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| | The Human Resources: Recruiting, Hiring, and Staffing Network is not currently active and cannot accept new posts | | Value based workplace | Views: 915 | | Sep 06, 2007 11:42 am | | Value based workplace | # | 
kishor Jagirdar | | Value driven:
an organization that has focused on core values goes a long way where as those who don’t, make a lot of splash but sink without notice very quickly. Its important today that people are respected individually and the extent of the well being of the organization has depends on its care quotient .Not just being profit driven but build on core values.
An interesting example was given of Ford motors which had a defective design that was proving fatal to the driver in accidents and it took nearly over 100 lives before the company sat up and confessed that something was seriously wrong.
Integrity + Attitude:
At TATA STEEL every individual stride on the fact that if one is honest, sincere and committed to the job, no one can take away the job. After all it’s the attitude towards work and its direction that really matters The HR has to be strong and have the courage to point out the issues to the top most authority which may be detrimental to the common interest of the organization not merely act as a” Yes Sir person”
I sincerely feel the above is growingly important as unlike the previous decades we now have come to observe that small business units thrive better and much more efficient than large enterprises and they collectively comprise a very large mass in the economic statistics.
HR policies and strategies work in a place having moderate human population and not in a small team like nucleus enterprises.
How do we handle this and arrest the lack of basic values in workplace
Private Reply to kishor Jagirdar | | Sep 09, 2007 3:23 am | | re: Value based workplace | # | 
Jo Verde | | Hi Kishor,
First I applaud you for taking on such a huge and controversial issue, one that inevitably must address both the employer and current/potential employee views.
As you are well aware, my focus is in Human Resources and Professional Development so it follows that I have a definite view to offer for consideration
One of the biggest challenges facing all organizations, SMEs and larger corporates is how to translate its corporate strategy into something that employees can understand and act upon on.
I refer to this more as a corporate culture and applies to all sizes of organizations.....
- Communicates what the organization believes in
- Provides employees a sense of direction and expected behavior
- Shapes employees’ attitude about themselves, the organization, and their roles
- Creates a sense of identity, orderliness, and consistency
- Fosters employee loyalty and commitment every day.
Defining a clear set of corporate values is a component part of developing a high performance culture, critical in sustaining a company’s competitive advantage and is not something that can be easily replicated by the competition. When momentum is built up it comes to life within the organization.
Values should be related to six major areas:
•Organization
•Employees
•Customers
•Community
•Environment
•Shareholders
Every business looks for something distinctive in the market place. The values vocabulary is relatively limited, and can tend towards truisms, but its interpretation can be individual and dynamic, creating an environment that promotes initiative and appropriate degrees of risk taking amongst employees.
I recently had the opportunity to speak to a group of MBA HR students in Goa,India and one of the key areas we spent time on, was the change required by employers in understanding the paradigm shift to what we believed employees wanted years ago versus what new employees want and how they view the job market in fitting in with their value system. It becomes a critical issue for Human Resources to deal effectively within manpower planning today.
I have also for some time talked about the responsibility of human resources in operationalizing the strategy, providing value added factual feedback to senior executives
I divide the HR functions into groupings. By chunking accountabilities it is easier to divide and track to the organization’s HR strategy.
Organizational Analysis
•Organizational design
•Job definition and documentation
•Succession planning
•Staffing strategies and utilization
•Communication and decision-making processes
•Management/supervisory practices – leadership, coaching, mentoring
•Vision,Values
Human Resource Management
•Human resources policies
•Employee surveys
•Training and development programs
•Human resources audits
•Hiring and retention strategies
•Human resources information technologies, systems, and operating practices
Performance Management
•Identifying competencies – technical and behavioral
•Goal setting processes
•Defining performance measures that reflect business strategy
•Approaches to assessing or rating performance
•Performance review forms and administration
•Employee and supervisory training and coaching programs
•Links to pay increases, promotions, recognition, and professional development opportunities
Employee recognition programs
•Total reward strategy and compensation philosophy
•Benchmarking and competitive analysis
•Short-term incentive plans
•Long-term incentive plans
Unless and until Human Resources personnel understand their place at the management table and how each of the sub processes contribute to all aspects of the business to provide value added input…things will not change.
Inherent or overlaid in all of this discussion is the expectation that the skills, knowledge and behaviors are modeled throughout the organization…big or small. And that is where the values come into play.
Thanks for the opportunity of sharing my random thought firings for this evening…
Regards,
Jo
Private Reply to Jo Verde | | Sep 10, 2007 8:11 am | | re: Value based workplace | # | 
Ben Simonton | |
Kishor,
You are right that a value based workplace is far more productive than one which is not. I used a strategy designed by myself to turnaround four different management disasters including a nuclear-powered cruiser and a 1300 person unionized group in New York City.
In my last position, productivity improved by over 300% per person in 4 years and such things as morale, creativity, innovation, motivation and commitment went through the roof. In fact, most employees literally loved to come to work.
For the first 12 years of my 30+ years of managing people, I used a top-down command and control method. Though I was considered to be one of the best managers, I was disappointed that I could not better motivate poor and mediocre employees.
During a computer systems management masters program I was exposed to the Copernican theory of management. That theory contends that the boss is the earth rotating around the workers who are the sun. I thought long and hard about this analogy and eventually admitted that it was correct. My organization would only be as good as the sum of the outputs of the workers on any particular day, not what I did. Whereas I had always believed that the workers supported me, the Copernican theory made me realize that they were far more important than I and that it was I who supported them with such things as training, tools, materials, parts, direction, technical support, discipline, and the like.
This revelation led me to question why I had not been listening to these very important people. So in my next job I did listen to them rather than spend all my time figuring out my next order and ensuring that my other orders had been carried out. What I heard were complaints, suggestions and questions, many of which had to do with a desire for better support so that they could do a better job.
The more I addressed these complaints, suggestions and questions, addressed with their agreement that whatever I provided was satisfactory to them, the better they performed. In the course of this, I learned that they shared the same values I had such as for honesty, integrity, fairness, forthrightness, admission of error, compassion, humility, respect, courtesy, knowledge, perseverance, safety, quality, and the like. In fact, I started discussing these values openly with them as together we tried to find solutions to problems which simultaneously met the highest standards of all values.
Slowly but surely, they took full responsibility for their workplace as I raised the standards reflected in my support and better met their desires for the highest quality of support. What I learned was that they performed their work using the value standards implied by my support.
This was a major breakthrough in understanding.
What I learned was that the quality of my support was my leadership of them. If I showed disrespect by providing poor quality tools, that tended to cause them to disrespect their work, their customers, their fellow workers and their bosses. But if I provided very high quality tools, that tended to cause them to treat their work, customers, each other and bosses with great respect.
I also learned that top-down command and control is demeaning and disrespectful of workers and prevents them from developing a strong sense of ownership of the workplace. A strong sense of ownership is what drives productivity, innovation, commitment and morale through the roof.
There is one more piece to this values puzzle and that is converting the 95% of all workers who are followers into being non-followers. Followers spend a considerable amount of their brainpower on determining what to follow while non-followers spend 100% of their brainpower on their work. Causing employees to do what they think is right, what their own value standards dictate, and then helping them to meet the highest standards of all values through discussing those values and what they can do to meet them is the solution to this issue. This is done in the process of addressing all complaints, suggestions and questions.
Employees can only develop a strong sense of ownership if the boss allows them to become self-directed under the control of very high standards of all values. Visions, goals, targets and the like directed from the top only serve to deny employees a sense of ownership. Only if it is their vision and their goal can these be a positive and powerful influence.
That is a quick sketch of what I did. To better understand, read an interview of me.
http://www.extensor.co.uk/articles/int_simonton/interview_ben_simonton.html
Best regards, Ben Simonton
Author "Leading People to be Highly Motivated and Committed"
http://www.bensimonton.com
Private Reply to Ben Simonton | | Sep 10, 2007 10:05 pm | | re: re: Value based workplace | # |
Jo Verde | | Hi Ben,
What a great recount of how you were able to make changes in your basic leadership style based on reflection and consideration.I applaud you.
Thanks for sharing your experience...may I have your permission to use your story in the classroom as a positive example?
R. JoPrivate Reply to Jo Verde | | Sep 11, 2007 10:26 am | | re: re: re: Value based workplace | # |
Ben Simonton | | Jo,
I would be honored that you use my story.
I did not flesh out the conversion of followers into non-followers. That conversion achieves about 60% of the available productivity gain while leadership toward very high standards of all values gets the other 40%.
I was impressed by your profile and wish you great success in your consulting efforts. If I can help you in any way, I would be most willing to do so.
If you would like to have an electronic copy of my book, I will send it. It is a bit heavy as it contains almost all one needs to know about managing people. But it does have lots of substance.
Thanks for your kind words, Ben
Private Reply to Ben Simonton | | |
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