 727s originally mounted several lavatories and the support systems to operate them, and we must assume that the freight company had them removed to save on weight and space. Moreover, while military flights in single-seat or two-seat aircraft may sometimes last as long as 18 hours, very few such pilots will be subjected to regular 18-hour shifts in peacetime – a practice the striking pilots describe as the rule, rather than the exception on their jobs. They also note that after 18 hours with a crew of three and nothing but zip-lock bags for sanitation, the inside of the aircraft can get a bit unpleasant…
Why, exactly, the freight company thinks this is a good idea is not addressed by the article linked above. Certainly, every pound of equipment you can remove from the airplane means more payload you can carry and less spent on fuel, but even the military will provide pilots with a chemical-pack toilet (like the one in an RV or camper) whenever there is room to do so, and there’s no doubt that the company is not coming off very well in the press accounts of this issue. To say nothing about the striking pilots or the potential loss of business if more of their personnel join the revolt…
I point all of this out to you not, as usual, because I believe that anyone following this blog (assuming anyone follows this blog) would be daft enough to believe that their employees would be okay with 18-hour shifts every day, let alone 4-hour turn-around times between shifts or plastic bags for lavatory functions, but rather to illustrate the point that decisions that make sense on paper don’t always work well in practice. The fact is, I’ve worked 18-hour (and 20-hour and 25-hour) shifts without overtime pay, had to go back to work after only 4 or 5 hours off, and worked under conditions where a plastic bag would actually have been a step up over our sanitary facilities – and every one of those companies has been destroyed by the competition, driven out of business by employee lawsuits, bankrupted by boycotts, shut down by government regulations, or all of the above. So the next time you have a great money-saving idea, remember to think it through…
Happy Labor Day, everybody!
People who believe that being a commercial pilot must be exciting, glamorous, or at least nice work if you can get it may want to skip the rest of this post and wait for the next Grad School Diaries installment on Saturday. As noted in this story from the The Associated Press quoted by SF Gate online, 62 pilots and flight engineers from a Florida-based air freight company went on strike last week protesting the fact that their employers do not provide restrooms for them onboard their aircraft. It seems that these old 727 cargo conversions had everything stripped out of the original cabin, including the lavatories, leaving the crews with nothing but plastic zip-lock bags to relieve themselves in. And you thought your office restroom stank…
Now, in fairness, relief bags of this type (usually with a small sponge in the bottom to help with containment) are commonly used by military pilots assigned to make long flights in aircraft without restrooms, but it should be noted that many military aircraft have no where to put a restroom in the first place. These old 727s originally mounted several lavatories and the support systems to operate them, and we must assume that the freight company had them removed to save on weight and space. Moreover, while military flights in single-seat or two-seat aircraft may sometimes last as long as 18 hours, very few such pilots will be subjected to regular 18-hour shifts in peacetime – a practice the striking pilots describe as the rule, rather than the exception on their jobs. They also note that after 18 hours with a crew of three and nothing but zip-lock bags for sanitation, the inside of the aircraft can get a bit unpleasant…
Why, exactly, the freight company thinks this is a good idea is not addressed by the article linked above. Certainly, every pound of equipment you can remove from the airplane means more payload you can carry and less spent on fuel, but even the military will provide pilots with a chemical-pack toilet (like the one in an RV or camper) whenever there is room to do so, and there’s no doubt that the company is not coming off very well in the press accounts of this issue. To say nothing about the striking pilots or the potential loss of business if more of their personnel join the revolt…
I point all of this out to you not, as usual, because I believe that anyone following this blog (assuming anyone follows this blog) would be daft enough to believe that their employees would be okay with 18-hour shifts every day, let alone 4-hour turn-around times between shifts or plastic bags for lavatory functions, but rather to illustrate the point that decisions that make sense on paper don’t always work well in practice. The fact is, I’ve worked 18-hour (and 20-hour and 25-hour) shifts without overtime pay, had to go back to work after only 4 or 5 hours off, and worked under conditions where a plastic bag would actually have been a step up over our sanitary facilities – and every one of those companies has been destroyed by the competition, driven out of business by employee lawsuits, bankrupted by boycotts, shut down by government regulations, or all of the above. So the next time you have a great money-saving idea, remember to think it through…
Happy Labor Day, everybody!
Thursday, June 4, 2009
Tipping Over the Court Decision
We’ve already considered the issue of tips as part of an employee’s regular compensation in this blog, and I’ve also mentioned that as a Manager in the drugstore days, I was not allowed to accept them (customers would occasionally insist, and I’d then accept on behalf of my crew – and share the wealth with everyone who was on-shift that day). What you may not know is that while a number of states allow employers to pay lower-than-minimum wages to employees who receive tips, most of those same states have laws preventing employers from paying supervisors or managers based on the assumption of tips, OR letting supervisors and managers participate in “tip pool” systems. Which makes the situation going on in California right now all the more confusing…
If you’ve ever seen a tip jar on the counter at a bagel shop or a coffee house, then you’ve seen a tip pool in operation. In some restaurants, for example, you will see a team of servers looking after multiple tables, to the extent that it’s really difficult to tell who did the most work looking after a specific party – or who the customers were trying to reward when they left their tip. So what will happen is that at the end of the night, the manager will add up all of the tips left during that shift, divide by the number of people who were waiting tables (and sometimes by the number of hours worked), and pay each waiter that amount. Obviously, it doesn’t make any sense to have the manager (or supervisor) who is responsible for dividing up the tips also share in them; there is no way any of the staff would ever trust such a process, and no reason the customers (or higher management) should trust in such a system, either. You’d have to be an idiot even to suggest it…
Apparently, the people running Starbucks are that sort of idiot. A lawsuit filed in California in 2004 brought to light the fact that Starbucks was requiring its personnel to share tip-jar proceeds with their supervisors, despite state laws prohibiting this practice. The company defended this regulation by pointing out that a Starbucks supervisor does 95% of the same tasks as anyone else in their retail locations, including taking care of the customers, and that therefore it was appropriate that they share in the rewards (tips). Starbucks corporate also noted that its “supervisors” can’t hire, discipline or terminate the employees they direct, and are not responsible for distributing tips the way a manager running a tip pool would be. The court, however, felt differently, and last year awarded the baristas about $86 million in damages, and $20 million in interest. Which would have settled the matter had the company not appealed…
Which, of course, they promptly did. A story being reported this week by the Associated Press indicates that the 4th District Appeals Court has overturned the lower court’s ruling, agreeing with the company that the supervisors are doing essentially the same job as the baristas and should therefore be given a share of the tips. Which wouldn’t be a problem, except that the ruling directly contradicts the section of the state’s labor code that governs compensation schemes, which explicitly states that employers may not pay supervisors (of any kind) from tip pools (of any kind). Needless to say, the case is on its way to the California Supreme Court…
Now, I don’t want to rag on Starbucks, which is having enough troubles of its own, what with the closing stores, stock devaluation, and new direct challenges from McDonalds and Dunkin’ Doughnuts. But I can’t help thinking that this is not a healthy policy, both the original tip-sharing requirement and the ongoing legal battles. On the one hand, it has the potential to be a massive public relations nightmare, and on the other hand it has the potential to devalue supervisor positions all across the service sector (if companies are allowed to start cutting those salaries and paying the corresponding employees from tips), lowering the standard of living for supervisors and the quality of personnel who would be willing to accept those jobs. The repercussions could destabilize yet another sector of American commerce, lower the quality of service and ultimately performance and profit levels for thousands of companies, and drive the economy that much further into the tank…
Seems like rather a lot to risk over just not having to pay your supervisors another dollar or two, that’s all I’m saying…
If you’ve ever seen a tip jar on the counter at a bagel shop or a coffee house, then you’ve seen a tip pool in operation. In some restaurants, for example, you will see a team of servers looking after multiple tables, to the extent that it’s really difficult to tell who did the most work looking after a specific party – or who the customers were trying to reward when they left their tip. So what will happen is that at the end of the night, the manager will add up all of the tips left during that shift, divide by the number of people who were waiting tables (and sometimes by the number of hours worked), and pay each waiter that amount. Obviously, it doesn’t make any sense to have the manager (or supervisor) who is responsible for dividing up the tips also share in them; there is no way any of the staff would ever trust such a process, and no reason the customers (or higher management) should trust in such a system, either. You’d have to be an idiot even to suggest it…
Apparently, the people running Starbucks are that sort of idiot. A lawsuit filed in California in 2004 brought to light the fact that Starbucks was requiring its personnel to share tip-jar proceeds with their supervisors, despite state laws prohibiting this practice. The company defended this regulation by pointing out that a Starbucks supervisor does 95% of the same tasks as anyone else in their retail locations, including taking care of the customers, and that therefore it was appropriate that they share in the rewards (tips). Starbucks corporate also noted that its “supervisors” can’t hire, discipline or terminate the employees they direct, and are not responsible for distributing tips the way a manager running a tip pool would be. The court, however, felt differently, and last year awarded the baristas about $86 million in damages, and $20 million in interest. Which would have settled the matter had the company not appealed…
Which, of course, they promptly did. A story being reported this week by the Associated Press indicates that the 4th District Appeals Court has overturned the lower court’s ruling, agreeing with the company that the supervisors are doing essentially the same job as the baristas and should therefore be given a share of the tips. Which wouldn’t be a problem, except that the ruling directly contradicts the section of the state’s labor code that governs compensation schemes, which explicitly states that employers may not pay supervisors (of any kind) from tip pools (of any kind). Needless to say, the case is on its way to the California Supreme Court…
Now, I don’t want to rag on Starbucks, which is having enough troubles of its own, what with the closing stores, stock devaluation, and new direct challenges from McDonalds and Dunkin’ Doughnuts. But I can’t help thinking that this is not a healthy policy, both the original tip-sharing requirement and the ongoing legal battles. On the one hand, it has the potential to be a massive public relations nightmare, and on the other hand it has the potential to devalue supervisor positions all across the service sector (if companies are allowed to start cutting those salaries and paying the corresponding employees from tips), lowering the standard of living for supervisors and the quality of personnel who would be willing to accept those jobs. The repercussions could destabilize yet another sector of American commerce, lower the quality of service and ultimately performance and profit levels for thousands of companies, and drive the economy that much further into the tank…
Seems like rather a lot to risk over just not having to pay your supervisors another dollar or two, that’s all I’m saying…
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Pirates vs. Lawyers
Okay, I know the ongoing Internet meme is “Pirates vs. Ninjas,” but the fact is that if there are any ninjas running around in the 21st Century you’re really not likely to find out anything of substance about them in a business blog. Pirates versus lawyers, however, was probably inevitable from the moment an American-flagged vessel was taken and any member of the crew subjected to any inconvenience, let alone harm…
To the surprise of, apparently, absolutely no one, a member of the crew from the Maersk Alabama is suing both the shipping line and the company that provided the crew for subjecting him to an unsafe work environment, not having armed security aboard, not sending the ship on a safer route to its destination, and so on. I call it to your attention not to mock either the companies or the crew, but to point out that this is another one of those cases that is more complicated than it looks…
On the one hand, pirate attacks off the Horn of Africa are not exactly a new occurrence. In fact, the Alabama herself was attacked on at least two prior occasions on the same voyage before the pirates managed to board her successfully. This has prompted several nations to being regular anti-piracy patrols through that part of the shipping lanes, and some companies (notably the Italian cruise line mentioned a few posts ago) to start putting armed security guards aboard their ships. So it’s no stretch to imagine that both companies already knew the situation was a hazard and did nothing about it because of cost considerations. On the other hand, the fact that the crew had been holding safety meetings “every month for the last three years” (according to the crewman bringing the lawsuit) to discuss the situation suggests that they already knew they were going into harm’s way…
So who’s right here? Should the company have made greater efforts to protect the crew of the Alabama before they sent her back into pirate-infested waters? Should the crew have realized that the company was sending them into harm’s way and either demanded hazard pay or just quit and gotten safer jobs? Do we criticize the companies for trying to make more money by not going around the Somali coast and/or paying for armed guards, or do we call the crew on knowing the job was risky and then complaining when the risks actually came home to roost? More to the point, what would you do if it was your company – or a job that you otherwise liked and wanted to keep?
It sounds like some poor jury in Texas is in for a rough time of it. Personally, I’m just grateful that the closest we have to either pirates or lawyers on my current gig is the Law School across the street. And if there are any ninjas lurking around the Upper Midwest these days, I really don’t want to know about them…
To the surprise of, apparently, absolutely no one, a member of the crew from the Maersk Alabama is suing both the shipping line and the company that provided the crew for subjecting him to an unsafe work environment, not having armed security aboard, not sending the ship on a safer route to its destination, and so on. I call it to your attention not to mock either the companies or the crew, but to point out that this is another one of those cases that is more complicated than it looks…
On the one hand, pirate attacks off the Horn of Africa are not exactly a new occurrence. In fact, the Alabama herself was attacked on at least two prior occasions on the same voyage before the pirates managed to board her successfully. This has prompted several nations to being regular anti-piracy patrols through that part of the shipping lanes, and some companies (notably the Italian cruise line mentioned a few posts ago) to start putting armed security guards aboard their ships. So it’s no stretch to imagine that both companies already knew the situation was a hazard and did nothing about it because of cost considerations. On the other hand, the fact that the crew had been holding safety meetings “every month for the last three years” (according to the crewman bringing the lawsuit) to discuss the situation suggests that they already knew they were going into harm’s way…
So who’s right here? Should the company have made greater efforts to protect the crew of the Alabama before they sent her back into pirate-infested waters? Should the crew have realized that the company was sending them into harm’s way and either demanded hazard pay or just quit and gotten safer jobs? Do we criticize the companies for trying to make more money by not going around the Somali coast and/or paying for armed guards, or do we call the crew on knowing the job was risky and then complaining when the risks actually came home to roost? More to the point, what would you do if it was your company – or a job that you otherwise liked and wanted to keep?
It sounds like some poor jury in Texas is in for a rough time of it. Personally, I’m just grateful that the closest we have to either pirates or lawyers on my current gig is the Law School across the street. And if there are any ninjas lurking around the Upper Midwest these days, I really don’t want to know about them…
Monday, March 9, 2009
The Ethics of Tipping
Looking back on my time in retail reminded me of another odd recurring event: getting a tip. I’ve worked for tips a few times, mostly on even less pleasant jobs, but every so often in retail I’d help someone carry something out to their car, tie something to the roof, get an odd-shaped (or very large) purchase out the loading dock, or in one spectacularly weird case, put out an engine fire in their car, and the customer would want to give me a tip – which gave me a bit of a problem…
You see, as the Assistant Manager of the drug store, I was prohibited by corporate regulations from accepting any form of gratuity from a customer. Technically, so were the rank-and-file personnel, but since the officer responsible for enforcing those regulations was me, and there was no way I was going to call anybody making less than $8 a hour (which wasn’t much even then) on it, the only person in the store with any customer contact duties who was ever likely to face disciplinary action for accepting a tip was me. And, since a drug store never has enough line personnel to go around, the Assistant Manager is also the person most likely to take on any extra duties (like helping someone get their order loaded into their car) and thus the most likely to be offered a tip in the first place…
Of course, the larger ethical issue surrounding tips is when to offer one – and how much you should offer. On the one hand, many customer service personnel (notably waiters) are paid at below minimum wage (sometimes effectively nothing) because they are assumed to make their living on tips, and the government allows their employers to screw them out of a minimum wage on the grounds that it’s better for the business. On the other hand, we’ve all heard stories about (and most of us have experienced) people whose service was horrible who still expect a fat tip at the end of your transaction, whatever it happens to be. Some of them will get really aggressive about it, and retaliate for bad tips whenever they can…
I don’t have a lot of problems with this myself, mostly because anything egregious enough to make me want to stiff someone on a tip will also be bad enough that I’ll ask to speak with their manager and do something (potentially, at least) much worse. Or, in extreme cases, I’ll cancel my order, pay for anything I’ve actually received thus far, and walk out, never to return. If I’ve stayed all of the way through dinner without raising a stink, I’ll give somebody a base-level tip just for effort; and if they’ve made any effort at all to do a good job I’ll try to reward them for it. But that’s just me; you’ll see a similar behavior pattern in anyone who’s ever worked for tips…
The thing is, the people who object to having to leave a tip on purely financial grounds are kidding themselves. If we abolish the laws that allow employers to pay sub-minimum wages to their personnel, all that will happen is that menu prices will rise to cover the higher wages (and massive payroll tax increases), lowering the number of people who can afford to eat out and eliminating any chance these employees might have had of earning a better living. Your tip responsibility might be smaller, but the price of your dinner will be larger, and all of the same people will go on being screwed…
In the long run, businesses that take care of their employees do better than those that do not – and I could show you the research that proves it, if any of you actually cared. For myself, when I was the Assistant Manager of the drug store and someone gave me a tip I’d usually use it to buy snacks for my crew, which led to the practice of keeping a “munchies fund” in the break room, where all of the management team (including the line supervisors who reported to me and the store’s higher-level managers) contributed “found money” like tips to a fund that kept our people in cookies and chips -- which led to a measurable increase in morale whenever I was on the manager’s desk…
It’s worth thinking about…
You see, as the Assistant Manager of the drug store, I was prohibited by corporate regulations from accepting any form of gratuity from a customer. Technically, so were the rank-and-file personnel, but since the officer responsible for enforcing those regulations was me, and there was no way I was going to call anybody making less than $8 a hour (which wasn’t much even then) on it, the only person in the store with any customer contact duties who was ever likely to face disciplinary action for accepting a tip was me. And, since a drug store never has enough line personnel to go around, the Assistant Manager is also the person most likely to take on any extra duties (like helping someone get their order loaded into their car) and thus the most likely to be offered a tip in the first place…
Of course, the larger ethical issue surrounding tips is when to offer one – and how much you should offer. On the one hand, many customer service personnel (notably waiters) are paid at below minimum wage (sometimes effectively nothing) because they are assumed to make their living on tips, and the government allows their employers to screw them out of a minimum wage on the grounds that it’s better for the business. On the other hand, we’ve all heard stories about (and most of us have experienced) people whose service was horrible who still expect a fat tip at the end of your transaction, whatever it happens to be. Some of them will get really aggressive about it, and retaliate for bad tips whenever they can…
I don’t have a lot of problems with this myself, mostly because anything egregious enough to make me want to stiff someone on a tip will also be bad enough that I’ll ask to speak with their manager and do something (potentially, at least) much worse. Or, in extreme cases, I’ll cancel my order, pay for anything I’ve actually received thus far, and walk out, never to return. If I’ve stayed all of the way through dinner without raising a stink, I’ll give somebody a base-level tip just for effort; and if they’ve made any effort at all to do a good job I’ll try to reward them for it. But that’s just me; you’ll see a similar behavior pattern in anyone who’s ever worked for tips…
The thing is, the people who object to having to leave a tip on purely financial grounds are kidding themselves. If we abolish the laws that allow employers to pay sub-minimum wages to their personnel, all that will happen is that menu prices will rise to cover the higher wages (and massive payroll tax increases), lowering the number of people who can afford to eat out and eliminating any chance these employees might have had of earning a better living. Your tip responsibility might be smaller, but the price of your dinner will be larger, and all of the same people will go on being screwed…
In the long run, businesses that take care of their employees do better than those that do not – and I could show you the research that proves it, if any of you actually cared. For myself, when I was the Assistant Manager of the drug store and someone gave me a tip I’d usually use it to buy snacks for my crew, which led to the practice of keeping a “munchies fund” in the break room, where all of the management team (including the line supervisors who reported to me and the store’s higher-level managers) contributed “found money” like tips to a fund that kept our people in cookies and chips -- which led to a measurable increase in morale whenever I was on the manager’s desk…
It’s worth thinking about…
Sunday, July 6, 2008
Time Travel
I’m sending this one on ahead to myself (and any of you who are still reading this space), since I don’t think it would be either fair or safe to publish this post while still employed on this job. So for those of you reading along (including me), welcome back to the second week of June, 2008, and the truly bizarre place known as UCLA Extension, or UNEX…
Several weeks ago our Director scheduled a “retreat” for the Senior Staff members, to discuss ideas for a possible reorganization of the department. With our fiscal year ending, and funds being short, the Director decided to hold the retreat on Monday, June 9, 2008 at the Faculty Club facility on UCLA’s campus (that’s yesterday, from the point of view of when this post was being written). Given the number (and nature) of miss-steps that subsequently occurred, I thought this might be a good time to consider management retreats in general, and some of the things to avoid doing on one in particular…
To begin with, the whole project ran afoul of UNEX rules against spending money on food or entertainment for employees. Technically, even though Extension does not receive any taxpayer money, the funds we do get (from fees and tuitions) are still State money, and can’t be spent on these categories. Undaunted, the Senior Staff made plans to “retreat” to the conference room across the hall. The problem here is that getting off-site – or at least getting out of your regular working space – is critical for this sort of conceptual meeting to work in the first place. Otherwise, not only do you lose the sense of occasion (and importance) obtained by being Outside, but you’re much too likely to have people excuse themselves and go work on their usual assignments – which is in fact what happened…
Then there’s the lack of structure and the overabundance of agendas – which I regret to say are quite typical of this type of retreat. Every member of the management team is going to be threatened by different aspects of a reorganization, and each member of the team will have his or her own ideas about what changes should be made. In the case of our department, the Program Directors have been running their own areas of operation as little independent departments for years, and will resist any chance to centralize control or work more collaboratively, while the Program Managers have been used primarily as Administrative Analysts (not managers at all) during this period, and would like to actually have some hand in running things. If the Department’s Director doesn’t set the agenda and take a firm hand in running the discussion, the results will be anarchy – and the complete waste of a work day – before people decide the whole thing is rubbish, tune out, and the excuse themselves to return to work…
Which is, in fact, what appears to have happened…
Compounding matters, at least as far as I’m concerned, is the fact that I wasn’t invited to this “retreat” myself. Now I know some of you are thinking that since I’m leaving this job in three weeks, getting my opinion on the future direction of the department is not important. That’s almost certainly what my boss was thinking when he told me not to attend. But in this case, he was wrong (and so was anyone out there who agreed with him) for two reasons: First, because I am the only member of this department (however ephemeral) with a management degree, and the only one experience in leading this sort of reorganization event; and second, because with me absent and the third Program Manager position currently vacant, that left only one manager to represent the interests of a good 40% of the management team. The manager in question is a good man, and I’m sure he put on a really good show, but there’s no denying the fact that he was outnumbered five to one…
I could go on, but I think you get the point. The whole exercise was a huge waste of time and resources (although fortunately not taxpayer money), and will have to be repeated any number of times before any substantive change happens – if, in fact, any ever does. All things considered, I’d rather be in Winslow…
Several weeks ago our Director scheduled a “retreat” for the Senior Staff members, to discuss ideas for a possible reorganization of the department. With our fiscal year ending, and funds being short, the Director decided to hold the retreat on Monday, June 9, 2008 at the Faculty Club facility on UCLA’s campus (that’s yesterday, from the point of view of when this post was being written). Given the number (and nature) of miss-steps that subsequently occurred, I thought this might be a good time to consider management retreats in general, and some of the things to avoid doing on one in particular…
To begin with, the whole project ran afoul of UNEX rules against spending money on food or entertainment for employees. Technically, even though Extension does not receive any taxpayer money, the funds we do get (from fees and tuitions) are still State money, and can’t be spent on these categories. Undaunted, the Senior Staff made plans to “retreat” to the conference room across the hall. The problem here is that getting off-site – or at least getting out of your regular working space – is critical for this sort of conceptual meeting to work in the first place. Otherwise, not only do you lose the sense of occasion (and importance) obtained by being Outside, but you’re much too likely to have people excuse themselves and go work on their usual assignments – which is in fact what happened…
Then there’s the lack of structure and the overabundance of agendas – which I regret to say are quite typical of this type of retreat. Every member of the management team is going to be threatened by different aspects of a reorganization, and each member of the team will have his or her own ideas about what changes should be made. In the case of our department, the Program Directors have been running their own areas of operation as little independent departments for years, and will resist any chance to centralize control or work more collaboratively, while the Program Managers have been used primarily as Administrative Analysts (not managers at all) during this period, and would like to actually have some hand in running things. If the Department’s Director doesn’t set the agenda and take a firm hand in running the discussion, the results will be anarchy – and the complete waste of a work day – before people decide the whole thing is rubbish, tune out, and the excuse themselves to return to work…
Which is, in fact, what appears to have happened…
Compounding matters, at least as far as I’m concerned, is the fact that I wasn’t invited to this “retreat” myself. Now I know some of you are thinking that since I’m leaving this job in three weeks, getting my opinion on the future direction of the department is not important. That’s almost certainly what my boss was thinking when he told me not to attend. But in this case, he was wrong (and so was anyone out there who agreed with him) for two reasons: First, because I am the only member of this department (however ephemeral) with a management degree, and the only one experience in leading this sort of reorganization event; and second, because with me absent and the third Program Manager position currently vacant, that left only one manager to represent the interests of a good 40% of the management team. The manager in question is a good man, and I’m sure he put on a really good show, but there’s no denying the fact that he was outnumbered five to one…
I could go on, but I think you get the point. The whole exercise was a huge waste of time and resources (although fortunately not taxpayer money), and will have to be repeated any number of times before any substantive change happens – if, in fact, any ever does. All things considered, I’d rather be in Winslow…
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
Before You Go…
How many of you out there have ever had an exit interview? To date, my working life has included about 22 years of full-time employment, and in the dozen or so jobs I’ve had so far (which I realize is too many for only 22 years – especially when you consider that one of those jobs lasted 5 years and two others were 3 years each) only two companies actually conducted an exit interview with me when I left. In one or two cases, where I had been laid off or asked to resign, I suppose my employers might have felt that I didn’t have much to tell them (they were wrong, in fact), but in the remaining eight cases, it was mostly a matter of the company not doing such interviews, my boss being too unprofessional to bother about one, or some other form of institutional failure…
When I left my job with Tosco in Phoenix I was so exasperated that no one was going to interview me (the company had turned down my request for an interview) that I wrote down all of my comments and sent it to our Director as a memo. But what I have since discovered is that almost no one seems to conduct these interviews; outside of very large and very regimented organizations (like my late employers) most people seem to feel that someone who has elected to leave the company is no longer relevant to the future of the organization, and if they’ve been laid off, asked to leave, or fired, there’s no point in even listening to them. Indeed, you’d better have them escorted off of the premises before they have a further bad influence on the rest of your people or, you know, steal something…
I’ll admit that if you’ve fired someone for gross incompetence, there may not be much point in trying to capture what they know about the organization. But even someone who does not do their job properly may still know things about the company that the management team doesn’t, and someone who has elected to leave voluntarily almost certainly does. The purpose of doing these interviews is not just to find out why someone has chosen to leave, but also what they know about the firm, what they think is positive, what they think needs work, where your organization is weak, and where it is strong, and so on. Because, let’s face it, it’s now or never…
From a management standpoint, the exit interview gives you a unique opportunity to look inside your own organization and find out what your employees really think about you and your policies. An employee who is leaving the company will tell you things they would never dare say when there was a chance that you would fire (or discipline) them; they’ll tell your human resources people things you would not believe. Conflicts between employees, abuses of power and privilege, unsuspected rivalries, and outright flaunting of company regulations (and sometimes the law) may come to light at this time. And then there’s the possibility that the departing employee hasn’t been doing the job you thought they were doing in the first place…
The bottom line is that like most feedback opportunities, the majority of all exit interviews will not produce anything spectacular, unexpected, or even interesting; but that one occasional example might contain a single nugget of information that could change your entire operation for the better – or save the company from destruction. It might seem tedious, expensive and time consuming to conduct those interviews (or just expensive, if you pay the human resource people to do them for you), but I have to ask if you can really afford to take the chance of missing that one special piece of information. Can you, in fact, afford to take the chance of ignoring your employees’ opinions in the hope that they don’t know anything you need to know? It’s possible, I suppose – but I for one would not want to bet the company on it…
When I left my job with Tosco in Phoenix I was so exasperated that no one was going to interview me (the company had turned down my request for an interview) that I wrote down all of my comments and sent it to our Director as a memo. But what I have since discovered is that almost no one seems to conduct these interviews; outside of very large and very regimented organizations (like my late employers) most people seem to feel that someone who has elected to leave the company is no longer relevant to the future of the organization, and if they’ve been laid off, asked to leave, or fired, there’s no point in even listening to them. Indeed, you’d better have them escorted off of the premises before they have a further bad influence on the rest of your people or, you know, steal something…
I’ll admit that if you’ve fired someone for gross incompetence, there may not be much point in trying to capture what they know about the organization. But even someone who does not do their job properly may still know things about the company that the management team doesn’t, and someone who has elected to leave voluntarily almost certainly does. The purpose of doing these interviews is not just to find out why someone has chosen to leave, but also what they know about the firm, what they think is positive, what they think needs work, where your organization is weak, and where it is strong, and so on. Because, let’s face it, it’s now or never…
From a management standpoint, the exit interview gives you a unique opportunity to look inside your own organization and find out what your employees really think about you and your policies. An employee who is leaving the company will tell you things they would never dare say when there was a chance that you would fire (or discipline) them; they’ll tell your human resources people things you would not believe. Conflicts between employees, abuses of power and privilege, unsuspected rivalries, and outright flaunting of company regulations (and sometimes the law) may come to light at this time. And then there’s the possibility that the departing employee hasn’t been doing the job you thought they were doing in the first place…
The bottom line is that like most feedback opportunities, the majority of all exit interviews will not produce anything spectacular, unexpected, or even interesting; but that one occasional example might contain a single nugget of information that could change your entire operation for the better – or save the company from destruction. It might seem tedious, expensive and time consuming to conduct those interviews (or just expensive, if you pay the human resource people to do them for you), but I have to ask if you can really afford to take the chance of missing that one special piece of information. Can you, in fact, afford to take the chance of ignoring your employees’ opinions in the hope that they don’t know anything you need to know? It’s possible, I suppose – but I for one would not want to bet the company on it…
Friday, June 13, 2008
Golden Coffins
According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, if Rupert Murdoch, CEO of News Corp. were to pass away this week, the company would immediately pay death benefits to his estate in the amount of $1.37 million. That’s right, folks; Mr. Murdoch’s heirs would receive an extra $1.37 million US, just because he died while still employed there. Most of us working stiffs have some sort of minor death benefit – usually just enough to cover funeral expenses, unless we want to pony up the premiums ourselves. But Rupert Murdoch, a multi-billionaire, is getting a death benefit equal to roughly 30 years of my salary. It sounds preposterous, doesn’t it? Until you realize that the President of News Corp. (57-year-old Peter Chernin) is slated to receive $5 million in company-funded life insurance and $32 million in other benefits if he passes away during this fiscal year…
Benefits of this type are generally known as “Golden Coffins,” and are justified the same way every other outrageous Executive perk is justified: as being necessary to attract and retain the best people. And to some extent this might be true; if you can get a $300 million benefit from Company A versus a $50 million benefit from Company B, for doing the same job, you’d probably go to work for Company A, wouldn’t you? The real question here is what, exactly, these executives do that is worth paying them salaries and bonuses in the hundreds of millions of dollars in the first place. Especially when you consider that said executives will be dead at the time these benefits are being paid out…
Consider the case of Brian Roberts, CEO of Comcast, whose $298 million dollar death benefits including continuing his salary and benefits for five years after his death. Or consider Disney’s Robert Iger, who will receive $62.4 million including three years of his salary. Or Charles Schwab, founder of the firm which bears his name, who will receive $3.7 million per year for 15 years for the license of his name as part of the $64.5 million he will receive after he passes away. Or, most amazing of all, consider Eugene Isenberg, CEO of Nabors Industries, who will receive $263.6 million in severance pay when he dies. No matter how good Mr. Isenberg is at his job, it’s difficult to fathom why he should be paid the equivalent of employing 186 people for 30 YEARS EACH at my current salary just for dropping dead…
The people who are advocating CEO compensation reform call these arrangements the ultimate example of not paying for performance, and in many ways they are quite correct. Some CEOs (and their apologists) excuse such arrangements as being based on the company’s stock price: since the death benefit is based on how well the company is doing, this supposedly gives the CEO an extra incentive to maximize stockholder value. Critics will quickly point out that every CEO is being paid to maximize stockholder value already, and many of them are being paid hundreds of millions of dollars to do so; if they want to leave 9-figure fortunes for their heirs they can surely afford to buy their own life insurance…
Personally, I’ve never had any issue with “pay for performance” programs; if the only change to your company was a new CEO, and your company’s performance improved by $700 million that year, I see nothing wrong with offering that individual a few percentage points of the improvement. Provided, of course, that he or she gets no bonus in a year where performance deteriorates, and is fired if that performance continues to degrade for several additional years. And personally, I would prefer to be worth more to the company (and my heirs) alive than I am dead. But as a taxpayer (and in some cases as a stockholder as well) I have to question how much these outrageous death benefits really contribute to the health of the company…
Benefits of this type are generally known as “Golden Coffins,” and are justified the same way every other outrageous Executive perk is justified: as being necessary to attract and retain the best people. And to some extent this might be true; if you can get a $300 million benefit from Company A versus a $50 million benefit from Company B, for doing the same job, you’d probably go to work for Company A, wouldn’t you? The real question here is what, exactly, these executives do that is worth paying them salaries and bonuses in the hundreds of millions of dollars in the first place. Especially when you consider that said executives will be dead at the time these benefits are being paid out…
Consider the case of Brian Roberts, CEO of Comcast, whose $298 million dollar death benefits including continuing his salary and benefits for five years after his death. Or consider Disney’s Robert Iger, who will receive $62.4 million including three years of his salary. Or Charles Schwab, founder of the firm which bears his name, who will receive $3.7 million per year for 15 years for the license of his name as part of the $64.5 million he will receive after he passes away. Or, most amazing of all, consider Eugene Isenberg, CEO of Nabors Industries, who will receive $263.6 million in severance pay when he dies. No matter how good Mr. Isenberg is at his job, it’s difficult to fathom why he should be paid the equivalent of employing 186 people for 30 YEARS EACH at my current salary just for dropping dead…
The people who are advocating CEO compensation reform call these arrangements the ultimate example of not paying for performance, and in many ways they are quite correct. Some CEOs (and their apologists) excuse such arrangements as being based on the company’s stock price: since the death benefit is based on how well the company is doing, this supposedly gives the CEO an extra incentive to maximize stockholder value. Critics will quickly point out that every CEO is being paid to maximize stockholder value already, and many of them are being paid hundreds of millions of dollars to do so; if they want to leave 9-figure fortunes for their heirs they can surely afford to buy their own life insurance…
Personally, I’ve never had any issue with “pay for performance” programs; if the only change to your company was a new CEO, and your company’s performance improved by $700 million that year, I see nothing wrong with offering that individual a few percentage points of the improvement. Provided, of course, that he or she gets no bonus in a year where performance deteriorates, and is fired if that performance continues to degrade for several additional years. And personally, I would prefer to be worth more to the company (and my heirs) alive than I am dead. But as a taxpayer (and in some cases as a stockholder as well) I have to question how much these outrageous death benefits really contribute to the health of the company…
Thursday, May 1, 2008
The Ethics of Family Leave
There's been a case in the news lately that points up just how thorny the whole "family leave" situation really is. If you're pro-business you probably regard these laws as putting the good of the individual (and their family) ahead of the company, the other employees, the economy, and society as a whole. If you're anti-business you probably regard these laws as the only thing standing between evil company owners who would skin their employees and sell the hides for footballs if they thought they could get away with it and basic human dignity. As usual, the truth lies somewhere between these extremes...
The case in question seems a bit far-fetched, and the fact that it's being reported by the New York Post does not help. According to the story, the employee was working 60 hours per week up until she began experiencing difficulties with her pregnancy, her doctors required her to spend several months on bed rest, and then only return for 30-hour weeks or less, but the company was not willing to agree to short work weeks, stating that the position was exempt and they would therefore work the poor woman for as many hours as they like. Almost makes the company's managers sound like they should be wearing black capes and twirling long mustachios, doesn't it?
The company isn't commenting on pending litigation (of course there's pending litigation. What made you think there wouldn't be?), but you can imagine how the other side of this story would go: it's a key position; we can't afford to pay two people to work it; we cooperated with the three months plus of family leave and vacations, but we can't just screw around for an undefined number of additional months/years; we understand the importance of family (and health) concerns, but we also have an obligation to our shareholders and the rest of our workforce (who will be unemployed and uninsured if we tank the company); it's not fair to our other exempt personnel, and so on.
So is it a case of somebody trying to achieve work-life balance and being screwed by their (now former) employer, or is it somebody who wants to get paid for 60 hours a week but only work 30, and also sees the opportunity to sue for a huge punitive settlement if they don't get their way? I can't tell you without seeing the actual documents of the case, but it does raise the question of what would you do if it was your company -- and your money? All else being equal -- the hours and working conditions are industry standard, and the employee isn't just trying to scam the company -- at what point do we have to declare that employing this individual is not practical, and request that he or she find another job?
I think we can probably agree that some jobs just aren't well suited to new parents; something that takes you away from your family for 60 hours a week isn't a good choice if you want to maintain a normal family life, and if you've just had a baby it's not likely to work out. By the same token, there are going to be some jobs that can't be split up among multiple employees and require an irregular (and large) number of hours each week. My question is, if you're the owner (or CEO) of a company with that problem, where would you draw the line? And how many people on either side of this issue will be flaming you on the Internet and burning you in effigy in the parking lot, regardless of where you draw it?
It's worth thinking about...
The case in question seems a bit far-fetched, and the fact that it's being reported by the New York Post does not help. According to the story, the employee was working 60 hours per week up until she began experiencing difficulties with her pregnancy, her doctors required her to spend several months on bed rest, and then only return for 30-hour weeks or less, but the company was not willing to agree to short work weeks, stating that the position was exempt and they would therefore work the poor woman for as many hours as they like. Almost makes the company's managers sound like they should be wearing black capes and twirling long mustachios, doesn't it?
The company isn't commenting on pending litigation (of course there's pending litigation. What made you think there wouldn't be?), but you can imagine how the other side of this story would go: it's a key position; we can't afford to pay two people to work it; we cooperated with the three months plus of family leave and vacations, but we can't just screw around for an undefined number of additional months/years; we understand the importance of family (and health) concerns, but we also have an obligation to our shareholders and the rest of our workforce (who will be unemployed and uninsured if we tank the company); it's not fair to our other exempt personnel, and so on.
So is it a case of somebody trying to achieve work-life balance and being screwed by their (now former) employer, or is it somebody who wants to get paid for 60 hours a week but only work 30, and also sees the opportunity to sue for a huge punitive settlement if they don't get their way? I can't tell you without seeing the actual documents of the case, but it does raise the question of what would you do if it was your company -- and your money? All else being equal -- the hours and working conditions are industry standard, and the employee isn't just trying to scam the company -- at what point do we have to declare that employing this individual is not practical, and request that he or she find another job?
I think we can probably agree that some jobs just aren't well suited to new parents; something that takes you away from your family for 60 hours a week isn't a good choice if you want to maintain a normal family life, and if you've just had a baby it's not likely to work out. By the same token, there are going to be some jobs that can't be split up among multiple employees and require an irregular (and large) number of hours each week. My question is, if you're the owner (or CEO) of a company with that problem, where would you draw the line? And how many people on either side of this issue will be flaming you on the Internet and burning you in effigy in the parking lot, regardless of where you draw it?
It's worth thinking about...
Sunday, January 6, 2008
The Ethics of Drug Testing
I know; most of you have been reading essays, rants, screeds, and in some cases legal briefs on this subject for years now, and you’re sick of hearing about it. Well, I’m not a lawyer, so I can’t comment on the legality of drug testing in the workplace; and I’m not an ethicist, so I can’t really comment on whether the entire process is really ethical or not; I’m a management scientist and a strategy scholar, and that does qualify me to comment on the management implications and strategic value of these testing programs. And just on those bases, there’s still a lot worth commenting on…
Now, I understand all of the points about invasion of privacy and unreasonable searches and so on, but the fact still remains that I really want the pilot of an airliner I’m flying on, the bus I’m riding on, or even the gasoline truck I’m driving behind to be clean and sober. Unfortunately, if the person operating a vehicle of this type has a bad drug trip and winds up killing dozens (or hundreds) of people, the fact that the operator can be sent to jail for long periods of time and sued for the wrongful deaths of their victims (assuming the pilot/driver survives in the first place!) isn’t going to matter to those who are killed, and it won’t matter much to their families, either. The stakes are so high, and the consequences of failure are so completely irreparable, that there is no way to “fix” the situation afterwards.
The problem is, drug testing is no real guarantee of safety, either. Any test method devised by humans can be beaten (if only by having somebody else provide the test samples), and even if someone does test clean, there’s nothing to prevent them from going out the NEXT day and getting hammered just before getting behind the wheel. A good manager, who works closely with his/her pilots or drivers and knows who is reliable and weeds out anyone likely to do something suicidally/homicidally stupid will help, but even the straightest people do slip off that straight and narrow way sometimes. I can tell you from personal experience that there’s no judging a book by its cover on this issue – and that sometimes the last person you would ever expect will turn out to be the one with the secret drug problem.
Then there’s the issue of false positives. Everybody knows these happen; there was even a segment on Mythbusters a few years back where they determined that you can get a false positive for at least 12 hours (possibly 18) after eating a poppy seed cake or roll. So you might find yourself watching an innocent hippie (who just happens to love poppy seed cakes) like a hawk, while a straight-arrow prig who irons and starches his underwear does a big pile of blow the day after a drug test and then crashes a tour bus into a corner market. It happens, folks. Drug and alcohol users have to be lucky every time; failure causes under critical conditions only have to get "lucky" once...
From a management standpoint, a drug test will never replace the need to know your people, keep a close watch over them, and help the ones who are making bad choices make better ones. This will always be part of the manager’s role, and if you don’t want to do those things, you may want to consider another line of work. From a strategic standpoint, random drug testing may or may not help your company avoid fines, legal exposure, and other problems (check with your corporate counsel), but it won’t replace the need for good line managers, and it can’t make you completely safe from drug-related problems. If you feel that the potential savings to be realized by preventing possible drug-related incidents (or just being able to demonstrate in court that you’ve made every effort to prevent them) exceeds the costs of lowering morale, generating employee resentment, losing valuable personnel, and being sued for invasion of privacy, then go ahead, but rest assured, no matter which way you choose to go, someone somewhere will tell you that you should have done the opposite.
Sometimes there really aren’t any good answers. It’s worth thinking about…
Now, I understand all of the points about invasion of privacy and unreasonable searches and so on, but the fact still remains that I really want the pilot of an airliner I’m flying on, the bus I’m riding on, or even the gasoline truck I’m driving behind to be clean and sober. Unfortunately, if the person operating a vehicle of this type has a bad drug trip and winds up killing dozens (or hundreds) of people, the fact that the operator can be sent to jail for long periods of time and sued for the wrongful deaths of their victims (assuming the pilot/driver survives in the first place!) isn’t going to matter to those who are killed, and it won’t matter much to their families, either. The stakes are so high, and the consequences of failure are so completely irreparable, that there is no way to “fix” the situation afterwards.
The problem is, drug testing is no real guarantee of safety, either. Any test method devised by humans can be beaten (if only by having somebody else provide the test samples), and even if someone does test clean, there’s nothing to prevent them from going out the NEXT day and getting hammered just before getting behind the wheel. A good manager, who works closely with his/her pilots or drivers and knows who is reliable and weeds out anyone likely to do something suicidally/homicidally stupid will help, but even the straightest people do slip off that straight and narrow way sometimes. I can tell you from personal experience that there’s no judging a book by its cover on this issue – and that sometimes the last person you would ever expect will turn out to be the one with the secret drug problem.
Then there’s the issue of false positives. Everybody knows these happen; there was even a segment on Mythbusters a few years back where they determined that you can get a false positive for at least 12 hours (possibly 18) after eating a poppy seed cake or roll. So you might find yourself watching an innocent hippie (who just happens to love poppy seed cakes) like a hawk, while a straight-arrow prig who irons and starches his underwear does a big pile of blow the day after a drug test and then crashes a tour bus into a corner market. It happens, folks. Drug and alcohol users have to be lucky every time; failure causes under critical conditions only have to get "lucky" once...
From a management standpoint, a drug test will never replace the need to know your people, keep a close watch over them, and help the ones who are making bad choices make better ones. This will always be part of the manager’s role, and if you don’t want to do those things, you may want to consider another line of work. From a strategic standpoint, random drug testing may or may not help your company avoid fines, legal exposure, and other problems (check with your corporate counsel), but it won’t replace the need for good line managers, and it can’t make you completely safe from drug-related problems. If you feel that the potential savings to be realized by preventing possible drug-related incidents (or just being able to demonstrate in court that you’ve made every effort to prevent them) exceeds the costs of lowering morale, generating employee resentment, losing valuable personnel, and being sued for invasion of privacy, then go ahead, but rest assured, no matter which way you choose to go, someone somewhere will tell you that you should have done the opposite.
Sometimes there really aren’t any good answers. It’s worth thinking about…
Sunday, October 7, 2007
The Ethics of Brown-Nosing
In any social group, whether it has a larger function or not, you are going to encounter some cross-section of suck-ups, lickspittles and brown-noses doing what they do best, which is curry favor with those more powerful than themselves on some dimension. It seems to be a hard-wired part of human behavior, and only the most principled of people are completely immune to it. But while the debate as to whether this behavior represents a defect of character or merely the ruthless drive to do whatever is necessary for personal success (and whether that sort of ruthlessness is itself a defect of character) may never be settled, it does seem clear that there is a line between working hard as a means of advancing one’s career and sucking up to the boss in order to avoid doing any hard work while still advancing one’s career – and that this line is sometimes finer than we realize.
Let me give you a scenario that my MBA instructor on human resources topics and ethics, Professor David Mathison gave our class in 1994. Let’s say you’ve just taken a new job, and you decide to put in a few extra hours of work each day, just to make the right impression. Everyone else goes home right at 5:00, but you stay until 6:30 or 7:00 every day, plugging away. Finally, one night, your boss comes back to the office to get something, and finds you still at your desk two hours after everyone else has left. Surprised to see you, he asks if anything is wrong.
This is your big moment. You smile and say, “Nothing’s wrong; I just wanted to get a few more things done before I left!”
And your boss frowns, and asks, “Are you having problems with your job? Everyone else seems able to finish all of their assignments by the end of business.”
And you realize that you’ve painted yourself into a corner. No, there’s no reason you couldn’t finish everything and go home on time. You’re actually doing more work than is necessary, either making the job more complicated than it has to be or taking on other people’s assignments, or both, simply because you wanted to look good. But there’s really no way to tell the boss that without looking like a complete suck-up, because that’s actually what you’ve been doing. You’re behaving in an unnatural or at least non-standard way in order to gain favor with those in power. It’s certainly more useful than complimenting the boss on his hideous fashion sense or offering to take his dry cleaning in for him, but it’s still currying favor. If your boss is the type who dislikes brown-nosing, you’ve probably generated the opposite result from the one you wanted.
Dr. Mathison’s point (and mine here, too) is that no matter how benign your sucking up behavior is, you are still doing something inherently unethical – lying about your actual work ethic and trying to make yourself look exceptional at the expense of your co-workers. You would never do these things openly or blatantly; the suggestion that you would lie to your boss or undermine your more experienced co-workers probably offends you – but that’s exactly what your apple-polishing behavior was doing, albeit more as lies of omission than anything else.
Now I’m certainly not advocating that you avoid extra work right after taking a new job, or at any other time, or for that matter, suggesting that you don’t let your superiors know what you are working on and how much you are accomplishing. I’m suggesting that the next time you do anything other than your regular duties at your normal pace during a standard-length day (standard for whatever job you do, that is) that you make sure you know where that line between normal conduct and brown-nosing is – and whether or not you’ve crossed it…
Let me give you a scenario that my MBA instructor on human resources topics and ethics, Professor David Mathison gave our class in 1994. Let’s say you’ve just taken a new job, and you decide to put in a few extra hours of work each day, just to make the right impression. Everyone else goes home right at 5:00, but you stay until 6:30 or 7:00 every day, plugging away. Finally, one night, your boss comes back to the office to get something, and finds you still at your desk two hours after everyone else has left. Surprised to see you, he asks if anything is wrong.
This is your big moment. You smile and say, “Nothing’s wrong; I just wanted to get a few more things done before I left!”
And your boss frowns, and asks, “Are you having problems with your job? Everyone else seems able to finish all of their assignments by the end of business.”
And you realize that you’ve painted yourself into a corner. No, there’s no reason you couldn’t finish everything and go home on time. You’re actually doing more work than is necessary, either making the job more complicated than it has to be or taking on other people’s assignments, or both, simply because you wanted to look good. But there’s really no way to tell the boss that without looking like a complete suck-up, because that’s actually what you’ve been doing. You’re behaving in an unnatural or at least non-standard way in order to gain favor with those in power. It’s certainly more useful than complimenting the boss on his hideous fashion sense or offering to take his dry cleaning in for him, but it’s still currying favor. If your boss is the type who dislikes brown-nosing, you’ve probably generated the opposite result from the one you wanted.
Dr. Mathison’s point (and mine here, too) is that no matter how benign your sucking up behavior is, you are still doing something inherently unethical – lying about your actual work ethic and trying to make yourself look exceptional at the expense of your co-workers. You would never do these things openly or blatantly; the suggestion that you would lie to your boss or undermine your more experienced co-workers probably offends you – but that’s exactly what your apple-polishing behavior was doing, albeit more as lies of omission than anything else.
Now I’m certainly not advocating that you avoid extra work right after taking a new job, or at any other time, or for that matter, suggesting that you don’t let your superiors know what you are working on and how much you are accomplishing. I’m suggesting that the next time you do anything other than your regular duties at your normal pace during a standard-length day (standard for whatever job you do, that is) that you make sure you know where that line between normal conduct and brown-nosing is – and whether or not you’ve crossed it…
Sunday, September 30, 2007
The Ethics of Loyalty
If you’re a Dodgers fan (and heaven knows I’m not suggesting anyone should be after this year), you’ve probably been hearing a lot lately about how the team’s veteran players are blaming this season’s collapse (from the best record in the Major Leagues two months ago to 4th place in their division today) on the younger players and the mistakes, poor cooperation, and attitude being given off by the younger players. Meanwhile, those same younger athletes are pointing out that the complaining veterans have all struggled this year, turning in lackluster performances while the team has tried to cope with injuries and other problems. It would be nice to dismiss all of this on a bunch of grown men making millions of dollars to play a kid’s game – and then whining about it. Unfortunately, the situation is all too similar to a problem every manager will face sooner or later.
Let’s suppose for a moment that you need to promote one of your people. The new position will offer more responsibility, more money, and generally be seen as an advancement of the person selected. You would think that this would be simple: just select the person best suited to perform these new duties and promote him or her. If there is one person who is clearly the best choice (e.g., most experienced, best leader, best at doing their job, best at teaching others how to do the job) this should in fact be relatively simple; if not, you will have to figure out which of your people is the best in which of these areas, and try to select the best of the lot. If it’s a very close decision, you might even want to “interview” these people, and ask them how they would handle the new position. Unless you’ve been living in a cave somewhere for the past thirty years, however, you already know better than to favor people of a specific race, gender, ethnicity, age, height, size, weight, sexual preference or style of dress, so we will assume that you don’t.
Where things become murky is when you attempt to factor length of service into the equation. Some companies actually do consider seniority as a factor in promotion, holding that a person’s years with the company indicate their stability, maturity and loyalty in addition to familiarity with company policy and experience on the job. Other companies have a strict policy of “merit only” promotions – promote the best person for the job, even if that person has been around for a few months and everyone else in the department has decades of experience on the job. A company-wide policy may take the heat off of you, or at least give you something to blame for the choice you are being forced to make, but it does nothing to solve the underlying ethical problem.
Does the company owe its long-term employees anything in particular? Assuming they have been paid fair wages and given decent working conditions (including reasonable hours and livable benefits), does management owe them special consideration when issuing promotions? Or, perhaps more to the point, does the company’s obligation to support, reward and advance its loyal employees supersede its obligation to promote the best possible managers, thus maximizing performance and shareholder value? Especially when you consider that if your senior people believe they are being deliberately passed over for promotion (because the younger people will require lower salaries, for example) they are likely to leave the company seeking advancement elsewhere?
Of course, this same issue by definition touches on problems such as recognition (people see promotion as a public acknowledgement of their performance and abilities), security (people believe – often quite incorrectly – that higher-level people are less likely to be laid off or fired), morale (it’s demoralizing at best to be passed over; it can easily be insulting, depressing or infuriating, depending on whom you were passed over for) and employee retention (if the only way to obtain promotion and the attendant increase in responsibility, power, reputation and money is to change employers, people certainly will), but those issues will exist no matter how carefully we select people for promotion, and we can almost guarantee that someone will feel unjustly passed over no matter what we do. The question we as managers have to ask is where to draw that line between rewarding loyalty to the company and doing what is best for the company, on those (hopefully rare) occasions when these are not one and the same…
Let’s suppose for a moment that you need to promote one of your people. The new position will offer more responsibility, more money, and generally be seen as an advancement of the person selected. You would think that this would be simple: just select the person best suited to perform these new duties and promote him or her. If there is one person who is clearly the best choice (e.g., most experienced, best leader, best at doing their job, best at teaching others how to do the job) this should in fact be relatively simple; if not, you will have to figure out which of your people is the best in which of these areas, and try to select the best of the lot. If it’s a very close decision, you might even want to “interview” these people, and ask them how they would handle the new position. Unless you’ve been living in a cave somewhere for the past thirty years, however, you already know better than to favor people of a specific race, gender, ethnicity, age, height, size, weight, sexual preference or style of dress, so we will assume that you don’t.
Where things become murky is when you attempt to factor length of service into the equation. Some companies actually do consider seniority as a factor in promotion, holding that a person’s years with the company indicate their stability, maturity and loyalty in addition to familiarity with company policy and experience on the job. Other companies have a strict policy of “merit only” promotions – promote the best person for the job, even if that person has been around for a few months and everyone else in the department has decades of experience on the job. A company-wide policy may take the heat off of you, or at least give you something to blame for the choice you are being forced to make, but it does nothing to solve the underlying ethical problem.
Does the company owe its long-term employees anything in particular? Assuming they have been paid fair wages and given decent working conditions (including reasonable hours and livable benefits), does management owe them special consideration when issuing promotions? Or, perhaps more to the point, does the company’s obligation to support, reward and advance its loyal employees supersede its obligation to promote the best possible managers, thus maximizing performance and shareholder value? Especially when you consider that if your senior people believe they are being deliberately passed over for promotion (because the younger people will require lower salaries, for example) they are likely to leave the company seeking advancement elsewhere?
Of course, this same issue by definition touches on problems such as recognition (people see promotion as a public acknowledgement of their performance and abilities), security (people believe – often quite incorrectly – that higher-level people are less likely to be laid off or fired), morale (it’s demoralizing at best to be passed over; it can easily be insulting, depressing or infuriating, depending on whom you were passed over for) and employee retention (if the only way to obtain promotion and the attendant increase in responsibility, power, reputation and money is to change employers, people certainly will), but those issues will exist no matter how carefully we select people for promotion, and we can almost guarantee that someone will feel unjustly passed over no matter what we do. The question we as managers have to ask is where to draw that line between rewarding loyalty to the company and doing what is best for the company, on those (hopefully rare) occasions when these are not one and the same…
Friday, September 21, 2007
Ignorance
“How can you possibly be expected to manage a group of people if you don’t understand how to do the jobs they are doing?” someone asked me the other day. It’s a good question. Ideally, of course, you would like to have every member of the management team learn how to do every job within the entire organization, or at least within the part of it that they manage, but the simple truth is that this won’t always be possible. Any large and complex organization is likely to have more individual jobs in it than any person could learn to do in one working lifetime, and as I noted in my post about Institutional Memory, just knowing how to do that type of job may not be enough to handle the specific requirements of a particular job.
In most cases, except for the foreman or team leader of a group who began as one of the workers in that group and has received promotion since, taking over any business unit is going to mean that there are people reporting to you who have jobs (or at least tasks) that you do not fully understand. If you are a senior manager, this will almost certainly be the case; the CEO of an oil company is probably not qualified as a research chemist, an IT manager, a CPA, a drilling team manager, a transportation unit foreman, or the captain of an oil tanker in addition to his or her expertise as a strategist and a businessperson, for example. The CEO may not even have experience in other aspects of business itself; he or she may not be a marketer, a finance expert, or even particularly good with numbers.
The key skill that our hypothetical CEO must have, and all of us who practice the profession of management should aspire to, is the ability to learn the essential issues of getting the job done. The CEO does not need to understand how to operate an 80,000 ton ship in dangerous waters, but he or she needs to understand how long it will take to get the ship where it needs to go, what the costs of doing so will be, and why the safety precautions required by corporate policy and Federal law are important. Similarly, the CEO doesn’t really need to know how to create a new computer system to handle order capture, inventory management and billing operations so much as what resources will be required to do so, how long it will take to properly test and de-bug the software, and how much time and effort (and money) it will take to re-train the product replenishment and billing personnel to use the new system.
The key to finding out these things – and therefore the cornerstone of this absolutely critical managerial skill – is to avoid the fallacy common to all too many people that anything you don’t understand must be simple. This simple logical disconnect, a combination of ignorance and arrogance, kills off more good companies and ideas than every other management blunder put together. And the worst part is, it is 100% preventable. As a very wise man once told me, “Stupidity is forever, but ignorance is curable.”
To avoid making this mistake, all you have to do is learn things. Make sure that you understand all of the requirements to achieve a specific goal, and if you don’t, keep having people break it down for you into simpler and simpler pieces until you do. This will require the commitment of time, and a significant amount of work on your part, which is why so many managers avoid doing it, but the long-term effects are worth the effort. In addition to curtailing stupid management mistakes, this procedure will help you to avoid resentment in your subordinates by not undervaluing their expertise or ordering them to do things that are stupid, wasteful or time consuming (as they see it). In fact, you can even use it to raise morale and make your people feel appreciated (thus appealing to their Security, Recognition and Self-Actualization needs).
Of course this does require more from the management team than most people realize – but that’s going to be my next topic…
In most cases, except for the foreman or team leader of a group who began as one of the workers in that group and has received promotion since, taking over any business unit is going to mean that there are people reporting to you who have jobs (or at least tasks) that you do not fully understand. If you are a senior manager, this will almost certainly be the case; the CEO of an oil company is probably not qualified as a research chemist, an IT manager, a CPA, a drilling team manager, a transportation unit foreman, or the captain of an oil tanker in addition to his or her expertise as a strategist and a businessperson, for example. The CEO may not even have experience in other aspects of business itself; he or she may not be a marketer, a finance expert, or even particularly good with numbers.
The key skill that our hypothetical CEO must have, and all of us who practice the profession of management should aspire to, is the ability to learn the essential issues of getting the job done. The CEO does not need to understand how to operate an 80,000 ton ship in dangerous waters, but he or she needs to understand how long it will take to get the ship where it needs to go, what the costs of doing so will be, and why the safety precautions required by corporate policy and Federal law are important. Similarly, the CEO doesn’t really need to know how to create a new computer system to handle order capture, inventory management and billing operations so much as what resources will be required to do so, how long it will take to properly test and de-bug the software, and how much time and effort (and money) it will take to re-train the product replenishment and billing personnel to use the new system.
The key to finding out these things – and therefore the cornerstone of this absolutely critical managerial skill – is to avoid the fallacy common to all too many people that anything you don’t understand must be simple. This simple logical disconnect, a combination of ignorance and arrogance, kills off more good companies and ideas than every other management blunder put together. And the worst part is, it is 100% preventable. As a very wise man once told me, “Stupidity is forever, but ignorance is curable.”
To avoid making this mistake, all you have to do is learn things. Make sure that you understand all of the requirements to achieve a specific goal, and if you don’t, keep having people break it down for you into simpler and simpler pieces until you do. This will require the commitment of time, and a significant amount of work on your part, which is why so many managers avoid doing it, but the long-term effects are worth the effort. In addition to curtailing stupid management mistakes, this procedure will help you to avoid resentment in your subordinates by not undervaluing their expertise or ordering them to do things that are stupid, wasteful or time consuming (as they see it). In fact, you can even use it to raise morale and make your people feel appreciated (thus appealing to their Security, Recognition and Self-Actualization needs).
Of course this does require more from the management team than most people realize – but that’s going to be my next topic…
Monday, September 17, 2007
Cross Training
This is another one of those business school terms that is actually more complicated than it sounds. It’s also a much more powerful tool than it appears to be at first glance, with the potential to improve morale, increase employee retention, lower headcount and/or salary costs, and even preserve institutional memory. Unfortunately, it also has the potential to degenerate into a complete unholy mess if done incorrectly. Let’s take a closer look at the concept.
The basic idea of Cross Training is simple: each of the people who work for us should know how to do at least one job task beyond their own job description. Ideally, of course, everyone within the organization would know how to do every job within the organization, but this is rarely possible on a large scale, particularly where professionals or other highly-trained employees are involved. Most cross training programs will have to settle for teaching each employee how to perform the job tasks of an individual from another part of the company (e.g. another work group, department or division).
The effects on morale are fairly obvious: the cross training assignment helps to break up an employee’s routine and make their work more interesting; it also demonstrates that the company has an interest in keeping the employee around and thinks highly enough of him or her to believe that he or she can master a second job in addition to their own. This can fulfill the employee’s need for both recognition (the company thinks well of them) and self-actualization (the chance to learn new things and develop new skills), and possibly even security (the company is less likely to fire someone who can do multiple jobs for them), thus increasing job satisfaction and lowering turnover.
The effect on headcount and salary is also apparent: cross-trained personnel can cover for each other during breaks, meal periods, sick days, vacations, or other forms of leave, thus eliminating the need for an overage of personnel to cover this down time. In addition, if all of your employees know how to complete a specific task, the loss of one employee will not impact that task; someone else can handle the function until a replacement can be recruited and hired, and any of the cross-trained personnel can in turn instruct the replacement on how to do that task. Thus, this program spreads both expertise and institutional memory among many employees instead of entrusting it to a single individual.
A good example of what happens when you don’t cross train came up in conversation a few weeks back. The executor of an estate was trying to close out the investment accounts of the deceased so that he could distribute the funds to the heirs. Unfortunately, the investment company (which I won’t name) told him that they had only one person who dealt with this contingency procedure, and she was on vacation. The executor was stunned, and so was I when I heard the story. This was a company with thousands of employees, billions (or possibly hundreds of billions) in assets, television ads that run during major sporting events and on prime-time network shows, billboards, bus benches and heaven only knows what else, and they employ only ONE person who can process closing out an account in the event of the account holder’s death?
Even worse, that one person is an idiot; when she finally returned from vacation she managed to waste another week of the executor’s time by repeatedly losing documents, misplacing faxes, and so on. But that’s not really the point. They are violating the Second Rule of Business by annoying their customers (the executor had his own accounts with them) and their heirs (none of the heirs is ever likely to forget this outrage), but that’s not the point, either. The point is that unless the procedures in question are unbelievably complex and the investment company is critically understaffed, they could have avoided the entire situation with a program that would have cost them nothing more than the time of the person or persons being cross-trained.
Of course, a cross training program still has to be set up and managed intelligently in order to have proper effect; people will probably be limited to learning jobs appropriate to their own level of education and training (you can’t train the ditch-diggers to cover for the electrical engineers, and I wouldn’t suggest using one of the engineers to dig ditches), and they probably won’t be able to back up employees located in other time zones (unless all of the work in question is Internet-based). But within those limits there are very few management programs that have more potential upside for less cost…
The basic idea of Cross Training is simple: each of the people who work for us should know how to do at least one job task beyond their own job description. Ideally, of course, everyone within the organization would know how to do every job within the organization, but this is rarely possible on a large scale, particularly where professionals or other highly-trained employees are involved. Most cross training programs will have to settle for teaching each employee how to perform the job tasks of an individual from another part of the company (e.g. another work group, department or division).
The effects on morale are fairly obvious: the cross training assignment helps to break up an employee’s routine and make their work more interesting; it also demonstrates that the company has an interest in keeping the employee around and thinks highly enough of him or her to believe that he or she can master a second job in addition to their own. This can fulfill the employee’s need for both recognition (the company thinks well of them) and self-actualization (the chance to learn new things and develop new skills), and possibly even security (the company is less likely to fire someone who can do multiple jobs for them), thus increasing job satisfaction and lowering turnover.
The effect on headcount and salary is also apparent: cross-trained personnel can cover for each other during breaks, meal periods, sick days, vacations, or other forms of leave, thus eliminating the need for an overage of personnel to cover this down time. In addition, if all of your employees know how to complete a specific task, the loss of one employee will not impact that task; someone else can handle the function until a replacement can be recruited and hired, and any of the cross-trained personnel can in turn instruct the replacement on how to do that task. Thus, this program spreads both expertise and institutional memory among many employees instead of entrusting it to a single individual.
A good example of what happens when you don’t cross train came up in conversation a few weeks back. The executor of an estate was trying to close out the investment accounts of the deceased so that he could distribute the funds to the heirs. Unfortunately, the investment company (which I won’t name) told him that they had only one person who dealt with this contingency procedure, and she was on vacation. The executor was stunned, and so was I when I heard the story. This was a company with thousands of employees, billions (or possibly hundreds of billions) in assets, television ads that run during major sporting events and on prime-time network shows, billboards, bus benches and heaven only knows what else, and they employ only ONE person who can process closing out an account in the event of the account holder’s death?
Even worse, that one person is an idiot; when she finally returned from vacation she managed to waste another week of the executor’s time by repeatedly losing documents, misplacing faxes, and so on. But that’s not really the point. They are violating the Second Rule of Business by annoying their customers (the executor had his own accounts with them) and their heirs (none of the heirs is ever likely to forget this outrage), but that’s not the point, either. The point is that unless the procedures in question are unbelievably complex and the investment company is critically understaffed, they could have avoided the entire situation with a program that would have cost them nothing more than the time of the person or persons being cross-trained.
Of course, a cross training program still has to be set up and managed intelligently in order to have proper effect; people will probably be limited to learning jobs appropriate to their own level of education and training (you can’t train the ditch-diggers to cover for the electrical engineers, and I wouldn’t suggest using one of the engineers to dig ditches), and they probably won’t be able to back up employees located in other time zones (unless all of the work in question is Internet-based). But within those limits there are very few management programs that have more potential upside for less cost…
Friday, September 14, 2007
Institutional Memory
One of the technical terms you hear B-school types throwing around sometimes is “institutional memory,” which refers to the knowledge accumulated by all of the people who work for a given organization during the time they are employed. Some experts will include all of the working experience and job skills accumulated by the employees in the definition as well, but the term is more commonly applied to the facts, concepts and non-task experiences that the people working in a given group accumulate. Thus, a given retail employee may know everything you could ask for about inventory control, customer service, store maintenance, shipping and receiving, and running a cash register, but only someone who has actually worked in the Sav-on (now CVS) store in Silverlake California knows that you have to shift loads going up the conveyor belt to the storage attic to the left so they don’t fall off going around the turns.
That may not sound important in itself, unless you’ve ever had to clean up a few cases worth of corned beef brine from the floor after the cases fell and the cans shattered. Or, worse yet, had to fill out the accident report and the Worker’s Compensation forms after a case falls off and lands on someone’s head. Since it would cost more than the store’s net income for several years to have the conveyor system ripped out and replaced with something more functional, however, new employees being assigned to that unit will probably have to learn how to avoid this type of product spill for many years to come. It’s something that someone who has worked in that location would know, and could easily pass along to new employees, but which someone who has never worked in that unit would not know, regardless of how knowledgeable or how experienced they happen to be.
All right, it’s a rather slapstick way of making a serious point. In any business unit, whether it’s a low-end retail store or an elite University department, there are going to be odd bits of knowledge that can not be contained in any job description or procedures manual; that can only be obtained from actually doing the job and having the experiences that come with it. Maybe it’s how to keep the computers running; maybe it’s who to call in Payroll when the checks aren’t on time; maybe it’s what part of the day the office will be the least busy (best time to schedule tours, interviews, staff meetings, etc). It’s why experienced personnel will always out-perform new personnel, regardless of relative levels of training or ability, at least until the learning curve catches up to the level of the more experience workers.
It’s also the main reason why employee retention is so important. Certainly, the costs associated with recruiting and hiring new personnel can be huge, as can the costs of certification and/or formal training. But the biggest single drawback to new personnel is just learning curve – how long it takes the new people to learn the nuances of the job. This is just as true for management personnel as it is for the rank and file, by the way; General George S. Patton once said that it took at least five years for an Army officer to learn enough to begin earning his pay – and that some of them never did. Of course, there will always be those cases where an employee is costing the company more to retain than the cost to replace them, just as there will always be employees who receive job offers with salaries the company can’t match. But any Human Resources policy that does not take into consideration the learning curve and institutional memory factors is just (there’s no nice word for it) stupid.
Of course, the ideal situation would be to capture the institutional memory of a work group in some permanent form external to the workers themselves, so that it can be retained no matter how the employees come and go…
But that’s my next topic…
That may not sound important in itself, unless you’ve ever had to clean up a few cases worth of corned beef brine from the floor after the cases fell and the cans shattered. Or, worse yet, had to fill out the accident report and the Worker’s Compensation forms after a case falls off and lands on someone’s head. Since it would cost more than the store’s net income for several years to have the conveyor system ripped out and replaced with something more functional, however, new employees being assigned to that unit will probably have to learn how to avoid this type of product spill for many years to come. It’s something that someone who has worked in that location would know, and could easily pass along to new employees, but which someone who has never worked in that unit would not know, regardless of how knowledgeable or how experienced they happen to be.
All right, it’s a rather slapstick way of making a serious point. In any business unit, whether it’s a low-end retail store or an elite University department, there are going to be odd bits of knowledge that can not be contained in any job description or procedures manual; that can only be obtained from actually doing the job and having the experiences that come with it. Maybe it’s how to keep the computers running; maybe it’s who to call in Payroll when the checks aren’t on time; maybe it’s what part of the day the office will be the least busy (best time to schedule tours, interviews, staff meetings, etc). It’s why experienced personnel will always out-perform new personnel, regardless of relative levels of training or ability, at least until the learning curve catches up to the level of the more experience workers.
It’s also the main reason why employee retention is so important. Certainly, the costs associated with recruiting and hiring new personnel can be huge, as can the costs of certification and/or formal training. But the biggest single drawback to new personnel is just learning curve – how long it takes the new people to learn the nuances of the job. This is just as true for management personnel as it is for the rank and file, by the way; General George S. Patton once said that it took at least five years for an Army officer to learn enough to begin earning his pay – and that some of them never did. Of course, there will always be those cases where an employee is costing the company more to retain than the cost to replace them, just as there will always be employees who receive job offers with salaries the company can’t match. But any Human Resources policy that does not take into consideration the learning curve and institutional memory factors is just (there’s no nice word for it) stupid.
Of course, the ideal situation would be to capture the institutional memory of a work group in some permanent form external to the workers themselves, so that it can be retained no matter how the employees come and go…
But that’s my next topic…
Monday, September 10, 2007
Respect
Don’t worry; I’m not going to break into song. It’s just that over the weekend I remembered something an old boss of mine had said, just before I decided he was a complete nincompoop and quit the company. One of my co-workers was a fairly serious martial artist, and the Boss had introduced him to an acquaintance who was a high-level master of some martial arts form or other; it might even have been the same one my co-worker practiced. My co-worker (who had been studying the martial arts all of his life and had a fairly high ranking of his own) was polite and respectful during the meeting, but when pressed about it later, had told our Boss that he intended to continue with his own studies and the teachers who had gotten him this far. When pressured, he said that despite the “master’s” qualifications, he didn’t think it was a good fit for him; he could learn more the way he was going.
Well, needless to say, the Boss was outraged. This was The Master of Whatever (I’m sorry; I can’t remember the name 17 years later) and my co-worker was just some pissant who could not understand the honor he was being offered. The Boss ranted (to me – and I was not in management in this company, I was just another pissant) about how disrespectful this was, of this friend, The Master of Whatever, and of the Boss himself. From then on, my co-worker was unable to do anything right, at least as far as the Boss was concerned, and soon left the company, despite having been one of our best producers for the three previous years.
I call this to your attention for two reasons. One, of course, is the old line about “Respect is not given; it is earned.” You can earn respect from your employees in many ways, but yelling at them, belittling them in front of their co-workers, or finding fault with their work because they refuse to kiss your ass (or that of someone you designate) are all so counterproductive that I can’t even think of a bad metaphor for how counterproductive they are. Stupid isn’t even the word. It was bad enough that the Boss couldn’t grasp that one of his employees might have a different view of the world from his own; the fact that said employee was an expert in this subject (a 3rd degree black belt, if I remember correctly) and the Boss was not (he was a big, fat, overdeveloped man who had been a professional baseball player twenty years and eighty pounds earlier. I could have taken him with a Q-tip) just made it worse.
But the fact that he then decided to make management decisions based on this difference of opinion was infinitely worse. In the end, his insistence that my co-worker kiss ass on command cost our company between $350,000 and $500,000 per year – and back then, that was a lot of money. In the long run, in fact, this same behavior cost the company a lot more – since I left shortly thereafter, as did most of the unit’s best people. Basically, everyone who had an ounce of self-respect and/or integrity packed it in and left, costing the company of at least a few million dollars per year, and shortly thereafter costing the Boss his job, as well.
The problem in this situation wasn’t that our Boss needed to be a better manager – he knew the profession quite well, in fact. The problem was that he needed to be a better man – and they don’t teach you how to do that in business school…
Well, needless to say, the Boss was outraged. This was The Master of Whatever (I’m sorry; I can’t remember the name 17 years later) and my co-worker was just some pissant who could not understand the honor he was being offered. The Boss ranted (to me – and I was not in management in this company, I was just another pissant) about how disrespectful this was, of this friend, The Master of Whatever, and of the Boss himself. From then on, my co-worker was unable to do anything right, at least as far as the Boss was concerned, and soon left the company, despite having been one of our best producers for the three previous years.
I call this to your attention for two reasons. One, of course, is the old line about “Respect is not given; it is earned.” You can earn respect from your employees in many ways, but yelling at them, belittling them in front of their co-workers, or finding fault with their work because they refuse to kiss your ass (or that of someone you designate) are all so counterproductive that I can’t even think of a bad metaphor for how counterproductive they are. Stupid isn’t even the word. It was bad enough that the Boss couldn’t grasp that one of his employees might have a different view of the world from his own; the fact that said employee was an expert in this subject (a 3rd degree black belt, if I remember correctly) and the Boss was not (he was a big, fat, overdeveloped man who had been a professional baseball player twenty years and eighty pounds earlier. I could have taken him with a Q-tip) just made it worse.
But the fact that he then decided to make management decisions based on this difference of opinion was infinitely worse. In the end, his insistence that my co-worker kiss ass on command cost our company between $350,000 and $500,000 per year – and back then, that was a lot of money. In the long run, in fact, this same behavior cost the company a lot more – since I left shortly thereafter, as did most of the unit’s best people. Basically, everyone who had an ounce of self-respect and/or integrity packed it in and left, costing the company of at least a few million dollars per year, and shortly thereafter costing the Boss his job, as well.
The problem in this situation wasn’t that our Boss needed to be a better manager – he knew the profession quite well, in fact. The problem was that he needed to be a better man – and they don’t teach you how to do that in business school…
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Annual Review Nightmares
I could probably write an entire post just about the mistakes I’ve seen managers make in trying to review me. Well, actually, I could probably write a book about those errors, and maybe someday I will. The fact is, you can learn a lot about an organization just by examining its annual review process. In particular, you can learn which mistakes are being made because the management team doesn’t know any better, and which ones are being made because the organization’s entire structure is rotting…
All too often, management personnel regard these reviews as a useless drain on their time, and put as little effort into them as possible. They don’t keep track of the employees’ performance, make no note of their subordinates’ accomplishments, and conduct annual reviews only because their own superiors require them to do so. In fact, on one job I did not receive a review for nearly 30 months – and then got one only because the company was being sued, and had been required to produce their internal records. I’ve even seen cases of managers having subordinates write their own reviews, and then signing them and putting them in permanent files still unread.
I’m not sure “management apathy” is actually a term. But I’ve watched it kill any number of otherwise worthwhile organizations, and this is a clear case of it.
Then we have inappropriate rating systems. On one past job, our division President decreed that since no one is perfect, no one could receive a “5” on the 1 to 5 performance scale on their review. Most of the division’s managers interpreted this to mean that no one could receive a “5” ranking on any part of the review. Since our review had 20 ranking questions, this made the highest possible score an 80, although it was still alleged to be 100. Even worse, these rankings determined the size of your annual raise; so while there was a percentage given for those who got a “5”, no one EVER received that amount.
Then we have the raises themselves. In the company I just mentioned, a “5” meant that you got a 3% raise; a “4” meant that you got a 2% raise; a “3” meant 1%, a “2” meant that you did not get a salary increase, and a “1” meant you were fired. Leaving aside for the moment the fact that no one ever got a “5” and very few people ever saw a “4”, this practice is stupid for at least two other reasons. First, the low salary increase completely ignores the employees’ level 4 (Recognition) needs and may actually ignore their level 1 (Survival) needs as well, if the increase is lower than the prevailing rate of inflation. Even worse, however, is the fact that you can not discipline someone by threatening to withhold their raise if you are not giving them one in the first place. “Behave, or you won’t get your 1%!” is just not effective.
Finally, there was the case of management telling us that there would be no raises this year because it had been a difficult year for the company, financially. Unfortunately, every employee in this company was also a stockholder, since we received stock as part of the retirement plan, which meant that every one of us had received a letter three weeks earlier bragging that the company was having its best year ever and would be paying record dividends. I stapled together the stockholder letter, the memo from senior management saying they couldn’t afford to give raises, and the Dilbert cartoon where exactly the same thing happens, and gave it to my boss at my annual review that year, right after he told me I was getting 1%. It probably didn’t help… But then it’s hard to imagine that anything would have at that point.
All too often, management personnel regard these reviews as a useless drain on their time, and put as little effort into them as possible. They don’t keep track of the employees’ performance, make no note of their subordinates’ accomplishments, and conduct annual reviews only because their own superiors require them to do so. In fact, on one job I did not receive a review for nearly 30 months – and then got one only because the company was being sued, and had been required to produce their internal records. I’ve even seen cases of managers having subordinates write their own reviews, and then signing them and putting them in permanent files still unread.
I’m not sure “management apathy” is actually a term. But I’ve watched it kill any number of otherwise worthwhile organizations, and this is a clear case of it.
Then we have inappropriate rating systems. On one past job, our division President decreed that since no one is perfect, no one could receive a “5” on the 1 to 5 performance scale on their review. Most of the division’s managers interpreted this to mean that no one could receive a “5” ranking on any part of the review. Since our review had 20 ranking questions, this made the highest possible score an 80, although it was still alleged to be 100. Even worse, these rankings determined the size of your annual raise; so while there was a percentage given for those who got a “5”, no one EVER received that amount.
Then we have the raises themselves. In the company I just mentioned, a “5” meant that you got a 3% raise; a “4” meant that you got a 2% raise; a “3” meant 1%, a “2” meant that you did not get a salary increase, and a “1” meant you were fired. Leaving aside for the moment the fact that no one ever got a “5” and very few people ever saw a “4”, this practice is stupid for at least two other reasons. First, the low salary increase completely ignores the employees’ level 4 (Recognition) needs and may actually ignore their level 1 (Survival) needs as well, if the increase is lower than the prevailing rate of inflation. Even worse, however, is the fact that you can not discipline someone by threatening to withhold their raise if you are not giving them one in the first place. “Behave, or you won’t get your 1%!” is just not effective.
Finally, there was the case of management telling us that there would be no raises this year because it had been a difficult year for the company, financially. Unfortunately, every employee in this company was also a stockholder, since we received stock as part of the retirement plan, which meant that every one of us had received a letter three weeks earlier bragging that the company was having its best year ever and would be paying record dividends. I stapled together the stockholder letter, the memo from senior management saying they couldn’t afford to give raises, and the Dilbert cartoon where exactly the same thing happens, and gave it to my boss at my annual review that year, right after he told me I was getting 1%. It probably didn’t help… But then it’s hard to imagine that anything would have at that point.
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
THAT Time of Year Again…
No, not the “Holidays.” I refer here to the season when most companies, and many other employers, begin the Annual Review process, one of the most universally hated rituals in the working world. I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t have at least one horror story to tell about annual reviews, and I’ve met very few people who’ve ever had a completely positive experience with the process. Even allowing for the fact that the review is intended to address long-term bad habits, it still seems outrageous that a basic function of day-to-day management has devolved into this sort of quagmire. It makes you wonder if anyone out there remembers what these reviews are supposed to do, doesn’t it?
First off, an annual review is supposed to provide the employee with feedback about their overall performance for the previous year. Unfortunately, this requires managers to keep track of how their subordinates are performing over the course of the year. Since management personnel for the most part believe that they will receive the same salary whether they do this or not, many of them don’t; they will just use whatever vague memories they have of the year, often colored by the last interaction with the employee they can remember. As a result, many people have learned that all they have to do is perform well in the first few weeks of June each year, and their review is a breeze.
Second, the review is supposed to correct long-term bad habits. Not actual mistakes or infractions, which should be dealt with as they occur, but simply things that either irritate fellow workers or lead to lower efficiency. Too often, a review will turn into a “slam session” as the manager vents his or her anger regarding everything the employee has done wrong over the previous 12 months. One manager of my acquaintance was actually keeping a “secret discipline file” in which he would catalog everything his subordinates did that he felt was wrong or annoying. However, he only mentioned this file when trying to bring people into line (“That’s going in the file!”), and only shared the contents during the annual reviews. Or sometimes, at a review two or three years later.
Third, the review is supposed to deal with any discrepancies between the employee’s written job description and what they are actually being asked to do. Job descriptions are another in a long list of business documents that, like mission statements, operating philosophies, and the like, are more often ignored or misapplied than actually used correctly. In many cases, a job description is only used during the hiring process or when an employee is refusing to do something. When used properly, however, a set of job descriptions should tell the reader everything the unit does, and which employees are responsible for which tasks – in other words, everything you would need to know to operate or even reproduce the unit in question. It in turn forms the basis of operating plans, company regulations, strategic planning cycles, and orientation for both the management personnel and those they supervise.
All too often, however, these descriptions are simply rubber stamped by both management and the employees, and completely ignored. Done properly, a review should include a statement written by the employee detailing their current duties and the procedures they follow to complete those duties, which should then be compared to the written job description during the meeting with their supervisor, and either the duties or the description modified to bring them into agreement. An employee should also have the opportunity to comment on their own performance and any other relevant issues during the written and verbal review process. The manager should read this self-assessment before starting the actual review meeting, and be prepared to address the employee’s concerns as well as voicing their own.
Finally, the employee and the manager should discuss any improvement in performance that appears to be necessary, and any changes in job description that appear to be needed. The manager needs to use this process to provide recognition for good work (see my posts on the Hierarchy of Needs and Level 4: Recognition) and, if at all possible, reward for good performance where applicable. At least, that’s how this process is supposed to work. Next time we’ll go over some examples of what happens when it doesn’t…
First off, an annual review is supposed to provide the employee with feedback about their overall performance for the previous year. Unfortunately, this requires managers to keep track of how their subordinates are performing over the course of the year. Since management personnel for the most part believe that they will receive the same salary whether they do this or not, many of them don’t; they will just use whatever vague memories they have of the year, often colored by the last interaction with the employee they can remember. As a result, many people have learned that all they have to do is perform well in the first few weeks of June each year, and their review is a breeze.
Second, the review is supposed to correct long-term bad habits. Not actual mistakes or infractions, which should be dealt with as they occur, but simply things that either irritate fellow workers or lead to lower efficiency. Too often, a review will turn into a “slam session” as the manager vents his or her anger regarding everything the employee has done wrong over the previous 12 months. One manager of my acquaintance was actually keeping a “secret discipline file” in which he would catalog everything his subordinates did that he felt was wrong or annoying. However, he only mentioned this file when trying to bring people into line (“That’s going in the file!”), and only shared the contents during the annual reviews. Or sometimes, at a review two or three years later.
Third, the review is supposed to deal with any discrepancies between the employee’s written job description and what they are actually being asked to do. Job descriptions are another in a long list of business documents that, like mission statements, operating philosophies, and the like, are more often ignored or misapplied than actually used correctly. In many cases, a job description is only used during the hiring process or when an employee is refusing to do something. When used properly, however, a set of job descriptions should tell the reader everything the unit does, and which employees are responsible for which tasks – in other words, everything you would need to know to operate or even reproduce the unit in question. It in turn forms the basis of operating plans, company regulations, strategic planning cycles, and orientation for both the management personnel and those they supervise.
All too often, however, these descriptions are simply rubber stamped by both management and the employees, and completely ignored. Done properly, a review should include a statement written by the employee detailing their current duties and the procedures they follow to complete those duties, which should then be compared to the written job description during the meeting with their supervisor, and either the duties or the description modified to bring them into agreement. An employee should also have the opportunity to comment on their own performance and any other relevant issues during the written and verbal review process. The manager should read this self-assessment before starting the actual review meeting, and be prepared to address the employee’s concerns as well as voicing their own.
Finally, the employee and the manager should discuss any improvement in performance that appears to be necessary, and any changes in job description that appear to be needed. The manager needs to use this process to provide recognition for good work (see my posts on the Hierarchy of Needs and Level 4: Recognition) and, if at all possible, reward for good performance where applicable. At least, that’s how this process is supposed to work. Next time we’ll go over some examples of what happens when it doesn’t…
Friday, June 22, 2007
The Audience is Listening…
Well, actually, they’re probably not. Anyone who has spent any time at all in Corporate America has probably complained that management isn’t listening to the employees at least once. Let me say up front that you should not take this personally; I was once the senior business analyst of a $450 million dollar wholesale unit, and my division President refused to listen to me, despite the fact that I had been consistently accurate. Unfortunately, even people who do, in fact, know better will sometimes refuse to listen to input from their subordinates, either to establish how important they are, put the subordinate in their place, or just because thinking about input requires work, while a knee-jerk rejection does not.
That this type of behavior is stupid should be obvious; if you do not listen to your subordinates, how will you know what is going on within your unit? What is less obvious is that in addition to being poor management practice, this also fails to address the needs of the employees at level 4 of the Hierarchy of Needs : Recognition.
No one wants to feel like a faceless cog in the machine, especially if they are. So once their survival and security needs are met, and they begin to form social connections to the employees around them, most people will begin looking for recognition of the quality of their work, their importance to the organization, and the fact that their input matters to higher levels of management. This may or may not have a competitive element, depending on the psychology of the individual, but even those people who do not feel any need to compete with their peers still like to feel appreciated.
The most obvious form of recognition, monetary reward, is harder to utilize than most people believe; even if your department has the budget to do so, it is not practical to be constantly handing chunks of money to the employees. Many companies make use of non-monetary awards, such as certificates of appreciation, but these are ultimately little more than adult versions of the gold stars we received in Kindergarten; unless the award itself is of value/prestige to the employee, the piece of paper itself will have little value.
The first step in providing proper recognition for your workforce is simply listening. Make it clear to your people that you want their input, and if you find their ideas sound, you will act on them. When you do implement an employee suggestion, make sure their peers (as much of the company as possible, in fact) know that you have done so. If someone has achieved high levels of productivity, make sure that everyone knows about that, as well. A token of your esteem (like a certificate) can work if it fulfills the employee’s fourth-level needs; so can an extra perk like an afternoon off with pay, or tickets to a sporting event, so long as they come with “bragging rights” – recognition from the rest of the group that the individual is being rewarded for their high performance.
One of the best variations of this idea I have ever seen was the “Lunch with the CEO” program. The idea was, each month the CEO of a large corporation would select the Employee of the Month from a list of candidates forwarded up through the Vice Presidents, Directors, Managers, Supervisors and Team Leaders. Instead of a nice certificate, however, what the Employee of the Month got was a one-on-one lunch meeting with the CEO, in the Executive Lunchroom. The meeting was a “no ranks” conversation; the CEO made a point of getting the employee’s first name and calling him by it, and asking for the employee’s input on the direction of the company (and any other issues the employee felt were important).
It’s debatable whether the CEO ever actually learned any deep, dark secrets this way – although these lunches undoubtedly gave him a look into life on the factory floor, in the warehouse, and down on the cubicle farm that he would otherwise never have gotten. The effect on morale, on the other hand, was quite obvious. Every time this happened, the employee would go back to the floor and tell his (or her) peers about having lunch with the CEO, and how the head of their company wanted the employee’s input and how he LISTENED to everything he/she said.
And this cost the company… One lunch. Usually a nice lunch, something a CEO wouldn’t mind eating, but still less than $20 for a boost in morale that thousands of dollars in company-sponsored social events could not have equaled. It’s worth thinking about…
That this type of behavior is stupid should be obvious; if you do not listen to your subordinates, how will you know what is going on within your unit? What is less obvious is that in addition to being poor management practice, this also fails to address the needs of the employees at level 4 of the Hierarchy of Needs : Recognition.
No one wants to feel like a faceless cog in the machine, especially if they are. So once their survival and security needs are met, and they begin to form social connections to the employees around them, most people will begin looking for recognition of the quality of their work, their importance to the organization, and the fact that their input matters to higher levels of management. This may or may not have a competitive element, depending on the psychology of the individual, but even those people who do not feel any need to compete with their peers still like to feel appreciated.
The most obvious form of recognition, monetary reward, is harder to utilize than most people believe; even if your department has the budget to do so, it is not practical to be constantly handing chunks of money to the employees. Many companies make use of non-monetary awards, such as certificates of appreciation, but these are ultimately little more than adult versions of the gold stars we received in Kindergarten; unless the award itself is of value/prestige to the employee, the piece of paper itself will have little value.
The first step in providing proper recognition for your workforce is simply listening. Make it clear to your people that you want their input, and if you find their ideas sound, you will act on them. When you do implement an employee suggestion, make sure their peers (as much of the company as possible, in fact) know that you have done so. If someone has achieved high levels of productivity, make sure that everyone knows about that, as well. A token of your esteem (like a certificate) can work if it fulfills the employee’s fourth-level needs; so can an extra perk like an afternoon off with pay, or tickets to a sporting event, so long as they come with “bragging rights” – recognition from the rest of the group that the individual is being rewarded for their high performance.
One of the best variations of this idea I have ever seen was the “Lunch with the CEO” program. The idea was, each month the CEO of a large corporation would select the Employee of the Month from a list of candidates forwarded up through the Vice Presidents, Directors, Managers, Supervisors and Team Leaders. Instead of a nice certificate, however, what the Employee of the Month got was a one-on-one lunch meeting with the CEO, in the Executive Lunchroom. The meeting was a “no ranks” conversation; the CEO made a point of getting the employee’s first name and calling him by it, and asking for the employee’s input on the direction of the company (and any other issues the employee felt were important).
It’s debatable whether the CEO ever actually learned any deep, dark secrets this way – although these lunches undoubtedly gave him a look into life on the factory floor, in the warehouse, and down on the cubicle farm that he would otherwise never have gotten. The effect on morale, on the other hand, was quite obvious. Every time this happened, the employee would go back to the floor and tell his (or her) peers about having lunch with the CEO, and how the head of their company wanted the employee’s input and how he LISTENED to everything he/she said.
And this cost the company… One lunch. Usually a nice lunch, something a CEO wouldn’t mind eating, but still less than $20 for a boost in morale that thousands of dollars in company-sponsored social events could not have equaled. It’s worth thinking about…
Thursday, June 21, 2007
Building a Team
“So if company picnics and similar events are usually failures because they don’t address an employee’s Belonging needs, how can the company address this level of the Hierarchy?” I hear some of you asking. “Should we just give up and let the social interactions in our workgroup go where they will?”
Surprisingly, that doesn’t work well either. If the personnel assigned to you are professionals, who are able to form relationships based on mutual respect and collaborate on projects because the understand the value of pooling skills and experience, then it may be unnecessary to foster better interactions in the group. But most of us will not be so fortunate; the average line manager will face the task of trying to develop a team out of many diverse elements.
The first thing to keep in mind is that people are not as stupid as senior management would like us to think. Trying to manipulate them into doing something is generally not going to work; trying to manipulate them into doing something counter to their own best interest is so likely to fail that I can’t really understand why people keep trying it. To create a meaningful event, we need to begin by figuring out what our people really like to do – and one of the best ways to do this is to ask them. If you are fortunate enough to have an entire group (or even a large majority) of golfers, or bowlers, or baseball fans, those events might be worthwhile. If your group is diverse in its interests, there is always the option of taking them to lunch, or an after-work beer call.
Which brings us to the second thing we need to be mindful of: do not schedule events during evenings, weekends or other unpaid time unless absolutely unavoidable. If the activity you’ve chosen is a sporting event, and the sport is only played on Sundays and Monday nights, for example, then this can’t be helped. But events held on the employees’ time will be seen as unpaid overtime, and resented as usual, particularly if the event itself is unpopular. Similarly, try to avoid events that use up other employee resources, such as money or equipment, as these will also conflict with first-level (Survival) needs. Where possible, schedule these events on company time, or use comp time (where available) to make up for it.
Also, keep in mind that activities that build team interaction do not have to be off-site, extraneous activities. Involving the employees in problem solving activities, and particularly in forward planning cycles, can get them to work together and recognize the different assets each team member brings to the table. Probably the simplest team-building exercise ever invented is what is known as the “No Ranks” discussion. Developed during the Second World War by the British Army’s technology research establishment, these conferences are discussions in which ranks are expressly not observed; in which a humble line employee should have no fears about telling a senior VP that his idea will never work. Whether any useful information will be revealed in such discussions is highly debatable; it is also completely irrelevant. Even if senior management does not learn anything new this way (and they almost always will) the effect on morale, and the cohesion of the team involved, is more than worth the effort.
Of course, part of building a good team is convincing the employees that we are listening to them, and that we value their input and consider them to be an important part of the process. This, however, also takes us into the realm of Recognition, which is level 4 of the Hierarchy of needs…
Surprisingly, that doesn’t work well either. If the personnel assigned to you are professionals, who are able to form relationships based on mutual respect and collaborate on projects because the understand the value of pooling skills and experience, then it may be unnecessary to foster better interactions in the group. But most of us will not be so fortunate; the average line manager will face the task of trying to develop a team out of many diverse elements.
The first thing to keep in mind is that people are not as stupid as senior management would like us to think. Trying to manipulate them into doing something is generally not going to work; trying to manipulate them into doing something counter to their own best interest is so likely to fail that I can’t really understand why people keep trying it. To create a meaningful event, we need to begin by figuring out what our people really like to do – and one of the best ways to do this is to ask them. If you are fortunate enough to have an entire group (or even a large majority) of golfers, or bowlers, or baseball fans, those events might be worthwhile. If your group is diverse in its interests, there is always the option of taking them to lunch, or an after-work beer call.
Which brings us to the second thing we need to be mindful of: do not schedule events during evenings, weekends or other unpaid time unless absolutely unavoidable. If the activity you’ve chosen is a sporting event, and the sport is only played on Sundays and Monday nights, for example, then this can’t be helped. But events held on the employees’ time will be seen as unpaid overtime, and resented as usual, particularly if the event itself is unpopular. Similarly, try to avoid events that use up other employee resources, such as money or equipment, as these will also conflict with first-level (Survival) needs. Where possible, schedule these events on company time, or use comp time (where available) to make up for it.
Also, keep in mind that activities that build team interaction do not have to be off-site, extraneous activities. Involving the employees in problem solving activities, and particularly in forward planning cycles, can get them to work together and recognize the different assets each team member brings to the table. Probably the simplest team-building exercise ever invented is what is known as the “No Ranks” discussion. Developed during the Second World War by the British Army’s technology research establishment, these conferences are discussions in which ranks are expressly not observed; in which a humble line employee should have no fears about telling a senior VP that his idea will never work. Whether any useful information will be revealed in such discussions is highly debatable; it is also completely irrelevant. Even if senior management does not learn anything new this way (and they almost always will) the effect on morale, and the cohesion of the team involved, is more than worth the effort.
Of course, part of building a good team is convincing the employees that we are listening to them, and that we value their input and consider them to be an important part of the process. This, however, also takes us into the realm of Recognition, which is level 4 of the Hierarchy of needs…
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